For a great long while, Genesis drummer and replacement singer to the band’s original singer, the much beloved and high revered Peter Gabriel — a progressive rock superhero, songwriter, record producer and activist extraordinaire —  when he broke away from the band in 1975 to launch a solo career, Phil Collins replaced him, which proved to be a far from salutary development for the band and for Collin’s nascent career, with Collins quickly becoming a figure of widespread derision among music critics, longtime fans of the band, and most members of the general public.
Phil Collins with first wife Andrea Bertorelli and daughter Joely, circa 1979.
As if thing weren’t bad enough, in 1978 Collins went on a year-long hiatus from the band, moving to Vancouver in what would was destined to emerge as a vain attempt at repairing his marriage to Andrea Bertorelli, who had decamped from England to Lotusland, with Collins also working to maintain his relationship with his daughter Joely, an endeavour the was doomed to fail, with Collins returning to England in late 1979, at which time he went into seclusion for more than a year, despondent, near suicide and a drunk.
During his year-long period of seclusion, with regular therapy he eventually quit drinking, and at the suggestion of his therapist turned to his first love, writing music and lyrics, something he’d not done since early in his career, coming to terms with his divorce by pouring his heart out into 10 songs that eventually became his début album, Face Value, released in February 1981 on Virgin-Atlantic Records, reaching number in the charts across the globe, from the UK, U.S., Canada and Sweden to Austria, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the album certified 5-times Platinum. Not bad for a washed up and much derided musician.
Today, then, Phil Collins’ Face Value, which 40 years ago helped me to traverse the shoals of my own nasty, contemptible and painful divorce.
Starting on the top left: The Cinematic Orchestra, Brooke Fraser, Azure Ray, Love, Allison Moorer (in the middle), Andy Gibb, Bebel Gilberto, Crash Test Dummies, and Billie Eilish.
Today on Music Sunday, a chill 9-song Spotify playlist of some of my favourite laid-back songs, spanning the years from 1967 (that’d be the American group Love’s Alone Again Or, written by band member Bryan MacLean) right up until present day, with Billie Eilish’s, I Love You.
The various artists span the globe, from New Zealand singer-songwriter Brooke Fraser — with whom I became acquainted one autumn day in 1997 when walking into a neighbourhood consignment clothing store — where, of course, I purchased a great new sweater, the young woman behind the counter a recent Kiwi emigré, who was more than happy to share her love of Ms. Fraser’s music with me; Brazil’s Bebel Gilberto, singing a song originally recorded by her then 24-year-old step-mother Astrud, in 1965; plus a lo-fi jazz song from Britain’s The Cinematic Orchestra, featuring Québéçois singer-songwriter Patrick Watson on vocals; a song by Australia’s Andy Gibb; and music from Alison Moorer, raised in the southern U.S., which is where Azure Ray’s Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor hail from; and, from Canada, the Winnipeg-based Crash Test Dummies, Brad Roberts on vocals; and last but not least, the incomparable chanteuse, Billie Eilish.
At age 15, a young Rickie Lee Jones dropped out of school and ran away from her Pacific Northwest home in search of her father, an itinerant jazz musician, who had abandoned her family when she was 10 years of age. After spending time living in a barrio in Los Angeles, once on the road again, Rickie Lee finally located her father in Kansas City, Missouri — but didn’t end up staying very long, instead returning to her Puget Sound home, writing her GED, enrolling first at a small college in Tacoma, and afterward, at age 18, moving south to Huntington Beach, California.
Tom Waits’ interpretation of the classic Bernstein/Sondheim song, Somewhere, from the 1961 musical West Side Story, the song on the 1978 Tom Waits album, Blue Valentine.
While in L.A., Rickie Lee played in bars and coffee houses in L.A., and at the age of 21 she began to play in clubs in Venice, sitting in with various jazz bands. Soon after Rickie Lee moved to Venice, where she met local piano player and songwriter Alfred Johnson, the two of them in time setting about to compose the songs Weasel and the White Boys, and Company, both songs later included in Rickie Lee’s eponymous début album.
