Long a believer in the impossible, Rickie Lee Jones has lived an extraordinary life of song. Here, she reflects on five decades of making music.
Transcript
Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones spent her early life drifting to and fro, landing wherever good luck and intuition seemed to guide her. In the mid 1970s, that place was Los Angeles. It was there that she would write the hit single “Chuck E’s In Love.” In 1979, her debut album sold over 2 million copies and she went on in her career to win two Grammys, and to claim her spot as one of the greatest singer/songwriters in American popular music. She joins me now to discuss her journey, her career and her newly released memoir. Rickie Lee Jones, welcome to Design Matters.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Hi, good to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Hi. Rickie, congratulations on your memoir. I agree with music critic Bob Lefsetz, who said it’s absolutely the best book about being an artist in the rock world that he’s ever read. Congratulations.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Your book is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Fans of yours know that the name Last Chance Texaco is taken from the title of one of your songs from your 1979 debut album. What made you decide to use that song title as the title of your book?
Rickie Lee Jones:
I think it’s evocative of a journey telling the story of a life on the road. When I think about it, actually, my dad wrote this story called “The Road Runner” when I was little. We traveled around so much, me in the back of that car, my life has been on the road. The other reason is the song is one of the most powerful and unique songs I’ve written, but I think mostly because it seemed to be the true signpost of my life.
Debbie Millman:
You write in the introduction that “Last Chance Texaco” remains a kind of living spirit to you, a whisper of belief and impossibilities. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about your belief in impossibilities.
Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s so intrinsic to my nature that it’s almost hard to separate it and talk about it. But I’ve always had and have still this feeling of being in a frame of being a story that’s watched by something that I interact with and talk to, that I talk to and interact with. That is to say that it manifests almost at will, but it manifests before me in proofs, which would suggest doubts, but people have doubts because they can’t see the invisible world. But we have a connection to things we can’t see. We find it out in science—“Oh, there are atoms, there are molecules.” So anyway, that’s what it is. There’s an unfettered connection to the invisible world that is both noun and verb. It is both a place and a feeling of personality that interacts with, because we don’t quite have words here to describe it. I don’t try, but I know it is with me always.
Debbie Millman:
You go on to state that after all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious, which I loved. I want to ask, how does it remain stubbornly mysterious?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I guess because you can’t ever figure out how things operate, but also in a more innocent way, when I take a walk outside and look up at the birds, and there’s a connection between the bird and some other thing that’s going to happen later in the day. If you’re watching, you’ll see it all, and it’s stubbornly mysterious because it refuses to reveal itself. Yet probably it’s revealing itself all the time. It’s us that refuses to see, but there’s a little prose going on in the book too.
Debbie Millman:
I want to go back in time a bit and talk about not only where you came from, but who you came from. Your paternal grandfather, Frank Peg Leg Jones, and your grandmother, Myrtle Lee, were vaudevillians based in Chicago, where you were born. Frank was a really big star singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit. He was once billed above Milton Burrow. Though he lost a limb in a childhood train accident, he was quite a good dancer. You’ve written that you were in awe of your grandfather. Do you have memories of seeing him perform when you were a child?
Rickie Lee Jones:
He died in 1940. He died before my parents met each other. I’ll just tell you a little side story. I joined Ancestry.com, and in that, a distant cousin contacted me and I found out all these things because he’s done a whole family history that includes my side. He separates from me around 1800, but he told me all about my family. That’s when I just found out when Frank died. I’m hoping in some piece of film that they find in a studio that Peg Leg Jones will be there in an audition tape, but I’ve never got to see him. We had two whole scrapbooks of his notices, which I can no longer find. I’m hoping they’re in storage. But I remember the one about Milton Burrow because Milton Burrow was famous. And the one which I quoted in the book, “This mono-ped puts most two-legged men to shame.” I love the language they used back then. They’re very succinct—“mono-ped.”
Debbie Millman:
A mono-ped. Yes.
Rickie Lee Jones:
So Frank, yeah. We were kind of [inaudible] at people who tumbled from town to town. Frank Peg Leg Jones is the one who started that by joining vaudeville, because all of the other Joneses still lived in Beaufort County, NC. We are the only ones that went tumbling West like a tumbleweed. My family line goes back to the very first settlers of North Carolina. Indeed, we are the first families of North Carolina. So I’m going to get a little plaque that … and that is an incredible thing. I wish that I could have passed that on to the Joneses before they passed away because wouldn’t they have been how happy. I don’t know, maybe they would have poo-pooed it, but wouldn’t they have been happy to see that all that rambling comes from the very first Welshman who rambled over to America in 1720.
Debbie Millman:
That’s incredible. I’ve done Ancestry on both sides of my family. I can go all the way back to the early 1800s on my father’s side of the family. But on my mom’s side of the family, we only go back to my great grandmother, and that is because no one can remember her maiden name, which is just completely heartbreaking to me, the idea that no one can remember.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, mine was adopted. Not only did we not have her last name, but we had no idea, but this fellow found her last name. I think some people just have a propensity for this kind of thing.
