Chuck E. Weiss, 'a skinny white Jewish kid' from Denver, Colorado, wasjamming with the best of them when he met Tom Waits, and went on to become one of LA's legendary hipsters
When Rickie Lee Jones sang the good news that Chuck E.'s In Love, the person she was referring to was one Chuck E. Weiss, the hippest cat ever to leave Denver, and the man at the heart of a boho-jazz and blues scene that smoked its way through Los Angeles in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Along with Rickie Lee, Tom Waits and others, Weiss provided an intelligent alternative to everything that bland spell could throw at the world. It was throwback stuff certainly, carried with an accomplished hipster pose, but it was appealing nevertheless, making its way into right-thinking bedsits all over the world. For anybody stuck in their bedroom, hanging out with Rickie Lee, Tom Waits and the mysterious Chuck E. Weiss seemed like the coolest thing imaginable, and their down-at-heel Californian fantasy was irresistible stuff.
"I can probably speak for the other two here," says Weiss. "We felt we were on to something, yes; but we also felt a great sense of alienation. I don't think that we were very well received in the musical community at that time. I'm not speaking of the mainstream community, I'm speaking of the underground community. I don't think they really got what we were doing."
Born in Denver, Colorado, Weiss was hanging around the local clubs by the time he was 10 years old. There was a thriving underground blues and folk scene in the coffee houses, and there was more of a history there than the rest of the US realised. As Weiss describes it, "it was sort of an in-between place, between New York and LA - a train stop for the middle of the nation, and so it was a hub for a lot of Bohemian people". While his father was not exactly Bohemian, he certainly had the hippest of record collections, something which had a huge impact on the young Chuck E.
"It wasn't that big a collection, but what he had was real cool. He had a wide variety of music he liked - stuff like The Sabre Dance, and boogie woogie music too. And when I first heard boogie woogie I was a little kid, and I went nuts, man. He was listening to Harry 'The Hipster' Gibson, Freddie Slack and Albert Ammons, so those were the first people I was introduced too. I didn't have any idea how obscure it was, and I thought everybody knew who they were! So I was stuck in a different time frame for most of the kids my age," says Weiss.
His exposure to the music led him constantly to dream of other places - New Orleans, in particular, where it wouldn't have been quite so extraordinary for someone so young to be playing the clubs. "My schoolfriends had no idea," he says, "they thought I was from outer space man!" Even the fact that both Damon Runyon and John Fante were local heroes was not enough to keep him in town, and, just as soon as he could, he was off on his musical travels.
By the time he hit his teens, he was on the road with blues legend Lightnin' Hopkins. "He took me under his wing," recalls Weiss, "just as a young guy who was really enthusiastic about the music. He just wanted to show me the way." It seems like a made-up story. Few musicians could claim an introduction to the life of a professional musician quite like this one. Weiss was, as he puts it, "a skinny white Jewish kid", and Hopkins was the real thing - fond of his quarts of gin and playing his blues the old way. Not for Lightnin' the strict limitations of those 12 predictable bars.
"Well, that's what he liked about me," laughs Weiss, "I could tell when he was about to make a stop. Most cats had no idea when he was going to stop. Like he'd stop in strange places, like 14 bars into the song! Of course I was in awe of him. He was somebody that I had listened to on record and on the radio, and all of a sudden, here I am playing with him. But he was really patient with me, because I made a lot of mistakes. And yeah, Lightnin' Hopkins sure did love gin, man, but I didn't have to drink it if I didn't want to."
By the late 1960s, Weiss was extremely well connected within the blues scene. He was recording with Willie Dixon, jamming with Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and seemed destined to settle somewhere in Chicago. In 1972, however, Weiss met Tom Waits, and all destinations changed. They wrote a song together called Spare Parts, and because Waits planned to release it on his Nighthawks at the Diner album, Weiss decided to head for the City of Angels.
"It was quite an adventure, to say the least," he says. "Of course when we started hanging out together, neither one of us were known at all, so it's not like I was hanging out with somebody I knew was a legend. But I think both of us had a sense that some innovation might have happened musically, and realised that the time was important. I don't think we took it as seriously as we should have, but there was an ambition, though. We were doing a lot of spoken word and rap, very close to what is now hip-hop. But not really hip-hop, because we were much more conscientious about the choice of phrasing that we used. But we were doing spoken word and rap in the middle of a song-writer era, which made us freaks to begin with."
WEISS eventually settled in the Tropicana on Santa Monica Boulevard - a legendary but not very appealing hotel, where Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and others had stayed in more glamorous times. Some months later, Waits moved, and soon everybody seemed to be laying their heads at the Tropicana once again. Anywhere that could claim both Waits and Blondie soon became a born-again landmark but, that said, LA still seemed like the last place for someone as hip, hep and clued-in to the blues as Chuck E. Weiss. It seemed wrong then and it still does - even if he did open Sunset's Viper Room with his pal Johnny Depp.
"In a sense, you're right, but there was a long tradition in the South Central area. All those cats like Lester Young and Dexter Gordon. There was that history. But I like it here in a living sense. But if I was to ask if my music is appreciated by the people here, I'd have to say that in a certain sense it is. I'm not the biggest thing here, by any means, but I feel comfortable here because I like the weather and the lifestyle. And I do have a sense of what happened in the past - of the tradition."
The new album, Old Souls & Wolf Tickets, is chock full of virtually every US tradition. There's even an old track recorded with Willie Dixon back in 1970, which gives the whole thing a serious benediction. It's a music which conjures up twisted dreams of voodoo lounges, bar-fly dives, New Orleans thunderstorms, smoky jazzy flea-pit hotels and crazy hep-talk jive. It sounds exactly like the inside of Chuck E. Weiss's head.
Old Souls & Wolf Tickets is on RYKO