Rickie Lee Jones, 1978 - Top Fifty

Rickie's Wonderful Joint

Hit single Chuck E.’s In Love announced Rickie Lee Jones to the world and me in all its funky sass and beat storytelling, narratives made real by the grammar of the street, And he hang that sign on the door....He learn all of the lines. But the album also announced the folk songstress in the Joni Mitchell lineage, for example the sweet piano ballad On Saturday Afternoons in 1963. These ballads were also stunningly beautiful, Night Train as plaintively aching in this beauty as any we had heard before, the slur and harmonies in the vocals rising and rolling hypnotically, the poetry painting atmospherically,

Here she comes

I’m safe here with you

On the Night Train

Oh mama, mama.

Concrete is wheeling by

Down at the end of a lullaby

On the Night Train

Young Blood provided the strut that balances this perfect album of folk to be-bop, funk to jazz. Easy Money told one of the album’s many beatnik stories with characters living in the grooves. A song I would play again and again was the gorgeous The Last Chance Texaco, poetry and melody made beautifully poignant in the wonderful writing and singing of Rickie Lee,

A long stretch of headlights

Bends into 1-9

Tiptoe into truck stops

And sleepy diesel eyes

Volcanoes rumble in the taxi

And glow in the dark

Camels in the driver’s seat

A slow easy mark

This song has one of the most dramatic denouements, the motoring metaphors peaking in the vocal which harmonises at the end as a car that races by and away.

Side 2 of the vinyl picks up the beat with a clutch of storytellers, beginning here with Danny’s All-Star Joint – more places and people we grew to know so well – and Rickie recites her urban poetry

Your sister’s into mustard

She loves to walk the pup

She likes the pickles and the relish

She never gets enough

A Hershey milkshake

Steamin’ on a stick

For a Carte Blanche sandwich

Oh lettuce get thick...

It’s not because I’m dirty,

It’s not because I’m clean,

It’s not because I kiss the boys behind the magazine

Hey boys? How ‘bout a fight?

Cuz here comes Rickie with the girdle on tight

And if she don’t know your name

She knows what you got

From your matzo balls

To the chicken-in-the-pot

Chicken-in-the-pot

Chicken-in-the-pot

and of course we love it because Rickie is dirty, the sleaze and sass as taut as her girdle.

Then we visit Coolsville to meet Bragger and Junior Lee, just before bopping over to Weasel and the White Boy Cools to hang out with Sal, Angela, Perry and Mario. It is just so......cool.

Penultimate Company is all late night jazz and blues, so sweetly sung – just listen to how Rickie delivers the verse

I’ll see you in another life, baby

I’ll free you in my dreams

But when I reach across the galaxy

I will miss your company

and beyond, the sweeping strings unable to compete with the rising beauty of her vocals.

This brilliant albums ends on After Hours [Twelve Bars Past Goodnight] and we are lullabyed to loneliness with Rickie Lee’s Laura Nyroesque lament, saying goodbye to the vivid world we have also inhabited for those two glorious sides,

And all the gang has gone home

And I’m standing on the corner

All alone

NB the poem Rickie Lee Jones in the previous post is a reworking – last night – of a poem I wrote in 1978 having watched a live concert of Rickie Lee on TV.