While living in Staten Island in 1981, my girlfriend Christine turned me on to Rickie Lee Jones, whose first album had the big hit Chuck E.'s in Love -- but the song that both Christine and I really liked was Last-Chance Texaco. I bought Rickie Lee's second album (Pirates) right away when it came out later that year, after my odyssey in Los Angeles.
I fell in love with that record, listened to it over and over, and was influenced by it very much in my own work at the time, most strongly in this song, which was written at the very end (late September) of a summer sojurn in Wildwood, NJ, in 1983.
Copying Rickie Lee's style naturally made me think a lot of Christine, and so i used our relationship as the basis for the fictional lyrics. School had started in Wildwood, and the high school was across the street from my apartment, so i mixed thoughts inspired by that with memories of good times with Christine.
The whole song is very much tinged with the wistfulness of both the breakup of that relationship and the fact that summer was over and Wildwood was pretty quiet. I tried to capture this mostly by the persistence of the "major 7th" in chords that are mostly Pythagorean, containing "major 2nds", "5ths", and "major 6ths".
This song has a more complicated rhyme scheme than most of my lyrics, and in the bridge section i also enjoyed using some complicated syncopation in the rhythm and a nice bracing dissonance in a passing chord.
here are some maps of the Mansion Ave. area of Staten Island, NY (courtesy of mapquest.
the red star marks the Great Kills neighborhood of Staten Island
the area around Great Kills harbor, near Christine's house
