The phone rang in a Los Angeles apartment in the fall of 1977.
Rickie Lee Jones was in her early twenties, a bar singer with no record deal and no hit.
The man who picked up the receiver was Tom Waits, her boyfriend and fellow songwriter.
On the other end of the line was their friend Chuck E. Weiss, missing for weeks.
Weiss was a singer, songwriter, and professional night owl who drifted through the same clubs they did.
Night after night, the three of them had talked music until sunrise around the Tropicana Motel.
Then Weiss had simply vanished, without a word to anyone in the circle.
Now his voice came crackling down the line from Denver, Colorado.
He had moved there, he explained, for the oldest reason in the world.
He had fallen in love.
Waits listened, said very little, and hung up the phone.
Then he turned around and announced, “Chuck E.’s in love.”
Jones heard something in those four words that Waits himself did not.
She heard a rhythm, a grin, and the top of a chorus.
It began with a phone call.
Less than two years later, that sentence would be coming out of radios all over America.
This is the story of how it got there.
A Circle of Night Owls at the Tropicana
Jones and Waits were then among the most talked-about young songwriters in Los Angeles.
They had met in 1977 at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood club where songwriters proved themselves.
Weiss belonged to the same late-night world of clubs, diners, and cheap motel rooms.
The Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard served as a home base for traveling musicians.
Weiss was the circle’s spark plug, a blues-loving character with a comedian’s timing.
When he disappeared, nobody in the group knew whether to worry or to laugh.
Friends like that do not usually vanish quietly, and his absence became a running joke.
The joke ran for weeks, through many late nights and unanswered questions.
But the joke ended the night the telephone rang.
The Sentence She Could Not Let Go
Jones took Waits’s flat little announcement and started turning it over like a melody.
She built the song as a teasing interrogation, demanding to know where Chuck had been hiding.
In the verses she wonders why he no longer comes down to lean against the parking meter with the old crowd.
That leaning had its own slang name in their world, three initials everyone in the circle understood.
The song is packed with the street talk and hipster shorthand of their after-hours life.
Near the end she added a playful twist, hinting that Chuck might be in love with the singer herself.
Jones later made clear that the twist was pure invention, a wink rather than a confession.
The real Chuck had simply fallen for someone in Denver and decided to stay.
What she had written, almost by accident, was the most commercial song of her young life.
There was just one problem, and it was a big one.
Nobody had ever sold a song quite like this to pop radio.
A Showcase, a Demo, and a Warner Bros. Deal
Jones had been singing in Venice bars and coffee houses since she was twenty-one.
Her club sets mixed traditional jazz standards with originals she had written herself.
Some of those originals were collaborations with pianist Alfred Johnson, her first writing partner.
Word about the beret-wearing singer with the smoky, slurred phrasing reached record executives.
At a label showcase, she performed “Chuck E.’s in Love” in front of the men with the contracts.
A demo tape carrying “The Last Chance Texaco” and “Easy Money” sealed the argument.
Warner Bros. signed her and paired her with producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman.
Waronker and Titelman were craftsmen who understood both jazz looseness and pop discipline.
They believed the strange little song could lead an entire album.
Radio, however, would have the final vote.
In the Studio with the Best Players in Town
Sessions for the album ran from September to December 1978 in Burbank.
The producers built her band out of Los Angeles session royalty.
Drummers Steve Gadd, Jeff Porcaro, and Andy Newmark all played on the record.
Willie Weeks held down the bass while Buzz Feiten and Fred Tackett played guitar.
Red Callender, a veteran of the jazz age, added his double bass.
Dr. John, one of her heroes, sat in on keyboards.
Randy Newman contributed synthesizer parts, and Michael McDonald sang backing vocals.
Horn players Tom Scott, Ernie Watts, and Chuck Findley gave the songs an after-hours glow.
Nick DeCaro added accordion and wrote orchestral arrangements for three tracks.
Johnny Mandel arranged the orchestra on “Coolsville” and “Company.”
Two album tracks were even recorded live on December 22, 1978.
