peggy@ism70.UUCP (11/10/84)
Rickie Lee Jones Back From the Edge by Kristine McKenna Reprinted from LA's "Reader" Friday, November 9, 1984 Vol. 7, No. 4 Contrary to popular opinion, Rickie Lee Jones is not a chick, broad, gal, babe, or dame. She's a girl, a sweet, rather fragile girl who became an overnight sensation in 1979 when she scored a hit single called "Chuck E.'s in Love," only to find herself floundering in the shark-infested waters of stardom with no land in sight. Because Rickie Lee sings in a scatting, hipster style, people assume she's a tough cookie. She is certainly a determined girl, but she is most definitely not tough, and she lost her footing during that quick trip from rags to riches and was sucked into fame's deadly whirlpool of drugs, booze, and ill-famed love affairs. By 1982 Rickie Lee was so thoroughly exhausted she checked out of the spotlight for some desperately needed soul-searching. She moved from her home town of Los Angeles to New York. She moved to Paris. She began swimming every day. She fasted and lost twenty-five pounds. She calmed down and listened to the inner voice of self-preservation that had been drowned out by the hubbub of her career and finally decided to let herself off the hook. This period of healing has resulted in a wonderful new record that stands as proof that emotional health is not necessarily boring. The undercurrent of dread that colored Jones's last LP, "Pirates," is gone, and with "The Magazine" she moves from the dark alleyways of the inner city into the light of a Midwestern afternoon. This is a record about innocence reclaimed, about forgiving oneself and the world, and she wraps these themes in music that floats and flutters like feathers in the sky. The gum-cracking sass that seems to be Jones's trademark can still be heard on three of the tunes here, but it's her gentle, spiritual side that makes this record resonate. Structurally, "The Magazine" is very much of a piece, an orchestral work that includes linking bits of incidental music, a spoken monologue, and a nursery rhyme. Co-produced by Jones and James Newton Howard, the record is brilliantly arranged; as it progresses it blossoms into an American landscape dotted with gorgeous little embellishments that ping just...so. Jones's voice has grown richer and bigger, and she's able to do more with it now, yet she has the confidence not to overload every measure, to leave clean space in the music. "The Magazine" is not as flamboyantly theatrical, not as "street" as records Jones has made in the past. This is music that exists in dreamtime, wistful music about memories that become burnished jewels as they recede into the past. Jones befriends her own past in these songs, jettisons the myth of misery as glamour, and forges her sadness into gold. And what's ultimately so impressive about this record is that she conveys all this musically. You needn't study a lyric sheet to grasp what "The Magazine" is about; it speaks in a tongue that's truer than words. Jones will be taking her new songs to the concert stage with a tour that kicks off in Normal, Illinois, this coming Tuesday, takes her to Australia in January, and concludes next spring with performances in Europe, the United Kingdom, and a few Eastern bloc countries. She plays the Universal Amphitheatre on December 14. Last spring Jones returned to Los Angeles where she is living with her cat and her boyfriend. (No names please. It's heard enough to make these things fly without the prying eyes of the world intruding.) Whoever he is, he's had a salutary effect on Miss Jones. Talking with her in her manager's office on Sunset Strip, I found Jones to be the very picture of health. Wearing no make-up, shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes which she immediately kicked off, she stretched out on a couch with a diet soda and radiated vitality. She does, however, move through life quite gingerly at this point. It hasn't been that long since she moved out of the hurtin' side of town, and she answered my questions with extreme care, speaking slowly in a soft voice and searching for the precise word needed to make herself clearly understood. Before we get to the questions, a little background: Rickie Lee Jones was born in Chicago on November 8, 1954--thirty years ago yesterday. Her father was an aspiring actor, her mother a waitress, and her grandparents were vaudevillians. The second of four children born to nomadic parents, Rickie Lee began running when she was fourteen. She moved to Los Angeles in 1973 when she was nineteen. She wrote her first song, "Easy Money," in 1976, began performing in 1977, and was on the cover of "Rolling Stone" two years later. Like her pal Tom Waits, Jones is a narrative writer with a talent for rich, concisely drawn character sketches, and her songs are peopled with vagabond souls who are frequently short on cash but always long on street smarts and style. Incorporating R&B, pop, jazz, and Broadway, her music