Duck Soup: The Enigma of Rickie Lee Jones

There are many ways to approach the story of Rickie Lee Jones. But let’s start with an anecdote from studio drummer Jeff Porcaro, who was called in as session player on RLJ’s second album Pirates—allegedly because Jones had admired his brush work at a previous encounter.

Porcaro, a legend in the world of studio musicians, later recounted the story:

“What a great thing. I go to the session, it's Chuck Rainey on bass, Dean Parks on guitar, Russell Ferrante on piano, Lenny Castro on percussion, and Rickie Lee Jones playing piano and singing. The drums are in an isolation booth with a big glass going across so I can see everybody in the main studio. I have my headphones on, and we start going over the first song. After the first pass of the tune, Rickie Lee in the phones goes, ‘Mr. Porcaro, I know you're known for keeping good time, but on these sessions, I can't have you do that. With my music, when I'm telling my story, I like things to speed up and slow down, and I like people to follow me.’”

Porcaro, a consummate professional, asks the engineer to give him more of Jones’s vocal in his headphones so he can follow her rhythmic shifts. The band starts the song again—but Jones stops it halfway through and tells the drummer: “The time is too straight. You gotta loosen up a bit.” Porcaro apologizes, and asks for still more of the vocal track in his headphone mix. On the next take, he focuses closely on Jones’s singing, speeding up and slowing down in response to every twist and turn. But RLJ is still displeased. She halts the take and starts complaining again about the beat. Now every musician on the date—a group of all-star studio players—is tense and anxious. The next take is so unsettled that the producer calls a break.

After the break, the band switches to another song—to try to get their mojo back. Pocaro describes what happened next:

“So we start laying the track down, and I come up to this simple fill: triplets over one bar. It's written out on my music, and I play the fill. She stops. She says, You have to play harder. . . . Everybody looks at me. I look at everybody. I go, ‘Okay, let's do it again.’ We start again. One bar before the fill, I hear, louder than hell in my phones, We're coming up to the fill. Remember to play hard, while we're grooving. I whack the mess out of my drums, as hard as I've ever hit anything in my life. While I'm hitting them, she's screaming, Harder! I stop. She stops. I'm looking at my drums. My heads have dents in them; if I hit the drum lightly, it will buzz, and I'm pissed. I'm steaming inside. I'm thinking, ‘Nobody talks to me that way.’ [Producer] Lenny Waronker says, ‘Let's do it again.’ We start again, and everybody is looking at me while they are playing. We're coming up to the fill, and she goes, Play hard! and I take my sticks like daggers and I do the fill, except I stab holes through my tom-tom heads. I land on my snare drum, both sticks are shaking, vibrating, bouncing on the snare drum.

“I get up and pick up my gig bag. There's complete silence. I slide open the sliding glass door, walk past her, down the hallway, get in my car, and I drive home.”

In the aftermath, Porcaro heard from another musician that Jones might sue him—but she let the incident pass. Pirates was eventually released, to critical acclaim, with Steve Gadd, another studio legend, handling much of the drum work.

But here’s the best part of the story. Three years later, Porcaro gets a call from a producer asking him to play on a Rickie Lee Jones session for the album The Magazine. This can’t be true, he thinks—has she forgotten their previous encounter? Maybe she was going through a bad spell back then, and doesn’t even remember the details? So Porcaro, taking pride in his professionalism and unwilling to hold grudges, decides to do the date, and see what happens.

When he shows up, Rickie Lee Jones greets him like an old friend: “Hi, Jeff, good to see you again. You seem to have lost weight.” The session takes place effortlessly and with excellent results. At the conclusion of the second song, Jones walks up to his drum kit, and in front of all the musicians—some who had been in attendance at the Pirates debacle—told Porcaro: "Jeff, I really have to tell you this. No drummer has ever played so great for me, listened to my music so closely, understood what I'm saying with lyrics, and has followed me as well as you. I just want to thank you for the good tracks."

Porcaro’s reaction: “I almost broke up laughing because I had played no differently for her the year before.”

II.

But by the time of this second session with Porcaro in 1984, Rickie Lee Jones—the rising star whose creativity and artistry had, just a short while before, seemed to promise (or even demand) a long career at the top of the music business—had already seen her moment come and go, at least from the point of view of the industry. She wasn’t even thirty years old, but the critics were no longer charmed by her capriciousness. When The Magazine was released, the New York Times responded: “Miss Jones is still looking for direction.” But even casual fans could tell something was wrong. In the five years after the release of her million-selling debut album Rickie Lee Jones, this hot new songwriter only released one album and an EP —a total of 67 minutes and 11 seconds of music.

Do the math: that works out to 13 minutes of new music per year.

Clearly Jones was focused on something besides composing and recording. But, whatever her reasons, most of her audience had left, never to return. You can measure the impact on the Billboard chart Rickie Lee Jones (1979) peaked at number 3 on the US album chart. Her follow-up Pirates reached as high as number 5. The Magazine topped out at number 44. The follow-up Flying Cowboys did somewhat better, reaching number 39. But with Pop Pop, recorded in 1989, Jones got no higher than number 121. The days of hit albums and large audiences were over, and they wouldn’t be coming back coming back. In retrospect, her commercial high point as a pop star was her first album, which produced her only genuine radio hit, “Chuck E.’s in Love.”

This is a familiar story in the music business—a promising debut followed by disappointment. So why am I so troubled by the fall of Rickie Lee Jones? There’s a simple answer: her talent was extraordinary. She seemed poised not only to have hit songs—which, after all, aren’t a rarity in the entertainment world—but do something even more remarkable, namely redefine the parameters of pop singing.

Her studio battle with Porcaro is all too revealing on this front, and it’s why I started my account by relating it. Rickie Lee Jones had a different concept of time than the other singers. She could make it seem as if her voice was floating over the ground beat with the freshness and changeability of the shifting colors of a sunset. This is something you occasionally find in jazz, but even there it’s a rarity: few improvisers can force the beat into such total submission to their artistic vision. But Jones seemed to do it effortlessly—at least for a time.

The sad reality is that her declining sales were the result, to some extent, of her growing affinity for jazz. Her final exile from the Billboard top 100 albums came in response to the unabashed jazz sensibility of Pop Pop (1989). In this regard, Jones experienced the same backlash that ended Joni Mitchell’s run of hit albums after the release of her jazzy Mingus album. Before Mingus, every new Joni Mitchell album seemed destined to get into the top 20 on the chart—afterwards none of them would. But for Rickie Lee Jones, the decline was sharper and less forgiving. After all, Mitchell was embraced by the jazz community—Herbie Hancock even won a Grammy for Album of the Year with his River: The Joni Letters (2007). Rickie Lee Jones, in contract, rarely received that kind of cherishing and celebration from jazz insiders—although she had perhaps the jazziest ways of phrasing of any pop music star during the second half of the twentieth century.

Yet this rhythmic flexibility was only part of Rickie Lee Jones’s innovative approach to singing. She also had a way of moving from singing to spoken speech and back again, while handling every gradation along the way. Listen again to her breakout hit, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” cueing the track at the 1:30 point, and hear what she does in the next thirty seconds. Was anyone else doing this in pop music? The short answer is: No, not even close.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: Rolling Stone
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