Category Archives: fixin to die rag

Stories of a Life | Redux | Chief Cook & Bottle Washer

August 31, 2024Essay, fixin to die rag, Food & Health, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life Redux, VanRamblingsjude, megan, simon fraser universityRaymond Tomlin

Jude and Megan Tomlin, aged 3 and 16 months, sitting at the kitchen table in 1978
1978. Jude, at age 3½, and Megan at near 2 years of age. At the kitchen table for breakfast.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was extolling the virtues of my Instant Pot to a friend, in a lull in the conversation, she turned to me and said, “You like to cook, don’t you?”

The short answer: I derive pleasure from both cooking and baking.

Here’s the story behind my love for the culinary powers of the kitchen.

1616 Semlin Drive, at E. 1st Ave. in Vancouver. One of the homes I lived in growing up.

From my earliest days, I fended for myself.

My mother worked three jobs, and my father worked the afternoon shift at the Post Office. When I arrived home from school, although my father often left a stew bubbling away in the slow cooker, from age seven on, for the most part if I wanted to eat, I’d have to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself, and for my sister.

So, being somewhat industrious, I learned to cook — well, make sandwiches and, for dessert, Jello, at least for the first few years.

I loved turkey growing up (all that triptiphan), so with the help of my mother, I learned to make her delicious turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and vegetables. For the most part, though, my cooking skills were rudimentary — but I didn’t starve, and more often than not there was food in my belly.

When in 1970, Cathy and I moved in together, marrying soon after, I was responsible for most of the cooking. Cathy’s mom sent her out $1000 a month (she didn’t know we were living together), visiting every three months, taking us to the local Woodward’s grocery floor, where she dropped in excess of $300 at each visit.

With Cathy’s mother money, we ate a fairly staple diet of generously thick T-bone steaks and baked potatoes.

Simon Fraser University’s Louis Riel House, SFU’S student family 1 + 2 bedroom residence.

Soon after moving into the Louis Riel Student Residence at Simon Fraser University in 1971, Cathy joined a women’s group, who met every Wednesday evening. Among the decisions that were taken by the women’s group was this: men shall participate in all household chores, and share in all food preparation.

As we often ate together with other of the students in the residence, my specialty became salads — all different kinds of healthy, nutritious salads, chock full of vegetables, nuts, sunflower seeds, and more.

At this point, Cathy still hated to cook — there was immense pressure placed on Cathy by her peers to develop culinary skills, but she refused. All that changed in the summer of 1973, which is a story for another day.

2182 East 2nd Avenue, in the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood of Vancouver.

When Cathy and I separated in 1978 — Jude and I lived in the home above, before Jude, Megan and I moved to Simon Fraser University and Louis Riel House, when I began work on my Masters degree — the thought occurred to me one morning when making breakfast that I was now the lone parent, and the sole person responsible for ensuring the children ate nutritious foods at each meal in order that they might grow up into healthy adults.

I took on the task of learning the art of cooking (and baking), in earnest.

There was, however, a quid pro quo involved.

After returning from a day of larnin’ and T.A.’ing at SFU, after picking up the children at daycare at 4:30pm, and walking the relatively short distance to our two-bedroom apartment at Louis Riel House, while the children played with their friends on the lawn in front of our apartment, I prepared dinner, calling them in about 45 minutes after dinner preparation had begun.

The kids were famished, and so was I.

Here’s where the quid pro quo came in: at the end of each meal, each of the children had to turn and say to me some version of, “Daddy that was a good dinner. It was mmmm, delicious. Thank you for making dinner for all of us, and all the work you put in to feeding us healthy and nutritious breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and all those wonderful desserts we love!”

I needed the incentive provided to me by both children, and their gratitude — which, in time, they came to acknowledge as their own. The kids felt good about encouraging me, as I encouraged them in all of their endeavours.

We were a happy family, and all was well with the world for the three of us.

Now, I was an adventuresome cook, and not everything I made turned out to the liking of all of us, or each one of us.

Being a dedicated democrat, Jude, Megan and I made a deal with one another in respect of dinner. Both children had to eat at least two bites of each food item I prepared: after all the work I put into preparing a dish, the least they could do was try out the dish to see whether they might like it.

Most of the time they did, but sometimes not.

One night, I made cream of escargot soup. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. But at the end of the soup entrée, I turned to the children and asked them what they thought, to which they replied almost in unison, “It was all right, tasty enough I suppose, but I’m not sure if I’d ever want to have it again.”

