Today’s classic song of the day is the iconoclastic “Chuck E’s in Love,” the first hit from equally iconoclastic performer Rickie Lee Jones. It was released in April of 1979, rose all the way to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and almost overnight catapulted then-newcomer Ms. Jones to unlikely pop music stardom. .
There was nothing on the radio before or since that sounded quite like “Chuck E’s in Love.” It’s got a little jazz, a little blues, a little bit of beat poetry, and a whole lot of hip. The song has a lazy shuffle beat, supported by nothing more than a sparse acoustic guitar and Steve Gadd’s behind-the-beat drums. But then it stops mid-stream for Ms. Jones to recite that “Is he here?” bit then starts back up (after a wonderfully tricky little drum fill from Mr. Gadd) to finish the song pretty much like it started—except with the revelation that Chuck is actually “in love with the little girl who’s singin’ this song.” It was hip, it was cool, it gave us a peek into a world of hipsters and jazzers, and it exploded on the radio like nothing else at the time.
“Chuck E’s in Love” springs from a true story. Rickie Lee Jones and her lover and fellow hipster songwriter Tom Waits were friends with a blues drummer, dishwasher, jazz lover, and all-around character named Chuck E. Weiss. (Waits later described his longtime pal as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”) After hanging out with Waits and Jones for some time, terrorizing polite society, Mr. Weiss, who they all called “Chuck E,” abruptly disappeared and stayed disappeared for several weeks. One day Waits got a call from Weiss, who told him he had moved to Denver because he’d fallen in love with a woman there (actually a distant cousin) while on a trip back to his hometown. When Waits got off the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love.” That sounded like a song title to her, so she wrote it, changing only the ending so that the subject of the tune was in love with the song’s singer. Poetic license; it’s allowed.
I love “Chuck E’s in Love” because it is accessibly hip and because of Steve Gadd’s unmistakable drumming. That lick leading out of the rubato section back into the final verse is just choice. It’s an alternating hi-hat/snare/bass thing, but with straight 16ths against the background shuffle. Only Professor Gadd could come up with something like that. It’s fun to listen to and even more fun to play, once you figure it out.
Rickie Lee Jones was born in Chicago, raised in Phoenix, and moved to California when she was a teenager. She was 21 when she started singing jazz and some original compositions in small clubs in and around Venice, California. She met Tom Waits (and Chuck Weiss) at the Troubadour in 1977, when she was 23 years old. Rickie Lee and Tom were together for two years, splitting up around the time she released her eponymous debut album.
“Chuck E’s in Love” was Rickie Lee Jones’ first and biggest hit. That song and her debut album won her four Grammy nominations and she won one, for Best New Artist. Her second album, Pirates, was released in 1981 to critical acclaim, although it didn’t spawn any major hit singles. She released an EP, Girl at Her Volcano, in 1983 then moved to Paris to write songs for her fourth album, The Magazine, which was released the following year. She took four years off before releasing her next album, 1989’s Flying Cowboys, which was produced by Steely Dan’s very own Walter Becker. (It’s a great album and the single “Satellite” should have been a hit, but wasn’t.)
Ms. Jones kept recording after that but pretty much faded from the mainstream consciousness. In recent years she’s started touring again, albeit to smaller houses, and that seems to be okay by her. She’s currently 68 years old and living in New Orleans.
In case you’re wondering, the acronym “PLP” in the lyrics is short for “public leaning post,” meaning just hanging out on the corner. That’s apparently what hipsters in L.A. do.
