Category Archives: Jude and Megan

Music Sundays | Top Début Album of the Past 45 Years

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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.

Stories of a Life | Redux | Do You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth?

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Traveling on a train across Europe, with a Eurail Pass, in the 1970s

In the summer of 1974, Cathy and I travelled to Europe for a three-month European summer vacation, BritRail and Eurail passes in hand, this was going to be a summer vacation to keep in our memory for always.

And so it proved to be …

On another day, in another post evoking memories of our cross-continental European sabbatical, I’ll relate more stories of what occurred that summer.

Train travel in Spain, in the 1970s, as the train makes its way around the bend

Only 10 days prior to the event I am about to relate, Cathy and I had arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, alighting from a cruise liner we’d boarded in Southampton, England (passage was only 5£s, much cheaper than now).

After a couple of wonderful days in Lisbon, Cathy and I embarked on the first part of our hitchhiking journey throughout every portion of Portugal we could get to, finally traveling along the Algarve before arriving in the south of the country, ready to board a train to Spain. Unfortunately, I developed some intestinal disorder or other, requiring rest and fluids. Once Cathy could see that I was going to be fine, she left the confines of our little pensão to allow me to recover in peace, returning with stories of her having spent a wonderful day at the beach with an enthusiastic retinue of young Portuguese men, who had paid attention to and flirted with her throughout the day. Cathy was in paradisiacal heaven; me, not so much.

Still, I was feeling better, almost recovered from my intestinal malady, and the two of us made a decision to be on our way the next morning.

Traveling from the south of Portugal to Spain, in the 1970s

To say that I was in a bad mood when I got onto the train is to understate the matter. On the way to the station, who should we run into but the very group of amorous men Cathy had spent the previous day with, all of whom were beside themselves that this braless blonde goddess of a woman was leaving their country, as they beseeched her to “Stay, please stay.” Alas, no luck for them; this was my wife, and we were going to be on our way.

Still suffering from the vestiges of both an irritable case of jealousy and a now worsening intestinal disorder, I was in a foul mood once we got onto the train, and as we pulled away from the station, my very loud and ill-tempered mood voiced in intemperate English, those sitting around us thinking that I must be some homem louco, and not wishing in any manner to engage.

A few minutes into my decorous rant, a young woman walked up to me, and asked in the boldest terms possible …

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

“Huh,” I asked?

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? That’s the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard. You’ve got to teach me how to swear!”

At which point, she sat down across from me, her lithe African American dancer companion moving past me to sit next to her.

“Susan. My name is Susan. This is my friend, Danelle,” she said, pointing in the direction of Danelle. “We’re from New York. We go to school there. Columbia. I’m in English Lit. Danelle’s taking dance — not hard to tell, huh? You two traveling through Europe, are you?” Susan all but shouted. “I come from a large Jewish family. You? We’re traveling through Europe together.”

And thus began a beautiful friendship. Turns out that Susan could swear much better than I could; she needed no instruction from me. Turns out, too, that she had my number, and for all the weeks we traveled together through Europe, Susan had not one kind word for me, as she set about to make my life hell — and I loved every minute of it. Susan became the sister I wished I’d had: profane, self-confident, phenomenally bright and opinionated, her acute dissection of me done lovingly and with care, to this day one of the best, most loving relationships I’ve ever had.

Little known fact about me: I love being called out by bright, emotionally healthy, socially-skilled and whole women.

Two-year-old Jude Nathan Tomlin, baby Megan Jessica, and dad, Raymond, in June 1977
The summer of 1974, when Cathy became pregnant with Jude, on the right above.

Without the women in my life, Cathy or Megan, my daughter — when Cathy and I separated — Lori, Justine, Alison, Patricia, Julienne or Melissa, each of whom loved me, love me still, and made me a better person, the best parts of me directly attributable to these lovely women, to whom I am so grateful for caring enough about me to make me a better person.