“Chuck E.’s in Love” was placed first on the finished album, track one, side one.
Every part of that record sounded expensive except the story behind its first song.
A Jazzy Song in the Summer of Disco
The album, simply titled Rickie Lee Jones, arrived at the end of February 1979.
America that spring was dancing to disco and humming along to arena rock.
Nothing on the radio sounded like a finger-snapping jazz strut about a missing friend.
Warner Bros. released “Chuck E.’s in Love” as a single on April 28, 1979.
Its B-side was “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963,” one of the live-recorded tracks.
The single ran barely three and a half minutes, built for radio almost despite itself.
A playful music video carried the song to television audiences as well.
Programmers who expected resistance from listeners got exactly the opposite reaction.
Requests poured in from people who could not explain why they loved it.
And then the song started climbing.
To No. 4 on the Hot 100
Week after week through the summer of 1979, the single climbed the Billboard Hot 100.
It finally stopped at No. 4, one of the defining records of that season.
The trade magazine Cash Box took it to No. 4 on its singles chart as well.
Canada and New Zealand both sent the song to No. 5.
Britain took it to No. 18, Ireland to No. 19, and Australia to No. 15.
On Billboard’s adult contemporary chart it reached No. 20, a second audience entirely.
By year’s end it ranked No. 63 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for 1979.
Cash Box placed it even higher, at No. 24 on its year-end singles chart.
The album climbed even higher than the single, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.
On August 7, 1979, that album was certified platinum for a million American sales.
It also went all the way to No. 1 in Australia.
A second single, “Young Blood,” reached No. 40 before the year was out.
The bar singer from Venice was suddenly a pop star.
The Night Television Found Her
On April 7, 1979, barely a month after the album appeared, Jones performed on Saturday Night Live.
She sang “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Coolsville” for a national audience that had never seen her.
The episode was hosted by actor Richard Benjamin.
The beret, the stance, and that slurred, swinging voice all landed at once.
By Monday morning she was being called an overnight sensation.
Time magazine had covered her very first professional show, in Boston, and dubbed her “The Duchess of Coolsville.”
On July 22, 1979, she played Carnegie Hall, with guitarist Buzz Feiten in her band.
That August she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
The cover image, Jones crouched low in her beret, became instantly famous.
Fame had arrived much faster than anyone around her had planned for.
But the most dramatic chapter was still to come.
Four Grammy Nominations and One Golden Night
When the Grammy nominations were announced, the debut album was everywhere on the list.
“Chuck E.’s in Love” was nominated for Song of the Year.
The same song earned her a nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.
“The Last Chance Texaco” was nominated for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female.
Even the album’s engineering, by Tom Knox, received a nomination.
Jones herself collected four nominations from a single first album.
On Grammy night in 1980, she won the award that matters most to a newcomer.
She was named Best New Artist.
The bar singer from the Venice coffeehouses now had a Grammy on her shelf.
And the whole improbable run had started with one sentence spoken across a room.
It began with a phone call.
The Album Around the Song
The album held eleven songs, and critics treated nearly all of them as keepers.
AllMusic later gave the debut a five-star rating in its retrospective review.
Down Beat magazine awarded it four stars, a rare welcome from the jazz world.
The record reached No. 3 in New Zealand and No. 11 in Canada.
In Britain it climbed to No. 18 on the national album chart.
Its cover photograph was taken by Norman Seeff, with art direction by Mike Salisbury.
Songs like “Easy Money” had traveled from her demo tape straight into the finished album.
Reviewers kept reaching for comparisons, Laura Nyro and Tom Waits among them, then giving up.
The record sounded like a synthesis of familiar styles and like nothing else at all.
That was exactly the combination Warner Bros. had hoped radio would accept.
Why the Song Refuses to Grow Old
“Chuck E.’s in Love” remains the biggest hit of Jones’s career, and she has never run from it.
It still anchors every conversation about 1979, the year jazz briefly crashed the pop charts.
Critics kept returning to the debut album and finding more to admire.
AllMusic described a sound that resembled many familiar styles and yet nothing anybody had ever done before.
