Last Chance Texaco

March 1, 2021

Jones, a relatively unknown performer, shot to recognition overnight in 1979 with a legendary performance on Saturday Night Live, thanks to her captivating voice and distinctive red beret. A Grammy Award for Best New Artist and multiple covers of Rolling Stone magazine quickly followed. Jones takes readers on her wild journey to stardom in this memoir of her youth and early career. Her youth was transient, as she crisscrossed the country with her family until finally settling in the Pacific Northwest. As a teenager, she suffered from suburban malaise and ran away from home several times, even living in a Big Sur cave. Like her music, Jones's anecdotes bop with immediacy and are filled with unsavory--but somehow sweet--characters such as bank robbers, pimps, and drug dealers. In spite of her troubles, she is generous toward her family and her many collaborators. VERDICT Fans will enjoy this buoyant coming-of-age narrative by one of music's most idiosyncratic performers.--Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

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Starred review from April 12, 2021
Two-time Grammy Award–winning singer Jones delivers a crackling debut memoir recounting her roving early years. Coming of age in a struggling family of orphans and artists in Arizona, her worldview was shaped by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s as well as the trauma she inherited from her veteran father and narrowly escaped as a hitchhiking runaway. “Some of us are born to live lives on an exaggerated scale,” writes Jones. Divided into driving-themed sections, she begins with her childhood in “The Back Seat” and makes it to the “Driver’s Seat” when her career as a singer-songwriter took off in 1979. Her travels informed tracks like “Easy Money” and “Night Train,” with help from a world of edgy characters and lovers who became her muses. (“We were religions, we converted to each other,” she writes of her romance with Tom Waits.) Threading her account with song lyrics, Jones creates a narrative soundtrack of her influences, including Crosby, Stills & Nash, Marvin Gaye, and Laura Nyro. From a harrowing affair with heroin to bold career risks—for instance, not budging when SNL’s Lorne Michael said her set might be cut short—Jones depicts both the pitfalls and bravery of living with nothing to lose. Wise and gorgeous, this story is as poetic as the songs that made Jones famous.

Starred review from March 1, 2021
Even after all these years, her image remains the same: elusive, mysterious, cool. Her physical presence is also indelible: a sleek singer-songwriter in a red beret. But Grammy-winning Rickie Lee Jones' life has not been as polished as her music. In her lyrical memoir, she writes about her rootless childhood as the granddaughter of vaudevillian performers, her difficult years as a teenage runaway, and her battles with drugs and other demons. But there was always music. "Performing is a religious experience for me," she writes. She also shares her stormy relationship with that other idiosyncratic troubadour, Tom Waits, and tales of her early gigs at L.A.'s famous Troubadour club, of friends and lovers, cowriters and producers, from Dr. John and Lowell George to a particularly weird encounter with Van Morrison. A nomad at heart, Jones has spent most of her life in cars, vans, and buses, traveling the world "via my thumb and VW Microbus" and even the now-gone Concorde. Jones was an old soul before she was even an adult. With gorgeous prose ("I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door") interspersed with her lyrics, this is as distinctive as she is, a rich, bracing, and candid memoir dancing with the love of language.

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Starred review from February 15, 2021
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.

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