With a new album of quirky pop standards that has sharply divided critics and fans, Rickie Lee Jones has begun to reinvent herself-and not a moment too soon, she says.
When Jones first hit in 1979 with ”Chuck E.`s in Love,” nobody quite knew what to make of her gypsy clothes, musky voice and beatnik tunes.
She looked and sounded like she had just walked out of a Jack Kerouac novel, but this hipster wasn`t playing it for campy thrills. Over four albums, an EP and a series of tours, she made some of the most personal, eccentric and emotionally resonant music of the last decade.
Jones, who will headline Tuesday at the Park West (the show is sold out), felt that original spark begin to fade with her lushly produced 1989 album,
”Flying Cowboys.”
”That was the end of a group of albums and a way of making records,”
she says. ” `Flying Cowboys` got bigger-sounding than I intended it to in some places. I like things to sound a little raggedy, a little more homemade. What had been very new and interesting 10 years ago had become the middle of the road and I don`t like to be in there at all. I hate that.”
Jones said she saw herself turning into a caricature.
”The most horrible thing is to find that you`re repeating yourself accidentally,” she says. ”(`Cowboys` producer) Walter Becker had a good word for it, `edified.` You become edified.
”They`ll do it with rap, too. It becomes part of society rather than separate from it when they use it for 25 McDonald`s commercials and 3 Levis`
commercials and steal the idea for a television show theme and little bits of your character are in cartoons. Eventually you suffer the consequences of that. I sensed it really seriously happening to me and I guess it all added up to needing to do something different. So I found another way to do a record.” And how. ”Pop Pop” (Geffen) isn`t exactly a pop album. Nor is it quite jazz or blues, for that matter. What it is, is a collection of standards that sounds anything but reverent, touching on movie and show tunes, Frank Sinatra and Jimi Hendrix.
”I had just finished a tour and I knew it would be a long wait for the next album-and really difficult, if I started to undertake writing again,”
she says. ”This album was right there, in a way. I had wanted to do it a long time and here was the opportunity.”
Of the wide array of songs chosen for the album, including the 1926 Tin Pan Alley standard ”Bye Bye Blackbird,” ”Hi-Lili Hi-Lo” from the 1952 film ”Lili” and Oscar Brown Jr.`s ”Dat Dere,” Jones said only one-the Jefferson Airplane`s ”Comin` Back to Me”-had been on her wish list for years.
”The rest came up in the last year or two,” she says. ”When it came time to do the record, those were the ones that turned out to be the least cliched.”
”Pop Pop” has the warmth and intimacy of a pre-rock era recording session. With producer David Weiss of Was (Not Was), Jones sang the tunes with a drummer-less acoustic band, including such stalwarts as guitarist Robben Ford, bassist Charlie Haden and saxophonist Joe Henderson.
”It is pretty much a jazz album,” Jones says. ”But it`s not a left turn, as some people are saying. To me it`s as creative of an effort and as natural as anything I would have written. People who like my writing are saying they`re waiting for my next real record. . . . Oh, that`s so cold. I can hear more creativity happening with this stuff than anything I`ve done in a long time.”
Jones` between-the-cracks style of singing, a mixture of child-like wonder and almost sobbing intensity, tends to draw lines in the sand for most music fans. Some jazz critics have blasted ”Pop Pop” as misguided and criticized Jones` ragamuffin singing style.
Certainly, Jones doesn`t quite nail all the notes dead center and her pitch wavers occasionally. Yet there`s also a sense that she isn`t holding anything back, that she`s breaking off a piece of her heart with each line.
”I think jazz is what I sing best, but I really kind of make up my own way of singing,” she says. ”I read a book about singing before I made my first album, and it helped me in breathing and moving the sound, but I never had a lesson. Most of the time students end up imitating their teachers. I don`t try to be something else than what I am. I just make it happen well. Even things that are flawed end up part of the style.”
More than anything, she says, her nomadic life as a child and her father`s interest in music shaped her artistic sensibility.
”My dad listened to Nina Simone and played the trumpet and sang a lot around the house,” Jones says. ”I could name a few records he had, but I was more influenced by him than anything he listened to. He`d sing the Mills Brothers, Sinatra, the blues, `St. James Infirmary,` `St. Louis Blues`-all those `Saint` songs.”
She can`t fully explain how she gets inside her music, or, in the case of ”Pop Pop,” someone else`s.
”I guess that`s my gift-I get to comprehend music instinctivly,” she says. But there`s no question she must first inhabit a song before she can sing it.
For the album`s opener, ”My One and Only Love,” originally recorded by Sinatra in 1952, Jones explains that she found the lyric too sweet at first, but ”I wanted to sing the melody very much.”
”So I just walked around and spoke the words for a couple of days,” she says. ”It caught me by surprise, because suddenly I realized how really, really intimate the song was. I realized, `This isn`t syrupy at all. It isn`t street language, but it is very intimate, very sexual.` I just came in through the backdoor to the lyric and now I love it very much.”
Her need to feel that connection partially accounts for Jones` erratic concert performances over the years. Although her last area show, at Poplar Creek in the summer of 1990, was among the year`s most memorable, with the singer twirling about the stage in her stocking feet, Jones says she`d just as soon not perform at big outdoor concerts.
”I hate the distance between stage and audience,” she says. ”And even when people come to see performers they like, they come with a completely different attitude. We started that tour in Atlanta and people came in with picnics, and they`re sitting drinking beer. That`s nice for them, but it`s terrible for me.
”I would go out in the lawn before the show and think to myself, `This is so nice, I think I`d have a picnic here too.` So I try to relate to it as entertainment instead of art. People aren`t all there for a dramatic evening, they`re there to have a nice evening. . . . Maybe I`m just not the person to do that with.”
