SONG OF THE DAY

“On Sat­ur­day After­noons in 1963″ by Rickie Lee Jones (Rickie Lee Jones, Warner Broth­ers Records, 1979). Writ­ten by Rickie Lee Jones.

LYRICS

The most as you’ll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by

You saved your own spe­cial friend
’Cuz here you need some­thing to hide her in
And you stay inside that fool­ish grin
When every­day now secrets end
Oh and then again
Years may go by

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- After arriv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia in the mid-1970s, Jones started writ­ing songs more seri­ously and by 1977 had met singer-songwriters Chuck E. Weiss and Tom Waits, who became her lover dur­ing this period.

- A demo con­tain­ing songs for the album includ­ing “The Last Chance Tex­aco”, “Easy Money”, “Young Blood” and “After Hours” did the rounds in 1978 and earned Jones a record deal with Warner Bros. Records. Record­ing ses­sions dur­ing 1978 yielded eleven songs for inclu­sion on an album, with two, “On Sat­ur­day After­noons in 1963″ and “After Hours,” recorded live on Decem­ber 22, 1978.

- By June 1981, the album had sold over two mil­lion copies in the US alone.

-  The album cover con­tributed to the image of Jones as a cool beret-wearing beat­nik; it was reported at the time that Jones was a heavy drinker and also a drug addict, and she and Tom Waits were known as rock music’s bohemian couple.

- She was fea­tured on the August 9, 1979 cover of Rolling Stone mag­a­zine, becom­ing one of the most suc­cess­ful music stars of the year.

- Her grand­fa­ther, Frank Jones, who lost a leg as a boy play­ing by the rail­road tracks, learned to dance and exe­cute flips with his peg leg and became a vaudevilliansinger/dancer/comedian under the name Peg Leg Jones. His wife, Myr­tle Lee, was a cho­rus girl, and the two of them trav­eled the vaude­ville cir­cuit when not home in Chicago with their four children.

- Richard Loris Jones, Rickie Lee Jones’ father, was four when his mother was killed by a truck in front of him. The chil­dren were put in board­ing schools, and Richard ran away to Boys Town when he heard about the film­ing going on there, and does appear for a moment in the doc­u­men­tary short that pre­cedes the film Boy’s Town.

– In 2001, Jones was the orga­nizer of the web com­mu­nity “Fur­ni­ture for the Peo­ple”, which is involved in gar­den­ing, social activism, boot­leg exchange and left wing politics.

- She has pro­duced records (includ­ing Leo Kottke’s Pecu­liaroso).

- Warner Bros. knew Jones was “the real thing” and obtained a spot for her on Sat­ur­day Night Live the week of her release. Sat­ur­day Night Live por­trayed her amidst garbage cans. Five months later she sold out two Carnegie Hall shows.

- Warn Broth­ers had also filmed for her what came to be an early music video — a twelve-minute, three-song movie, in which Jones was depicted as kind of girl next door street character.

- With Time mag­a­zine dub­bing her “the Duchess of Coolsville” in its review of her first show, Jones’ image was solidified.

- Some­time in Novem­ber 1979, Francis Ford Cop­pola asked Rickie Lee to col­lab­o­rate with Waits on his upcom­ing film, One from the Heart, but she balked, cit­ing the recent breakup. Fran­cis responded that it would be per­fect for the film, since the two char­ac­ters are sep­a­rated, and he asked her to recon­sider. She refused. Waits called in Novem­ber, but Jones did not return his call. A month later, Waits met his wife, a sec­re­tary at Zoetrope. They never spoke to each other again.

- Jones secured five nom­i­na­tions at the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Per­for­mance, Female, Best Rock Vocal Per­for­mance, Female, Song of the Year (“Chuck E.‘s in Love”), and Best New Artist, which she won at the Jan­u­ary 1980 cer­e­mony. She was also voted Best Jazz Singer by Play­boy magazine’s critic and reader polls.

- Rolling Stone remained fer­vent sup­port­ers of Jones, with a sec­ond cover fea­ture in 1981; the mag­a­zine also included a glow­ing five-star assess­ment of Pirates, which became a com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful follow-up by reach­ing US #5 on the Bill­board 200. More impor­tantly, is the fact that in Amer­ica “Woody and Dutch…” became a kind of com­mer­cial main­stay. The fin­ger snaps and jive talk beat were imi­tated in adver­tise­ments for McDonald’s, Dr. Pep­per, and others.

- A num­ber of tele­vi­sion and movies had licensed her work in these years, includ­ing Thir­tysome­thing, Frankie and Johnny, When a Man Loves a Woman, Jerry Maguire, Friends with Money and the French film Sub­way.

- Renewed inter­est in Jones led to the three-disc anthol­o­gy Duchess of Coolsville: An Anthol­ogy, released through reis­sue spe­cial­ists Rhino in June 2005. A lav­ish pack­age, the alphabetically-arranged release fea­tured album songs, live mate­r­ial, cov­ers, and demos, and fea­tured essays by Jones as well as var­i­ous col­lab­o­ra­tors, as well as trib­utes from artists includ­ing Randy New­man, Wal­ter Becker, Quincy Jones, and Tori Amos.

- Also in 2005, Jones was invited to take part in her boyfriend and col­lab­o­ra­tor Lee Cantelon’s music ver­sion of his book The Words, a book of the words of Christ, set into sim­ple chap­ters and themes. Cantelon’s idea was to have var­i­ous artists recite the text over pri­mal rock music, but Jones elected to try some­thing that had never been done, to impro­vise her own impres­sion of the texts, melody and lyric, in stream of con­scious­ness ses­sions, rather than read Jesus’ words. The ses­sions were recorded at an artist’s loft on Expo­si­tion Boule­vard in Cul­ver City. When Can­telon could no longer fin­ish the project, Jones picked it up as her own record and hired Rob Schnaf to fin­ish the pro­duc­tion at Sun­set Sound in 2007, and the result was the The Ser­mon on Exposition.

- For her next project, Jones opted to fin­ish half-written songs dat­ing back as far as 1986 (“Wild Girl”) as well as include new ones (the 2008-penned “The Gospel of Car­los, Nor­man and Smith,” “Bonfires”). Jones released Balm in Gilead on the Fan­tasy label in Novem­ber 2009. The album also included a new record­ing of “The Moon Is Made Of Gold,” a song writ­ten by her father Richard Loris Jones in 1954. Ben Harper, Victoria Williams, Jon Brion, Alison Krauss and the late Vic Ches­nutt all made con­tri­bu­tions to the album.

VIDEO OF THE DAY