is haunted by a melancholy yearning for some distant, fading, American Dream: a street corner, a neighborhood where faces are friendly and familiar and a body feels at home. The loneliness expressed in her music is utterly naked and in the past has been so bitterly unrelenting that it has driven the singer and the song into an imaginary realm of dreams and illusion. Rickie Lee's dreams were biting back for a while there, but the spirits are looking friendlier these days. Q: Do you consider yourself a lucky person, or have you had to struggle for all you've achieved? A: I think I'm very, very lucky, if that's the word. Blessed would be the word I'd use. I'm here where I would like to be and whether the blessing is my ability to recognize that fact or my ability to get here doesn't matter. Both those things are necessary. You have to allow yourself to be somewhere that you wanted to be and then realize that you're there, to say to yourself, "oh good, I'm happy here." We're always struggling to get to the next place because there's always more to do, other happiness to find, to the point that we don't allow ourselves to ever be happy. People sometimes drive themselves because they're afraid that if they stop and be happy they won't move anymore. Like those grown-ups who did such good work then suddenly stopped. But you shouldn't gauge yourself in other people's eyes. If I stop working and somebody thinks I "lost it," well, that's fine. I don't care if they think I lost it. Q: It sounds as if you have your career in a pretty good perspective. Has that always been the case? A: No. There was a time when I was completely consumed by my persona and this is something I've had to work very hard on. And my rational mind is constantly being challenged by this business. I'm just keeping my eyes open now because this is real life. Sometimes one regards this sort of thing, interviews and going on TV, as a fantasy, but it's real life. So I've learned to go slowly and ask myself, Do I want to talk to this person? Do I want to talk about this? How am I gonna feel when I go home and what am I gonna read about myself? This is real life and I've learned to be delicate and think a little more about what I say and do. Q: What's the chief disadvantage of fame? A: I don't like fame at all and think it's very evil. A little bit of fame is nice, I guess, like if you're on the school football team, but fame where millions of people think they know you is disturbing. It's disturbing because they see you different and bigger than real life, and almost every time you'll start to perceive yourself that way. It's hard to keep your vision of yourself clear when you're being assaulted by that. When people begin to behave differently toward you, how can you move through your environment and remain untouched by it? Eventually you must accept that things have changed, then try to put that into perspective. You tell yourself, this is part of my job. I'm a famous singer and they are recognizing a famous singer, but I'm still this size when I go home. I never change this size. Q: Why do you think millions of people are so willing to subjugate their own ego to "celebrities"? A: Media. Because we have television and hundreds of pictures and movies you get to know people not in real physical blood, but only in terms of what they represent to you. Q: What's your media intake? Do you watch television and movies? Read magazines? Play records? A: I have my TV in a little room off to the side so it isn't something I can have on casually, and I don't watch it too often. I rarely listen to the radio. I protect my ears and don't like to hear things I didn't ask to hear. My boyfriend plays records so I hear them, but the only records I usually play are classical music or my own. Once in a while I'll play Marvin Gaye if I feel like dancing, but playing those records is like going to visit someone. It's more than that--it's like going to visit a family. It's packed with emotion, information, and gyration, and I don't subject myself to that unless I'm really in the mood. I rarely go to see live music either. I do read. At the moment I'm reading and English grammar book, Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion," which I'm having trouble getting started, and a book on the life of a cell. Q: How has fame been of use to you? A: It will be of use to me now because I've finally accepted that I want it. I wanted people to hear me and they have and that's good. many people seem to hunger for fame just for the sake of being famous. I don't know, maybe it gives them a sense of immortality, a feeling that after they've died, people will still know they were here. As an artist, you like to think that fame is an acknowledgment of your art. What I like best abut fame is the wonderful letters I get from people. I get letters that are so deep and personal that sometimes I read them and say, "Oh, you got it!" You know, records are not just a seal of music, but