Everyone wants to talk about the boys of the beat generation. It is so tempting to paint the past as an entirely male affair: women are the girlfriends, the wives, the muses and the cake makers. The girls might have learnt how to ‘do it for themselves’, but before those phony girl power con jobs of the 80s, with women like Madonna selling faux power, and plastic fantastic sex, and words that didn’t mean much but sounded good on the damn radio. I was bored of walking like an Egyptian with my true colors shining through before I even made it out of grade school. I got my kicks out on Route 66 with Bobby D, and on the back seats of Cadillacs with old Hank, and in the gutter with Lou…and in the pages of Steinbeck rolling around in dustbowls, and wondering if anyone was still on the road with Neal and Jack, travelling eternally towards the Mexico of the mind.
I still joke that I never read anything by another woman, and the only female singer songwriter I ever listen to with any passion is Joni Mitchell. It is partly true. It’s Queen Bee syndrome. I do not play well with other women. They tend to irritate me. I would rather listen to Warren Zevon’s bombast whilst drinking tea and reading Hunter S Thompson than try, once again to make it work with Laurie Anderson, or persuade myself that I really like Kate Bush after all. There is just too much fluff, too much knowing earnestness. I need a sardonic kick, not the ‘kick inside’. Don’t tell me about ‘this woman’s work’ Kate, I have enough to do keeping life rolling on without worrying about you too. I just don’t feel it. Up till the point that I slunk along to pay my respects to the legendary Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, at the Sweet Relief for Musicans concert in San Francisco, at the beginning of the year, I had never even heard of Rickie Lee. My fault. I am a creature of habit. I know what I like to listen to. I am currently working my way through Leo Ferre’s Verlaine et Rimbaud and know I would be pretentious if I didn’t just love it as much as I do. I didn’t expect Rickie to bring me such deep joy, yet here she is, reeling me in. I don’t know about Billie Faire, but I think I found the girl that Ramblin’ Jack was talking about, in 912 Greens, who he recounts seeing dancing around the banana tree like a hip, louche ballerina. Rickie isn’t just the muse: she is an artist and a star in her own right, and just far enough left of center, down the alleyway and off of the strip, as Suzanne Vega once sang to hold my attention.
I believe there is a heartbeat to the universe, and not everyone can tune into it, but those who can channel some kind of higher power, something beautiful, something that does not die, but can be passed onto those who live, and live fully: Kerouac’s ‘mad ones’, and boy, in the best sense of the term, is Rickie Lee one of Kerouac’s ‘mad ones’! Just when I think I have her worked out, and she comes on like Carole King with less grip on conventionality. In the shimmeringly beautiful Skeletons, she sings “Some kids like to watch Saturday cartoons, some girls listen to records all day in their rooms’. All of a sudden, like all the best writers, and those who transmit emotion through their art, I was there, I was seen. I was in my room, listening to Bob Dylan, listening to Television, while my sibling sat downstairs laughing like a drain because the cat had tried to eat the mouse once again. I never saw the point. Rickie doesn’t sing about childhood, about being the black sheep, the odd one out, she takes you there, and she holds your hand and she becomes that best friend you never had but always wanted. And there is the rub! That is the crux of the matter! Rickie is a supreme empath who invites you into her life and winds her way into yours, but it’s ok, because she balances it out, with her hip, kooky act, with all her scat credentials and has you bopping around the room along side her. Rickie has a voice and a sensibility built for jazz, and a soul made for poetry.
Woody and Dutch on A Slow Train to Peking takes you on the road, with all of the swish rap of Neal Cassady on a speed binge, doing 120 down the highway with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road. Somehow this jazz-infused boppy little number starts to roll along like a particularly juicy page in On The Road. There are hints of her brilliantly off the wall renditions in her first album, Pirates, with the mind bending changes of pace and mood, as shown in Traces of the Western Slopes, a style that was used in a diluted and restrained way by Joni Mitchell, even if Joni did get there first, and ripped off by Kate Bush, in my opinion. Think Hissing of the Summer Lawns with no regard for radio play. If you love Joni when she gets down and weird with Jaco Pastorius then you will adore Rickie Lee. Rickie does not give as many imperiously perfect moments as Joni does, but when it clicks she is somehow more honest, less phony and less self aware. Riki is singing for the sheer love of expressing whatever she is picking up on the airwaves, that needs to come out of her brain waves. She is singing from some deeply feminine point of pain, where to be female and different, female and artistic, female and sensitive, is to somehow be defective. You won’t ever get a boy to marry you that way, I can hear my mother saying in the hoot of the horns, and me and Riki both run like the wind for the wilds and hope she is right.
It is a rare and beautiful thing at my time of life, after all the listening I have done over decades of finding sound to live alongside, to find something as infinitely engaging and lovely as Pirates. Critic crap put aside, no one giving me vinyls or asking me to promote anything, this treasure of an album from 1981 by an artist that does not get even a fraction of the recognition and love they deserve, should have every plaudit I can throw at it. It belongs on my regular playlist, has earnt its place as ‘writing music’ and is going to accompany me on a walk around Golden Gate Park in the morning.
Riki is one of the successors to the beat generation. Beat is a state of mind, a type of creation, a way of making art out of the way life feels, the cicadian movement of time, and the gentle waves of emotion and experience that buffet souls around. Riki has a wild sense of humor, she tells the boys how it is, she is unapologetically hedonistic and gorgeously free. That is the ticket, that is the real gig – to find and embrace freedom over conventionality, and to do it with a ‘do dooo de dooo’ expression of musicality that takes you back to Billy Faire’s backyard, with Kerouac in that old wooden chair, dancing round a banana tree, and making everyone jealous that they are not as free and wild and hip and connected to the great beyond as you are. Riki has ‘it’, that deep connection to the art, to the road, to the freedom of spirit, and Pirates is the soundtrack to feminine rebellion and the true power that comes from being truly a woman who does not give a single flying fuck who is in love and why they are and what they are doing just as long as they can come along for the ride and pick up the rhythm of living.
Very nice