|
STORY & PHOTOS By PAUL ZOLLO
page 1
EDITOR'S NOTE: For more with Rickie Lee Jones, check out our Archives
for another interview, Rickie Lee Jones: 2000.
 here's a place where the invisible world, the realm of the spirit, intersects with the physical world. And tonight that place is at the intersection of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard. These long thoroughfares run parallel for multiple miles before they suddenly, without any logic or warning, cross. They cross in east Hollywood, one of many odd intersections in this little hamlet under the big sign, the same town in which Rickie Lee retreated years ago into an old late-night office building of ghosts to develop the characters that populated her first songs. And tonight we're in that physical Hollywood together, though we both recognize it's also an imagined Hollywood, one in which the wild Rickie Lee of those "Danny All-Star Joint" late nights imagines a world in which an older, more established Rickie Lee has famously flown with flying cowboys and sailed with mystic pirates into a realm where her music is known and loved throughout the world.
She's happy tonight. Driving to a favorite restaurant through these old streets of Hollywood after dark, it's a world she knows well, having lived and worked here on and off for almost 30 years. She knows it so well that she suggests short-cuts that even this Hollywood veteran doesn't know, and remarks on the sad demise of certain landmarks. But there's a "point of gratitude," as she puts it, in her heart tonight. It's a gratitude that's foremost in her thoughts, and evident on her newest album, Sermon On Exposition Boulevard, a song cycle of quiet inspirations and ecstatic exhortations on the meaning of Christ. But this album isn't about religion, it isn't about faith. It's about joy. It's about the "secret rooms of the heart" where one can go to be alone with God. More than anything it's about bringing the message of Christ down to earth. With the poetic grace of the unfathomable everyday that she's brought to all her songs since the start, Rickie takes us into that secret room of her heart, and sheds light into how it feels for a human to intersect with God. She writes of the divine connection in moments of familial intimacy we all share; in "that dance you make when you're by yourself just before your mother calls you on the phone." (And this correspondence of the eternal with the ordinary is exemplified in our physical midst over dinner, as in the stream of discussing her song "Gethsemane" she interjects, "I need a napkin; I got some ice-cream on my sleeve.") She connects to the story of Christ's last days with the customary wistful humor she's expressed throughout her work. "When I hear about the [final days of Jesus' life]," she says, "I think, wow, how much can go wrong in one weekend? You get there on a Friday and by Sunday you're dead."
You are the prayer
I tell you what
You gotta take it back from them
Because the prayers belong to you
All you gotta do is say hey hey
I'm down here too, I'm down here too
I'm down here too
And I hear you in the trees
And I hear you
And I'm near you
I wonder why there's so much suffering
I want to say thank you, thank you
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you
I wanted to say thank you, thank you
I wanted to say
I wanted to say
You are where I like it best
From "Where I Like It Best"
By Rickie Lee Jones, Lee Cantelon & Peter Atanasoff
Though she's driven down her share of dark boulevards and shady thoroughfares, on this night she's driving into the light. Her new album has been embraced by critics and fans around the globe, she's got a man in her life who is solid, wise and beloved (Lee Cantelon, musician-photographer and author of The Words, who is ensconced in the back seat), and she's got a beautiful daughter, Charlotte, who now lives on her own in Pasadena, but who is still powerfully connected to the mother who raised her alone. "The greatest way to evoke God is to be joyful," she says. "That's when God can manifest and shine through. And it's much harder for God to find its way through when there's so much sorrow. So you can only fight that sorrow with a joyful, joyful noise." Tonight the artist who felt she was forever an outsider is on the inside, driving down an avenue of genuine joy.
Now I walk among them and I sing to them
And I open up my wrists
And nobody knows my name
And I translate into many hours of history
But nobody knows my name
I stood in the four winds
I stood in the four winds
I stood in the four winds
And nobody knows my name
From "Nobody Knows My Name"
By Rickie Lee Jones, Lee Cantelon & Peter Atanasoff
She's always been brave. It's a special kind of bravado in her voice and in her songs, a sense of tough triumph, of having endured hardships, of that transcendent calm after a seriously dark storm. Her voice hovers precariously on that tremulous edge between heartbreak and joy. And on this night, sitting with Lee and this writer at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, she's happy - her new record is being critically embraced at a level she hasn't reached in years - and her concerts are being well-attended. But there's an after-storm elation in her, a sense of a soul having been shaken to the core. She discusses, softly, how an artist in this industry can't separate herself from the industry's response to her work, and the difficulty in recognizing the timeless value of her art at times when record sales don't add up to much. "Thank you," she says more than once. "Thanks for believing."
It's never been hard to believe in Rickie Lee Jones. Unlike other spiritual souls who have walked this earth, her spirit is preserved for us. It's there in the music. The essence of divine inspiration lives in every track she's recorded. More than most recording artists, especially in these modern times, Rickie has always been able to be quiet and still enough to retreat to her heart's secret room to hear the spirit, the music, the words. From the momentous moment of her unparalleled debut back in 1979, she's shone with courageous capacity to follow her muse wherever it leads, to make the music she hears, and sing the songs that emanate only from her singular soul. From that debut to the astounding multi-tempo suites of Pirates through the extended mysteries of The Magazine and the radiant desert soundscapes of Flying Cowboys to the fabulous electric-acoustic spook-hop funk of Ghostyhead and to The Evening of My Best Day [the album prior to Sermon], she's always played by her own rules, and always won. Now comes another miraculous turn in one of the most inspirational careers of any American songwriter, and it's called Sermon On Exposition Boulevard.