Once Susan and I had settled down — there was an immediate connection between Susan and I, which Cathy took as the beginnings of an affair the two of us would have (as if I would sleep with my sister — Danelle, on the other hand, well … perhaps a story for another day, but nothing really happened, other than the two of us becoming close, different from Susan).

J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories, an anthology of short stories published in April 1953

 

Danelle saw a ragged copy of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories peeking out of Cathy’s backpack. “Okay,” she said. “In rounds, let’s each one of us give the title of one of the Salinger short stories,” which we proceeded to do.

Cathy was just now reading Salinger, while I’d read the book while we were still in England, about three weeks earlier.

Cathy started first, For Esmé — with Love and Squalor. Danelle, Teddy. Susan, showing off, came up with A Perfect Day for Bananafish, telling us all, “That story was first published in the January 31, 1948 edition of The New Yorker.” Show off! I was up next, and came up with Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Phew — just barely came up with that one! Thank goodness.

Onto the second round: Cathy, Down at the Dinghy; Danelle, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes; Susan, showing off again, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, “turned down by The New Yorker in late 1951, and published by the British Information World Review, early in 1952.”

Me? Struggling yet again, but subject to a momentary epiphany, I blurted out, Just Before the War with the Eskimos. There we were, eight stories down and one to go.

But do you think any one of us could come up with the title to the 9th tale in Salinger’s 1953 anthology of short stories? Nope. We thought about it, and thought about it — and nothing, nada, zero, zilch. We racked our brains, and we simply couldn’t come up with the title of the 9th short story.

We sat there, hushed. For the first time in about half an hour, there was silence between us, only the voices of children on the train, and the clickety-clack of the tracks as the train headed relentlessly towards Madrid.

We couldn’t look at one another. We were, as a group, downcast, looking up occasionally at the passing scenery, only furtively glancing at one another, only periodically and with reservation, as Cathy held onto my arm, putting hers in mine.

Danelle looking up, she too wishing for human contact.

Finally, Susan looked up at me, looked directly at me, her eyes steely and hard yet … how do I say it? … full of love and confidence in me, that I somehow would be the one to rescue us from the irresolvable dilemma in which we found ourselves.

Beseechingly, Susan’s stare did not abate …

“The Laughing Man,” I said, “The Laughing Man! The 9th story in Salinger’s anthology is …” and before I could say the words, I was smothered in kisses, Cathy to my left, Susan having placed herself in my lap, kissing my cheeks, my lips, my forehead, and when she found herself unable to catch her breath, Danelle carrying on where Susan had left off, more tender than Susan, loving and appreciative, Cathy now holding me tight, love all around us.

A moment that will live in me always, a gift of the landscape of my life.

Sunday Music | #VanRamblings’ 100 Favourite Albums

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Over the coming couple of years — and perhaps over more time —  VanRamblings will publish our favourite 100 albums of all time, not just the auspicious début albums as the graphic above suggests, but all of our favourite albums of all time.

Readers will notice in the time to come that many — in reality, most —  of our favourite music features female vocalists, as was pointed out to us by our friend J.B. Shayne in the early 90s as he perused our massive CD collection, commenting “Do you realize that 90% of your CD collection features female vocalists?”

Up until that time, we hadn’t realized that feature of our music collection — but we certainly have since.

Whether it’s Lucinda Williams, Billie Eilish, Fiona Apple, Iris DeMent, Norah Jones, Rickie Lee Jones (our favourite), Lori McKenna, Adele, Stina Nordenstam, Rumer, Liana La Havas, Emiliana Torrini, Miranda Lambert, Allison Moorer, Feist, Lily Allen, Anita Baker,  The Roches, Eva Cassidy, Laura Nyro, Azure Ray, Sharon von Etten, Kasey Chambers, Imogen Heap / Frou Frou and Tracy Thorne / Everything But the Girl,  VanRamblings appreciates narrative storytelling in song, and the distaff reflection of life that is captured by these outstanding artists in their music.