I agreed with them. We never ate cream of escargot soup ever again.

Each of us were allowed to have three foods on a list of our creation, foods we did not have to eat, no matter what.

Megan had three foods, Jude had three foods, and I had three foods — those foods changed over a period of time.

In order to add a food to our individual “nah, I don’t want to eat that food” list, some food on each of our lists had to come off. Took some thought on the part of the children as to whether they wanted to remove a food.

Megan, for a great long while didn’t like avocados — but one day, while placing a new food she didn’t like onto her “don’t eat” list, she took avocados off her list, eventually coming to love avocados, as she does to this day.

Watching me prepare meals all the time he was growing up caused Jude to want to become a chef — he worked in the food industry throughout his late teens and twenties, before getting into teaching, which paid better, and was overall less stressful, with “more honourable people”, he’d say to me.

In her teens, Megan became a vegan — there’s a story there, too, which I’ll leave for another day — and, for the most part, took on the preparation of her own meals, as did Jude over a period of time.

After the summer of 1973, Cathy became a great cook — there’s not much I miss about that tumultuous marriage, but I sure miss Cathy’s avant-garde cooking, her culinary craftsmanship, spicing and phenomenally delicious cooking.

Ah well.

Stories of a Life | Redux | The Ties That Bind Daughters and Fathers

August 24, 2024Essay, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life Redux, Vancouver, VanRamblingsbctf, cathy, jude, meganRaymond Tomlin

When Megan Jessica Tomlin was born on a Saturday night, March 26th, 1977, at Burnaby General Hospital at 10:26pm, given that she was a breech birth, the hospital room was filled with a harried collection of nurses and doctors and an anesthesiologist who’d been called to assist with the birth.

As a medicated Cathy lay peacefully, stock still on her white-sheeted hospital bed — given that she was infused with anaesthetic drugs to aid in the birth, to keep her sedated for what turned out to be her second, very difficult birth — upon delivery, a nurse gathered our new daughter, Megan, and brought her over to me, as I stood to Cathy’s left, just behind where her head lay, and handed my hushed newborn daughter into my arms.

For the 10 minutes that followed, a seeming lifetime of remembrance and love, Megan her eyes all blue peered directly into my eyes and deep into my soul, and for those few brief moments I into hers, as my daughter imprinted on me / bonded with me as the father who would become in her early years, and in succeeding years through to her late teens, the single most transformative person in her life, a father she trusted & loved with all her generous heart.

In the weeks that followed Megan’s birth, the wheels began to fall off the bus that was my marriage to Cathy, as Cathy seemed to lose herself, quitting her job at the Ministry of Human Resources office, drinking, staying out all night long, and otherwise engaging in self-destructive behaviour.

Why?

Given my position as the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Learning and Working Conditions Chair for the Interior, and my long years of work previous with the Federation, and the great relationship I’d developed with Linda Shuto — working with her to form the first Status of Women office within an NGO anywhere on the continent — as well as BCTF President Jim McFarlane and, more especially with BCTF Vice-President Don Walmsley, as you might well expect from a Federation comprised of mainly older members, Executive plans were afoot for Federation generational leadership change — and I was targeted as the person who would become a future BCTF President.

Don Walmsley visited Cathy and me multiple times throughout 1977, in our newly acquired Interior home, to advise the both of us that plans were in process to, at the spring BCTF AGM in 1978, run me as a second vice-president of the Federation, with an eye to soon becoming BCTF President.

Here’s how the Federation saw it, Don explaining to the both of us: my organizing bona fides in the Interior had gained provincial attention, Cathy and I were a young couple “from the Interior” (the left of the Federation liked the idea of running candidates from rural areas), Cathy was a professional, was sophisticated and presented well, we had two children — we were, as far as the Federation was concerned, “the perfect couple”.

Here’s what Don Walmsley told Cathy and I …

“Next year, Raymond, we’ll run you for 2nd VP. Cathy, you can run as a Board of Education COPE trustee candidate for Vancouver School Board. Raymond, we’ll find you a job in Vancouver, find you a house, and Cathy we’ll make sure you’re employed, as well, finding you a job in the city similar to what you’re doing up here. Next year (1978), once you’re on the Executive, Raymond, and have moved down to the city, you’ll be closer to the Federation offices.

