Chuck E. Weiss has fallen into the Big Sleep

I was standing in my apartment in West LA on a Monday night in 1991, when I decided I wanted to go out on the town. Back then, the only way to find live music was a local paper called the LA Weekly. I checked the listings and on Monday night, there was only one thing happening: a band called Chuck E. Weiss and the Goddamn Liars. They were playing at The Central on Sunset Blvd. I had no idea what kind of music they played, but I liked their cheeky name, so I headed outside and climbed into my VW Bug, popped in cassette and belted out “Like a Rolling Stone” along with Bob Dylan for the ride up Robertson Boulevard to Hollywood.

“How does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown…”

I parked on Sunset and paid the $5 cover charge to get into the club. The band hadn’t started yet, but as I stood at the bar alone, I ran into some of my co-workers from Stage Deli, where we all waited tables in between performing gigs. One handsome young man leaned over with a jubilant smile, “You’ve never heard Chuck E. play?” I shook my head. “Chuck E.’s God!” he shouted, knocking back a shot of giggle water.

A few minutes later, I heard the sound of a saxophone and finger-snapping and saw the crowd of sweaty bodies parting to make way for two vastly different oddballs: a tall wild-haired saxophone player named Spyder Mittleman, and the very short Chuck E., who was hunched over, snapping his fingers like a Beatnik in a dark seedy poetry bar who has just heard “Howl” for the first time. They both wore sunglasses, and they took their time sauntering through the crowd, whipping them into a frenzy before they climbed onto the stage and launched into their witty-Louis Prima-New Orleans-style-rockabilly-blues. I slid off my barstool and started to dance and didn’t finish until they played their very last song, Goddamn Liar. Chuck E. would stand onstage, smoking his cigarette, wearing his sunglasses, and every time the band would pause, and the dancers in the crowd would freeze, he would say, “Goddamn Liar” and the band would start up again. It was like a grown-up version of Freeze Dance.

Then he would usually shout, “Get the hell out of my gas station!” and exit the stage to exuberant screaming and applause.

As I drove home that night in my bug, my ear drums muted from the loud music, I rolled down my windows so that the warm gardenia-scented air could cool the glistening sweat off my arms. I thought my co-server was right: Chuck E. was God, and if not the God, he was a god, an insanely talented, mischievous version of Dionysus, reigning over Monday nights in Hollywood.

I attended the show every Monday night for the next two years, swooping in just as the show started to dance myself into a shimmering joyous delirium before silently swooping out. Every friend and any person I met during the week, I would drag to dance with me on Monday nights.

Eventually, Chuck E. and I talked, and I started running into him and the band at Canters in the middle of the night. Canters was one of the only 24-hour diners open in the city, and it was a magnet for the night owls of the city.

Chuck E. became a cherished friend. I would drive to his Hollywood bungalow in the afternoons and climb into his 1963 Dodge Dart and we would run errands and go to lunch. Occasionally we would take his cherished two-tone car, a turquoise and white pristine 1955 Chevy Bel Air. I have never met anyone who made me laugh harder during such mundane errands as depositing money at the bank. 

Chuck E. was a brilliant storyteller, and I was a brilliant listener, and even though he was full of tall tales, I adored listening to his adventures. His whoppers were infamous, hence the name Goddamn Liar. Once he almost convinced me that when whales blow their spouts, ink comes out. We had been discussing the marvel of squid ink, so it wasn’t completely off the wall to think this might be true. This is before the internet, and you could not just pick up your phone and google information. For all I knew about whale spouts, he might be right. When he realized he had nearly hooked me, he leaned back, took a drag off his ever- present cigarette, and said, “And that’s why the ocean is blue.” Then he threw back his head and laughed for a good five minutes. His lies were so infamous that Tom Waits wrote a song about them called, “Jitterbug  Boy: Sitting on a Curb with Chuck E. Weiss and Sam Jones.” The song is about three guys one-upping each other with hilarious tall tales.

Chuck E. loved cats, and he ended up rescuing many. On his album Old Souls and Wolf Tickets, many of the songs are about all the cats he knew—from Milo and Mythos to Jake’s Wake to Sweetie-O, who was a deaf cat who lived under a car in his neighborhood. He would go feed her every day. He loved cats so much he decided I needed one too. I said no thank you: I’m allergic, I travel too much, and I don’t want the responsibility, but next thing I know, he called me to come pick out a kitten from a litter being fostered by his neighbor. I went to his apartment that he had created to look like 1930’s Hollywood, with a vintage record player, piles of records, and gorgeous art deco furniture. We walked across the lush palm tree courtyard to Amber’s place, where a several kittens were mewing and climbing all over each other. I sat down, and the tiniest of them all, the runt, climbed up my body, rested paws tinier than a gumdrop on my chin, touching his nose to mine. I’m always a sucker for the ones least likely to survive. I was smitten for that kitten and when he was 8-weeks-old, I brought him home. His official name was Sir Charles Edward Weiss after Chuck E., but his other official name was Coco Bojangles, because his fur was the color of a cup of hot cocoa and when he stretched his little paws, he looked like a dancer. Coco would stare into my eyes with his bright blue eyes, as if he’d known me and loved me for thousands of years. He became the light of my life. Somehow my allergies disappeared.

When I first met my true love, Kim, in 1992, the first place I took her was to see Chuck E. play at a coffee shop called Highland Grounds, a coffee shop. He was always joined by amazing musicians, like Benmont, the “orchestra man” with the receding hairline, who showed up in a suit and played stunning boogie-woogie on the piano, captivating the audience with his lightning fingers. I later learned he was not an “orchestra man,” but played with a band called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The night I took Kim was the first time I met Tom Waits, who was also there to see Chuck E. Tom had a long history with Chuck E. and had written many songs about him. They had also written many songs together. They were two parts of the infamous trio that also included Rickie Lee Jones.

