Old New Songs
Blues rocker and LA scenester Chuck E. Weiss left us on July 20.
WHEN RICKIE Lee Jones first met Chuck E. Weiss and Tom Waits, the two men were inseparable. “I could not tell them apart,” she wrote in an ode to the former. Authentic hipsters, the three became the gritty enfant terribles of Los Angeles. Eventually Weiss’s biggest fame came after Jones wrote 1979’s Chuck E.’s In Love, a swinging, somewhat fictionalised tale that became her first and biggest hit, winding up at Number 4 on the US pop charts.
Born on March 18, 1945 to Denver record-store owners, a connoisseur’s love of black music led him to drum on tour with Lightnin’ Hopkins and play behind Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Moving to LA, he formed a band: Chuck E. Weiss And The Goddamn Liars. They cooked up a grits’n’gravy feast of honking tenor sax rhythm & blues with dollops of cool jazz, Tex-Mex and Hollywood backlot exotica behind Weiss’s growled lyrics that blended the Beats, Bukowski, film noir and nursery rhymes. At times it seemed as if he was speaking in tongues.
A 1980s Monday night residency at Sunset Strip club The Central culminated in Weiss and pals (including Johnny Depp) buying the joint and renaming it The Viper Room. The watering hole for the young, famous and self-destructive gained notoriety when River Phoenix OD’d there. Weiss found sobriety and mentored others seeking the same.
He released a series of albums, all perfect party records of funky, danceable rock’n’roll. The last was 2014’s Red Beans And Weiss: self-produced with help from Waits, Depp and late drummer Don Heffington, it’s a celebration of life’s rough side, the milieu Weiss made home with all his golden heart. “Chuck E. loved music, pastrami and cats,” says pal Kinky Friedman. The two had recently finished what is probably Weiss’s last song: See You Down The Highway.
“His lyrics blended the Beats, Bukowski, film noir and nursery rhymes.”