In 1979, we’ll run you for 1st VP, and depending on how the election goes for President of the Federation, if our candidate loses, we’ll run you for President in 1980. If our candidate wins, and serves a three year term, we’ll run you for President in 1983.”

Sounded good to me — and not so good to Cathy, as elucidated above.

Once Don had left our home, Cathy told me that she had no intention of having the next 20 years of her life being planned by the teachers’ federation, nor was she enamoured of the idea of living in my shadow.

Understandable.

You know how when you’re watching an awards show on TV, and the winner is (almost invariably) a man, the first person he thanks, whom he gushes over, is his wife, saying ardently, “I couldn’t have done it without her — she’s been my rock, and has stood by my side throughout the entire journey that has led to tonight. I will love you for always, my beloved.”

Believe me when I write: Cathy was having none of that arrant palaver.

The summer of 1977, when Megan was a few months old, and Jude was two years of age

Long story short, by early 1978, I had been awarded custody of both Jude and Megan, Cathy was off gallivanting around the globe, drinking and carousing with a rock ‘n roll band she’d joined — and I was left to raise our two infant children.

From the outset, Megan was a bright and engaged child, far ahead of her milestone maturational markers — walking at 9 months, speaking at age 1, reading at 18 months — and by the time she was two years of age, as in control of her environment as any 11-year-old child of my acquaintance.

Where Jude — 21 months Megan’s senior — wanted to be out and about all the time, one of the friendliest, most gregarious and social children you’d ever want to meet, Megan was quiet, reserved, pensive and thoughtful, as big a “daddy’s girl” as could possibly be imagined, by my side throughout the day, and separated from me only when she was in daycare, or asleep.

As Cathy and I often remarked to one another as Megan was growing up, “Whose child is this, anyway? Megan certainly can’t be ours — she’s just so much brighter & more capable than either of us, or both of us combined.”

For me, there has never been anyone to whom I have been closer, who has understood me and “had my number”, with whom my relationship has proved more loving & honest than has long been the case with Megan & me.

We acknowledge — as if we have known each other across many lifetimes — that we have found one another on this Earth, in this lifetime, and as I josh Megan by referring to her as her very own diety, in this life the two of us take succour in the knowledge that we love one another, that as we live lives that are separate, Megan now married with children, and me in my west side home spending hours each day writing stories just like this, that as we run across one another from time to time, as we often do in my Kitsilano neighbourhood, that the first words each of us will utter will be, “I love you” — as we set about to continue our day.

The knowing glance tells you everything you need to know about fathers & daughters.

Stories of a Life | Redux | Serendipity, Kismet, Love

January 27, 2024fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life Redux, VanRamblingschild sex offenders, kismet, lori, love, masters degree, megan, psychologist, vancouver community collegeRaymond Tomlin

The woman you see pictured above is the love of my life.

In the summer of 1988, Lori and her son Darren, and my two children, 11-year-old Megan and 13-year-old Jude, travelled over to the west coast of Vancouver Island, where we rented a cabin near Tofino, and where we enjoyed the time of our lives, a memory that resides deep in me still.

Photo of Megan Tomlin, taken at the cabin near Tofino where we stayed in August 1988

As the children were growing up, given that (for the most part) during the first few years of their lives I was the sole custodial parent — sharing custody with Cathy as the children grew older — my relationship with my children was close.

Jude and Megan and I talked about everything, and as far as was possible I answered every question put by them to me, as honestly and as fully as I could.

While Jude was an energetic boy of the world, making friends with anyone and everyone, full of joy and laughter, out and about in the neighbourhood and across the city, skateboarding and skiing and as athletic as he could possibly be, Megan was a much quieter child, no more reflective than Jude, just more prone to staying close, wanting always to converse on the broadest range of topics, and anxious to learn as much about the world (and all its complexities) as she could.

Megan, in particular, was curious about the state and nature of the world, about politics and political structures, about the nature of governmental decision-making, both children attending the peace marches with me each year, as well as meetings of the progressive, left-of-centre Coalition of Progressive Electors Vancouver civic party, as well as at various federal and provincial New Democratic Party meetings, with Megan as engaged as she could be as a budding young feminist and community activist.

Megan, as with my mother, was also possessed of a preternatural ability.

Photo, Broadway campus, Vancouver Community College, taken from Chinacreek Park

Over the years, as we shared our lives with one another, both Jude and Megan were curious about my “work”, what I was up to when I wasn’t with them.

