The concerts at the Santa Monica Pier are a sort of institution, and bring generally a large crowd every Thursday night during the summer. But when you see the kind of crowd, the kind of parking nightmare of last Thursday night, you know it is a special one. Rickie Lee Jones was the performer and she is quite a legend! A legend I unfortunately did not know much about, for some reason I had never been captivated by her music, never seen her live, and I just knew she was part of these iconic figures of American music, like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Her long career started in 1979 with a self-titled album that received 5 Grammy nominations, no less, and she has released 14 albums in total!
Tons of people had aggregated on the pier and even on the beach below, people of all ages although many were in their 50’s. When she came on stage, she declared ‘There are so many songs about the fair, this is gonna be an old school show’, she was of course alluding to the fact that the Santa Monica pier is a boardwalk fair.
She started with ‘Chuck E.’s in love’, ‘Weasel and the White Boys Cool’, ‘Easy Money’ (the first song she wrote in Venice, she declared, remembering her time there at Susan’s Kitchen), ‘The Last Chance Texaco’, ‘Danny’s All-Star Joint’, ‘Company’, all coming from her debut album! She played first an acoustic guitar, before moving to the piano, and fortunately for me she was announcing very often the title of her songs in advance, although I probably have skipped a few.
She had a full band consisting of Peter Adams on keyboards, Jeff Pevar and Jones on guitar, Reggie McBride on bass and a horn section only for some songs, with trumpet, saxophone and trombone.
Her savant mix of jazz, pop, rhythm and blues gives to her tunes a real uniqueness in the world of pop-rock, and with the stories she tells, she has built a large collection of expressionistic songs.
‘You don’t know how blessed I feel’ she said just before going behind the piano where she continued with more old songs like ‘We belong together’, ‘A Lucky Guy’, ‘Pirates’, and ‘Living it up’ with the full band and Tom Waits’ ghost.
Having seen her on TV, I can tell she has somewhat changed, but, at 55, her voice is incredibly similar to what I remember, high-pitched and nasal, almost childish at times, lamenting on the music, climbing over the saxophone outbursts. You like it or you don’t, but the people at the pier last night were real admirers, singing along or dancing.
Back in the front of the stage, she played tambourines and then acoustic guitar again for ‘Ugly man’, who ‘can come back again’, she said, suddenly going all political calling for revolution, evoking the Black Panthers, and singing lyrics like: ‘He’s an ugly man/He always was an ugly man/He grew up to be like his father/An ugly man/And he’ll tell you lies/He’ll look at you and tell you lies/He grew up to be like his father/Ugly inside’… she is talking about the ex-president right?
‘Wild girl’ was the last song of the evening, a song she started writing in 86 and finished only a year and half ago while thinking about her daughter who turned 21 at that time. She explained that, at that age, ‘they can’t hear’, but it does not stop her from telling!
It was like she was home, feeling comfortable on the beach, returning to her roots with all these old songs; after all California is where she ran away at the young age of 16, and the close by Venice Beach where she lived for several years. ‘Aren’t we lucky to be alive?’ she asked to the audience, ‘Let’s keep it that way!’ And I could not agree more.