Debbie Millman:
Your mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio, and her parents were unable to take care of her. The courts ruled your mom’s mom an unfit mother, and all four of her children were permanently separated from her. You write in your book that all four children, along with a million other orphans of the great depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate towards children’s homes. Rickie, how did she finally get away? It’s a really remarkable story in your book.
Rickie Lee Jones:
You mean about old One Ball?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Rickie Lee Jones:
So One Ball was named One Ball because she wore her hair in one bun on top of her head. But the children had called her One Ball to indicate the one testicle they thought was hanging under the skirt. My mother, every time she told that story, she’d laugh. I think from all those, which at that time, I guess wasn’t that many years, 30 years separated, it was safe to laugh at this inhumane woman that was the matron. She’d sneak up on the children, that was her thing, to be in the shadows, catch them and terrify them before she hurt them. She was sneaking up and back at my mother who was brushing her hair in the mirror and she saw her coming up from behind.
It was a great moment of redemption because she turned and caught her just before she got there and held her hair brush up and said, “If you ever come after me again, I’m going to ram this hairbrush up your butt.” She probably said “ass,” because that was more like my mother, but I wrote “butt” because I didn’t want to portray my mother worse than the matron because she swore, but that’s what she did. She stood up to the sadist and frightened her. I guess my mother left soon after and the woman never bothered her again. At least that’s how the story was told to me.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. You write that childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow—
Rickie Lee Jones:
Of our happy-ever-afters.
Debbie Millman:
… of our happy-ever-afters. It’s a beautiful line. You go on to state that no matter what your mom did, she found traces of her past obstructing the future. How did that affect you?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, we never escape it. It gets passed on to all of us. Trauma is generational, I have learned. So if your grandmother was raped, you’re going to live with it. If they tell, it doesn’t dissipate. I think even if they don’t tell, their behavior will be so bizarre in particular ways. So even talking about it, it’s as if it happened to me. My mind begins to dissipate and swirl. It’s hard to stay centered on the subject. There’s so much trauma in my mother’s past. These stories I tell are the only ones she told, but sometimes hinted to something worse. She would say of the religious fanatics who populate that area, the [inaudible], she would say, “Goddamn hypocrites.” But the look on her face said much, much more than those words, as if something had happened to her specifically by religious people. And she’s just never going to tell her children about it. So I think it always gets passed on. How do you heal from it? I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll keep living and we’ll find out how.
Debbie Millman:
You were 3 years old when you made your debut as a performer. You were a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi. Rickie, is it true you were so intoxicated by the applause of the audience, your dance teacher how to escort you off the stage?
Rickie Lee Jones:
It is totally true. So I remember—and we saved that little uniform for so long—I remember it had spangles on it. In fact, now that I say this out loud, I think every costume I put on somehow evokes that very first snowflake outfit. But as I bowed and didn’t know I’d been out there longer, and all the kids had left the stage and I was still bowing, and the people were applauding and laughing, I just stayed—“Thank you very much.” And they liked to tell that story as I grew up. There’s always one of us out there.
Debbie Millman:
So, safe to say you realized very early on you liked being on stage?
Rickie Lee Jones:
I liked it. I felt no fear and liked everybody’s happy smiling faces. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I really related to a great deal was how you grew up creating invisible friends. In your book, you describe how you would daydream about an invisible horse galloping down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find you waiting and fearless. Then a trembling velvet muzzle would press against your hand, which was the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only you understood and contained its wild heart. You’d then holler out to your invisible horse, to the consternation of your siblings, who watched you in bewilderment. What did your family make of your invisible world?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I only became aware of them watching me when my mother told my dad to tell my invisible friend goodbye, that she didn’t want me talking to things that weren’t there anymore. But she didn’t seem to understand that that was as real to me as the physical world. There was no possibility that I could tell my invisible friend goodbye. That’d be like telling her goodbye. They just thought and did slightly treat me as if I was a little bit different than most people, which since that’s how they always treated me, it was normal, but it didn’t feel good. So maybe my mom thought if I stopped doing these things, that I would start to find my way toward real people and make real friends. Little did she know the reason I had invisible friends was because the real people didn’t want to play with me. I was also very bossy in my invisible world. I could control everything. With real people, they had ideas that were definitely inferior to mine.
Debbie Millman:
Did you name your invisible friends?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
I had an invisible friend named Goonie, for some reason, and I made my mother set the table with a place setting for her every night.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent. My friend was named Bashla. That’s a Slavic name, I don’t know where that came from, Bashla. Then when my parents quizzed me about my invisible friends, I began to make up others. I took the cue of the question to mean you should have more friends. So I made up SlowBeeSlow, but none was as real as Bashla.
Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up, your father’s anger and depression grew and he often left for months at a time. Your mother’s mood swings were unpredictable, and one day you came home from school to find that she had all of her teeth pulled out because they were hurting her. How were you able to make sense of this behavior and keep any semblance of your center?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, that event that my mother did, that was after the accident with my brother. So I think she was having a long, long fall. Why she decided to hurt herself, I don’t know if that was a conversation with my father. I said that thing about trauma having an impact forever, who knows where that came from. But for myself as an 11-year-old girl who’d already seen the accident and all the trouble, for my mother to do this thing without warning, and I come home from school and she doesn’t have any teeth, was maybe like the very last door to our lives than it had been to the new, bizarre horror that was coming. “You just can’t do stuff like that, mom, and you got to keep your children informed. Tell your daughter, ‘I’m thinking of getting Paul’s teeth.’ Say something so that I don’t come home and meet a mother without any teeth.”