Arising from that interest on their part, I always sought to make them a part of my work life, taking them to the places of my employments, to my office in SFU’s Faculty of Education when I was working on my Masters, to attend in the elementary school classes where I taught (when they were on a ProD day), at Vancouver Community College, and later in my work at Pacific Press (which paid phenomenally well for very little work, allowing me to continue work as an arts and entertainment editor, and later, Director of Special Projects at Vancouver Magazine).

Early in the 1988 summer semester at Vancouver Community College, Megan attended my Monday evening English Literature class, sitting quietly near the back, erudite and well-read as always (better read than me, true then, true still), interjecting occasionally to clarify some bit of information, for me or for one of the students in my English Literature class, unassuming, friendly, and clearly informed.

Midway through the three-hour class, we took a 15-minute break, most of the students leaving the classroom, with Megan standing with me outside my office, opposite the classroom, when the following occurred …

“Daddy,” said Megan, “do you see that woman standing just on the other side of the glass doors, the blonde-haired woman leaning on the railing?” Then a pause and the proffering of a question, “What day of the week is it?”

“Monday,” I replied.

“Hmmm,” she said, looking somewhat quizzical. “Monday, huh?”

At which point, she seemed to find herself lost in thought for a moment, then turned to me to say, “By Thursday, the two of you will be living together.”

“Megan,” I protested, “I don’t even know who that woman is. And besides, she seems much younger than me.”

And with that, we dropped the subject, shortly after returning to the classroom, where she set about to correct me on aspects of my teaching presentation style, and information that I had imparted that she felt was not clear enough, and should have been better clarified by me, telling me during the break …

“Given who these students are, you seem not to be taking into consideration that they’ve been out of school for awhile. Your use of language, the words you choose could be better chosen to impart your message. And, oh yeah, you were telling the students that they would be expected to write papers during the semester. I want to be present when you’re grading those papers, and I want to read the papers you’re unsure as to what grade you will give. Overall, I trust your judgement — I’m just not sure I feel all that confident that your command of what constitutes good essay writing is as well-developed as it could be.”

The class was over at 9pm, I met with a handful of my students, some in the classroom, others in the hallway, and a couple in my office (with Megan waiting outside in the hallway, engaging with some of my students).

When the class had come to an end, I reminded the students Tuesday’s class would take place downtown, at a venue where a play I’d be teaching was currently being performed; student attendance was mandatory.

Megan and I left the campus around 9:30pm, stopping off at Mike and Edith’s (friends of ours) Cheesecake, Etc. on Granville Street, near the south end of the Granville Street bridge, where Megan enjoyed a piece of cheesecake topped with fresh, organic strawberries, and I had my usual fresh-baked, and toasted, baguette with butter and jam.

Both VCC Broadway campus English Literature classes attended the performance of the play, which took place upstairs from what is now part of the Vancouver Film School. My class sat close by me, while students who were taking my colleague Peter’s English Lit class sat nearby him, except …

When the lights went down, and the play began, I felt a warm hand move over my right hand, and looked over to see an absolutely radiant, beautiful young blonde woman, with her arm rubbing up against mine. I thought to myself, as I am wont to do in similar situations (which always come as a surprise to me, having occurred quite frequently throughout my life) …

“Raymond, it’s a figment of your imagination. There’s no one sitting next to you, and most certainly, no one has their hand on top of yours.”

I didn’t give it another thought, returning my attention to the play.

On the Wednesday, I taught my Writing class (grammar! … I am the last person you would want to have teach you grammar … I am capable of doing it … grammar just seems so restrictive to me … but I suppose you need to know the rules, before you can break them).

Thursday I returned to teach my English Literature class.

After class was over, and after meeting with a few of my students, a blonde-haired woman walked up to me — who I may, or may not, have been made aware of earlier in the week — saying to me …

“I’m working on a paper on apartheid, and have been told you might be of assistance in helping point me in the right direction to research the paper, and provide me as well with how I might best formulate my argument.

I’ve heard that you like to walk, particularly along the stretch of beach over by Spanish Banks. I was wondering if we might walk and talk, which would afford you an opportunity for some fresh air after three hours in a stuffy classroom? It is, after all, a lovely full moon night, don’t you think?”

I thought the idea of the walk was a good idea, and (as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I am more than voluble about conversing on issues of interest to me). I grabbed my coat out of my instructor’s office, and the two of us headed off in the direction of my car.

