Two decades ago, Chuck E. Weiss was famous, but for all the wrong reasons. An aspiring singer/songwriter and big bad boho daddy in his own right, Weiss, without warning, found himself in the limelight not for his own accomplishments, but for being the subject of the ultracool, fingersnapping Rickie Lee Jones smash "Chuck E.'s in Love." |

"I hated it, hated every minute of it," Weiss says of the attention the song focused on him back then. "Just the mere fact that there was a song about me, and I didn't write it ... I was really a self-absorbed youth in those days, and if I had written it, I wouldn't have minded so much. But to get all this attention for something I didn't do, I considered it a slap in my face.

"In retrospect, of course, I now think it was pretty cool."

Weiss had other claims to fame, too. He's been a legend in his spare time on the L.A. scene for a quarter century, holding down a long-running gig with his band, the God Damn Liars, at the Central, the now-shuttered night spot Weiss helped pal Johnny Depp reconfigure as the Viper Room. Even before that, some say, Weiss served as the prototype for his friend Tom Waits' transformation from gentle folkie to streetwise hipster sage. "Being that we've been the best of friends for almost thirty years, I'm sure we've rubbed off on each other," Weiss says diplomatically. "I know I've gotten a lot of inspiration from him, and I would hope to think it was vice versa."

Now, at long last, Weiss has the opportunity to welcome the world to his skewed vision of life on his own with Extremely Cool, his just-released, Waits-produced album on Rykodisc. It's Weiss' first effort since The Other Side of Town, an abortive debut of demo recordings released in 1981, which he now mostly repudiates.

So why the long layoff?

"I just got a little distracted," Weiss says matter-of-factly. "A lot of people during that eighteen-year time came up with ideas and concepts for me to record, and it was just not right. Some of the ideas were really absurd. So I just pursued the live thing. Therapeutically, I need to play a lot."

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that Weiss won't be vying with New Radicals and the Offspring for buzz clip status anytime soon. Not that Extremely Cool, with its combination of junkyard blues, noirish jazz, New Orleans R&B, and pumping rock & roll, wouldn't trounce those bands given some space on the airwaves. Weiss alternately brays, moans, and pleads on some tracks, while on others he releases either a scarifying falsetto or comic line of jive. He casts a voodoo spell on "Devil With the Blue Suede Shoes," pays tribute to another local scenester on the high-stepping "Jimmy Would," and recites the tongue-twisting spoken work piece "Do You Know What I Idi Amin" over a galloping boogie rhythm.

Weiss says he likes to write about things that are "real -- real disturbing, that is."

"'Deeply Sorry' is a song where a guy who finds his girlfriend in bed with his mother," Weiss notes with an evil chuckle. "My guitar player Tony called me up one night and said he'd like to write a song about a teenage dilemma. He said, 'I know a guy who found his girlfriend in bed with his brother.' I said, 'Well, how 'bout if we make it his mother? That's a dilemma.'"

Social mores dictate that Weiss' titular advertisement of himself as extremely cool is evidence that the opposite is true, but really, he's just telling it like it is. Even his method of touring for the album -- he and his band are working out a deal with Amtrak to travel by train and play gigs at train stations across America -- is pretty hip. "I don't like to fly," he admits, "so this just fits right into it. But this is something that hasn't been done for a long time, and it might be cool. It'd be better than playing at a mall, you know what I'm saying?"

DANIEL DURCHHOLZ(February 8, 1999)