Rickie Lee Jones, c/d?

didn't she try and sue them or something.

but holy shit! this record is so much more perfect than i remembered it. and it has that very "1979 singer-songwriter trying to get on FM rock radio" production quality.

what strikes me most of all is how GOOD -- how completely and totally OTM -- her waits impression is.

also, what's up w/the fact that my mom won't let me steal her records anymore. she doesn't EVER listen to them. and what i listen to almost exactly mimics what she was listening to at my age

ANY dollar bin should have it. i'm assuming you don't have it on CD or mp3s?

"Naw...naw...I'm not the greatest. I don't think there is a 'greatest.' Maybe we're living in a time of No Greatest. There's no 'greatest' anymore. I dunno...maybe one of -you- is the greatest. [pause] Hey...if anybody here thinks they're the greatest, come on up onstage. [pause] Naw...never mind...one of you assholes would probably do it."

Still the best stage patter I've ever heard.

http://www.matadorrecords.com/images/minis/ole-626.jpg

xpost: i figured it was one of the other kinds.

(Sorry, I've been drinking Pernod, and am sentimental and nostalgic.)

not even small change? i'll grant that he could be excessively maudlin and prone to the worst elements of beat-cliche, but the sadness is sad and the jokes are roffletastic and the cocktail-schmaltz piano playing is just godly.

otoh, i'd hate to think of where we'd be if our favorite wackos had never been allowed to free-express.

But yeah, of course, total rulelessness can be pretty fab.

i think if anything waits has gotten more like that over the years -- it's a shame his frank's wild years/black rider phase had to turn into stuffy elderstatesmanship rather than the full-on nihilism it should have progressed into. he's had a similar career arc as neil young (who shouldn't be doing that grandfatherly folksy twaddle either).

the early tom waits records were fun innocent L.A. hedonism. dirty jokes. good times.

I would still rather listen to Small Change, it must be said.

New album Sermon On Exposition Boulevard is a big mess. She walks in the sandals of Jesus when there was nothing wrong with her boots; she also does this mewling speaking-in-tongues thing on a few songs. Not good. And yet, and yet--the first song, "Nobody Knows My Name" rocks harder than she ever has. Drone-mantra, post VU throw down. We don't need another song about Elvis (the Son of God, of course) and Cadillacs, but this one has a groove that gets her over the silly name dropping (I think it's available for download on her website somewhere). And her voice is really terrific, when she's not mewling, and some of the best tracks just about reach the Vanological gospel trance state she's always loved. I give it a solid B.

I'm really digging 'Magazine' right now.

lol yeah that’s what i was figuring

nb Fats loses in the end so who knows, Living it Up & Woody n Dutch might have a chance. iirc when the album was new my local critic was all "if there was more Woody n Dutch on this record it would be a better followup to the resplendent debut." fuck that guy forever btw

pirates is absolutely the best album ever made

◎ yes

^^^all polls shd take this form (including the same exact working)

s/b wording

concur

massively underrated album.

massively underrated album
artist.

love this record

autobiography out April 2019

http://groveatlantic.com/book/rickie-lee/

well holy shit this was amazing to stumble on on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_172cffdDJU

!!!!!

!

That's glorious.

I've totally missed (avoided?) Rickie for some reason and holy shit has the last few days been a revelation - to the point I've been afflicted with Nelson fever and will now declare Pirates the best album in the world.

IMDB trivia for "The Pope of Greenwich Village" - Rickie Lee Jones had originally written and recorded an instrumental demo as a theme, but it was rejected in favor of Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind." The demo, which retained the title "Theme for the Pope" (because of the movie), wound up on her 1984 album The Magazine.

interesting -- I've been listening to The Magazine a lot lately but I wasn't aware of that. here's what Sal Bernardi says about it:

SB: I never wrote lyrics in French, but a few different people wrote French lyrics for a melody that I wrote ‘Theme for the Pope’ - a strange travel for that melody. Initially, a friend in Quebec wrote some lyrics and called it ‘Danse la Reve des Cleo’.

Several years later, there was a film called ‘The Pope of Greenwich Village’. I think the film people were seeking soundtrack music. Rickie and I had reworked the song a bit and made a demo without lyrics. It wasn’t used in the film, but Rickie released it on ‘The Magazine’, calling it by the working title for the film “Theme for the Pope”. For the European release of the album, a writer here in Paris wrote French lyrics and titled it ‘Marrant de Duece’, I think.

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article/7823/Sal-Bernardi-Interview

I prefer the version with French lyrics that appears on the LP, and I'm not sure why they included a different version on the CD release. I assume the CD version is the original demo and the LP version is the demo with overdubbed vocals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGrEg9SdN3M

oops, that's the CD version but this is the LP version I meant to post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqp3z0sX5UI

excellent song selection for an ideal concert:
https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/very-good-trip/very-good-trip-11-septembre-2019

I really don't know much about Rickie Lee Jones, but I was listening to the radio just now and came across an interview with someone I didn't know. All I knew is that it was a musician, and that when they played bits of her music it wasn't that old, like '70s-now, but the person being interview sounded like she was in her 90s, which didn't add up. I was absolutely shocked to learn it was Rickie Lee Jones, who is only 66. Wow. I guess she lived hard.

she certainly doesn't look 90, her voice does sound a bit odd now though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOjAtmLzM6g

she can still sing pretty well, though her range seems to have narrowed a great deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOjAtmLzM6g

It seems like there's always been a mismatch between her singing voice and speaking voice. I remember being truly surprised that the voice sample in "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb was her. But then her speaking voice now sounds way different from her speaking voice then.