It felt like I was living in some kind of opium dream, sitting down and sharing a coffee with Tom and Chuck E., listening to their growly tall tales. I ran into Chuck E. one night on Fairfax and he introduced me to his other best friend, Johnny, who shyly held out his hand to shake mine and I realized Johnny was Johnny Depp.

When The Central went up for sale in the 90’s, Johnny and Chuck E. bought it and turned it into a 1930’s style nightclub called the Viper Room. A “Viper” is 1930’s slang for a pot smoker, as memorialized in the Fats Waller song, “If You’re a Viper,” aka “The Reefer Song,” my go-to song should there be a microphone handy after too much wine. I belted it out often at Miceli’s in Hollywood with Brian, the piano player who would put his shoes on his hands and still lay beautifully. The Viper Room had 1930’s style matchbooks, green diamonds around the club, and a big Havana moon over the stage. When Chuck E. learned that I had to miss one of his shows because I didn’t have the cover charge, he put my name on the permanent list so I never had to pay again. The Viper Room was magic at first, filled with performers at the top of their game. On any given night, you could see many film stars and music stars there just to play the music or hear the music. Kim and I performed our burlesque act there every Thursday night for two years, with Catherine Delish as our grand finale. Anyone who wanted to see us perform could show up on Thursday night and see us. The club ended up being filled with our friends, and Kim and I would perform, then head out into the club in our matching silky kimonos. Thursday nights were filled with ecstatic joyful adventures and wild shenanigans.

And then tragedy hit and changed everything. An incredibly talented young actor named River Phoenix overdosed at the club and died right in front of the door on Sunset. With his tragic death, the club lost it’s magic, and was taken over by a scheming scoundrel who managed to push Chuck E. out.

It was the end of an era.

One afternoon, I woke up from a dream about my funeral. I called Chuck E. and left him a long message on his answering machine telling him that when I died, I wanted a Dixieland New Orleans funeral, with a parade and a marching band and umbrellas and boas, and I wanted him to lead it. He invited me to his house and said, “I want you to hear something.” He played his newest song for me, one that he had recorded two months earlier. It was called “Dixieland Funeral” and was almost word for word the message I had left him.  As I sat on his antique couch with my jaw on the floor, he laughed, leaned back, dragged on his cigarette, and said, “And that’s what they call synchronicity.”

Chuck E. and I had birthdays two days apart, and we often celebrated together, with dinner at Miceli’s, a movie at Grauman’s Chinese Theater and two hot fudge sundaes at CC Brown’s. Like the rest of the live performers, we were up at all hours of the night and slept till noon, meeting for breakfast around 1pm at the diners that served breakfast all day. We talked about our obsession with Hollywood in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 70’s, Kerouac and Dean Moriarty, the Cotton Club and Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, On the Road and an autobiography of Mezz Mezzrow, an infamous jazz clarinetist from the 20’s called Really the Blues, which I turned around and recommended to my acting teacher, Jeff Goldblum. Jeff had been a prodigy jazz piano player and had been playing professionally since the age of 13. He was often out playing at the clubs around LA in the 90’s as well.

Chuck E. was a recovering drug addict, and when I asked him to tell me the single most important thing he had learned in his time on the planet, he took a drag off his cigarette, thought for a moment, and said, “The ‘why’s’ don’t matter.” I have always remembered that sentence, but I still haven’t decided if it’s true. Do the why’s matter? Maybe, maybe not.

Chuck E. wrote a song for me on his album Extremely Cool. The title was “Oh Marcy” (he wanted to surprise me and hadn’t asked me if I spelled my name with an I or a y.) He put a secret code in the song so my friends would know it was written for me. The code was “Coco.” He mentions Coco several times in the song, alluding to the kitten he had given me. It was because of that album that one fateful night at the Viper Room in 1999, at the record release party for Extremely Cool, I met my future, and now ex, husband. George ran a record label and had produced the album along with Tom Waits, with “Oh Marcy” being his favorite song on it. We met at the party that night, and when I saw him it felt like being hit by lightning. Every cell in my body lit up. But he lived in a faraway land called Massachussetts, and I lived in LA with no intentions of ever heading back east. We kept in touch through Chuck E. George would ask about me, and I would ask about him. When I decided to go to Harvard. I asked Chuck E. for the phone number of his record label president, that guy I’d met at the Viper Room two years earlier, as he was the only person I had ever met from Massachussetts. I ended up marrying that guy from the Viper Room, and we had two children together before he broke my heart into a million pieces, the scalliwag. But that’s the way of life, right? Loving and losing.

Once I moved to Boston and New Orleans, I rarely saw Chuck E. I met up with him every time I visited LA, and the last time I saw him, I took my kids to meet him at one of our favorite diners on Franklin. Chuck E. had a hurt back and had a hard time sitting up. He sat sideways in the booth, his mass of hair sticking up, wearing his cat eye sunglasses.

Always irreverent, even when he was in pain, my son, who was five at the time, looked at him and said ,”I’m going to throw you in the trash can and roll you down the hill.” Chuck E. flipped his head in disbelief and said, “I’m going to throw YOU in the trash can and roll YOU down the hill.” And so began the tall tales back and forth with both of them laughing gleefully with every whopper. My son is now fifteen and has carried on the tradition of making up tall tales.

I hope that as he grows up, he finds joy in sitting on a curb with his friends, laughing and telling stories, making music, and rescuing lost kittens, who may be covered in fur, or may just be appear for no reason on a random Monday night, looking for something they can’t quite put into words.

Chuck E, wherever you are, thank you for the magic.