VanRamblings’ love for music dates back to our early childhood.

Our mother, Mary, was a vocalist —  from time to time — in a hit local music group that gained quite a following across the continent and internationally, a country / roots band called The Rhythm Pals. There was always song in our home, my mother’s propensity to sing along with music on the radio a feature of life, whether at home or in the car. Such was the case, singing with my own children growing up.

In the late 50s / early 60s, a regular Saturday activity would be to go to the record store, where my mother, my sister and I would rifle through the bins of 45s, choosing our 10 favourites — this at a time when you could get 10 records for $1.00 — which, upon returning home, would go directly onto our record player.

Music always filled our home, my mother’s taste in music vast, although her love for country music (the same was true of my father) knew no bounds.

Commencing next Sunday, we’ll present the music from what we believe to be the most auspicious début albums of the past 45 years.

C’mon back then to see who that artist might be (hint: she is featured in the graphic above the outset of the writing in today’s Sunday Music column).

Stories of a Life | Redux | Film | A Central Organizing Force In Tomlin Family Life

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Film has always been a central, organizing force in my relationship with both my daughter, Megan, and my son, Jude.

Our collective love of the cinema, attending film festivals and discussing what we saw following the various screenings we attended (usually at the Fresgo Inn on Davie, which was alive no matter the time of night or early morning) was, over the years, a central feature of our relationship — the relationship between son and daughter, and dad — that allowed us to delve deep into discussions of the meaning of life, and our collective responsibility to work towards creating a fairer and more just world for everyone.

Heart and deep caring for humanity was at the centre of our love of film, and at the centre of our loving familial relationship, informing the choices we made about how we would conduct ourselves in the world, and the projects and causes to which we would devote our time and our energies.

In the 1980s, when Cathy and I were going through a rancorous divorce, film brought us together.

When in Seattle — which we visited frequently, always staying on the non-smoking 33rd floor of the Weston twin towers — in 1984, we took in a screening of Garry Marshall’s The Flamingo Kid — the story of a working class boy (Matt Dillon) who takes a summer job at a beach resort and learns valuable life lessons.

Megan was seven years of age, and Jude 9 — both were uncertain about the efficacy of our trip south (without their mother’s permission — we called her upon arriving at our hotel), but the screening alleviated and, finally, repaired any of their concerns, and all went well that weekend. Fortuitously, too, upon our return, the divorce proceedings inexplicably moved forward into a more reasonable and thoughtful direction, reflective of all our collective concerns.

Whenever there was “trouble” in our relationship — generated, most usually, by their mother — film served to salve the wounds of dysfunction, allowing us to find our collective centre while healing the wounds that rent all of our lives during a decade-long, million dollar custody dispute.

Film spoke to us, made us better, took us out of the drudgery of our too often protean daily and, more often, troubled lives, and engaged us while putting our lives into a broader and more human scale perspective. Never once was there a film that we saw together when we didn’t come out of the screening feeling more whole, and more at one with ourselves and the world.

Such was true, at the screenings of Glenn Close and John Malkovich’s Dangerous Liaisons over the holiday period in 1988, or months later at the screening of Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, which we took in at the Oakridge Theatre, a favourite and comforting cinema haunt of ours.

When Megan wanted some “alone time” with me, it almost always revolved around watching a film together, although as Megan matured (and as her love for film matured), Megan made it plain that she was present in the theatre to watch the film, not “share time” with me, choosing always to sit in a whole other section of the theatre (it drove her crazy in the times that we were sitting together in a theatre that I would check in occasionally with her, looking at her to determine how she felt about the film — talking during a film was an unforgivable sin, so that was never going to happen).

Some days, Megan would call and say, “Dad, take me to a film.” And because I was a film critic at the time, and had a pass to attend at any cinema in North America, off the two of us would traipse to see Kathy Bates’ Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) or Johnny Depp’s Benny & Joon (1993) at the old 12-theatre complex downstairs in the Royal Centre mall.

