Rickie Lee Jones

A LADY WANTS outdoor lighting installed. House in Tacoma, decent wiring.

An electrician goes to the house and notices a provocative concert poster: sultry shadows, polka-dot dress, cascading blonde hair, head tilted with attitude. It's Rickie Lee Jones, the singer whose street-girl drawl won her a Grammy in 1979 as Best New Artist.

Oh, the electrician asks the homeowner. Do you know Rickie Lee Jones?

"I AM Rickie Lee Jones!" the lady tells him.

When are people going to see her for who she really is?

"Wow, this is deep," Jones muses later. "How come he's looking right at me and he doesn't know it's me? I don't look so terribly different. Is it the glamour? Obscurity? Legend? When people place you in their lives, even if they're not huge fans, they place you in a spiritual or mystical place. . . . They never expect you to appear standing in line in the supermarket, especially around here."

"HERE" IS TACOMA, where Rickie Lee Jones is 45 and living in a sweet blue house with a white picket fence, blooming jasmine and a truck parked in the driveway. "I can look at this place from the outside and say: That's a happy family that lives in there," Jones says.

This is a long way from Jones' hipster days, or rather nights, when she was broke, roomed under the HOLLYWOOD sign and hung out in dives with musician Tom Waits, spinning lyrics about Cecil, Sal the Weasel and the jukebox that goes doyt-doyt.

"She created this whole other world," says singer-song writer Emily Saliers of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. "You know, street characters with their different funky names. Women being beaten up and trying to deal with that. `Skeletons' - a guy on the verge of a new life who gets blown away by the cops. `Last Chance Texaco' - the long, long stretches of road and the desolation of a weary heart. She's such a mood evoker. . . . Her voice isn't too pretty, which is what I like about it. It's got that swagger and scratch."

Next month Jones will release a new CD of songs, classics popularized by Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Ella Fitzgerald, Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, the musical "West Side Story." Jones imprints them with her signature pulse, stretching and wringing the tunes in surprising spots. The overall effect is close, bourbon-smooth, New-York lounge.

The CD arrives at the end of several months of touring that Jones launched with a sold-out concert for June's opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Since then she's played venues across Canada and 15 concerts in Germany and Scandinavia. Next month she hits California, including the Hollywood Bowl.

This isn't a comeback, though, because Jones never left. She gets ticked when strangers stare at her until the flash of recognition: Oh! Rickie Lee Jones! So, uh, are you still singing?

During the past two decades Jones has recorded 10 albums and compact discs and performed hundreds of shows of varying caliber. She's survived drugs, marriage, motherhood, divorce and left a trail of forwarding addresses in Paris and California. She outlasted grunge, boy bands and the sale of her label, Mercury, to Seagrams. She didn't overdose like Janis Joplin or die young like Mama Cass or sell out like Cher. She didn't morph like Madonna, who makes Jones mad, makes her mimic dramatically:

Now I'm a punk rocker, now I'm Hindu hands, now I'm gonna take off my clothes. Whatever's popular. Whatever I think will get you get you to pay attention to me and buy my records.

"She has no personality and that's her final redemption," Jones says of Madonna. " . . . It's done a lot of harm because it normalizes and minimalizes women as objects to sell mediocre art."

Jones escaped that scene in 1998. These are her Tacoma years. She moved back to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to her mom and extended family in Olympia. Hollywood had run its course.

"Life there was over," she says. "It was vacuous. It was sucking up energy. I felt like I was dying. My little kid wasn't little anymore." Her daughter, Charlotte Rose, went to school with the children of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ice T and the sister of Madonna. Jones discovered the kids were measuring themselves according to whose family was more famous. "I said: This ends now. This doesn't do justice to my daughter, as her own powerful person."

Jones wanted Charlotte to come of age "someplace where she cannot see women sold on every billboard" and where she wouldn't be exposed to so many drugs. "I thought: Y'know, I really hated it up there (the Northwest), but there's something unchanged about it and maybe they still play jump rope or something, and actually, there's a bunch of hopscotch things on the sidewalk over there . . .. " She nods to the neighborhood outside.

"So we're down 'til eighth grade. Then we'll see."