of everything you are at a particular point in time, and sometimes people pick that up. Perhaps you do press out parts of living soul in music and when that sound comes out it sprinkles out all that living soul. Sometimes you listen to somebody's record and I swear to God you can feel them. Q: How did getting money change your life? A: It changed my value system about money in a very good way and a very bad way as well. There was a period when I had real disregard for money because I got too much too fast. I was very poor, then got very rich. So I squandered a great deal of money, and I didn't enjoy doing that. I bought nothing and just spent it. It was a bad way to get money because money's a powerful thing. You can use it and it doesn't have to be horrible, but generally it's very evil. It evokes feelings of greed and greed is a killer. One of the things I went through with money was, all my life I felt that I didn't have any friends, and so I started measuring friendship on the basis of my money. A woman who already didn't trust people now seriously mistrusted people in a much deeper way. "These people want to fuck me because I have money." You wouldn't disrespect yourself enough to admit that to yourself but it's in there. It's a bad double bind. I've had to do some serious work about this and it's a hard one. There was a period where I tried to deal with it by simply giving everyone my money. I either wouldn't give anybody a dime or I just gave anyone all of it! That would change day to day. I recently decided to give away most of my clothes. I think it's good to do that periodically, give it all away and begin again. I think if you can do it physically then you can do it spiritually as well. But you must do both. The heart has to see you do it physically. Q: Have you always been a compulsive shedder of things? A: In a sense, yes. I used to run away from home and leave everything behind. And I never has a lot so it didn't really matter. We always moved around so much that I never got attached to articles the way that people who live in one place do. I learned to see possessions as boxes that you carry around. And my stuff got stolen so much! When I was thirteen, we went to Chicago and all of our things were in the car. We went in and slept and when we came out our car had been stolen, so I lost everything then. Then, four years ago my landlord in New York, who was a complete manic depressive cocaine addict lunatic, went into my apartment in some drug fit and threw every single thing I owned into the street. I had about $25,000 worth of stuff in there--clothes, guitars, amplifiers,books, records--everything. And, of course, none of it was left in the street by the time I returned home. That was a time of real deep evil in my life. This guy wasn't my boyfriend, but he was relating to me in that way. "How come you didn't call me," he screamed. People do that you know. They have sudden fits of jealousy, or whatever ego involvement he had about the fact that I was living above him. He was a nut! Q: Do you live and insulated life? A: I meet lot of people but I don't often take people into my life and never have, except for one period when I was very, very lonely. But it's like sound for me. I'm not interested in too much random information. Once in a while I'll go out and get some but I don't like to be bombarded with it. Q: Are you easily enchanted by people? A: No. My songs might give people that impression, but those are characters and I'm not necessarily enchanted with them. I create those people and I'm enchanted with my own imagination. Q: It's a popular theory that an artist must be in some sort of turmoil in order to create. Do you think there's any truth to that? A: Creation does come out of struggle, either physical or emotional, but struggle does not have to be self-destructive. People do confuse this issue. For whatever reason--fame, guilt--they manifest their own hell in order to keep themselves perpetually creative. I think you have to keep yourself healthy, observing, and smart, and when it's ready to be born it will come out. And you will have a struggle, you needn't doubt that. I personally have stored up enough blues throughout the course of my life that I never need to have the blues again. I have a big well of it I can draw on for the rest of my life, and I don't have to make that up because it's in there. So it's not necessary to live a miserable life. You don't have to live in hell, and, as a matter of fact, people who do generally die. Q: What's the chief pitfall and artist need be on guard against? A: It's never any one thing. It's a real dance and you gotta watch where you're going. One simple thing you must remain aware of is that you mustn't gauge yourself in the public eye, or try and anticipate what your audience will like because you're afraid you'll no longer be able to make a living if you don't please them. If you do please them, you'll be able to make a living, and you probably