By 1977, Rickie Lee was playing original material at Hollywood’s Ala Carte Club, when she came to the attention of Tom Waits, who was particularly impressed with her interpretation of a song her father had written, The Moon is Made of Gold. By early 1978, Rickie Lee found herself in the studio where Tom Waits was recording his latest album, Blue Valentine.
Towards the end of the Warner Bros. Blue Valentine recording session, with all the musicians in the room, Rickie was asked if she wanted to record some tracks on the master tape, whereupon she laid down four tracks: Weasel and the White Boys, Company, Easy Money, and The Last Chance Texaco — and thought nothing more of it, until Warner Bros. executive and producer Lenny Waronker was listening to the master tape in his office one day, and was floored when he heard Rickie Lee Jones for the first time.
A year later, in March 1979, Rickie Lee Jones was released and became a hit, buoyed by the chart success of the jazz-flavoured single Chuck E.’s In Love, which hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rickie Lee became an overnight sensation, touring the album across North America and Europe.
I saw Rickie Lee in Vancouver, at The Orpheum, in the summer of 1979.
Rickie Lee followed up her début album with Pirates, considered by many to be her masterpiece, the album returning her to the upper echelons of the charts, along the way garnering a rave five-star review in Rolling Stone.
Long story short, success proved a challenge for Rickie Lee. Behind the scenes, by late 1982 Rickie Lee was struggling with intense addictions, ranging from alcohol, to heroin and cocaine. The authorities were aware of her drug usage, as a Reagan administration set about to make an example of her, and charge and jail her. An oft told tale in the music industry.
Prior to her being charged, Warner Bros. made arrangements to spirit Rickie Lee out of the country, to the south of France — but before leaving, Rickie Lee insisted on recording a 10″ EP, 1983’s jazz-infused Girl At Her Volcano, a virtually unknown album in Rickie Lee’s vast discography, but by far my favourite Rickie Lee recording, and the music which became the soundtrack of my children’s lives in their early, and most formative years.
Lush Life (Girl at Her Volcano), recorded live at L.A.’s Perkins Palace, April 16, 1982
Cobbling together a recording as best they could before spiriting a troubled Rickie Lee out of the country and to safety, the Girl At Her Volcano EP, while highlighting Rickie Lee’s propensity for jazz material, given that the recording is evenly split between classic pop studio and live jazz material actually reveals itself to be a surprisingly cohesive recording.
The studio material, arrangement and production-wise, balances the atmospherics of 1981’s Pirates with the impressionistic, airy tone of The Magazine, which also was to display a return to a more upbeat, joyous jazz-pop style. The lone original is the beautiful two-minute Hey Bub, which, as the liner notes reveal, was the first song written for Pirates in September 1979 but was left off the LP. It’s similar to those lonely, sad, forlorn ballads from the album like Skeletons or The Returns, and similarly gorgeous.
The brief, electric piano-fuelled So Long is a Girl At Her Volcano highlight.
The real highlights of Girl At Her Volcano, though, have to be her sublime live renditions of some notable jazz standards. Rickie Lee’s interpretations of Lush Life and My Funny Valentine breathe new life into familiar material; her emotive vocals and inventive phrasing completely rejuvenate and revitalize the songs. She puts in a passionate vocal performance, certainly, but also a technically superb performance — with dazzling range, precision, and control. Rickie Lee’s voice is not especially big but she wows with her incredible feeling and ability. Those two recordings are from consecutive nights in Pasadena’s Perkins Palace and the LA’s Roxy on April 17-18, 1982, and, along with a September 1979 recording of Something Cool from Amsterdam’s Theater Carre, represent three of Rickie Lee Jones’ career best vocal performances, simply moving and spine-chilling in their intensity.
