Kicks from Rickie Lee Jones

William Dart indulges himself in the back catalogue of Rickie Lee Jones – all 40 years of it. Plus there’s a new album called Kicks.

"My life is mostly like a mom's life. Except, not completely because I have this wonderful diversion of, uh … you know… showbusiness."

… Rickie Lee Jones on motherhood and showbiz in an interview recorded in 1991, introducing her first album of cover versions, Pop Pop, which included this classic ballad of existential barroom despair.

Over the last few weeks, rather than frequenting bars and drinking rye, I’ve been staying at home, with milder libations, indulging myself in the back catalogue of Rickie Lee Jones … all four decades of it.

1991’s Pop Pop album somehow kept repeating on me, and why not? Jones’ brink-of-tears voice is certainly one justification. The other, the feathery filigree spun by a trio of guitarist Robben Ford, bass man Charlie Haden and Dino Saluzzi on bandoneon.

Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman’s 'The Ballad of the Sad Young Men' is not the only moment of lachrymosa on the Pop Pop set. The same songwriting team competes with itself in the sob stakes with their 'Spring can really hang you up the most'.

But the album wasn’t all Tin Pan Alley on the weepy side. Jones justifies her reputation as the Duchess of Coolsville by including the Jefferson Airplane’s 'Comin’ Back to You' and Jimi Hendrix’s 'Up from the Skies'.

The Hendrix song, taken from his second album Axis Bold as Love, enjoyed a bit of resurgence in the late 80s being covered, rather pretentiously, by Sting and Gil Evans; and then with post-punk thrust by Joan Jett.

Rickie Lee Jones, working with two guitars and bass, opts for an airy, jazzy approach, as if  Django Reinhardt and his Hot Club had time travelled into the Topanga recording studio for the evening.

The song itself, with Hendrix at his most mystically hippie, makes connections for us in 2019 with the current tragedy of the Amazon on fire.

Rickie Lee Jones, who has a strong and individual pen in her own right, has always enjoyed sampling the songbooks of others – from as far back as 1983, when her third album caught her in concert singing numbers by Billy Strayhorn, Rodgers and Hart and her very special friend, Tom Waits.

She had another such adventure with bass player Rob Wasserman, with whom she visited this country in the mid-1990s.

Her take on Joseph Kozma’s 'Autumn Leaves' that appeared on Wasserman’s 1988 Duets album is something else. Starting with inchoate mumble halfway through a verse, it builds up to embrace both scat vocalising and some eerie piling up of vocals, as Wasserman moves from plucking to bowing and back again.

There were more collaborations on her 2000 album of cover versions, titled It’s Like This, with recording sessions that brought in singers Ben Folds, Dan Hicks and Taj Mahal to put their own swing into Hoagy Carmichael’s 'Up a Lazy River'.

It’s disarmingly casual with the feel of a pretty laidback riverboat party to it. And, at the end, there’s a general consensus from all involved that it wasn’t too bad.

Returning from the river, there remained the problem of this album’s final duet.

Was setting up Jones and Joe Jackson as a warbling twosome in this fruity West Side Story duet really advisable? Or, considering the patchy ensemble between the two, was it perhaps just a try-out that somehow ended up on the final disc?

Rickie Lee Jones has been doing all the media slog expected to promote her new covers album, titled Kicks.

And, as it’s another collection of other people’s songs, she’s been called on in some quarters to defend the appropriateness of doing this. For Jones, it’s a bit like a musical Judgement Day. On the one side, as she sees it, there are the conservatives who consider any new interpretations to be tampering with the original; on the other, she counters, there are those who just say “Hooray, whatever you do is great.”

Ultimately the feedback has been positive, although she does remember a Rolling Stones tribute concert at Carnegie Hall for which she was down to sing 'Sympathy for the Devil'. She sat down, played some rhythm guitar and could feel the audience gasping. Looking back at the occasion, she describes their reaction as being like sucking in air. However, they held their breath and, just eight second later, they were with her.

Incidentally this was some time before she recorded this version of the song on her 2012 album, The Devil You Know.

Jones’ delightfully buoyant new album, Kicks, recorded in New Orleans with a local music team, couldn’t be further from the dark lustre of The Devil You Know, recorded in Los Angeles seven years ago.

There’s quite a time span in the 11 songs, ranging from a 1928 Harry Warren novelty number to a Simon Kirke and Paul Rodgers song that gave the band Bad Company its name in 1974.

How did they all come together and relate to one another? Very naturally, as it happens. Jones explains that she first heard them all around the same time, which made them songs that were all planted in the same garden.

The first single from the album, 'Lonely People', comes with a rather clever video that will swallow up only three and bit minutes of your life.