Other times, post dinner and after Megan had finished her homework, I’d say to Megan out of the blue, “I’m heading out to attend a preview screening of a film. Do you want to come along with me?” Megan would ponder my question for a moment before asking, “Which film?”

In 1991, one very long film preview screening we attended was Kevin Costner’s directorial début, Dances With Wolves, about which we knew nothing other than it starred one of our favourite actors, and off the two of us went.

At screening’s end (Megan and I actually sat together at this particular screening, which took place in the huge Granville 7 Cinema 7, cuz the preview theatre screening room was just packed), Megan turned to me, and said, “Dad, I knew this was going to be a great film.” And it was. “And, you know what else? It’s going to pick up a raft of Oscars this year, too, and be considered one of the, if not the, best films of the year.”

Jude and Megan also attended film festival screenings with me.

Almost inevitably, Vancouver International Film Festival founder, and co-owner of Festival Cinemas Leonard Schein was present with his wife Barbara, and at a screening’s end, Megan would make her way over to wherever Leonard and Barbara were sitting to enquire of him whether or not he intended to book the film into either the Varsity, Park or Starlight.

Following screenings of Neil Jordan’s 1992 putative multiple Oscar award winner, The Crying Game or, that same year, Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom, Megan marched over to Leonard, and asked him boldfacedly, “Well, what did you think?”

When Leonard indicated that he thought the films were not quite his cup of tea, both films would have difficulty finding an audience, and it was unlikely he’d be booking either film into one of his cinemas, Megan lit into Leonard with a passion and fury that I had rarely observed as coming from her, saying, “Are you out of your mind? Strictly Ballroom (or, The Crying Game) is a wonderful film, and just the sort of film that not only should you book, but that you MUST book — these are both groundbreaking films that will only serve to reinforce your reputation as an arts cinema impresario, but will also make you a tonne of money, and we all know that you’re all about the money. Either you book these films into The Varsity, or believe me when I tell you that there’ll be hell to pay when you see me next.”

And with that, Megan marched off.

At the 1990 Vancouver International Film Festival, I’d caught a screening of Whit Stillman’s directorial début, Metropolitan, in preview, and knew that this would be a film that Megan would love (and be astounded by, at the revelation of one of the characters, mid-film). I made arrangements to pick Megan up from University Hill Secondary at 3pm sharp on the day of the festival screening, we drove downtown, found a parking spot, and rushed over to The Studio Cinema on Granville to catch the 4pm screening of Metropolitan — which as I had predicted, Megan loved.

In early December 1993, on a particularly chilly and overcast day, at 10am in Cinema 2 at the Granville 7 theatre complex, I caught a screening of Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking new film, Philadelphia — a film about which I knew little, and a film that knocked me out (along with the handful of film critics in attendance — the Vancouver Sun’s Marke Andrews and the late Michael Walsh, long the lead film critic at The Province, as well as the late Lee Bacchus, soon to join Michael Walsh as a film critic at The Province) all of us at the theatre for the screening.

Emerging from the theatre just after noon, making my way onto Granville, I looked for the nearest telephone in order that I might call Megan at school.

I called the office at University Hill Secondary, and asked them to find Megan and bring her to the phone. When Megan asked, “Dad, is everything all right?”, I told her about the film I had just seen, and that when it opened in January, I wanted to take her and Jude to a screening at the Granville 7. We talked about the film for a few minutes, with her saying about 10 minutes in, “I’m holding up the school phone, and calls coming in. Let’s get together after school. Come and pick me up, and we can continue our conversation. I’ll see you then, Dad. I love you.”

There are gifts we give our children. From my parents, it was what would emerge as a lifelong love for country music. For Jude and Megan, my gift was a love of music, a love of the ballet, and an abiding love for film.