The early days of rock and roll, with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Presley, were over by the late 1950s. Don McClean famously wrote American Pie, about Holly’s tragic 1959 plane crash.
Little Richard eventually got religion and gave up rock and roll for a time, Chuck Berry got arrested and spent time in jail, and Presley was drafted and Col. Tom Parker turned him into a move simp after he got out. It took him a long time to get his greatness back.
The Beatles changed popular
music quite thoroughly when they showed up, and again when they started releasing revolutionary albums, starting with Help in 1965 and Revolver in 1966.
They broke up in 1970, when the oldest Beatle, Ringo Starr, was just 29. It’s amazing to think how much the Beatles changed the world, and all before they were 30.
They set popular music on a different course, and as their contemporaries grew older, their music similarly matured.
Popular music was no longer about holding hands at the sock hop; it was just as much about loss, mortality, and human weariness as love or anything else.
There were always interesting new musicians popping up in the 1970s, and one of the most unique talents was Rickie Lee Jones.
She sent out a demo of four superb songs that caused an immense bidding war. Ultimately she signed with Warner Brothers, releasing her first album in 1979, when she was 24. Eponymously named, it was a combination of jazz, blues, pop, and a voice unlike anything anyone had heard before.
The breakout hit from that album was Chuck E’s In Love, which was based on her friend Chuck E. Weiss, who somehow fell in love with his cousin.
The song took off as a quirky hit, which reached into the past, yet made something strikingly new and fresh.
There were other brilliant songs on that album, like Night Train, Young Blood, and Coolsville, and she would go on to put out many more, including We Belong Together, Woody and Dutch On The Slow Train To Peking, a superb cover of On The Street Where You Live, and many, many others.
But her career started with this fun, quirky and fresh song. It was not like anything else, and people responded deeply to that.