But I was famished.

I asked her if we might stop in for a brief moment at Cheesecake, Etc. on the way to the beach — we could discuss her paper over a bite to eat.

When we arrived at Cheesecake, Etc., after consulting with her, when Mike came up to take our order, I requested two orders of the toasted baguette with jam. “Oh, you mean the usual,” said Mike. Both Mike and Edith flitted around this woman and I for the half hour we were in the restaurant, with Mike taking a break to begin singing at his piano, his songs seemingly directed at this young woman and I.

Just before 10pm, this young woman and I left the restaurant, climbed back into my car, and headed towards the beach, traveling down West Broadway, during which glide along the street, she turned to me to say, “You live near here, don’t you? I noticed it’s getting kind of chilly. I was wondering if you might have a sweater I could wear?”

Within a couple of minutes, I pulled up in front of my housing co-op, turning to her saying, “I’ll grab you a sweater and be right down,” with her responding, “I’ll come up with you, if that’s alright, to find the sweater best to my liking.”

Upon entering my apartment, while she stood in my living room, I entered my bedroom to look on the shelving where I kept my two dozen sweaters (what can I say, I’m a sweater person). Upon returning to the living room, holding up a warm, late spring appropriate sweater I thought she would like, standing opposite her, she approached me, and standing on her tippy-toes, she kissed me.

Once again, I thought to myself, “Raymond, she didn’t kiss you. That’s just a false projection. You just better give her the sweater, and head off to the beach.”

While I was having this inner dialogue with myself, she once again stood on her tippy toes, pulling my face closer to hers, and kissed me again, a long, luxurious kiss, a kiss unlike any other I’d ever experienced.

Lori and I moved into together that night.

Coda

Four years from the date of the story above, Lori — who, as has been the case in my life these 50 years and more with all of the women who have shared their lives with me was / is / and remains brilliant, gifted and contributory — completed an honours Bachelor Degree at a Metro Vancouver institution of higher learning, which she then followed up with a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology.

After graduating with her Masters degree, Lori was hired by Corrections Canada to work — in a secure group setting, within various prisons — with sexual offenders who had offended against children. All but a very, very few of the men she worked with truly regretted their offense(s), of that she felt quite sure after spending weeks and months in session with them, and one on one with each one, as well — the recidivism rate among those with whom she had worked well below five per cent.

Shaun Joshua Deacon, 57, has a lengthy criminal history that includes convictions for sexual offenses against children in 1988, 1996 and 1998. (Not referenced in the paragraph directly below)

Except, Lori says, there were the “monsters” who found their way into her group, from time to time, irredeemable, violent sexual offenders who presented a palpable risk to re-offend, and hurt children in ways monstrous and despicable. Those few sexual predators scared the daylights out of her, and as far as she was able Lori did everything in her power to ensure these predators serve out their full sentences, requiring they be supervised in the community upon mandatory release.

Lori went on to complete a PhD. While working on her PhD, Lori was hired as a university instructor, and upon graduation was hired at the university as an assistant professor, working her way through the ranks over the years, publishing as is required, relatively high profile, and a credit to the university and her profession.

While working as a university teacher, Lori was hired as a psychologist within the university’s clinical psychology centre where she treated clients. Over time, Lori opened up a private psychology practice — a very successful practice, as proved to be the case over the years — working, mostly, with women survivors of abuse.

Music Sundays | Top Début Album of the Past 45 Years

January 21, 2024A & E, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Pop Culturemusic sundays, rickie lee jones, top 100 début albumsRaymond Tomlin

With the lights down in the Orpheum Theatre, all you heard for the first 20 minutes of the Rickie Lee Jones concert in 1979, in support of her eponymous début album, was the street-wise, near angelic voice of Rickie Lee Jones as it filled the venue, investing itself deep within the souls of the thousands who had gathered to see and hear the performer they had come to love, and love through and up until this day.

Rickie Lee Jones in New York City, 1979

A fractured childhood, years as a hippie drifter, her incredible adventures before she found fame — and of her intense relationship with Tom Waits in the 1970s — fill her life story.

Rickie Lee Jones was just three years old when she made her début as a performer, appearing briefly as a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi.