Debbie Millman:
There’s a thread of magic that runs through Last Chance Texaco, where you talk about sensing things or knowing things in a way that’s very mysterious. We talked a little bit about that earlier. This happens quite vividly with the premonition you have about your older brother’s accident. I don’t know if you’re OK to talk about it at all, but can you describe the premonition and then what subsequently happened to him, and how he is now?
Rickie Lee Jones:
There have been a few times where I’ve had this place come upon me, and it is a place. I was in a lot of stressors in the lunchroom. It was just a few weeks into my sixth grade year, I think. I was still 10 years old, and the kids were drawing [inaudible] lines around their trays and I had to get out of the lunchroom, and to do that, I had to go by the table of older kids who were very mean. So on my way out, I stopped to look at some pictures, class pictures, that were on the right side of the auditorium stage. That’s where we ate, in the auditorium. As I looked at my brother’s graduation picture, the light in the room went away just like in a movie and centered around his picture. But it’s more than that.
It’s kind of scary because when I talk about it, it’s here, but I don’t talk about it much. It’s possible I could have had a life of premonitions if I would have let it happen anymore. But at any rate, I saw the picture and the message came. The message was really clear. It said, “Something is going to happen to Danny and nothing will ever be the same.” As if a gentle angel was saying, “So we’re letting you know, and there’s nothing you can do.” I don’t know. As years went by, I thought, when we used to make records, we worked with tape, and when you hit the cymbal really loud or the guitar really loud, the sound actually echoed over in part of the tape. So you’d hear an echo of a sound just before it came when you’re listening back.
It’s quite amazing, and as years have gone by, I thought, Maybe time is kind of like that, because we live in a spiral universe. Maybe some events are so loud they echo into the future, just like the … but at any rate, he did have this terrible accident 48 hours later. The man hit his motorcycle and knocked him off, dragging him along the road, because his foot was caught on the fender. Cut his leg open so bad. They severed his leg, but his head hitting the ground also caused traumatic brain injury.
You ask how he is now. Well, he didn’t have a great life, but he had an OK life. He ran a pool tournament for a while. He had his own pool hall, but probably nothing like the life he was hoping to have. When people are infirm or handicapped, or when people live a life that way, the only thing that they don’t want is to be measured as less than. “This is the life that is now, this is what I am. I’m not less than I was. I’m just Dan.” He’s still alive and he’s funny. The thing that he had when he was a little kid, he never lost, which was just a kind of lighthearted way of going through the world. Isn’t that something?
Debbie Millman:
Thank you for sharing that, Rickie. It seems that you were able to find solace and comfort in music, and you write about how you felt rescued by The Beatles.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. They had some kind of a magic in their sound. It changed the world. Elvis was powerful, right? An American symbol, a sex symbol, but there was something about The Beatles that did more than rock and roll. I just never understood how to express it. But when I hear the harmonica, the room that the reverb creates and the guitar, and there’s a place, I am transported back to that place in time. Like so many of us are with music, the way we felt when we first heard it. So, I guess it’s the music.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things I loved reading about was how you loved The Beatles so much you had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, Ringo rings, you collected Beatles trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum. You felt that if you could not have Paul, you would be Paul, and your love of The Beatles seemed to really help you undergo a social and spiritual metamorphosis, and rock music at that point became your Bible. But one thing that I loved was that you didn’t want to be a girl singer or The Beatles’ girlfriend. You wanted to be a Beatle, and there’s a big distinction there.
Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s the key, isn’t it?
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Rickie Lee Jones:
And maybe that’s the calling. I just don’t know, but I could never have settled for any of the roles that were offered to the girls. It was just automatic that I would be them.
Debbie Millman:
Over the course of your early life, in sort of preparation for your career, you had a number of incidents that you turned down, which took a lot of bravery and courage. And the first was when you started singing, your dad was so impressed with your ability, he took you to an audition for the Lew King show, which was a local television talent show, and you won. But then a decision had to be made that really did impact one direction that your life could have taken. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure. The Lew King Rangers show was, like you said, a talent show for kids. Who is the famous guy in Vegas, [singing], what was his … he was a star on that show. I auditioned and I was a good singer as a kid, but they told my parents that they would have to buy an insurance policy if I was going to be on the show. An insurance policy was just gangsterism. It would’ve cost a lot of money, from what my parents earned. When we were driving home, I was in the backseat, and I remember this so well, lots of talking, lots of talking about it. Then finally they put it back in my hands and said, “If you really want to do this, we’ll find a way to do it.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it—it’s wrong what they’re doing,” and I turned down what I lusted for, which was not only to be on television, but to sing in front of people.
