Gary James' Interview With The Duchess Of Coolsville
Rickie Lee Jones



She's been called "The Duchess Of Coolsville." She's appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. She's appeared on Saturday Night Live. She is probably best known for her 1979 song "Chuck E's In Love", which made it all the way to number four on the Billboard charts. We are talking about Rickie Lee Jones. Rickie's newest album, "Kicks", a collection of songs from the Great American Songbook, was released in June, 2019. In support of that album, Rickie Lee Jones is headed out on the road, both in the U.S. and overseas. We spoke to Rickie about her music and her life.

Q - I see you performed at the Glastonbury Festival in June (2019). I believe I've heard of that festival. Is that for singer/songwriters?

A - I've only seen it on TV, with Dolly Parton and The Cure. I think it's for big acts in general that are maybe British or European, but I think what they said is they're expanding to a more acoustic stage. But, it was a very weird stage. It had like a bunch of imitation Beatle acts. To be on the stage with an imitator is a hard thing. I think they should get that together because a real musician competing with that makes it a competition. That just doesn't belong together. I don't really know who's organizing it, but I was glad to be there. It was a bizarre stage.

Q - Tribute acts are very popular.

A - Oh, they were huge. It's people's chance to sing along with The Beatles. I can't believe it. In my generation it would've been dismissed. Anybody imitating art, or replicating I should say, from a musician's point of view, would have been dismissed because it's not creation. It takes a lot of good quality to do that stuff, but anyway, I digress.

Q - Did you release your autobiography last year or are you working on your autobiography?

A - I didn't release my autobiography. I signed a contract.

Q - Is it difficult to go back and review your life?

A - Yeah. Well, I mean we're always walking around with the past, telling stories of our lives. We all do it. To write about it as a story, to find the art of the story, which is how I want to write a book, has proven a challenge. It's taken a lot longer than I thought it would take, but when I'm done I'm going to have a beautiful story, not just episodes of my life.

Q - When did you start writing songs?

A - When I was about four, five.

Q - I guess it came easy to you then?

A - I did. It does. I can make it hard if hard things are happening in my life and the feeling can be painful, but it's very easy to write songs. I'm always thinking of songs. They're always rolling around in there. Some years they're better than others.

Q - Always?

A - Yeah, always.

Q - You really served what I would call an apprenticeship program. You worked as a waitress. You started singing in bars, nightclubs. So, when you see the top singers of today who didn't have that experience, what goes through your mind?

A - You know, I don't assess people by the rules of my life. This is a different time. If you can sing, you can sing. That apprentice program is the business of singing. It's not singing. You can sit in your room and learn to sing beautifully. You're not going to learn out there, yelling in a club. (laughs)

Q - You need to be in front of an audience, don't you?

A - If you want to be a performer. Steely Dan never performed live. A recording artist is a very different job than a performing artist and we come from a time when it was all the same. But the good thing I like about this is it values the difference because those are two very different skills. To be a great singer doesn't necessarily mean you're a great performer, and vice versa. Case in point, Bette Midler. Bette Midler is a great performer, but not particularly a great singer.

Q - But, don't forget Bette Midler is also an actress.

A - She's an actress, yeah. And I like acting out the songs. I think that's a wonderful way to help people understand and make their way to their own feelings.

Q - When you were younger, you would just put up your thumb and start hitch-hiking. Did the dangers of hitch-hiking ever occur to you?

A - Sure they do.

Q - And you just put that out of your mind?

A - I think when you're a kid you feel indestructible and so you go do perilous things because you don't have very many yesterdays and that whole life is in front of you. That's how you measure the moment you're in. It feels like life will keep going because it always has and so you put yourself in danger or you ignore danger. I think that's true of most of us and it certainly was of me.

Q - Where did this confidence come from that you knew you were going to be successful?

A - It was just in me. I think as much as possible it was kind of like a destiny so that there are three roads in front of you, but one of 'em is an escalator. Which one of 'em are you get on? As soon as the escalator appeared, I stepped on it and it seemed as if life moved very quickly toward a better path. It was very hard getting to that escalator, but once there, everything fell into place.

Q - Your song, "Chuck E's In Love" was written about a real person?

A - Yeah, yeah. Sure.

Q - Suppose you had written "Rickie's In Love", do you think that would've been as much of a hit?

A - No, I don't. I think there was something in the spelling of Chuck E, using the initial instead of the ie. I think also Chuck is kind of an old fashioned name. It's a nickname for Charlie. It's a very American, almost colloquial thing. Doing the twist on it with the E made it very catchy. People loved "Chuck E's In Love". When they saw Chuck E they went "Holy Moses!" And a year later Chuck E's Pizza and Joe E and Car E and the initial thing took off everywhere. I think if it was Rick E, first of all they wouldn't like you singing about yourself. Rickie is kind of ethnic. It's just not as apple pie as Chuck E.

Q - How long did it take you to write that song?

A - It was written in an afternoon, the lyric was. Then the music was probably an evening and a day.

Q - When you appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone it was a big deal for you, wasn't it?

A - It was a big deal for me. It was a big deal for the magazine too. It was their biggest selling issue. By 1982, in back sales that issue was their biggest selling one. So, it was big for them too.

Q - Your appearance on Saturday Night Live was also big for you and the show.

A - Yeah, but that was forty years ago. I don't know if it was big for their show because they were the only game in town. (laughs) But it did kind of introduce me to the world all in one night.

Q - Is it true that your master tapes are gone forever from that Universal fire?

A - Oh, I can't believe you're bringing this up. My master tapes are gone forever. They are burned up. We have something 'cause I own the records now from the manufacturing from them, but the tapes themselves burned. I believe there's a class action lawsuit because they didn't tell anybody that their tapes had burned up.

Q - Now, wouldn't you think the record companies would have had a back-up system? There's no digital copies of albums somewhere?

A - I think this is just the original 24-track tapes. That's my understanding. Back then, we didn't make computer copies of it as they manufactured the thing. They would make a record and send that master record to the factory. From that master record other records were made. But the tapes themselves apparently were burned up. I don't really know if Warner Bros. made a computer copy. When we did the Rhio stuff, which was twelve years ago, (2007), I just can't remember because it took so long to get that Rhino thing out. This is a good question. We were going to use the original masters to make that stuff from. Because nobody's given me notice, I don't know how many things were burned in the fire. I don't know what's gone and what remains. I just actually found out about it two months ago (June 2019).

Q - If a company does not have the master tapes, then what does the company have? What is the worth of the company?

A - Interesting.

Q - How can a record company release "The Best Of...", "The Very Best Of...", "The Unreleased Tracks Of..." if there's nothing there to release?

A - All those Frank Sinatra (records). I thought it was the Warner Bros. thing that burned up. If you're telling me it was Universal, there could have been two fires because that would be highly suspicious. Was the Warner Bros. stuff stored at Universal? I don't know. Interesting. I'm going to find out. That's a good question. My manager told me mine were gone in the Warner Bros. fires, or was it just the stuff I did that was connected to Universal? I'll have to find out.

Official Website: www.RickieLeeJones.com.

© Gary James. All rights reserved.