Rickie Lee Jones is like a folk legend, right? I am not sure the term folk exactly applies to her, but you get it. She has had a very long career, she has recorded 15 studio albums, in all the styles you can imagine, rock, R&B, blues, pop, jazz, soul, and she is quite unique. She is a two-time Grammy Award winner, and was listed among the 100 greatest women of rock by VH1 in 1999, but 1999 was a long time ago, alas.
I haven’t watched her career very closely but she has a style, a look and she has always affirmed herself as a true independent voice. ‘At that age, that time, I didn’t want to be associated with a thing. I never wanted to be associated with a movement. I really wanted to be able to define myself’, she said in a recent interview remembering the late 70s. She has never chosen the easy path of commercial success, choosing instead to experiment and produce a more complex sound after an early success. ‘For an audience, this is a pretty wide spectrum to follow. But there are a few people whose tastes are wide enough to get aspects of all the work. It’s all coming from the pictures that I have inside of my heart. There must be something authentic about that — some thread that makes it all a reflection of me’, she also said. She is someone who has always stayed true to herself and has taken risks.
So this American legend has to raise money to finance her next album, can you believe it? She opened a page on Pledge Music (which looks very much like a Kickstarter page) and I found this really surprising. You would expect to see that for young and unknown artists who are just making their first album, but Rickie Lee Jones?
The good thing is that she has already reached 71% of her goal offering amazing premiums, such as a house concert ($15,000-$40,000) some original paintings ($15,000), music instruments, clothes, shoes, boots, hats… this is part of what she wrote on her Pledge page:
‘I have been going through boxes that have lain unpacked for decades, and found some treasures. They are treasures to me personally, things I want to share with my fans because I want them to be with people and not in some storage unit.
There are some instruments that we will be adding to the campaign as it goes along; you can have a great piece of my history and a great guitar. They are all vintage, all played by me, and they all need new homes. I have two LPs that were test pressings made for me to check EQ, times between songs, so on. These are rare one-of-a-kind things.
There are three dresses made for me for the Flying Cowboys tour. One was worn on the “Flying Cowboys” video. They have been wrapped in tissue for many years. Another was in the lovely program made for the tour. I am selling the dress that I wore in Dr. John’s “Makin Whoopee” video. That dress, my hairstyle, which was a derivative of the Pirates rag wraps, all that stuff we made up and created that went on to become part of the culture. Girls do ringlets now and the “Makin’ Whoopee” thing shows up in a movie or two, and the video was a big success for Dr. John. We won Grammys for Best Jazz Duet. In fact, most of the clothes I am selling can be seen in some media. I’m also offering the beautiful purple velvet hat on the cover of my music publishing book, that was from a live club date during the Flying Cowboys tour.
I love to draw, and have drawn all my life. My work is on the cover of Girl at Her Volcano, my second “half” record on Warner Brothers records. I did one of my backdrops – a full Bible torn and pasted with the pages of some of my books, this was for the Ghostyhead tour (Jon Pareles described it in his review of the show for the New York Times). I have art for sale, posters, drawings, large and small. I am also offering Christmas cards, a package of 12. I’ve always made my own cards.’
At the end it looks a bit like a garage sale held by the artist on the internet, but she will write you the ‘song of your life’ for just $10,000! Take it as you want, I still find this situation very strange, coming from such an accomplished artist. It just goes back to what Exene Cervenka was saying last week at the Los Angeles Library, these days only a few ‘manufactured artists’ exist at the exclusion of everybody else. Have we reached the point where there is so little place for artists with original voices that they have to exclusively relay on their fan base?