Chuck E. Weiss

Extremely Cool (Ryko)
by Jon Sarre

Willie Dixon once called him “one of the best musicians in this town [Los Angeles], this country even.” Tom Waits is a fan and fellow collaborator (and producer of this record). Rickie Lee Jones name-dropped him way back when (“Chuck E.’s In Love,” it charted, even). As a mere teenager, he played drums for Lightnin’ Hopkins. If I knew why it took more than two decades for Chuck E. Weiss to put out his second record, I’d fill ya in (but I don’t think it’s onea those Boston – the band, not the city – deals). Weiss, they say, is some kinda underground legend in L.A. and normally, that shouldn’t mean a goddamned thing to somebody in Spokane or Rapid City, ‘cept he’s not some guy puttin’ billboards with his picture up all over the place or out walkin’ ocelots in a leopard print bikini, so color him a wee bit different than yer usual camera-hungry country freak.

“Twisted jungle music” is what he’s all about and, that, y’see, is a liberal appropriation from the scavenged bodies of work that make up the blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and whatever Cajun folk call their cultural hydra of a sound. Weiss riggs it all up and then sets himself up, not to knock ’em down, but, seemingly, to fall on his face. But each and every time he pulls the banana peel off the high wire and skates on past where other mortal souls’d come off like Dom DeLuise tryin’ to pass himself off as Dr. John. Needless to say, it also helps that he has Waits, who also knows this white-Negro shit blindfolded, on the producer’s bar stool. Let’s just say, like Weiss, Mr. Waits knows which old 78s to melt down.

Although Waits has two co-writer nods (the smokin’-straights all day and night funeral march, “It Rains On Me,” and the word-play rife “Do You Know What I Idi Amin,” where the once-feared moniker of everyone’s fave deposed Ugandan dictator is turned into a sentence fragment), Weiss is no Xerox. It’s pretty much his show, from the misguided tour through the Delta, through the lyrics of Carl Perkins and Little Richard (cuz he’s who Mitch Ryder ripped off) that is “Devil With the Blue Suede Shoes,” to “Deeply Sorry”‘s Workdogsesque misadventure worthy of The Jerry Springer Show (co-written by former X guitarist Tony Gilkyson), through the jazz scat of “Roll On Jordan,” to the closing beat poetics bar eulogy of “Sonny Could Lick All Those Cats.” It’s a good show, too – twenty years plus of experience and the results speak for themselves.
(Two Main St. 3rd Fl. Gloucester, MA 01930)