will if you continue to grow. Your audience, status, position--whatever all that's about--may change. Hopeful it will! I'd hate to have a career like Led Zeppelin's. They appeal to the exact people they appealed to fifteen years ago, so they must behave as they did then, regardless of how they've grown--if in fact they have. Maybe they're not very creative and haven't grown. How lucky not to move for fifteen years and continue to make millions! I should be so lucky. Q: What sort of landscape do you find most compelling. A: I am happier out of the city. I can be excited by a city for a little while but I'm not content. I was raised in wide open spaces and that's where I'm comfortable. Q: What public places do you feel most comfortable in? A: I'm pretty comfortable anywhere. I can tell you where I'm uncomfortable. I don't go to bars and don't like them. I don't like places where my peers are and a lot of status bullshit is going on. I try and stay away from that unless I'm really up for it and dressed for the part. The only places I go are restaurants and theatres. Q: You recently returned to Los Angeles after having lived in Paris for four months. How did Paris affect you? A: Very well, I think. I don't speak any French and I went there on the run at the very end of the dark side of the moon, knowing I was about to get very well. But when and how I was gonna do it, I didn't know. Because I didn't speak French, I learned to be humble, because in order to communicate with people I had to calm down and really make an effort to connect with people. How am I gonna get this bread from this little cunt behind the counter who wants to make fun of me? Shopping was a major trauma. How am I gonna buy my groceries from these people who're so mean to me? It was a wonderful lesson, and I did a lot of growing in the time I was there. It's a different culture. Maybe they're mean, maybe they're not. Whichever, move through it smoothly and don't take it all so personally. In three minutes that snotty clerk will be gone and she'll have forgotten you completely. Q: What are your favorite smells? A: There are body smells that I just love, and there are flowers that bloom when the sun's going down in California that I used to smell in Arizona. That smell takes me right back to being eleven years old. "Mom, I'm goin out," going down the street smelling these little white flowers. I also like the smell of wild magnolias, and there's an orchid that grows in Hawaii that smells like vanilla. Real creamy. Q: How do you see your music evolving? How is the new record different from the first one? A: It's hard for me to compare them in a linear way because they're like children to me and I don't see one as being an extension of another. Comparing "The Magazine" with the first album, I might say that the first one was older. I was not a lesser writer six years ago though I was writing different things. I was not as good a singer then, but because I was nervous and had to push harder for the notes, I did things I'm unable to do now. Now I'm able to sing with real ease. Q: How would you describe the mood of the new album? A: Constant, inspiring, hopeful. It doesn't leave me wondering "what's gonna happen?" For me, a sad picture is not a negative picture. It's simply sad. So the sad songs on the new album, though they are so touching, don't empty me out the way a song like "Company" empties me out. The mood of this one is definite and this person knows something about what they see, where with "Pirates," at the end of "Traces of the Western Slopes," it just asks a question. I left out the last line because I didn't know what it was and to me that was symbolic of the whole record. This record knows more where it's going and has a lot of short stories and peculiar scenarios that the music and characters come out of. Originally I was going to do a multimedia thing that included a book of the stories, the album, and some small films, with each one offering information abut the other. For instance, if I had a main character, a girl who goes into a store every day and buys something, then there might be a short story about the person who owns the store. I wanted to create a complete world. I still plan to do all this but I'm not gonna run a race in order to have everything out simultaneously so I can sell billions of records. Q: How do you compose? Do you have structured writing habits? A: Each time I write a song I seem to go about it differently, though I do usually keep a lot of notes. Let's say I have a definite idea of what I want to say in a song, as opposed to writing around a chorus; I might have a notebook filled with thoughts on a specific theme. By the end of the notebook there might be only three lines directly connected to the idea I began with, and they might end up as the bridge of another song. For instance, "Living It Up" started with the line "Eddie's got one crazy eye and he sits and watches Baretta all day." The initial idea