Charlotte Rose is now 12, poised and pony-tailed, a couple of years younger than when Jones first ran away from home. The pop star envisions a different kind of life for her daughter. "Charlotte does not want to be in the spotlight. She told me: I don't want to be like you. I just want to be like everybody else!" Jones says her daughter would make a great doctor, lawyer, architect or publicist because she is smart, logical, gets along with people and thinks in three dimensions.

Sound like a parent? Jones looks like a parent.

Take the Seattle concert this summer. Jones went with a no-fuss style: Unbraided her hair into kinky waves, borrowed a suit from her good friend Lee the day of the concert, swapped shirts with him last minute, forgot a belt so she kept having to hike up her pants on stage.

"It's the way I picture moms looking at the end of the day," observed Frank Neef, a longtime fan who was in the audience.

During the show, there were moments when Jones spoke to the crowd as if these were old friends who'd dropped by for coffee. Other times, she took charge like a school-bus driver. Ordered the sold-out crowd to be quiet when people tried to clap to the beat of "Weasel." (She didn't want to get trapped into singing the record version.) Declared she hated it - "Don't start yelling!" - when fans requested old favorites.

"Wow, this little girl's turned into a cranky old broad before my eyes!" joked another fan, Tim Streeter.

Jones treasures spontaneity. She likes to feel the moment and go with it. Her band wasn't swinging quite the way she wanted so she scrapped some of what they'd rehearsed and accompanied herself at the piano for a wrackingly beautiful set.

She offered a jagged, liquid rendition of "Magazine," a song she wrote about walking home after buying dope. "All I wanted to do in the world was to quit taking drugs, but I could not stop," she explained to the audience. "I could picture a time when I could not take drugs anymore. I could see it, a beautiful day. Full of color, but still very dark."

She sang the song, bowed her head over the keyboard and sighed. The audience allowed a long silence before they clapped.

"I don't see Rickie Lee Jones as young any more," Neef said later. "But neither am I."

Has it really been 21 years since Chuck E. was in love?

REMEMBER CHUCK E.? Easy Money? Coolsville? Danny's All-Star Joint?

Remember that first album cover? The sleek beret? Hair drifting over downcast lashes? Lips caressing that little black cigarette?

Either you remember, or you don't.

If you do remember, you may also recall what you wore, who you longed for (or wanted to dump), how weary you'd become of disco and Donna Summer and the synthesized rote of the radio when Jones sauntered onto the scene, creating eddies of jazz, and you listened to certain cuts, over and over, on your turntable or eight-track tape player because nobody else sounded quite like that, so young and vulnerable yet tough.

-- Rebecca Maker of Eugene: "I was in college in the Midwest. I was pulling straight A's, partying way too hard and working at a bar and restaurant as a waitress. Someone gave me a tape. I listened in my car, a Volkswagen Beetle, of course. My girlfriend was like, `She has her mouth full of marbles.' I was like, `Great marbles!' " Maker later took 10 years off to follow the Grateful Dead. She has the original Rickie Lee Jones cassette, still.

-- Tim and Jill. Tim heard Jill singing Rickie Lee Jones tunes with a Portland band. Tim was into Jones' music, the seedy characters, the intense emotional world. Jill had a great voice and a sparkle in her eye. "I just thought: Wow," Tim Streeter said. "I probably fell for her because she was up there, singing that. It charged me. It worked on many levels." Tim and Jill married. Jill sang "Danny's All-Star Joint" and "Coolsville" in her wedding dress. Later, Tim and Jill divorced. Tim sent Jill a cassette of Jones' "Company"

So I'll see you in another life now, baby

I'll free you in my dreams,

But when I reach across the galaxy

I will miss your company . . .

RICKIE LEE JONES in the year 2000, wearing a frumpy crocheted cap, talking about Rickie Lee Jones of the vintage beret:

"They really liked her. They liked the idea of her. She was self-confident. Saucy. Beautiful. Odd.

"My appearance, it resonated. It was different and friendly, easy to grasp. Sometimes a kind of scene or artist penetrates. Destiny and I were meant to arrive at that place. It was primed for me. I don't know why."

The radio industry sorts pop artists into mini-eras (e.g. pre-Beatles, punk, post-rap) to better target markets such as the Baby Boomers. Over the years, perceptual research has unearthed two fascinating concepts:

1. Listeners glom onto icons, someone from each little epoch who represents the leading edge of a musical change. Rickie Lee Jones led a generation out of the disco wasteland.