The album was eventually certified double platinum in Australia and silver in Britain.
When Chuck E. Weiss died in 2021 at seventy-six, his New York Times obituary led with the song.
Weiss had spent his later years as a beloved Los Angeles fixture, famous partly for vanishing.
Jones, for her part, kept his song in her live sets across five decades.
A friend’s good news became a nation’s song.
Rickie Lee Jones: The Duchess of Coolsville
Born on Chicago’s North Side
Rickie Lee Jones was born on November 8, 1954, on the north side of Chicago.
She was the third of four children born to Richard and Bettye Jones.
She was named after her father, who sang, wrote songs, painted, and played trumpet.
Her paternal grandparents had performed in vaudeville around Chicago.
Her grandfather Frank performed as Peg Leg Jones, singing, dancing, and playing ukulele.
Her mother, Bettye, had been raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio.
Nobody in that household treated performing as an exotic profession.
Music in the Jones home was less a lesson than a kind of weather.
A Childhood That Kept Moving
When Jones was four years old, the family left Chicago for Phoenix, Arizona.
She would live under the desert sun in Phoenix until she was fourteen.
The wide skies and long highways of Arizona would surface later in her songwriting.
By her late teens she was pointed west, toward Los Angeles and its music rooms.
At twenty-one she was singing traditional jazz and her own compositions in Venice.
The bars and coffee houses of Venice Beach became her first real stage.
There she met pianist Alfred Johnson, who became her first genuine writing partner.
Together they wrote “Weasel and the White Boys Cool” and “Company.”
Both of those songs would end up on her debut album.
She was building a repertoire in public, one small room at a time.
The Troubadour, Tom Waits, and Two Intense Years
In 1977, Jones met Tom Waits at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.
The two young songwriters became a couple and stayed together about two years.
They shared friends, songs, rooms, and the whole late-night geography of Los Angeles.
By most accounts, each of them sharpened the other’s writing during those years.
Their circle at the Tropicana Motel became a small legend of the era.
In 1980, director Francis Ford Coppola asked her to collaborate with Waits on a film.
The film was One from the Heart, and the offer came just after their breakup.
Jones declined, pointing to the split, and Waits made the music with Crystal Gayle instead.
She seldom traded on the relationship afterward, and she rarely discussed it.
Their partnership had ended, but the songs from those years remained.
Pirates and the Five-Star Review
Her second album, Pirates, arrived in 1981, two years after the debut.
It reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold.
Rolling Stone gave the album a five-star review.
The magazine also put her on its cover for a second time.
Her only single from the album to reach the Hot 100 was “A Lucky Guy,” at No. 64.
Two other tracks became minor hits on Billboard’s mainstream rock chart.
Around this period she moved between New York and San Francisco.
In San Francisco she became friends with the comedian Robin Williams.
Decades later, NPR ranked Pirates No. 49 among the 150 greatest albums made by women.
The album proved that the debut had been no happy accident.
It also confirmed she would follow her own muse rather than the singles chart.
Standards, Paris, and The Magazine
In 1983 she produced her own ten-inch EP, Girl at Her Volcano.
The EP mixed live and studio versions of jazz and pop standards with one original.
She even drew the cover art for the record herself.
That year she relocated to Paris for four months to write new songs.
The result was The Magazine, released in September 1984.
She produced the album together with composer James Newton Howard.
Its closing suite, subtitled “Rorschachs,” layered her voice over minimalist synthesizer patterns.
The lead single, “The Real End,” reached No. 82 on the Hot 100.
The pop moment was clearly passing, and Jones made no effort to chase it.
The Quiet Years and the Return
In 1984 she lost both her mentor Bob Regher and her father, Richard.
She stepped away from recording for four years, a silence largely attributed to those losses.
During the break she even voiced the Fairy Godmother in an animated Pinocchio film.
When she returned to the studio, she had signed with Geffen Records.
Geffen paired her with Walter Becker of Steely Dan, a kindred musical perfectionist.
Their album Flying Cowboys was released in September 1989.