I just compared two interviews from 2015 and 1989, and I guess she always had a drawl. That does make her speaking voice now sound like an older person's.

She sounds much better in that clip, this thing I heard on NPR sounded old and raspy.

I've seen a few excerpts from her new memoir, mostly re heroin use to deal w biz stress, which itself led to more biz probs, "Watch out for the junkie," yeah they're so rare in the music biz, but might have been more to it than that---anyway, she's glad she kicked it, loves her daughter---and from late 70s coverage in Rolling Stone, I gathered that she had a pretty interesting life before getting much involved in the biz. For instance she made a habit of singing to her brother while he was in a coma, until he finally woke up and said."Witch. Which reminds me that I liked Ghostyhead: her voice suited trip hop pretty well. Have also come across some good post-peak live sets on the 'Tube (one thing that still grosses me out: Tom Waits was her boyfriend, way back there now, but yuuuuuck she too cuet for him)

This is what I heard, btw:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/rickie-lee-joness-life-road

She is an absolute magician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB89sotCQx4

Great song I haven’t heard in ages. Love when the other voices come in.

Finished the book last night and really enjoyed it. I was ~2/3 through it and realized, geez, she's only like 17yo to this point. She had a wild early life in all senses of the word. She saw the world, lived a lifetime before she was even 18. The last third goes by quick and is mostly her early career (which overlapped her relationship w/ Tom Waits), which took off fast. But everything that led up to that was in some ways more interesting. She's a great storyteller. Recommended!

I've listened a lot to Pirates and especially Flying Cowboys since starting the book. Beautiful albums and the production on both is fantastic.

listening to the magazine and flying cowboys for the first time today and while they're not quite as transcendent as pirates they're still really fantastic wow

"satellites"!

The Magazine in particular is just brilliant (love Flying Cowboys as well) but yes unfair to compare it to one of the ten best albums of all time.

Vaguely relatedly I lost my copy of Ghostyhead and it appears it is not on streaming services!?!?!

The Magazine is the one I had on tape as a teenager and yeah it's wonderful, still my favourite tbh.

you can really hear her love of the blue nile on flying cowboys

I feel like she perhaps recognised kindred spirits: smooth surfaces / excessive feeling

I would love to know what Rickie thinks of Sade.

there are just some very blue nile synth tones in places on flying cowboys

which albums after that are worth digging into

I think Ghostyhead is really interesting: sort of a "belatedly ride the trip hop wave" effort on the surface but that dismissive take belies what's really going on which is that Rickie makes the obvious connection that these more rhythmic but still-guitar-driven soundtracks provide the perfect foil for her to really lean into her beatnik impulses - most of the album takes that kind of 'spill over the lines of the song' profusion aspect of her vocal approach to its logical conclusion. And musically I'm not sure what I'd compare it to: I imagine it was sold to Warner Bros as being in the vein of the first Beth Orton album but it's almost more like if New Kingdom decided to produce a folk artist.

I have Pop Pop too, it's nice enough but nothing ever really grabbed me about it.

I like Pop Pop, which was the first RLJ album I ever listened to. "Dat Dere" and the Jefferson Airplane cover were the standout tracks I recall.

It looks like the cover of the first album was flipped, I wonder why?

https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/photographs/gWMf6i/Rickie-Lee-Jones-Malibu-CA-1978

Was it? Most pics I see are oriented that way. Btw is she smoking a More cigarette there?

It wasn't. Album's always looked like this.

https://i.imgur.com/IYiRBnv.jpg

Weird, then I wonder what's happening here, and on some YouTube clips

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rickie-Lee-Jones/dp/B000002KK2

My guess is Gracenote or some other metadata provider for all the streaming/mp3 store platforms fucked with the art and it ended up everywhere. They've let the cover of Tracy Chapman's debut go on for years looking like a scan of a cd cover that was left in the back seat of a car in direct sunlight.

Don't know if I'll get a substantive answer, but I happen to know someone who works at Gracenote and she's going to ask the guy who handles that stuff tomorrow, so stay tuned maybe.

Ok so it turns out that when WB reissued the RLJ album in 2010 as an "original artist series" they flipped the image for reasons unknown to anyone but themselves.

Looks like she has a new album coming out - it's an American songbook album (all standards) produced by Russ Titelman. To promote it, she's doing an exclusive three-night residency at Birdland in NYC, which seems to have sold out, but there's a ticketed livestream. https://birdlandjazz.com/event/rickie-lee-jones/

Correction - she's doing two shows each night, and only the "early" shows have sold out. They still have tickets for the late shows:

https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/rickie-lee-jones-1623129

Pirates can bring me to tears.

I think Ghostyhead is really interesting: sort of a "belatedly ride the trip hop wave" effort on the surface but that dismissive take belies what's really going on which is that Rickie makes the obvious connection that these more rhythmic but still-guitar-driven soundtracks provide the perfect foil for her to really lean into her beatnik impulses - most of the album takes that kind of 'spill over the lines of the song' profusion aspect of her vocal approach to its logical conclusion. And musically I'm not sure what I'd compare it to: I imagine it was sold to Warner Bros as being in the vein of the first Beth Orton album but it's almost more like if New Kingdom decided to produce a folk artist.

― Tim F, Sunday, June 20, 2021 3:12 AM (one year ago)

so glad someone besides me loves this album

Pop Pop is great too, that Jimi cover is perfect