Who is rickie lee jones married to

It was an admission that shocked the then-hard-drinking Waits and prompted him to end his relationship with Jones, she writes. Within a year, he was sober and had married Kathleen Brennan, with whom Waits has collaborated ever since. Jones discussed her book with the Union-Tribune for nearly an hour recently.

Q: You have a great recollection of very specific details throughout the book, be it Midwestern truck drivers buying Mahavishnu Orchestra bootleg tapes that your boyfriend made, the uber-bleakness of being in the City of Industry — even before you were arrested there as a year-old runaway — or the canapes that a nun and a cowboy you were seated between on a plane ate.

Do you have a photographic memory? Did you keep journals? A: Well, I do remember incredibly detailed parts of my life and I can follow the thread into even more details. Q: At what point did you decide to write your memoir and how long did it take to complete? A: Well I was thinking about it for the last 10 years, maybe even since , I think. In fact, I decided to go out and get a publishing deal about 8 years ago.

Q: Was the book delayed? But that was because — what happened is, I went to Grove in New York and we edited the book, and it was a lot of work. I spent a lot of time over a couple of days doing that. They were upset, but I knew it was wrong the way they wanted it the book to be. At first I thought they knew better than me, so let them put it together. As soon as I got home, I showed the edited version to my friend who had been reading the book as it evolved. This is like another book created by the publisher.

God bless them, they stayed with me. I knew I was telling a bigger story, an American story, a story of family, a Charles Dickens -like story. It was a lot of work bringing the book back to the family, my family.

Q: You are unusually candid in your book, and you vividly share experiences and feelings in a completely unaffected, no-nonsense way. Was that easy, difficult, cathartic, or all three? A: Yes, a combination of all of them. There have been some things in me that have healed, even as recently as in the months before the book came out.

A: The writing is an evolution that has been life-changing for me. Every time I saw how bitter something in my book is, I tried to correct it. It was a powerful process, and one in which I learned how to write literature instead of songs. I recognized myself a little better after I finished writing it, so it was easy, hard and cathartic. Q: The cover of your book features a black-and-white photo of you from the s.

You are leaning against a convertible, wearing a white beret, a dark sleeveless top, and a knee-length skirt, with a brown paper bag in your left hand and a cigarette in your right hand.

What do you think of when you look at that photo? Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a day free trial. For Waronker, the obvious choice as Jones's first single was "Chuck E's in Love", a song inspired by a phone-call Waits had received as he and Jones slobbed around one night in his bungalow at the Tropicana motel. It was Weiss calling from Denver to say he'd been smitten by a distant cousin. When Waits uttered the immortal line, Jones seized on it.

By early July it was at number four, well on the way to becoming a sassy boho classic [and taking star billing on her debut, eponymous album, pictured inset, far right], and the beret-sporting, cigarillo-toting Jones — who'd only dared to dream of the cult acclaim accorded her boyfriend — was almost a household name.

But success changed everything. The truth was that Jones was being subtly undermined by Waits. And as he withdrew emotionally from her, she fell into the consoling arms of heroin. I had a bit of envy for what she achieved, too. But she couldn't handle it, man. People who carried guns; everywhere they went, always had a gun. The fact Jones was now a star made little difference to her drug intake. She has said she was a heroin addict for two years, though it was a subsequent six months of cocaine abuse that ultimately brought her to her knees.

Being with Waits, a man all too familiar with the effects of drugs on jazz musicians, would only have made her shame greater. Before a show at the capital's Dominion Theatre, Jones was photographed clinging to Waits like a little girl on her dad's lap. What, I ask, became of Janet?

But right behind that was a wave of chaos. She had an acute intelligence that would aim to do harm, so I just stayed as far from her as I possibly could. That barely does it justice. Aged 14, she lived in a cave as part of a commune, hitchhiked on her own from Big Sur to Detroit when not much older, and risked a lifetime in jail driving to Mexico and back with hippy outlaw dope smugglers.

Kids are wily. Nevertheless, there were times when she sailed too close to the wind, winding up in jail more than once, usually on suspicion of being an underage runaway with a false ID — which she was. She recalls several tearful calls to her parents, who, more often than not, travelled vast distances to take her home. While living in Mexico with a boyfriend, she was abducted by a rogue cab driver who drove her into the jungle intending to rape and possibly kill her.

She was saved by the sudden appearance of a bus load of Federales. For all that, I say, she seems to have had a guardian angel watching over her. Looking back, I think I was in some way running towards the safe house I would eventually find and a future that I was making happen by creating these adventures that we are now talking about. Throughout it all, she says, she never lost her sense of being destined for greater things. I never ever thought I would have a day job. It would always be a life of my own design, so I had this sense of purpose, I guess.

J ones eventually gravitated to Venice Beach in California, working menial jobs and singing in local bands to pay the rent. It was there in that she began writing her own songs, the likes of Easy Money and Weasel and the White Boys Cool, peopling them with characters based on the maverick souls she had met along the way. She first encountered Waits at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in , where he watched from the shadows as she sang a handful of songs to a near-empty club.

Soon afterwards, they had a one-night stand that ended abruptly with Waits cold-shouldering her the following morning. I was wearing high heels. I wanted to hide in a bush. I may have hidden in a bush. Their romance was all-consuming. It lasted barely a year, and his departure left her devastated just as her sudden celebrity swept her along in its tidal sway. In his absence, she drifted into the orbit of other wayward creative mavericks, including the supremely gifted songwriter and guitarist Lowell George, lead singer of Little Feat.

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