“I heard the audience’s applause and took it personally,” she writes in Last Chance Texaco, a vivid memoir that traces the arc of her often turbulent life from unsettled childhood to uneasy fame. “I remained bowing long after the other snowflakes had melted and left the stage. The dance teacher had to escort me off, but the audience was delighted and the die was cast. I liked it up there.”

An outsider by temperament, Jones has long walked to her own slightly off-kilter rhythm.

This song catapulting Rickie Lee Jones—winner of the 1980 Best New Artist Grammy—into prominence

In 1979, when she gatecrashed the mainstream with her self-titled début album and the buoyant, jazz-tinged hit single, Chuck E’s in Love, her sudden celebrity left her feeling all at sea.

“That was the biggest test,” she says, “For someone who always felt on the outside to suddenly have everyone treat me like I was above them, that was really hard. It was difficult to know how to be a person when that was going on.”

Back then, she was marketed as a boho songstress in a beret. A brief but intense relationship with Tom Waits, whose creative sensibility fleetingly chimed with her own, added to her cachet of cool. As a couple, they seemed to have emerged fully formed out of their own creative imaginations.

Rickie Lee Jones with Tom Waits, her partner at the time, on Santa Monica Pier, in the late 70s

If Waits’ stumblebum persona relied to a degree on creative method acting, she was the real deal: a survivor who had, as she puts it in the prologue of Last Chance Texaco, “lived volumes as a young girl long before I was famous”.

Now, aged 69, Rickie Lee Jones has finally settled in New Orleans, an easy-going, music-haunted city that suits her temperament.

“I’ve been here ten years, which is a kind of a record,” she says, laughing, in an interview she gave to The Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan. “I think it’s a good town for me. It’s still a bit weird. There’s lots of music and not so much celebrity. I guess I’ll stay here for a while if it doesn’t get washed away in the flood.”

Jones was born in 1954 in working-class Chicago, where her mother, Bettye, hailed from. Bettye was taken into care as a child and raised in state institutions after her father was jailed for stealing chickens. She added the “e” to the end of her first name on her release, aged 16, to symbolize a new beginning.

In Chicago, she met Richard Loris Jones, a struggling musician whose father was a vaudeville entertainer who went by the name of Frank “Peg Leg” Jones, his fame exacerbated by his violent streak. Survivors both, the couple moved from state to state during Rickie’s childhood.

“What were they running from? From cities, houses, and eventually, themselves, but they never got away from their difficult childhoods or their love for each other.”

For all its uncertainty, her childhood was often magical. When she was four, the family settled for a time in the ‘quiet town’ of Phoenix, Arizona, where she roamed freely in the desert, rode horses, and had adventures with her imaginary friends.

As a young girl, music was a conduit to another world of possibility. She saved up her pocket money to buy the soundtrack of West Side Story, whose street-opera dynamics would later find their way into her songs. When she sang songs from the album to herself as she played on the street, other children, and sometimes adults, would stop to listen.

“I drew a crowd! Music had built an accidental bridge between me and the world.”

A young Rickie in 1968: ‘I spent most of my life in cars, vans, and buses.’

Jones has described her own teenage adventuring as “a little bit Oz, a little bit Huck Finn”. That barely does it justice.

Aged 14, she lived in a cave as part of a commune, hitchhiked on her own from Big Sur to Detroit when not much older, and risked a lifetime in jail driving to Mexico and back with hippie outlaw dope smugglers.

“How could I have done all those things? But I did. Kids are wily.”

Nevertheless, there were times when she sailed too close to the wind, winding up in jail more than once, usually on suspicion of being an underage runaway with a false ID — which she was. On the Canadian border, she was arrested for “being in danger of leading a lewd and lascivious life” — she was braless under her T-shirt. She recalls several tearful calls to her parents, who, more often than not, travelled vast distances to take her home.

While living in Mexico with a boyfriend, she was abducted by a rogue cab driver who drove her into the jungle intending to rape and possibly kill her. She was saved by the sudden appearance of a bus load of Federales.

“There were some bad things that cast a long shadow.” she says. “They seemed to have living darkness about them that made me feel really frightened all over again.”

Jones eventually gravitated to Venice Beach in California, working menial jobs and singing in local bands to pay the rent. It was there in 1976 she began writing her own songs, the likes of Easy Money and Weasel and the White Boys Cool, peopling them with characters based on the maverick souls she had met along the way.

Jones first encountered Waits at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1977, where he watched from the shadows as she sang a handful of songs to a near-empty club. Soon afterwards, they had a one-night stand that ended abruptly with Waits cold-shouldering her the following morning.