for the song is a portrait of somebody who's unhappy, and then I find whatever images are gonna tell more about him. Q: What percentage of your ideas do you discard? A: Oh, man! Many. I start a lot of things and write many songs that just aren't good enough. And I'll know they're not but will continue to work on them because I know they'll lead to something else. I also discard a lot of good ideas simply because I'm not ready to do them. Q: Do you think you hear differently than other people do? A: I do because part of the hearing mechanism never formed in me. But I think everyone has a personalized way of hearing. Q: What are your favorite nonmusical sounds? A: Water, vacuum cleaners, washing machines. Those machines create a kind of circular drone and have a note that's like a mantra. Bagpipes do that too and they also get to me. All of their melodies spring off of a constant drone. When I was a little girl and my mother would vacuum, it would just knock me out. If she wanted me to to go to sleep, all she had to do is vacuum. Q: How do the arrangements of your songs come about? Are they developed in the studio, or do you go in to record with the song fairly complete in your head? A: The songs are pretty intact when I go in to record them. Some of the horn lines I might make up on the spot, but my sense of what the song is is already there. This time more that in the past, I made up the horns and stuff on the spot. Q: How much creative input do the players have? A: They're performances. Nobody writes down what they play except, say, if we need a particular bass line in a specific place. But we never tell them exactly what to play. Q: Are there things you'd like to do with your voice that you're technically incapable of? A: When I speak perhaps, but not when I sing. There's always something you're working on, but everything I set out to do I can do. When I made my first record, I had almost a four-octave range, but I can feel in the upper part of my throat that I don't have that anymore. But the idea of having a greater range just for the sake of having it isn't very interesting to me because it's hard to put all that range to use emotionally. Q: Do you have any interest in working in theatre or film? A: I am moving into theatre. People stick you in these little houses, but there's a lot of space between these types of art to be explored. There's a bit of Broadway in my writing, in the way I paint, turn, and speak to the audience, and I suppose I'd like to see a Broadway production of my music if I wrote it. I'd like to write a show and be in it as well, and I think I could do those things. I think I'd feel at ease on Broadway, but I don't want to be a rock'n'roll star acting, so I'm not real gung ho about getting in the movies. Q: What's the most widely held misconception about you? A: Because I write about certain types of people, I'm thought to be a big party girl or some kind of tough street girl, and I'm not that at all. That might have been true six years ago, but it's not true now. Dominant or forceful personalities in women are generally perceived as toughness because it's hard for people to accept women in a dominant role without making them whores. In movies, feminine heroes with any guts or vitality are cast as whores, and I don't see that changing at all. The women's movement seems to be for women of about forty, who married and followed a social dictate and are now following another social dictate that's telling them not to follow the old one. It's not individuals saying, "I'm gonna do this." Part of me thinks fine, I hope the women's movement helps them but I don't see that it's any different than the life they lived before. They don't know how to be women and be strong so they emulate the behavior of men. They dress like men. They go see male strippers. They're promiscuous. They've picked up the worst attributes of masculinity, and I don't think that's the way to do it. You must be who you are. Be a woman. Q: How would you describe the "American Dream"? A: It's a capitalistic dream based on the individual succeeding without any social barriers. It likes that word "individual" and has to do with the idea that each person can be President. They don't have that idea in Europe. I don't think one is better than the other, but the American Dream has caused incredible personal chaos in people's lives because their place in society has no definition. It's a beautiful dream but it causes a lot of agony because it tells every person "you could be and if you're not, there's something wrong with you." And that's a lie because we do have a social order here and there is a real class suppression. You know, the men who wrote the Constitution--and you notice it was only men--were so bourgeois that it didn't occur to them that some little peon might seriously believe it was his Constitution too. They were aristocrats and didn't consider that ten million niggers and five million Chinamen would believe they had a