Debbie Millman:
You write that the Lew King show and that decision was your first lesson in the dark corners of the music business, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. You go on to state, of the many exercises and integrity you have achieved or endured or failed, this was your greatest. Why is that?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Because I was a little kid and didn’t have the years that come as you get older, the years of reason. And I instinctually knew it was unethical, but a little kid wants what they want. So I think it’s a harder decision for a little kid to make, maybe not.
Debbie Millman:
You describe how that decision really gave you a compass of sorts, which is the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family, and all around you, your childhood was slipping away. But you write, to your North, you had a dream and only one direction you could call your own. Was that when you knew you wanted to be a professional musician?
Rickie Lee Jones:
I knew that I wanted to entertain. I wanted to act, I had been in tap and ballet. I was also swimming, hoping to go to the Olympics. So whatever I was going to be, it was going to be a self-made thing, not a thing I went to school to learn to be. It would be on my shoulders.
Debbie Millman:
Yet when you tried out for the school choir, you were turned down.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Not only were you turned down, but the music teacher singled you out in front of your friends and stated that your voice was too unusual and would not fit into his chorus. How do teachers like that even exist?
Rickie Lee Jones:
He kind of looked like a Marine. They’re just kind of people that are about everything being the same. Why they’re in the arts … I think there were a lot more of them in the arts. He was teaching everybody that if they wanted to be in music as a profession, they’d have to sound like this and sing like this, and maybe they’d get a job in this choir. You remember in the mid to late ’60s, choirs were very popular. They all sang in unison. So that was the job you could get, and I was like, “That is not the job I’m going to get.” But that hurt really badly.
Yet, he was right. My voice was different. There was something about me that seemed to piss teachers off, and they very unceremoniously sent me on my way. Maybe even at 12 or 13, I had a personality that was singular and meant to be a star on stage. I was not ever going to be in the choir. I always liked that little girl who did the long bow. I would always separate myself somehow, but they could have been so much gentler with me. It’s a longshot.
The people who become famous are longshots. They’re the people that teachers and most people around them go, “This guy’s never going to amount to anything,” because we are finding our way to a different plateau entirely. In that realm, we would be a bum; we’re not meant to be there. We’re meant to be up there. Since so few people make it, I guess, are able to define themselves and sell themselves as a singular new and different, because so many people want the same, same, same. So they treat you so badly. It’s a miracle that anybody who’s a little bit different ever achieves anything that they’re meant to achieve, I think. Yeah, that guy was a bad guy. He really hurt my feelings. He meant to hurt my feelings.
Debbie Millman:
And that’s the part that makes it cruel.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Your childhood was abruptly and forever altered by your brother’s injury. At that point you described your family life as something like a nuclear submarine waiting for the signal to destroy all known life. But music became an even stronger solace for you, and you write how Jefferson Airplane was on your turntable every day. Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and The Mothers of Invention were frequently played. You also love show tunes, particularly from West Side Story. You go on to describe how Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow seemed to be at the eye of a storm you longed to be part of. What storm was that?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, outside of my house, the hippies were growing. They’d been growing since ’65 and ’66. There’s an article in LOOK or LIFE Magazine about them on LSD, and little slices of them out there, and their long hair and Indian headbands. So first it’s a look that invites a child, but what they’re talking about, peace, protest, that’s way lower on the list. I wanted to be part of all that love and attention. They would have love-ins. There was a love-in or something in Encanto Park. I wanted to be there so bad. Well, all it was was people standing around. It wasn’t anything like what the title … I thought something magical would be happening in there. But nevertheless, I was drawn out of the family circle and all that trouble and drama to a larger picture that maybe I could find a place in.
Debbie Millman:
The last song on Side A of Surrealistic Pillow, “Comin’ Back to Me,” was my favorite. You taught yourself how to play the guitar, sounding out each note one phrase at a time by ear. How did you feel when you realized you could play it?
Rickie Lee Jones:
It took so long, so many weeks of practice, and memory, and getting … the fingers would hurt so badly pressing on those little steel razors. Then finally I could make that beautiful motion walking down from the C to the A minor. And when you’re making music, it’s like you’re weaving reality. You’re weaving places. You’re bringing the … it’s magic, and bringing these feelings into existence out here before you. Oh my God. I had longed to do it and I was doing it. That’s all I can say about that. It was pretty wonderful.
Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to skip too far ahead in time, but what was it like to record that song for your album Pop Pop?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wasn’t sure I should do it because it has always been that first song I learned and it’s attached to so many feelings that have their root when I was 11, or 10, or 12 years old. I go right back to that bedroom when I start thinking of that song. So, I didn’t want to put it out before me where it could be measured, and maybe people wouldn’t like it or would like it, but it wouldn’t be my private … but that didn’t happen at all. Actually, it’s remained my own private place. I was more concerned on a technical level with the key, because my voice is much lower now, but at the time it was pretty low in my register, and I was working hard to sing there. Marty Balin and I have a similar range that we can sing in. So I was just thinking about it technically—was I pulling it off?—because I knew how I felt singing it, but was I conveying it to the listener? That’s all I was thinking about.