Jones, with a dazzling and equivocal smile, slips in and out of a series of iconic costumes from cowgirl to Rosie the Riveter. It’s no accident too that the pair of young women who hold up the introductory titles cards are made to look like the Rickie Lee Jones of forty years ago.  

The song was a 1974 B-side for the band America, that made its name with its chart hit of 'A Horse with No Name'.  'Lonely People' is a sweet-bitter rather than bitter-sweet ode for the isolated ones, alone in life for whatever reason. It’s a number that means a lot to Jones, from a band that she describes as having suffered from having sounded like a copycat Neil Young.

But watch the video and try if you can to pin down what the sweetly smiling singer is really trying to project in the very first verse.

Steve Miller’s song 'Quicksilver Girl' first appeared on his band’s 1968 album Sailor.

Listening to it now, I’m not quite so sure of its real intentions … whether the young woman who spreads her wings for freedom is a rock Madonna or a hippie chick, an object of late 60s male fantasies.

But musically it’s unquestionably lovely in its jangling, tinkling, chiming way ... at one point, being frozen in tintinnabulation over the one harmony for over half a minute.

Rickie Lee Jones’s musical wisdom is definitely the product of her pursuing her own Blakean road of excess. She and band leader Mike Dillon seize upon the ambience of the original song to lock their rendition into a cabinet of chiming curiosities.

And while they do liberate some of Miller’s extremely stationary chords, trapped in exquisite stasis, when they get to the frozen tintinnabulation passage, they’re only too happy to extend it even further.

The oldest and perhaps least expected song on Rickie Lee Jones’ Kicks is a 1928 piece of froth by Harry Warren and Mort Dixon, written 17 years before the American bombing of Nagasaki making it, in retrospect, a rather grimly ironic Charleston. 

Dressed up for Kicks, 'Nagasaki' gives bandleader Mike Dillon the chance to gleam. Though he’s been handling everything from tambourine and timpani to concert bells and junk drum kit throughout the album, it’s his vibes which provide the jeweller’s putty here.

Listen out too for Aurora Nealand’s limber clarinet, as well as her vocal support as Jones patters Dixon’s lyrics, tactfully smoothing out one questionable moment.

However, do watch the animated video because here the politics are impeccable, and perfectly pitched for our Trumpian times.

Another favourite song of mine on Kicks is 'Mack the Knife' which miraculously manages to bypass too many memories of either Louis Armstrong or Bobby Darin.

But elsewhere I sometimes cling to the original versions. Lee Hazlewood’s 'Houston', for example, originally sung by Dean Martin, needs Dino’s glass-in-the-hand nonchalance, and those hearty backing singers.

Another Martin classic, 'You’re nobody till somebody loves you', begs for the same casual host-of-the-party styling, as well as the nudge and wink of a Playboy Pad orchestra.

I’m not sure either whether Jones really does justice to the naif innocence that makes Skeeter Davis’s 'The End of the World' penetrate the soul as it does. This song (which has challenged singers from Patti Smith to Susan Boyle) needs just the right tone of gauche in its two crucially spoken lines, and Jones can’t help but let them slip into melody.

But, hey, what sentiments this song is spreading – so smoothly – and, in doing so, what better finale for today’s show.  

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'My life is mostly like a Mom's life…' (spoken) – Rickie Lee Jones
Pop Pop: A Special Open Ended Conversation for Radio
(Geffen)

'The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men' (Wolf, Landesman) – Rickie Lee Jones
Pop Pop
(Geffen)

'Up From The Skies' (Hendrix) – Rickie Lee Jones
Pop Pop
(Geffen)

'Autumn Leaves' (Mercer et al) – Rob Wasserman, Rickie Lee Jones
Duets
(MCA)

'Up a Lazy River' (Carmichael, Arodin) – Rickie Lee Jones
It's Like This
(Artemis)

'One Hand, One Heart' (Bernstein, Sondheim) – Rickie Lee Jones, Joe Jackson
It's Like This
(Artemis)

'Sympathy For The Devil' (Jagger, Richards) – Rickie Lee Jones
The Devil You Know
(Concord)

'Lonely People' (Peek, Peek) – Rickie Lee Jones
Kicks
(Thirty Tigers)

'Quicksilver Girl' (Miller) – Steve Miller Band
Sailor
(Capitol)

'Quicksilver Girl' (Miller) – Rickie Lee Jones
Kicks
(Thirty Tigers)

'Nagasaki' (Warren, Dixon) – Single Nathaniel Shilkret and His Orchestra
single
()

'Nagasaki' (Warren, Dixon) – Rickie Lee Jones
Kicks
(Thirty Tigers)

'The End of the World' (Kent, Dee) – Rickie Lee Jones
Kicks
(Thirty Tigers)