“I was still standing on the step when he closed the door and walked away. The sun was up and it was already too hot. I was wearing high heels. I wanted to hide in a bush. I may have hidden in a bush.”

A few months later, she signed to Warner Brothers and “things started warming up again with Tom Waits”. Their romance was all-consuming.

“We fed a craving so sharp that we wanted to become each other.”

The romance lasted barely a year, and his departure left her devastated just as her sudden celebrity swept her along in its tidal sway. In his absence, she drifted into the orbit of other wayward creative mavericks, including the supremely gifted songwriter and guitarist Lowell George, lead singer of Little Feat.

“It’s hard to say what he was really like, because I never knew him when he was not on cocaine. He was out there all night long taking drugs. He didn’t seem to be making any head road into hanging around.”

A year after they met, George collapsed and died of a heart attack, aged 34.

There’s a reason people get addicted to heroin. There is something they like, some kind of solace, some kind of numbing

For a time, too, she became friends with the talismanic Mac Rebennack, AKA Dr John, whom she refers to as “a dubious character in my life; a creator and a destroyer”. In his company, she began using heroin, which she had tried just once before as a young hippie drifter.

“It’s not good to blame everything on my relationship with love,” Jones writes in her biography, “but, when I was younger, love was everything to me. I didn’t really have a self to hold on to when things turned bad. So, back then if a boyfriend said, ‘I don’t love you any more,’ I might go hurt myself. I wouldn’t try to kill myself, but I might go take drugs.”

“I think that we construct our personalities out of our family environment and mine was pretty unsettled. I was very loved, but that was probably the only healthy thing going on, but it’s possible that was not enough to keep me from being curious about the bad things in life, the forbidden things.”

Rickie Lee Jones, aged 69, living a quiet life in New Orleans, when not on a concert tour.

In the late 1970s, when car mechanics was a dirtier, oilier, greasier business, Jones’s eponymous début album of a singer-songwriter featured a jazzy, bluesey, heartfelt song about a truck stop that contained a multitude of references to the timing being wrong, dead batteries, disconnected plugs and cables, and looking under the hood to see what the trouble was.

Here was a woman who had hit on a metaphor for the heart as a malfunctioning piece of metal that could still be rescued in the right hands.

The mournful, elegiac song is strummed at a slow, sighing pace: the last chance to refuel before you run out of gas for many, many miles. There are references to Standard, Mobil and Shell, as well as to the man with the star. At the end Jones transforms her voice into the desolate howl of a passing vehicle, first approaching and then receding into the great American landscape.

On this muscular yet vulnerable track, which concludes the first side of the album, she sounds like she has all the time in the world — or at least all night. And you find yourself thinking: maybe Waits will be just around the corner, bouncing along in his old 55, with the sun coming up.

With her expressive soprano voice employing sudden alterations of volume and force, and her lyrical focus on Los Angeles street life, on Rickie Lee Jones’ self-titled début album she comes on like the love child of Laura Nyro and Tom Waits.

Given the population of colourful characters who populate her songs, she also might have had Bruce Springsteen in her bloodline (that is, the Springsteen of his first two albums) — although the prose poetry of Jones’ lyrics and music are all her own — and her jazz boho sensibility suggests Mose Allison as a grandfather. Producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, who knew all about assisting quirky singer / songwriters with their visions, instructed the jazz-credentialed musicians in the recording studio to follow Jones’ stop-and-start, loud-and-soft vocalizing, after which they overdubbed string parts here and there.

The music has a sprung rhythmic feel that follows the contours of Jones’ impressionistic stories about scuffling people on the streets and in the bars. There is an undertow of melancholy that becomes more overt toward the end, as the narrator’s friends and lovers clear out, leaving her.

“Standing on the corner/All alone,” as she sings in the final song, “After Hours (Twelve Bars Past Goodnight).” It’s a long way, if only 40 minutes or so, from the frolicsome opener, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” which had concluded that he was smitten by “the little girl who’s singin’ this song.”

But then, the romance of the street is easily replaced by its loneliness.

Rickie Lee Jones produced an astounding début album that simultaneously sounds like a synthesis of many familiar styles and like nothing that anybody’s ever done before, heralding the beginning of a pivotal career of great and lasting importance, and a singular and enduring contribution to the American song book.