Debbie Millman:
Is it different for you to perform songs that were written by other people rather than songs written by yourself?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
One song that I think is remarkable that you do is a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil,” which takes the song and makes it a completely different song. It’s a completely different song. I was playing it for my wife and I’m like, “Do you recognize this song?” And I played the first couple of bars that you sang and she’s like, “No.” And then I played the Rolling Stones’ version and she was like, “Holy shit.” I’m like, “Yeah. yeah.”
Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent.
Debbie Millman:
It’s amazing. Amazing.
Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s exactly what I would wish happened. So, yes, I have a very different relationship. When I hear a song, I can mold it in any direction I want. But when I write it, it’s almost like taking dictation—“This is the way I have to play it.” If I play it another way, that will be what it looks like. It’s like you’re making a baby in here, but you get to decide what it’s … so I have to stick to the creation of the song rather than the interpretation of the song when it’s mine.
Debbie Millman:
I think you were 14—you heard from a friend that her boyfriend was starting a band, and you auditioned and became the lead singer of the California Blues Band.
Rickie Lee Jones:
California Blues Band.
Debbie Millman:
Your mother gave you money to buy a paisley empire-waisted one-piece satin lounge pajama outfit that you saw at Lerners department store. I remember Lerners department store, by the way. What did it feel like to finally sort of be the lead singer in a band?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wore that pajama out of Lerners that day. So I was walking through Christown Mall with it on, and I felt like … so they’re looking at me, and I like that. Partly I think that they might not like me, but I don’t care. I’m kind of walking on air and I’m part of the hippies. That costume was an invitation to anywhere I wanted to go. I’m grown up, I’m part of the hippies, I’m a rockstar. We didn’t say rockstar back then, but I’m the lead singer of a band. I’m in a band. So it felt like, I guess, uniforms are supposed to make you feel. When you put on a uniform, you’re a part of us, and you do this. Maybe uniforms help you do your job better. But I felt like I had put on the uniform of my future.
It was also defiance, because the lounge pajama, it was a pajama, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know people wore lounge pajamas. I never heard of that. So it was defiance against my parents who would let, my mother would let me, but she wouldn’t like it, and all the people that were looking at me, and that defiance made me feel good. That’s the key in me, I guess, I need a little defiance.
Debbie Millman:
Actually, the defiance reminds me of an experience you had in high school where you were expelled because you refused to take off your hat.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. Defiance with clothes. When you take off the hat, you get no education.
Debbie Millman:
I believe that that teacher also was very cruel to you and told you that you were an undesirable element at the school.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, not the teacher, but the vice principal. The teacher was a woman, the home ed teacher, but the vice principal said I was an undesirable element because I said, “No, no, wait, you just expelled me. You suspended me for three days for this. I just got back.” He said, “I don’t care. You’re an undesirable element at this school.” So she didn’t seem to know that I’d already been absent—
Debbie Millman:
Punished for it.
Rickie Lee Jones:
… for three days, and sent the note in again. So it just seemed so unfair, but he made it clear, he didn’t care if it was fair, he was taking this opportunity to get me out of the school. Shame on him.
Debbie Millman:
Shame on him, indeed. Did he ever apologize to you when he realized what you did with your life?
Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s not just me. He kicked out 11 other hippies that year. He got rid of all the heads. Some of those kids were just long-haired kids. They didn’t smoke pot. They were really good students. No, he didn’t apologize to anybody.
Debbie Millman:
All of that ultimately motivated you to run away.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes, again.
Debbie Millman:
You ran away several times as a teenager. On the road, you had skirmishes with gangsters, would-be abductors. You snuck into a concert venue to see Jimi Hendrix. You witnessed an abusive man beating up his wife. You even met a pimp, who was actually rather nice. When you settled in Los Angeles, you lived in a cave for a while. You hitchhiked on a dark highway to get to Canada. Though I know in real life you end up alive—obviously, we’re talking—there were moments while reading your book where I was genuinely terrified that you might not make it. How scared were you during these experiences in your early life?
Rickie Lee Jones:
I think I was scared a lot. When I made the decision to leave my dad in 1968, he had become abusive and was drinking too much. Not that I hadn’t kind of been used to that a little bit, but when he beat me, that hadn’t happened before, and I went, “I’m out of here.” There’d been a festival I wanted to go to, so I took that opportunity to run away. I had an ability, it turned out, to take care of myself with strangers, but it was always terrifying. I hitchhiked, and you never know who’s going to pick you up. You have to be so aware of every tiny detail of the person if you’re going to survive. I had that skill and I also got a lot of luck.
So it was thrilling, but I was also a little baby. I was just 14 years old, and I looked older because I had big boobs. That’s all. If I’d been flat-chested, I don’t think anybody would have mistaken me for a 17 … I said I was 17 because I didn’t act like an 18-year-old because I didn’t know enough. So if I did 17, that would get me through.
I went in a car with somebody bringing pot back from Mexico. So that was so dang dangerous. And to me it was just kind of thrilling. Lots of people were bringing pot over. So I could do that too and see what that felt like to be nefarious. Well, from the time that guy got over there, I got worried about the people who brought the drugs. I was in danger. I didn’t know that guy. I mean, it was a friend of a friend of a friend, but who knows who he was. Yet, escorted there to Hot Springs and back home again. So it does sometimes feel like I had a very divine escort, which my intellect, my instincts, but no, it feels like something brighter than just me. So I was scared a lot.