2. Your most active and best memories of music happen between the ages of 16 and 22. "The key is you had so much more time to be involved in your music," says Jim La Marca, vice-president of Broadcast Programming, a Seattle radio programming and syndication company. "Plus, you're doing fun, wild things."

Added together, this means Jones' early hits are the soundtrack for many boomers' youth. Which may be why they're reluctant to let her grow up.

"If she's 20 years older, they are too," La Marca says, "and they don't want to go there."

Streeter, watching the sedate balding crowd in Bagley Wright Theater before Jones' Seattle show: "These people all look like my parents' age. I am my parents' age! And I'm sitting here doing this little time-warp kind of thing."

Jones, herself, has refused to remain in reverb. Although her later CDs haven't enjoyed the commercial success of the first two, her music has continued to evolve: snappy pop, melancholy ballads, moody torch-songs, even synthesized trip-hop.

Singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli, who plays on Jones' upcoming CD: "With Rickie Lee, each performance of the song is almost entirely different. She tries to get this unique bend. We'll all sit around her and she'll say how she wants it and she'll go: Let's just roll tape. Let's make things happen."

Bass player Rob Wasserman, who has played with Jones for two decades: "Out of everyone I've worked with, Rickie Lee was the most spontaneous, you know, always discovering new things in a childlike way." (Wasserman has also recorded with Lou Reed, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Oingo Boingo, Jennifer Warnes, Bobby McFerrin and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir.) "When I play music with her, I never know what to expect. That's what makes it so fun and exciting, but also scary."

And, for some fans, hard.

On her latest CD, "Ghostyhead," Jones experimented with synthesized loops and dissonance. During a concert tour, she played in a Detroit church where she had the seats removed so the audience wouldn't be so passive. Up front, a bunch of kids in saris waved incense and swayed to the music. "They had come to hear `Ghostyhead,' " Jones laughs. In the back, she saw the silhouettes of boomers, arms crossed stiffly over their chests. "They'd come to hear `Danny's All-Star Joint,' which I hadn't done in 17 years. I thought: If you can't go with me on this journey, go home. I won't be mad at you; don't be mad at me."

Later, when Jones and crew were playing pool in the basement, an overweight 40-something biker leaned down and shouted through the window: Tell her we hated that! Tell her to play the old . . . !

"I thought: You are exactly who I don't want to come to my shows," Jones says. "Whoever you thought I was, I never was. I'm a writer. It was all fiction. I made it up. I definitely went through the school of hard knocks, but I was not those characters I created, and I'm not now. . . . It would be nice if people catch up."

WHEN YOU DO CATCH up with Jones, you'll likely be struck by her vibrant imagination. She has premonitions. She remembers ghosts. She finds enormity in the ordinary. It's not hard to see how whimsical lyrics and characters loiter in such a mind.

At home one morning, Jones peeks through venetian blinds, playing pretend.

Spies, she whispers. Across the street, there's a plain beige house where people live but rarely leave. "Doesn't it look like a fortress?" She's read all of John Le Carre's thrillers and knows where to find trouble. Espionage in Tacoma. After all, battleships dock a few blocks away. War planes fly overhead.

"There are many clandestine things happening right under your nose - next door! If they're really good, you'd never feel the poison dart," she says. "Actually, I don't want to know what's going on. I just want to imagine."

She doesn't attempt to interpret this invisible world in which she deeply believes. It's sacred, like the place her songs spring from, and she doesn't like to talk about that, either. "Trying to explain reduces it," she says, "like trying to explain music, or love."

She's lounging in a wicker rocker in her sunroom, and a silvery flash makes her jump. "I thought it was one of those ghosts," she explains.

They first appeared during childhood in Elma, in Grays Harbor County, where Jones' family briefly rented a haunted farmhouse. The cellar housed a creepy metal mannequin and glass-plate negatives of stained-glass saints. Spirits wandered. Mirrors jumped off walls. " I knew they were there immediately," Jones says. "It was quite exciting."

There are family ghosts, too.

