Chuck E. Weiss
23rd and Stout

"If you find yourself at the Tropicana Motel, beware of Chuck E. Weiss, he might sell you a mouse's asshole as a wedding ring"
Tom Waits

Chuck E. Weiss could very well be the naughty uncle we've always dreamed of and never dared to ask for, caught between a hard-working dad and a mom with a rosary in her hands. The uncle who tells you about his life drowned in the bilge of vice, spent trying to figure out if time passes in the hall of a hotel or a nightclub on the Sunset Strip of West Hollywood L.A., among those characters who have been kissed by success while he continues to play for himself and for friends until the dawn's light forces the staff to throw him out.

The friends, the real ones like Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones who shared a room at the Tropicana and split their stories among alcohol, smoke, and sex, like the one about Chuck calling from who knows where and ending up with the title "Chuck E.'s in love" on Rickie's successful album. With that face, he could easily be one of the characters from Scorsese's mob movies, yet he was a drummer who in his youth served people like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. The shock was the meeting with Tom Waits in 1971 and the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration that would lead them to steal from each other. The difference being that Chuck didn't care about making records and even when his "The Other Side of Paradise" was released in 1981, which was nothing more than a demo tape, he cursed like a non-observant Jew at the record executives' heads who had published it against his will.

So for many years, he continued to perform live at the night club The Central that mix of rock'n roll, delta blues, jazz, cajun which for him is American music, until convincing Johnny Depp to take over the club and turn it into the Viper Club. Who knows why Chuck awoke in 1999 from the long record lethargy and released three more albums until now, he might answer, as usual, that it was the wrong thing to do and that's why he did it.

Perhaps it will be our same remark after listening to the first track of the album, this "Prince Minsky's Lament" which is somewhat the sum of his way of being, an indolent boogie-blues swaying on the dragged rhythm made for the story unrolled by Chuck between singing and talking. He is an extraordinary character, like those that exist only in movies like "The Big Lebowski" by the Coen brothers because no one would dare to dedicate a piece to Sterling Holloway (Sho is cold) imitating the "cartoon-like" voice of the great Disney voice actor in a long tale swung by the tenor and baritone saxophones.

It's precisely the cartoon world that is Chuck's, the surreal world of Tex Avery where anything can happen, being run over by a speeding train and immediately getting up to put the scattered pieces back together to run into the next hilarious death. Just listen to the title track entitled "An Incident with Marshall Bell" (an actor friend of Johnny Depp) with its meowing voice leading a jazz nocturne to go straight into the vicious atmosphere of the Viper Club from the back door, just in time to hear a "Primrose Lane" from another era with those brushed cymbals. This is also Chuck, for those who didn't know: a refined entertainer well-supported by Tony Gilkyson's guitar, who played for years in the "X" after Billy Zoom's departure, and the exceptional drumming of Don Heffington. Refined in a manner of speaking, because he's always stuck in that twilight, gravelly zone between Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits as brilliantly demonstrated in "Novade Nada" and "Another Drunken Sailor Song."

But in reality, Chuck is here to remind you not to take him too seriously and so off you go to the jubilation of little voices that make "Room With A View" similar to a loony asylum Doors-like blues and "Piccolo Pete" a country sung by a poop of a cowboy with hemorrhoids.

No Chuck, not even this time did you settle down and I won't vote for you because I know you've always shrugged off the judgment of others, let alone mine.

And in the end, although you aren't made to look like Laura Antonelli, I have nothing left to say but... thank you Uncle!