Debbie Millman:
When you settled in Los Angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you’d been fired from. You were set to get $85 a month for six months, which at the time was just enough to pay rent.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Just enough. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So you gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music or you would have to go home. I believe that one of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album, a song that I’ve probably played several thousand times in my life. It’s a song called “Company.” You talk about writing it in the book; I don’t remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song. Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote that song? I mean, that’s a crazy good song to be the first song you’ve ever really written. It’s a masterpiece.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. I had written the lyric. I worked for this gangster named Rocky, and luckily he was probably doing who knows when he was really shipping, but I’d have to sit at a desk and wait for a consolidated shipping form to fill out, and I have many hours to do nothing. So I started writing lyrics on the typewriter. The typewriter made me feel like a real writer, and I wrote the lyrics to “Young Blood,” some parts of “The Real End,” which becomes a line in “Coolsville,” and “Company.” Pretty much almost as it ends up, “I’ll remember you too clearly, but I’ll survive another day. Conversations to share, no one there. I’ll imagine what you’d say. Two for the movie show, three in the back row. Hold on tight.” So I’m playing with synchronized rhythmic ideas in the lyrics, right? Can you see the connection? So that’s what I’m sitting there doing.
But when I reach across the galaxy, and I think that was the line, that was not too many universes and galaxies, a few, but not too many in lyrics. “When I reach across the galaxy, I’ll miss your company.” In the old [inaudible] way, just two verses, not even a bridge. So I met this guy out on the beach, Alfred Johnson. He was playing piano, and he was good, and he knew Laura Nyro songs, and he was playing the old stuff that I liked, “Up on the Roof,” and whatever.
So I agreed to go over to his house, which was a little bit of a risky thing to do. At that age, sort of like 22 or so, I was not as risky as I had been as a teenager, but I went ahead over him and his friend, and when I walked in—and it was an apartment in the very back overlooking the garage—when I walked in, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, hanging from things and stuck on the lamps and stuff. So I had to use that … I was still at the door, I know, but I had to use that instinct of, “Is this a message or is this art? What am I looking at here?” And I could see them looking at me and I just went, “cool.” And I don’t even know if I commented on it, which made them respect me even more. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in danger.
I asked myself, “Why does the world have to be so dangerous that if you go over to somebody’s house, you don’t know if they’re going to kill you.” It’s so dangerous for women every day, and we live with that tension every day. Men can’t know, and they dismiss it. They go, “What are you always worried about?” Well, because there’s a lot to worry about, and you can’t know unless you become one of us, and how many ways we have to watch all the time.
So anyway, I got there and quite the opposite of danger happened, which is he sat behind his keyboard, and he had so much equipment. He loved all this equipment. Alfred is a Black man from far away, like Riverside or something. I assumed his language would be Black music, but it wasn’t. It was Buffalo Springfield and Little Feat. It was that generation of music, while mine actually was Marvin Gaye. And don’t get me wrong, I think Buffalo Springfield was a very important band, where many, many things connect. But so we had a common language that we didn’t know when we first met. As we began to play, he took ahold of the lyrics and he did something nobody does … I can only describe it as a physical thing where he took ahold of them and cut a little hole out and put his heart in them. He made them his own.
We did it in the old way of … like I would imagine the old timey songwriters would’ve done. So I’m standing by the keyboard, he’s there, and we’re singing every single thing. “So how are we going to write this, ‘Company’?” “’Company,’” I said, “I was hoping that Frank Sinatra might sing this.” OK. So I’ve given us some kind of a language to use to start. [singing] I could see Frank doing that. So there’s our first line. Then I think I do that, and then Alfred says [singing]. So, as we got deeper in, almost syllables were exchanged. [singing] Maybe that was one person. [singing] And that much took an hour and a half. So by 12 hours later, we’d finished it. [singing] Can’t sing it with the earphones in. [singing] “What cords are we going to put under there?” “So that second time we do it, when we suspend that cord and resolve it.” “Well, remember it, do it next time. Don’t forget. That was really good.”
So by the time it was done, we had lived a lifetime together, and we were done. We did write more. We wrote the bridge to “Weasel and the White Boys,” and he wants to write more, and I would like to write more with him. But I have to see him in another life because that was a whole lifetime spent with Alfred writing “Company.” I tell it with words, but I’d like to go back and feel what it was to have all life before you, before me, and know that every single thing I did mattered, and was forming all the roads that would be on the map to come.
It’s hard to have that at 66. But if you don’t, if you don’t say, “I have a life before me, and there are still many roads to carve out of everything I make,” it’s a question of timing also, but you have to keep seeing your life as before you, not after you. That power will go into the work that you make. I think one of the things about ‘Company,’ besides that I was a forlorn, love-lost lyricist, was all life was before us. And we had a lot at stake.
