First off, I will have to apologize to all of those Rickie Lee Jones fans out there. When it comes to the Chicago-born singer, songwriter and musician, there are only two things that I remember about her. One is the "SCTV" parody of that K-Tel album containing all of the cover versions of "Stairway to Heaven" in which Catherine O'Hara was emulating Jones' scatting jazz style for her take at around 1:07 above.
The other thing that I remember about Rickie Lee is "Chuck E.'s in Love", and if I have to remember anything about her, it should be this song. And I was surprised to find out that this song that had been created around a friend's (songwriter Charles E. Weiss) sudden telephone declaration of love as transmitted via her then-boyfriend Tom Waits was her first single from April 1979. I had assumed that Jones had been around for some years before that since that saucy drawl of a delivery was something that could only have come about through years of singing and playing and experience-building, but the rookie apparently hit it out of the ballpark like Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani.
It occasionally got onto the radio and what I remember along with Jones' singing is the slow playful strut of an arrangement as if the music were representing a pixie-ish Jones herself shuffling happily in her most comfortable neighbourhood one afternoon, greeting all of the neighbours and smiling to herself in some satisfaction after Chuck E. finally made that confession. In a way, I think "Chuck E.'s in Love" is a bit of a cousin to Billy Joel's earlier "Rosalinda's Eyes" in that with both I get that friendly and family-like atmosphere within an American inner-city community. Everyone knows each other and no secret stays secret for long...and she's perfectly fine with that.
Both in America and Canada, "Chuck E.'s in Love" did very well with it hitting No. 4 and No. 5 respectively on their countries' music charts. At the 1980 Grammys, Jones won Best New Artist and was nominated for Song of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female for the song.
"Chuck E.'s in Love" was released on April 28th 1979. I could find the April 30th Oricon rankings, so let's see what the Top 3 songs were that day.
1. Judy Ongg -- Miserarete（魅せられて）
2. Jiro Atsumi -- Yume Oi Zake（夢追い酒）
3. Godiego -- Beautiful Name
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