To do a dangerous thing with style
Is what I call art.– Charles Bukowski
When my concert companion asked what I thought about Rickie Lee Jones’s performance in Helsinki Wednesday night as we walked from the venue, it made capturing my “first thought, best thought” perspective easy: it was full of more ethereal moments than most concerts I had attended.
I don’t use the word ethereal lightly. Those moments do more than tug on the heartstrings and represent more profound exchanges. More on that later.
To describe Rickie Lee Jones on stage, a Charles Bukowski quote comes to mind: “To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.” Most artists can’t pull off what Jones does, something beyond pop but not entirely jazz (although the show did include a Thelonious Monk cover). She created a sacred space and maintained it seemingly without effort for nearly two hours.
“Performing is a religious experience for me. You can never know what I feel, only what you feel. My secret courage is my magic. You are doused with my strange water of emotion as you witness this courage, and that is my true performance. It sounds like music but something is being passed between us. Something personal.”
– Rickie Lee Jones (Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour)
Rickie Lee Jones is the real deal. She is a two-time Grammy winner (eight nominations!) and, without a doubt, one of the great American vocalists. She has lived and worked alongside the best singers, songwriters, and producers of the past five decades. Before playing “Easy Money,” she spoke about Lowell George of Little Feat, who recorded it for his only solo album, released weeks before he died at 34 in 1979. Her interactions with George changed her life and helped her to get a record contract when she was just about ready to pack things in and head home.
A friend introduced me to Rickie Lee Jones in 1982 while I was a freshman in college. That friend had Jones’s 1979 self-titled debut album and her 1981 album “Pirates” in her record crates, and we spent many hours smoking and listening to those songs.
Everyone in America had heard “Chuck E.’s In Love” on the radio in the late 1970s.
It is not Jones’s representative song, but it is her best-known. Wednesday night, when Jones played it as her second song, the audience received it, accordingly, recognizing it right away from its slap-and-bounce guitar hook. Still, I was glad she played it early as the second song of her set instead of saving it for later.
It was my first time seeing Rickie Lee Jones live, although I’ve now had her first three albums in my record collection for decades. After digging more deeply into her catalog this past week as I worked on this review (listening to most of it), I have become a super fan and am committed to becoming a completist. There’s something moody, engaging, and otherworldly about nearly everything she touches.
Dubbed the “Duchess of Coolsville,” you can read Jones’s backstory on Wikipedia (or in more detail in her memoir), so I won’t dig into that here. But I’m glad she’s still touring at 69. (At least a few people were surprised when I said I would be seeing her, one saying, “Really! The Duchess still tours?) It sounded like she had a few challenges on this tour, among them guitar or sound problems during at least a few shows, and recently left her stage outfit in the closet of an Oslo hotel only to find out when she called them that they knew nothing about it. She had to buy a new shirt for the Helsinki show. But the show was blessedly free of any but minor issues with sound.
I’m glad I went, but I almost didn’t. For months, I stared at ads for her Tavastia show on social media, unable to decide if I would go and not buy a ticket. I thought it would sell out, which would make my decision. But in the last days leading up to the show, I noticed it had still not sold out, so I grabbed a ticket the night before.
The show didn’t sell out.
I spoke to drummer and vibes player Mike Dillon (who also co-produced her recent covers album, Kicks) before the show, and he mentioned that ticket sales picked up at the end, so I wasn’t the only person in the sizable crowd who waited. This was lucky for us last-minute ticket buyers, sandwiched between the sold-out Stockholm show on Monday and Thursday night in London, all in venues with capacities under 1000 people.
The setlist felt fluid, Jones brushing off a few songs for the first time in a while, she admitted. Consequently, it felt personal and a review of setlist.fm shows a fair amount of variety, at least in song order from show to show.
The instrumentation was sparse but perfect. Mike Dillon provided drums and vibes and switched effortlessly between them, as Ben Rosblum did with accordion and piano. Both provided perfect complements to Jones’s vocals and guitar. Both accompanying musicians could showcase their virtuoso soloing abilities without ever overshadowing the star.
“Love is Gonna Bring Us Back Alive” was bouncy fun. “Altar Boy is hauntingly perfect and full of early Leonard Cohen vibes. “Satellites” from “Flying Cowboys” has recently become one of my favorite Rickie Lee songs, and the album (produced by Steely Dan’s Walter Becker) is now up there with her best in my mind.
The standout moment of the show was Jones’s cover of Julie London’s “Cry Me a River.” Jones performed with slow, tender, rising, and falling vibes chords from Dillon. This was the most ethereal moment of the show, fantastic in both sparseness and power. Downright magic.
Towards the end of the set, when Rickie Lee was at the piano for “We Belong Together” and “Traces of the Western Slopes,” I could barely see her from my spot stage left.
Jones had copies of her 2021 memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, on hand after the show. The chapter titles mirror the titles of her songs. But after standing for two hours, I had stiff legs and headed home instead of staying for a possible book signing. As I dig into it now, I regret I did not stay.
The phrase “never meet your heroes” came to mind, which I believe has been recently revised to “meet them.” Rickie Lee is getting older and perhaps losing a bit of her edge, as we all are, but she connects me to a time when I was also young. Aging is an integral part of life, and meeting your heroes from earlier times is one way of facing this.
No one is what they were forty years ago, and who would want to be?
“Last Chance Texaco” was the perfect closer to the set, rounding out the heavy reliance on her first album for material for the night (five of fifteen songs!). It’s one of Rickie Lee’s best, perhaps why she chose it to title her memoir.
It’s more than a song: it’s a musical journey that takes you out of yourself and makes you feel as if first and last chances are the same thing—they’re, in fact, your whole life. We’re lucky we get any chance at all, a point Jones articulates in the early part of her memoir when talking about all the stars that had to align with her ancestor’s actions simply for her to be born. Just as with her career, how Lowell George helped make some connections for her, her career also might never have happened. I join in gratitude that it did.