Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and outsize Los Angeles character immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s breakout hit song, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” died on July 20 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 76.

His brother, Byron, said the cause was kidney failure.

Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, an encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, a drummer, a songwriter and a widely acknowledged rascal who in the mid-1970s landed in Los Angeles from his native Denver with his friend the singer-songwriter Tom Waits.

At the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood folk club, where Mr. Weiss worked for a time as a dishwasher, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became an item and the three of them became inseparable as they caroused through Hollywood, stealing lawn ornaments and pranking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip smeared on their palms).

“It seems sometimes like we’re real romantic dreamers who got stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as her family at the time.

They lived at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy 1940s-era bohemia on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a regular DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except everyone had a tan and looked nice.”

In the fall of 1977, on a trip home to Denver, Mr. Weiss called his buddies back in Los Angeles, and when Mr. Waits put down the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love!”

Two years later, Ms. Jones’s fanciful riff on that declaration — “What’s her name?/Is that her there?/Oh, Christ, I think he’s even combed his hair” — had made her a star. (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it was not Ms. Jones whom Mr. Weiss had fallen for; it was a distant cousin of his.)

The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’s debut album, “Rickie Lee Jones,” and a 1980 Grammy Award nominee for song of the year. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)

In an essay in The Los Angeles Times on July 21, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she couldn’t tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them I think the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”

In a phone interview since then, she said of Mr. Weiss: “There was mischief in him, he was our trickster. He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are.”

Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father, Leo, was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat store, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.

His brother is his only immediate survivor.

In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music promoter, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colo. When blues performers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as drummer.

In 1973 Mr. Morris opened a Denver nightclub called Ebbets Field (he was born in Brooklyn), which drew performers like Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss filled in there too.

At the time, as Mr. Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and in the habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was I saw Waits do some finger-poppin’ stuff at Ebbets Fields one night,” he said, “and I went up to him after the show. I was wearing some platform shoes and a chinchilla coat, and I was slipping on the ice on the street outside because I was so high, and asked if he wanted to do some recording with me. He looked at me like I was from outer space, man.”

Nonetheless, he said, they became fast friends.

Mr. Waits, interviewed by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”

Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up collaborating on a number of things, in one instance co-writing the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom dirge on Mr. Waits’s album “Nighthawks at the Diner,” released in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool,” in 1999, was described in one review as “a goofy, eclectic mix of loosely-played blues and boogie-woogie.”

Though his songwriting was singular — “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the point of view of a neighbor’s cat — Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.

For much of the 1980s Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called the Central, accompanied by his band, The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the place with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-flecked ’90s-era nightclub.

He was often asked how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’s hit. “Yeah, I was flabbergasted,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know that, all in all, we would both be known for that for the rest of our lives.”

But the rest of their lives would no longer be intertwined.

“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ passed from the heavens and faded into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, from which it still has not really recovered, he and I became estranged, and everyone fell away from everyone,” Ms. Jones wrote of Mr. Weiss in her Los Angeles Times essay. “Waits left, the brief Camelot of our street corner jive ended. I had made fiction of us, made heroes of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did.”

Later, on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but not Chuck, and he knew a lot of people.” She added: “We think being the famous one is winning, but I’m not sure. Chuck did all right.”