Jones' paternal grandfather was a one-legged vaudeville and carny dancer named Peg Leg Jones. Her mother's father returned from World War I tipsy and unbalanced. After he was jailed for getting drunk and stealing chickens, his children were sent to orphanages, so Jones' mother, Bettye Jane, lived a hard life. "Like Orphan Annie, but much much worse," Jones says. "They had to watch their back . . . lecherous terrible things . . . serious violence. Everybody comes with a map based on all the people that came before them. I imagine everybody grows up on the stories of their parents."

And the songs. Jones' father, the late Richard Loris Jones, was a struggling musician who eked out a living as a waiter, gardener and moving man. He was delighted to discover his young daughter could carry a tune and sing harmony. He filled her ears with jazz and blues: Betty Carter, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Vince Guaraldi.

Her father taught her "My Funny Valentine" when she was in third grade. Jones sings a few notes, mapping the scale with her hand: You make me smiiIILLE. "`He got irritated I couldn't make this change from minor to major . . . That's a key change. A ridiculous unexpected one. It would be a hard thing for my little mind to grasp. It took a whole day."

Jones says her father's early tutelage helped her intuitively understand the meaning of a series of sounds. "It is a true mystical thing. One of the nice things is that he must have gotten that from his dad."

Music and imagination were Jones' escapes as her family disintegrated and Jones drifted: Chicago, Phoenix, North Thurston County, Seal Beach, Calif., Kansas City, Los Angeles, Olympia, Tulsa, back to L.A. - Venice, Hollywood.

Along the way, her brother, Danny, lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, her parents broke up and she was kicked out of North Thurston's Timberline High School for being a rebellious "long hair." (She later got her G.E.D. and went to college.) Through it all, Jones kept singing.

"When I was 18, I wasn't very good. I wanted to be. I wasn't a good writer and when I sang, I hadn't learn to project yet. I had my personality but it didn't have great volume." She imitated the lyrics and styles of Randy Newman and Taj Mahal and later, Laura Nyro. By 22, she was living in Venice, playing smoky clubs, crashing with friends, collecting unemployment and writing songs, many of them good. Then she moved to Hollywood and was discovered by Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman of Warner Brothers Records.

Now she's back.

"The four walls around me haven't until recently been very important because I've lived so far in my head. It's an amazing feeling to enjoy being here in Tacoma in my house. I really like it. A lot of people end up going back home in their adult life. Finally, I went back home."

One afternoon, we drove around Olympia on the way to The Evergreen College, where she had promised to guest-deejay a friend's radio show.

We roll past the landmarks of her early life. There's the place behind the bus station where, as a teen, she guzzled Southern Comfort, pretending to be Janis Joplin, and there's Martin Way, where her family lived for awhile in a trailer in King Arthur's Court, and over there, in the fall, that grand maple tree in front of the Capitol turns glorious red.

"I think of it as the soil, the stuff we draw from, the earth. It was interesting to be part of this, as a kid, though depressing."

This time, as an adult, Jones is grounded in music, gardening and being a Mom. She says she's taught Charlotte everything she knows about staying away from strangers in parked cars and what drugs do and don't do and how to treat people right, especially yourself.

Years ago, Jones had a revelatory moment after she spoke sharply to a store clerk and realized how much she'd hurt her. "There are people who are naturally nice. Others learn to be nice because they want to create something nice in their wake . . . I can still really be quite aggressive, like in traffic, but in general, I want people to feel good."

Now that Charlotte is more independent, Jones says she can evolve from being "Charlotte's mom" to "Rickie Lee." She thinks about a second career, maybe as an anthropologist. She's trying to write a song called "The King of Martin Way" about her brother Danny,

who lives in a tiny apartment

and takes the bus downtown

to play pool.

He bought a gold LTD but it's always

breaking down...

A train goes by and whistles and Jones says it's always been one her favorite sounds, especially at night, from way in the distance, over the water, such a homey, lonely feeling.

Her voice can be like that, so tender and raw and nasal sometimes, like she was crying 10 minutes ago but pulled herself together just to sing you this song. Or it could be her sinuses. They're triggered by certain foods, or stress; it hasn't been so bad here in the Pacific Northwest.

So she'll live here awhile and then she'll go. "I always have this thing of gotta go, gotta go, gotta get outta here," she says. "Maybe L.A. or Italy or New York, depending on Charlotte." Rickie Lee Jones is here for now. When the moment moves, she'll follow.

Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine.