chuck e's in love

 

Hits are so difficult, I am sure. Hard to get one, hard to live with it ever after. Better to have a few than just one, probably, but one is often enough to keep a career going if you manage it successfully. I told Carmel last week I was really enjoying Rickie Lee Jones and she went off about 'Chuck E.'s in Love' (I could be wrong but I heard her saying it as 'Chunkie's in Love') and  how much she hated that song. Well, sure. I wouldn't say I hated it, but familiarity hurts it, so now it seems like the weakest song on the first RLJ album. There was a kind of 'healthy icy pole' being advertised a lot on the tv in the late 70s, I can't remember what it was called but I can remember the banal, nursery-rhymish jingle that was I'm sure meant to echo the female folk singers of the 60s and 70s in terms of wholesomeness and, in a weird way, earnestness ('this means so much to me I'm prepared to rip through the craft I have painstakingly learned, and phrase myself clumsily'). 'Chuck E's in Love' is just so goofy it's practically coming at you with its hand out to shake and a big slack-jawed grin and stumbling in the gutter. The bit with the twist is when it's revealed - OMG - that Chuck E is in love with the song's narrator, ugh. 

I am so sure, now, though I don't think it ever occurred to me then, that 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is likely to have been some smart person's (obviously RLJ wrote it, but also probably Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, who produced both of them) attempt to replicate the success of Randy Newman's 'Short People'. It has the same kind of rhythm and feel, and while it's not so 'unreliable narrator', it has a measure of 'storytelling' quirk in its outlook.* 

What I found odd looking at press material on RLJ from 1979 was how often she was referred to as buxom and big-boned. I wouldn't know (and don't care, naturally) but clearly her album covers were very geared towards making you not think this about her. I imagine this probably ultimately worked in her favour. Look at the kind of bullshit people like poor old Linda Rondstadt had to negotiate in the 70s/80s and for that matter the kind of bullshit poor old Billie Eilish has to handle now. I'm not saying that I have anything very rad to say about that situation only that there seems to have been quite a bit of work put into RLJ's image to remove her from standard sexualisation, I don't know whether it was because she wasn't cut from the right cloth for that kind of treatment or for another reason. 

*On 25 March 1979 (p. 101) Bruce Rosen in the Hackensack, New Jersey Record said of the first RLJ album 'She does soft mood pieces - similar to those Randy Newman is known for'. I would say that in 1979 RN was known for 'Short People', rather than soft mood pieces, though of course he did do many of those and they were super effective. Incidentally RN also plays on RLJ's debut album but telling you what or where would entail getting up and removing the album sleeve from the shelf and looking at it for half a minute i.e. expending less time than I have just used writing this excuse to why I won't bother.