Whereas the first album worked as a dazzling showcase of Jones' singing and writing, the new LP builds a deeper romantic mythology in somewhat less commercial terms. There are no pop-soul struts as concise as "Chuck E.'s in Love," no future cabaret classics like "Company." Indeed,
Pirates isn't so much a pop record as a musical novel with a spiritual twist.
Though it doesn't follow a strict plot line, Pirates' core–an ill-fated love affair–suggests Jones' version of West Side Story. Set in standard Rebel without a Cause territory, the "Lonely Avenue" on which she and her band of outsiders swagger and fret is Los Angeles' La Brea Avenue. Here, Rickie Lee Jones cozies up to a gang of drifter-dreamers, whom she dubs the "Wild and the Only ones," in a variety of alter egos–as the high-school dropout Zero in "Living It Up"; as the widowed wife of Bird, who's shot down by the police while driving her to the hospital to have their baby, in "Skeletons"; as the girl holding on to her pirate lover's "rainbow sleeves" in the title tune. Since Jones and her alter egos are the only women in this macho-hipster world, she can be all things to all men: gang moll, Juliet, madonna and earth mother.
In revamping Romeo and Juliet, however, the artist doesn't merely repeat the doomed-lovers myth. Instead, she carries the story beyond the grave into a spirit world where the lovers' voices chase each other in a lonesome game of hide-and-seek. In the first album's "Company," Jones promised she would someday "reach across the galaxy" to her man, should they be permanently separated. In Pirates' "Traces of the Western Slopes" and "The Returns," she does just that in spacey pop-jazz flights.
So much metaphysical heavy breathing might seem foolish if Rickie Lee Jones hadn't developed a fusion of poetry, popular music, rock & roll and jazz that brilliantly weds thirty-five years of pop genres to the intensely rhapsodic diction of the Beat Generation. The climax comes in the eight-minute "Traces of the Western Slopes." A collaboration with Sal Bernardi (who sings the opening verse), this marvelous fantasia depicts a bohemian limbo of "Lolitas playing dominos and poker/Behind their daddys' shacks/Vacan
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