"You know you wake up one morning
And you're someone else
You're on your own
There is no miracle to take you home
And you cry to the god who leaves you there
To the branch and the bird and the empty air
To the God of why can't we turn back around
You say I've been true to you
Let me sing awhile
Let me sleep here
Don't make me beg…"
From "Gethsemane"
By Rickie Lee Jones & Peter Atanasoff
It all started when Lee invited her to come into the studio and recite some of the words from his book The Words, which is an attempt to deliver the genuine message of Jesus without the centuries of religious dogma and distortion that have been laid upon it. Working in Jerusalem and elsewhere, he analyzed the early sources for the text of Christ with Rabbinical scholars to place the words back in their original context. "The message has been hijacked," he explained. "As far back as when Christianity was adapted as the state religion in Rome by Constantine. And it became very, very far removed from what the teaching was. But there is really scholarship that goes back to when the original teaching was. If Titus hadn't destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the teaching of Christ would have remained. There is no disconnection here; this is an ancient Jewish writing." So he had been creating compelling musical tracks with guitarist Peter Atanasoff and others, and enlisting some great voices to recite the words of The Words. But when Rickie Lee arrived, she found herself inspired, almost transported, by the mystical power inherent in this ancient text, and rather then recite, she began to sing. And to improvise.
"Rickie came in," said Lee, "and we had these musical tracks. And they were good. And Rickie came in to read. And it was very simple, and here's the mike. And she starts to read, and she stops, and she says, `Can I sing instead?' And we said, 'Yeah.' And the natural thing is to ask her if she wanted to listen to some of the music beds to get some ideas, and Rickie says 'No, I like this one, 'Nobody Knows Me Name.' And she heard 20 seconds of it. You'd think the logical thing would be to listen to the track and contemplate how I'm gonna add music and lyrics to this music bed. But she said, 'No, I think I have a feel for it, let me just try something.' She sang the track extemporaneously. The music and the lyrics. And at the end of the track, we had the track that's on the album. And we were in awe. And at that point this changed from a very simple approach into something unbelievable."
What emerged - direct from her soul - is astounding. "Nobody Knows Your Name" came out whole, and in time an entire album of miraculous songs was created, an album truly borne of spirit, a connection with the invisible world from which all genuine art springs, and which she's brave enough to embrace and identify. None of it was pre-ordained or contrived. It was real, the essence of spirit. "It wasn't like we intended this at all," said Lee. "So these is no pretension to it. So we were just as surprised as anyone listening."
The ruling idea of Lee's exploration of the words was an understanding of Jesus' message as it existed in the first century, when the message stood simple and naked. Rickie picked up on this perspective and immediately made it her own, looking through the eyes of Christ, experiencing his experience, and thus translating it into our lives. "We read this text through this tremendous overlay," said Lee, "this heavy barnacle of history that makes it almost impossible to cut through. It's hard to get to the message when you're saddled with inquisitions and crusades and modern politics… It has expanded out and become this really other thing, and all our discussions now are about this other thing. And you look at the text now and realize it's actually very different. "
The lamp of the body is the eye
The lamp of the body is the eye
See the darkness shine
How great is the dark
See the dark
And are there not twelve hours of daylight
But if you walk by night
You will fall
From "Lamp of the Body"
By Rickie Lee Jones and Peter Atanasoff
Time has flown. When I first interviewed Rickie Lee in 1989, soon after the release of the masterful and mystical Flying Cowboys, her daughter Charlotte had just been born. "Before Charlotte, I never knew if there would be a future," she said back then in her signature hushed whisper. "Now I know there's a future, there has to be, because of Charlotte." Reminded today of this sentiment, she said, "Did I say that? I'll have to tell Charlotte that. That's a nice thing to say." Now some 18 years have passed, and Charlotte is a young woman, living on her own. Asked if her daughter likes her music, she said, "I don't know if she likes the music, but when she comes to my concerts, she likes all the feeling expressed, the level of emotion. She responds to the passion."
Rickie Lee tends to looks backwards and forwards, sometimes longing for her untamed youth and wistful about the future. On Flying Cowboys she celebrated the urban wilderness of her past from a safe distance. "When I was young," she sang with sad jubilance then on two different songs, "oh, I was a wild, wild one." Now she looks forward to a future when her famous songs will be cherished nostalgia. "You know, I wish I heard `Chuck E.'s In Love' on the oldies station," she says, "because I don't ever hear it. I'm looking forward to when it gets added to the playlist."
But mostly she embraces the present, and recognizes a "point of power" captured at this moment in time, even acknowledging that the heartbreak moments of the recent past were necessary to lead her to her current joy. "There's something wonderful going on right now," she says with a tender smile. "Everything is coming full circle."
(continued ...)
Top
| Back
<
| page 1
| page 2
| page 3
| page 4
| page 5
| >
|