It reached No. 39 on the Billboard 200 and was later certified gold.
The song “Satellites” reached No. 1 on a brand-new adult radio format chart.
Another track, “The Horses,” co-written with Becker, later appeared in the film Jerry Maguire.
In Australia, Daryl Braithwaite’s cover of “The Horses” reached No. 1 in 1991.
The comeback had succeeded entirely on her own terms.
A Second Grammy, Wearing Jazz Colors
In 1988 she sang the standard “Autumn Leaves” on bassist Rob Wasserman’s album Duets.
That performance earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female.
A year later she teamed up with Dr. John, an old friend from the debut sessions.
Their duet on “Makin’ Whoopee” was playful, sly, and beautifully matched.
In 1990 the duet won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Duo or Group.
She was now a two-time Grammy winner in two different musical worlds.
In 1991 she released Pop Pop, her first full album of jazz standards.
David Was produced it with an Argentinian flavor that nobody had predicted.
It reached No. 8 on Billboard’s contemporary jazz albums chart.
The pop star of 1979 had become, on her own schedule, a jazz singer.
Following Her Own Compass
Traffic from Paradise followed in 1993, made alongside guitarist Leo Kottke.
It included her version of David Bowie’s song “Rebel Rebel.”
Bowie was quoted as calling it his favorite cover of one of his own songs.
Naked Songs, in 1995, stripped her classics down to voice and acoustic guitar.
Ghostyhead, in 1997, swung the other way, into loops, beats, and electronic textures.
In 1994 she had begun playing her first solo shows, alone with her songs.
She also worked behind the glass, producing Leo Kottke’s album Peculiaroso.
None of these records chased the charts, and none sounded like the one before.
Meanwhile her voice kept turning up in places nobody expected.
The Orb built their celebrated track “Little Fluffy Clouds” around a sampled Jones interview.
Her record company objected, and the argument over the sample went to court.
She kept working anyway, in whatever direction the music pointed.
Standards Again, and a Life in New Orleans
In 2000 she released It’s Like This, an album of other people’s songs.
It covered the Beatles, Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, and the Gershwin brothers.
The album earned her another Grammy nomination, for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
The Evening of My Best Day followed in 2003, blending jazz, Celtic folk, blues, and gospel.
In 2005, Rhino gathered her career into a three-disc anthology called Duchess of Coolsville.
The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard arrived in 2007, built on improvised, stream-of-consciousness singing.
Balm in Gilead, in 2009, finished songs she had started as far back as 1986.
The Devil You Know, a covers album produced by Ben Harper, followed in 2012.
Afterward she left Los Angeles behind and settled in New Orleans.
In 2015 she released The Other Side of Desire, her first album of new originals in six years.
A documentary film about the making of that album appeared the same year.
Kicks followed in 2019, another set of favorite songs remade in her own style.
That June she performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England.
Almost everyone has answered a phone call that quietly rearranged their whole life.
Almost everyone has watched a friend disappear into a new love and felt happy and lonesome at once.
In 2021 she finally told her own story in a memoir, Last Chance Texaco.
Seventy-Two, and Still the Duchess
Her fifteenth studio album, Pieces of Treasure, arrived in 2023.
It brought her eighth Grammy nomination, again for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
Across five decades she has released fifteen studio albums without ever repeating herself.
VH1 once ranked her No. 30 among the hundred greatest women in rock and roll.
She still performs for audiences who first found her back in 1979.
She still sings the song about Chuck, and it still swings.
Trends came and went, but her voice remained.
So go back to that Los Angeles apartment in the fall of 1977.
The phone call is over, and Chuck E. Weiss is still in Denver, in love.
Tom Waits has delivered his sentence and already forgotten he ever said it.
But the young woman across the room has not forgotten it.
She can already hear the fingers snapping.
Within two years, that sentence would be a chorus the whole country knew.
Weiss lived to hear himself turned into a character in a song that never left the radio.
It began with a phone call.
Today, on her seventy-second birthday, Rickie Lee Jones is still out there singing it.
Some songs are hits, but this one is a friendship that learned to swing.
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