From the Publisher
Advance Praise for Last Chance Texaco
“This tender, fierce, intimate memoir is testament that Jones has lived a life as brave… and rich as her music—with love, heartbreak, addiction, and magic, sprinkled throughout.” —O Magazine “Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart…but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.” —Kirkus (starred review)
Praise for Rickie Lee Jones
“Rickie Lee Jones has been pushing down musical boundaries for over four decades with her hauntingly beautiful voice and fearless experimentation.” —NPR
“[Her] music has healing properties: the beauty of its melodies and the wisdom of its words soothe the soul and remind us what a peculiar treasure Jones is.” —Boston Globe
“Intimate and real . . . she feels like an old, confiding friend—plaintive and genuinely heartbreaking.” —Mother Jones
“One of the most intriguing, idiosyncratic vocalists of our time.” —USA Today
“A singular talent.” —Daily Mirror (UK)
“There has always been something defiant about Rickie Lee Jones . . . [with] a voice from a dream, elusive yet familiar, transcendent, a messenger from another place.” —Independent (UK)
“A standout international performer.” —The Australian
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-01-14
A memoir from the veteran singer and songwriter whose long career has involved plenty of ups and downs.
Born in Chicago in 1954, Jones begins with vivid stories of her early childhood in Arizona, where her family moved in 1959. Throughout, she proves herself as engaging a storyteller on the page as in her songs. A peripatetic family life took her through countless schools. “Constant moving was my parents' version of running away,” she writes, “and this inclination was reinforced in me every year of my life.” She began hitchhiking early in her teens and was kicked out of high school, labeled “an undesirable element” by the reactionary vice principal, “the real life version of Dean Wormer of Animal House.” But California hippie culture awaited, and more good luck than bad considering her propensity for taking risks and numerous illicit substances—though the latter eventually bit back hard. “I was living a life enchanted by impossible connections, narrow escapes, and the perfect timing of curiously strong coincidences,” she writes, recounting the time she bumped into her cousin at a Jimi Hendrix concert. The great passions of her pop-star years—Lowell George, Dr. John, and, most of all, Tom Waits—still inspire dreamy prose arpeggios. "Now we were religions, we converted to each other, we inspired each other and we spoke in tongues,” she writes about Waits. “He growled, I cooed. He softened, I growled….We were jellyfish, floating from day to night.” Sadly, however, "the apex of my love life corresponds to the apex of my career success, and unfortunately my success corresponded with my drug use.” The high times petered out by 1983, when she quit drugs and “headed to France.” She chronicles her life since then, including marriage and motherhood, in just a few pages—a wise editorial choice.
Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart…but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.