Debbie Millman:
But yet the song feels like an old soul wrote it. It’s hard to believe that you were just coming out of your teenage years when you wrote that song. You also wrote a song titled “Easy Money” that the producer, Bud Dain, liked.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Bud Dain.
Debbie Millman:
And then he offered you a job, wherein you would write a certain number of songs per month for $800 a month. And back in 1977, that was like winning the lottery. You were all set to sign it. And then similar to your decision with Lew King, you didn’t.
Rickie Lee Jones:
Similar with my brother, the voice that spoke about my brother’s accident. It wasn’t bad, but it was also almost like a juxtaposition of time, because understand, I have the pen in my hand. I’ve come up the elevator to the office to sign. And I have the pen in my hand and something very loudly says, “Don’t sign. If he wants you, someone else will too,” which is an invitation to the future. It’s saying, “You are just beginning. This is not where you’re supposed to go. Don’t stop here.” Isn’t that funny how destiny calls you, but you can get waylaid like the Odyssey. You can get waylaid. So, it was a powerful moment. I still am in awe that some part of me knew that I would go to better places. This would not be my only chance. When we’re down at the bottom, we do feel like anything is where we’re supposed to be.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You write that it took balls to pass up that opportunity and opt for poverty on the belief that something greater was meant for you. And it was, it was. At this point in your life, you were doing gigs around various small, somewhat seedy venues through Los Angeles. What would you consider to be your big breakthrough? What was that moment?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Troubadour. The Troubadour was the third show. Nick Mathe, my old next door neighbor, had become my manager, and he had actually done a pretty good job, I think. And we had decided we’d have three showcases, which showcases was like, you didn’t get paid. I guess it’s how it always is now, but you didn’t get paid and you did a 20- or 30-minute show. And then people could come and get a taste for who you are. So we did three of them. The last one would be at the Troubadour, and that one had a … it was like a snowball. The first one, there were three famous people, that is three A&R guys, or three … this was full of them. We got it attached to Wendy Waldman’s show because we couldn’t get in anywhere.
So they put us in at the very beginning of her show, God bless her for that. We had people from three record companies, Warner Brothers, Portrait, Horizon, and I think Portrait or Horizon was a subsidiary of Columbia, A&M, Tommy LiPuma. So there were a whole bunch of important folks at that show. I did five songs, and I invited my friends from the street, that is four or five guys I knew who hung out on the street on Santa Monica Boulevard, came in and sang harmony on an a capella thing. My friend from The Great American Food & Beverage Company came in and played piano on [inaudible], and I played the other … because I wanted to show them as much as I could how big the room was, what I liked, the old-timey stuff, a capella stuff, because I didn’t know if the songs I wrote showed you where I wanted to go. So anyway, that was my big plan, and I think it worked.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote about a drive with the producer Lowell George as the official beginning of your new life, the one that you live today, and you write, “That ride seemed so right and normal as if I had always been destined to ride in that Range Rover. Although I was giddy inside, I was cool. And if I may say, beautiful. I knew who I was, the songwriter, the girl in the beret. I belonged sipping Moet with Lowell George. I belonged.” What did you envision your future would be like at that point?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I think at that time I was really living in the here and now. So I had Lowell and the possibility of his world. I knew Tom and Chuck and their world. So this is me on unemployment, possibly becoming part of worlds that I’ve lived with all my life. So here sitting in the couch is David Crosby, and over there is Graham Nash. So that’s what I was doing. I don’t think I was doing anything else but navigating my feelings and the real world before me.
Debbie Millman:
You knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to have staying power. And before you even made a record, you were aware of the danger of being what you referred to as being used up too fast. Were you worried that that might happen?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure, but the illusion was a year into my career, and I was so very famous. All the doors opened, all the backstage doors opened, and I seemed to have so much money it would never go away. The illusion was that it would always be that way. It could never go away. That’s been the challenge, is learning that balloon of attention and fame will be expelled. And how will you be here in 30 years if this is where you want to be? The only way for me was to write work that was so iconic and so powerful that, like Frank Sinatra, who was my hero, that people would always come back to be a part of it. So that was what I set out to do. So, it’s been a life experience, not a career experience. It’s been learning how to navigate life.
The thing I feel now is that music and this career, there’s no difference between my life and my career, and my career and my life. They’re all mixed up together. That’s why it was OK to write the book and tell you about my history, because if you’re meant to be here, it’ll only do good. Also, I wanted to … I thought, There really aren’t very many stories of women’s whole lives. We have memoirs, but this is a story of a life, and a time, and a family, and at an extraordinary event, that is my career, but the book is the story of a life.
Debbie Millman:
What’s really interesting is as, I guess I would be considered a super fan, reading your book illuminated so much of your music in a completely different way, because you have been so private. I was sort of astounded by the history that you bring to your music, and it sort of helps augment the music in a completely different way. Relistening to your entire catalog in preparation for the interview, I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s the story in ‘Coolsville.’” You kind of get the music in a completely different way. Your second album, Pirates, is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. And I’m not saying that because I’m a fan, I’m saying that because it’s been written about as one of the greatest albums ever made.