All of six years of age, when Megan first heard Girl At Her Volcano, and Rickie Lee’s interpretation of Richard Rodgers’ My Funny Valentine — Jude and Megan and I were on our way back home from Seattle, where we’d spent the weekend, as we did once a month throughout the 1980s, and where I’d pick up a cassette of the as-yet-unreleased-in-Canada Girl At Her Volcano EP, late in the day, the night sky dark, clear and purple, Megan sitting nestled in the passenger seat, Jude sound asleep in the back seat, she turned to me and quietly asked, “Daddy, how can someone say …
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable.
Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?
“… isn’t Rickie Lee being cruel when she sings those lyrics? Are those the words you use to say to someone you love, that you really love them?”
From that chill 1983 autumn night until this pandemic-infused mid-autumn November, My Funny Valentine remains a Rickie Lee Jones unfavourite song for Megan, however much she loves everything else that Rickie Lee has recorded over the years, the soundtrack of a young girl’s life growing up, and now the mother of three children, living over on Vancouver’s east side.
Have a listen, and see what you think of Rickie Lee’s My Funny Valentine.
The perfectly matched, heartbreaking, heavenly collaboration between Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory, the pop-music masterpiece, was released on the 29th of September 1998 — slightly old-fashioned, yet insistently clear and capable of flooding the heart with all the awful beauty of love’s highs and lows … mostly lows … “In the darkest place,” it all begins, “I know that is where you’ll find me” — remains to this day one of my favourite albums ever, one I go back to again and again.
The people we meet on the album who move through these 12 perfect pop songs aren’t teenagers tasting first-love tears.
They’re grownups who know what they’ve done to themselves, their hearts broken, who are now enveloped in a realm we’ve all visited from time to time, a dimension where time ticks away just a bit more slowly and the world passes by at a remove. They are displaced and disconnected, seen only in fine silver frames, distant cities or watching from afar. They live in empty houses, waiting for sleep to come to take them somewhere else, and all this they do to music meticulously crafted by two experts of the form.
Neither producer Burt Bacharach nor composer Elvis Costello is a stranger to collaboration, but together they are a singular pairing, as Costello brings discipline and edge to Bacharach’s lush melodic outpourings, while Bacharach returns the favour by setting Costello’s exacting progressions and taut wordplay in soundscapes that are both intricate and silky smooth.
Take, as a spectacular example, the gorgeous ballad What’s Her Name Today?, a Costellian pondering on the ruin brought about by those in pain that’s not so much backed by Bacharach’s purposeful grand piano as admonished — you’re a fool it declares, before sweeping up the whole affair into a whirlwind of strings and human wreckage.
Other times, they’re more sympathetic, deploying Bacharach’s famous mellow trumpet to harmonize with the vocals on the tricky tale of infidelity Toledo, or winking at the conceit of The Sweetest Punch by threading the tune with chimes, a lovely instrument you have to hit, with mallets.
In the song above, the horns say a little prayer, below … the bells chime.
The sum of this artistic one + one is more than strictly musical. By coming together when they did, each man underwent a kind of recalibration whereby the sheen of kitsch acquired by Bacharach’s body of work since his ’60s heyday was stripped away, and Costello, then in his mid-40s, shed the last lingering remnants of his image as an angry young man.
In turn, Painted from Memory itself became a bridge, connecting classic works of love and loss — think Frank Sinatra’s ninth studio release, 1955’s concept album, In the Wee Small Hours — to the wave of pop-jazz new schoolers (Norah Jones, Michael Bublé) that followed closely in its wake.
Costello and Bacharach know that opening yourself up to the sentimental side of life exposes you to its cruelties as well; it takes courage, so Painted from Memory concludes with a plea for fortitude and grace. God Give Me Strength — which they wrote over the phone lines — is the first of the pair’s dual efforts and it remains one of the best, an achingly gorgeous last-stand waltz through the end stages of grief. “That song is sung out,” it concedes, “this bell is rung out.” Except that it isn’t, because there’s something in all of us, the part Painted from Memory renders so well, that will always wait for the bell to ring. That damned, beautiful bell.
Phil Collins with first wife Andrea Bertorelli and daughter Joely, circa 1979.
