State Of Grace
Filed under: with a gun— Nigey Lennon @ 11:03 am

Rickie Lee Jones
Tribeca Performing Arts Center
November 19, 2005

Rickie Lee Jones always seemed like someone who materialized in my peripheral vision and then vanished in the blink of an eye without leaving much of a trace in my memory bank: the shy, restless schoolmate with whom I shared my favorite records one afternoon in fourth grade, before she moved away to live with other relatives; the gawky girl who hung around the corral in Tucson for a couple of hours watching me and my team-roping mates practicing, but never worked up the nerve to talk to us; the bleary-eyed bohemian in line behind me at Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake, her shopping cart containing a fifth of cheap tequila, one lime, and a package of frozen enchiladas; the street musician on the Venice boardwalk, standing alone with her guitar near an abandoned storefront and singing softly to herself, all the while keeping her eyes aimed down at her old, worn-out sandals.

I finally saw Jones in person at her Tribeca Performing Arts Center concert the other night, and more than once I got the feeling she’d just refreshed a memory I didn’t know I had. It all began unassumingly enough: after a brief opening set by singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, Jones and her band (two guitarists, one of whom doubled on upright bass, a bass player, and a drummer) simply walked out onstage. The audience, on first sight of Rickie Lee, sent up a mighty cheer, at which she smiled shyly and said simply “Hello,” beamed a pretty smile toward the crowd, set down the glass of white wine she’d been drinking from, and picked up her acoustic guitar. Famous musicians generally make major entrances, and this was just the opposite. Jones was off to a good start.

Looking like she might have climbed out of bed just before leaving for the auditorium, Jones wore a long, loose dress with an animal print, dark blue tights, and a pair of cowboy boots with low roper heels. Her long, straight, unruly blonde hair occasionally got stuck under her guitar strap, and between songs she was constantly tugging at it and brushing it away from her face.

“It’s great to be back in New York,” she said at one point. “In a way it’s – it’s kind of scary. I…put on false eyelashes for the occasion. Can you see them?” (The audience laughed.) “Kind of weird looking, huh? these big dark things around my eyes…I’ve never worn them before.” (Pause.) “They hurt like hell.” (Major laughter.) “I – I’d take them off, but – that might create even a worse problem.” (General hilarity.) That was one of the longest speeches she made during the show. Her focus wasn’t on shtick: instead, she concentrated on leading the band, helping the musicians get through the songs; one of the guitarists especially seemed unfamiliar with the material, but they all played with enthusiasm. The set list was somewhat weighted toward Jones’ first two albums, with a sprinkling of later material.

Never having seen her perform before, one thing I had been curious about was how active a role she played in the performance of her music. Although she seemed somewhat lacking in personal confidence, her command of the music was thorough and authoritative. Without losing a beat, she teased the errant guitarist when he forgot a few bars of “The Last Chance Texaco,” making it seem as if the byplay was part of the song. As she strummed chords, sometimes alternating bass lines, on her well-traveled acoustic guitar, there was no doubt who was in charge. Later, the band left the stage and Jones performed several songs alone at the piano, including one of my favorites, “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” from her debut album, as well as “Pirates”, “Living It Up,” and “We Belong Together.” Nearly invisible behind the Steinway grand, pounding the floor with one cowboy boot and pumping the sustain pedal noisily with the other, as if she were driving a pickup truck, her performance was both eccentric (flurries of chords that once struck hung in the air, unresolved) and strangely moving. The audience, rapt, picked up her mood. ”My heart is full,” she said during a pause between songs. “Does anyone remember the movie ‘The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds’? How Joanne Woodward rehearsed the line, ‘My heart is full’ and tried to say it to her family, but it just didn’t work? My life has been that way…I always rehearse things like that, but they never quite come out right.” Later she commented, “I feel so lucky to be able to earn a living as a singer. Thank you.” These self-deprecating comments may have been carefully calculated, the result of years of trial and error, but at bottom, they seemed to be true, just as the songs themselves seemed to come from Jones’ emotional core. The audience, of course, ate it up.

While I’d always appreciated her smart phrasing and jazzy instincts, the sometimes screechy timbre of Jones’ singing voice tended to grate a bit, and if this mannerism was annoying when she was younger, it definitely hasn’t improved with age, as the concert tended to reveal. But when she speaks, slowly and gravely with a faint Midwestern twang, her voice seems to emanate from an old, very wise woman, one who has endured much pain, experienced great pleasure, and knows the respective value of both. I suspect her music begins in the same deep place that voice comes from, a bottomless well of memory, emotion, truth, and understanding. A CD of Jones speaking, telling stories real or imagined, with or without musical accompaniment, would be quite interesting.

Jones’ band returned after the solo piano interlude, and she called in two horn players to join them for a version of her anti-Bush anthem “Ugly Man.” “I always wanted to perform this song in New York, with horn players,” she explained to the audience. “I visualized a couple of Black Panthers standing on a riser, giving the Black Panther salute” (she raised her fist). “Well, as it turns out they couldn’t be here in person, but they’re here in spirit.” Its political message aside, “Ugly Man” is a striking song harmonically, and its jazzy chords did sound quite at home in Tribeca, especially when the trumpeter took a brief solo. Of course, since the audience was made up of diehard fans, many of whom shared her viewpoint, she was preaching to the choir, but Jones is to be commended for her courage (and foresight) in releasing the song at a time when its sentiments were considerably less popular than they have recently become.

In keeping with her no-frills, no-hype approach, Jones discouraged excessive applause between numbers by beginning each song close on the heels of the previous one. Likewise, she did not return for an encore, although the audience stood for a full ten minutes applauding, cheering, and yelling for more. They didn’t seem particularly surprised, or disappointed. Evidently her refusal to do encores is familiar to her fans.

In a very real sense, courage is what Rickie Lee Jones embodies. Never a long-legged, lithe chanteuse, not blessed with a natively great instrument, elegant savvy, cutting-edge hipness, or even conventional charisma, for a quarter-century she has relied on the resources she possesses – an excellent ear, a warm heart, a sly sense of humor – and has had the courage to share her deepest emotions with audiences. Hers is a suddenly familiar voice, the voice of the woman crying softly on the pay phone next to you, your own joyful laughter as you danced down the street with your high school friends. In the receptive listener Jones at her best can sometimes evoke a personal Zeitgeist, half-remembered but emotionally intense, in the way dreams are intense yet disembodied. And with her generous spirit, courage, and emotional universality, Rickie Lee Jones has succeeded not only in transcending her limits, but has in the process achieved something close to a state of grace.