And it was written at the end of your addiction to heroin, when you and musician Sal Bernardi lived on 9th Street in Manhattan. And you write that, “This is where Sal and I lost our way together. We stayed up all night and slept until 4 p.m. and rose half-dead to get high and feel half-alive again. We wrote music and read Edgar Allan Poe,” who shows up in some of the lyrics. “We lived the strange twilight, the slow-motion fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.” You’ve said that heroin was like a carnival ride you couldn’t exit until the ride was over. And one day you knew it was time to get off the ride. How did you kick the habit? Because you didn’t go to rehab. How did you manage to get over this?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, it took a lot of false starts. It’s hard to describe to anybody how overpowering heroin is to the spirit and the psyche. And I guess I’m many, many, many years away, so it’s safe for me to look, but it’s also kind of like, what’s that … you know that book, The Hobbit, and there’s that one eye in the tower? It’s kind of like that. If you turn and look at it, it’ll look at you too. But I guess it’s talking to the part of the brain that doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel pleasure, and it fills that up with safety and pleasure in a half-sleep state where you can write anything and be walking in a dream and talking. So, well, that’s nice. But in a month, or two, or six, this place begins to recede.
So when you stop taking the drug, this place isn’t quite the same anymore. So when you’ve been on that drug for a few years, you don’t have anything here to root into. It has gone away and become part of the dream place. The strength of will it takes to abandon that safe, wonderful dream place for this stark bright, hard, frightening world is incredible. When I was a drug addict, about two or three years, I began to want to be well. And that helps that language to say, “I’m sick and I want to be well.” It was very hard. I had a therapist, I tried, I failed, I tried, I failed. I identified triggers, and it took a year or a year and a half of saying “no more,” and then relapsing.
But after finally three months or four months, the test, I survived that test. I didn’t get high, and a year later, the year test. So, I never went to AA or anything, but it really was one day at a time, one step at a time. We made it here, we made it there, and resolving never to go back. Now, what I just wanted to do right now was to try to describe what addiction is so that people who don’t have addictive personalities could get a sense that it’s not a choice. It’s like an altering of the brain that takes place, and it takes the will to go, “I know that place exists, even though I can’t see it anymore, and I’m going back. I’m going over the mountains and through the deserts, and I’m finding my way back to reality.”
Debbie Millman:
You’ve been sober for decades now, and write, “How months go by now when you forget you were an addict. The dark is gone. The shadow’s faded. You are recovered and whole.” One thing that I shook my head over as I was reading your book was the notion that male rockers like Keith Richards, you sort of admired for his longevity and drug use. But women in rock and roll are shamed for the same behavior that men are often held for. How do you make sense of that, if you can?
Rickie Lee Jones:
I think we do it with women in all things. We assign a moral code to them that we don’t hold men to. And it’s sad because that dubiousness is creating careers. It’s very hard now to have a career if you won’t sell yourself sexually. We worked so hard to not have to do that. So that’s a little discouraging.
Debbie Millman:
Well, one other thing that you can’t help but notice if you look at the lyric and the liner notes of your albums, all the songs are “music and lyrics by Rickie Lee Jones,” for the most part. You look at some of the popular music today and you see, and I’m really not joking, 30 or 40 names. I don’t even know how that is possible.
Rickie Lee Jones:
I guess everybody in the room gets their name on.
Debbie Millman:
It seems like there was a moment in time where music was a very personal sort of soul-revealing experience. And over time, that’s sort of changed to really become entertainment.
Rickie Lee Jones:
The relationship was the art. It was the person’s relationship with art. Now, it’s a person’s relationship with show business and fame. What they’re seeking is success. What we sought was a great song. We hoped it sold, but our emphasis was the great song. It’s not anymore. Nobody’s trying to write a great song. They’re trying to write a hit song. That’s what shows. That’s too bad. But I really think we’re cyclical. People get tired of that. That’ll fall away. Something else will take its place. Hopefully songs, hopefully not just sounds, but who knows what’s coming?
Debbie Millman:
Finally, my last question is one that my wife, who is a writer, suggested that I ask you. The question is, how would the liner notes of your life read?
Rickie Lee Jones:
Of my life? Woo. That’s a long and creative thing, which I don’t know if I can do on the fly. It’s kind of like a tombstone too, right? That’s a kind of good idea. Instead of a tombstone, we’ll put some liner notes. I guess I would say she was a woman of her time who transcended her time, but that’s too easy. That’s more like a tombstone. I guess she was a woman who transcended, who found a place to fit in. You could go either way with that. But I think the jury’s out, and liner notes are always written by somebody else, their view of who you are. You can try to plant eggs and get them to go in that direction, but I was never sure how other people saw me. There’s a nice thing that’s happened this year, where I finally don’t feel misunderstood. That’s really all I could ask for. Things seem to be right now. So maybe there won’t be any liner notes, or just put it out and let people guess.
Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you how much your music has meant to me in my life. I own everything you’ve ever published and really just want to thank you for doing the work that you do. Thank you for enriching my life with your music and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Rickie Lee Jones:
You’re welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, too. Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones’ new memoir is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. You could read more about her remarkable career on her website, rickieleejones.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.