right to be President too. So it's a bad dream here because a little black child hears that he can be President, that it's his right, when in fact we're living under a specialized Constitution for white men. Q: What's your idea of an important achievement? A: There are many kinds. Living on a farm and teaching your kids something they're gonna carry with them always. Or to be a doctor and teach people about nutrition. I'm pretty careful about what I eat, and nutrition is my personal love in medicine because I know what it's done for me. I fasted for a few months on liquid food and that made me realize that people rarely eat for nutrition. They eat for nervous tension, sexual gratification, because they're lonely, because they're too nervous to share with people without eating. You go out with somebody and instead of saying, "Gee, I like you, I like to sit with you and be with you," [you say] "Let's go eat, let's go drink, let's go do something so we can pretend the reason we're together is not because we like each other." Q: What would you like to change about your life at this point? A: Nothing. I'm real pleased at how it's growing. I do wish I had more furniture in my house and that I had somebody to clean it up, but other than that, whatever's wrong, whatever's right, it's such a beautiful picture I wouldn't want to change or "correct" anything. It will correct itself, it will move where it's going. Whether or not it's the picture I would've drawn as a little child doesn't matter. I like it. What I'm trying to do is find out what is good about things. It's so easy to concentrate on what is wrong. Q: What's the biggest obstacle you've had to overcome in your life? A: As with everyone, I've been by own biggest obstacle. To be more specific, I think not being completely and utterly self-centered. I don't know how to talk about what I'm learning, but I think I'm learning to love. Part of that is learning to give and I don't think I ever gave. And what it is you give, you cannot say. There's no way to say what that is, but I never did this before. I'm less prideful and stubborn than I used to be and that's a lot to learn. It's a lot to learn not to walk out of a room or look out the window, not to say, "Alright, you're gonna pay for that." It's a lot to learn to say, "You don't have to pay." Q: What do you think triggered these changes in you? A: Everything that came before triggered those changes. And I finally reached the point where I made the choice to put as much work into learning how to be happy as I'd put into being unhappy. This has all been going on for the past two years--this being able to move, to see. Q: Beyond the obvious essentials, what things do you have to have to live? A: I think I want, and may even have to have, love now. When I see myself without love, I see myself angry again. I can always endure without it and get a lot of work done, but I don't know how much I like my life without love right now. I think it was always that way and I simply refused to acknowledge it. But I don't have anything to prove anymore by saying "I don't need anything." Q: Why do people cling to the past? A: It's true that very few people are able to live in present time. Obviously, the past is safer because it's already gone by and we know how it ends. It's a constant exercise to exist here, to find a reason to exist here, and the soul is always looking for a reason to be. People say things like "I'm bored." Bored? You cannot be bored! There are too many things to see and feel and hear, so obviously [people] block that out because they don't want to be here--probably because they find it too hard to be here. That's a pretty serious question. I like it, but I think it requires a little more thought than we have time for here. Q: Is memory a source of pain or pleasure? A: It's obviously both, depending on what you're remembering, but I'd say it's more a source of pleasure. We only do that which we want to do, whether it's feeling pain or feeling good. Pleasure might be the wrong word, but many people find great satisfaction in feeling very, very bad. As for memories, whatever you've retrieved or taken with you from the past is something you've chosen to carry with you. Q: What's the earliest memory fixed in your mind? A: The first thing I can remember is riding on my brother's back in some water and there were poles coming out of the water ahead of us. The main thing I remember is the sound of the water and the sound of the laughter. I'm holding on to his back and we're going down a stream and there's crabs biting his ankles and I'm strangling his neck and he dumps me off his back cause these crabs are biting him. And my mother's standing on the side of the bank. It's a beautiful memory. When I was little whenever I took a bath I'd put the washcloth on the side of the tub and listen to the inside of the bathtub because it sounded exactly like that stream. Yeah. The sound of the water was the salt of that memory.