The Duchess of Coolsville

By JAY COCKS

The Duchess of Coolsville Richie Lee Jones hits big with a dash of scat and street poetry

That odd sound coming from the direction of your dashboard is not your old engine purring, for once, like a silver fox. It's a little tune on the radio with a dash of scat, a hipster backbeat and a lyric that truly glides, laid down in a voice of sweet rough-and-tumble. Chuck E.'s in Love, the most unlikely hit of the season, is fixing to elbow all the disco aside and find a snug niche for itself in the Top Ten. The song proves that despite all the flash and flack, disco still has a considerable way to go.

Whatever the fad, the Top 40 is territory that has not often been treated to the sound of well-groomed bop and is usually alien to lyrics of such well-tuned wit as these: "He was sittin' behind us down at the Pantages/ And whatever it is that he's got up his sleeve/ I hope it isn't contagious/ What's her name?/ Is that her there?/ Christ, I think he's even combed his hair!" For this song about the amours of Chuck E., and for a fine new album full of similar vignettes of life on the main stem, you can thank Rickie Lee Jones, 24, who has never cut a record before but who has sung in hard-times joints "full of bikers, degenerates, drunken men and toothless women" as recently as last year. She bought her first good guitar three weeks ago.

She is too good to be just a fluke, too tender to pass completely for the street-wise character she likes to play in her songs, too unexpected and far too unlikely to be a product of some commercial calculation. Jones' sound, respect, gracefully oldtime, never turns antique. She likes Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye and Laura Nyro, but she also talks of Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan with respect, performs a stops-out version of an old Louis Prima tune to close out her concerts. Her songs have their origins in, and owe a friendly debt to, the work of such all-night-joint bards as Tom Waits. Chuck E. is a real character, a buddy of Waits' and of Rickie Lee's who has now become, according to the woman who immortalized him, "king of the sidewalk, the most popular guy on Santa Monica Boulevard."

Jones' songs all have a kind of Los Angeles lyricism, fast and relaxed and flush with exotic incongruity, like L.A.'s transplanted palm trees. "My writing is all from a particular neighborhood," she told TIME'S Jeff Melvoin. "I can pick any person on this street or the next and just be them." The titles fix the tone and set the stage (Easy Money, Coolsville, The Last Chance Texaco), while the songs spin out little narratives of hard luck and high spirits in the big town: "There was a Joe/ Leanin' on the back door/ A couple Jills with their eyes on a couple of bills/ Their eyes was statin'/ They was waitin'/ To get their hands on some Easy Money."

Jones sings of such capers in a musky voice that slides across the lyrics, scatting between them and eliding words in vintage hipster style, as if English were a foreign language learned in a speed-speech course. For slow learners, lyrics are printed on the back of the album, and they make for some of the best new reading in pop. Still, one can appreciate the offhand confusion of Randy Newman, no small influence on Jones, and no master of elocution either. Specially imported to play synthesizer on one album cut, Newman was asked what he thought of the song. "Can't tell," he replied. "Couldn't understand a word."

Communication during the production of the album was something of a scattershot affair. Producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman brought Jones into the recording studio, corralled some of the best musicians in town to play behind her, invested four or five patient months until the album was done. "Lenny and Russ could appreciate a ... um . . . wild and unusual personality," says Rickie Lee. "They gave me complete space."

With only one semester of piano lessons behind her, Rickie Lee put her musical ideas across by spinning out stories to set the mood she wanted. "If I'd allowed myself to be told what to do," she says, "I'm sure somebody would have loved to tell me. But I wouldn't stand for it." That kind of stubbornness also gave the musicians a good deal of room to move. "She steps back and lets us play," says a back-up musician on her current sold-out club tour. "She knows what she wants and we like that. She's a good muscian. It's hard to believe this is really her first professional gig."

He may not know about what Rickie Lee calls "extensive education in music at home." Born in Chicago, hard by Wrigley Field, the third child of a couple "in the restaurant business" (which, from the ironic Jones argot, translates as "waiter and waitress"), Rickie Lee had a vagabond childhood. Her parents split up, reunited, drifted from state to state and job to job. Her father sang a lot, wrote his daughter a little tune called The Moon Is Made of Gold ("So don't feel bad because the sun went down/ The moon is made of gold"), which she includes in her show. Kicked out of high school in Olympia, Wash., Rickie Lee started drifting and bumming, drinking heavily, getting a firsthand taste of the lowlife. "I've been as far down as I can go and I made it out," she reflects. "So there's nothing to be afraid of any more." Eventually she made her way out to Venice, held down a job as waitress and started playing small clubs for free in Los Angeles.

Just now, she is polishing up her show. Rickie Lee's performance, loose and good-natured, is also self-deprecatory in a winning way. "Oh, for Christ's sake, sit down," she smiles at some folks in the audience attempting to give her a standing ovation. Also, to make sure she keeps close to her roots, she fixes a parking meter downstage as part of the show. "I really do hang out at the parking meter," she explains. She was even going to load it up with change to time her set, but she forgot. She just got too carried away with excitement.

--Jay Cocks

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