Rickie Lee Jones - Last Chance Texaco

Frank Peg Leg Jones

H ere are the histories of my parents and siblings whose often tragically shaped lives feed my music and personality. Here are the stories of my friends and lovers, co-writers and producers, and those demons and angels who wage a constant battle for my soul. There were cave dwellers, Southern hoodoo, urban jails, and some of the most opulent hotels in the world. Ive traveled to these places via my thumb and VW bug and a few times, the Concorde supersonic jet. Ive lived volumes as a young girl long before I was famous and here I share the largeness of events I experienced through my younger eyes.

I sense a natural language being whispered that is shared by all of us. After all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious. In dreams I sometimes understand the symbols, but then I wake up and theyre gone. A puff of ink that will not stick to this reality. What was I hearing? What were they saying? Was it music? Surely I heard something . After all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious.

Music shapes us and fundamentally changes us. Once we have listened we do not stop. We do not ever recover from music. We will return again and again to the radio, the record store, the bedroom where girls listen to records all day.

Performing is a religious experience for me. You can never know what I feel, only what you feel. My secret courage is my magic. You are doused with my strange water of emotion as you witness this courage, and that is my true performance. It sounds like music but something is being passed between us. Something personal.

I have come to believe that I am moving in the right direction, following a path more than forging the way. My performances center around that belief. I am propelled forward by seemingly random events linked together by the fact that eventually I end up in better circumstances than when I began. Sure, bad things happen but if I keep pushing to become my best self, I am brought from the pain into a brighter passage. That instinctto believe in m y heartalways delivers me. I go where she is going. Im with Her.

: A PRELUDE TO GRAVITY

I named this book Last Chance Texaco because I spent most of my life in cars, vans, and buses. Back seats, shotgun, and driving myself. From these vantage points I watched life approach and recede. As time went by I was always running away from and moving to new life, but once I finally got there I could never lay down roots. For me, it seems, life is the vehicle and not the destination.

The meaning of Last Chance Texaco is simple. It is the light in the distance that never goes out, refuge for the tired traveler on a dark road. You can trust your car to the man who wears the star sang the old commercialan important backstory people today may not knowThe big bright Texaco star! I used the familiar signposts and lingo of my generation to build the lyrics of Texaco, and in fact most of my early songs make reference to obscure Americana nearly forgotten today. When my young life seemed to be nose-diving into the desert sands of Hollywood, going nowhere fast, I raised that Texaco star like a pirate flag and overtook my future against all odds. The man with the star is as much Christ as he is a lover or a stranger in a gas station, whomever it is you need to put your trust in tonight. Last Chance Texaco remains a kind of living spirit to me. A whisper of belief in impossibilities.

When I was twenty-three years old I drove around L.A. with Tom Waits. Wed cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blonde hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.

Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity: sailor hats and Bernardos pointed shoes. The more he tried to conceal his tenderness, the more he revealed a chafed and childlike nature. I adored him. He was my king. In bed he was the greatest performing lion in the world. I mean to say that Tom was never not performing.

Then quite suddenly, in November we were no longer seeing each other.

I spent the fall driving around with Lowell George, the charismatic guitarist from Little Feat, a local hero who kept his little feet in the street as it were. He found me there in my squalid basement encampment and we went drivin around in his Range Rover, seated high above the street studying various motels and apartments where he had spent time with Linda and Valerie and Bonnie too. He showed me the hotel I would live in one daythe Chateau Marmontand we sat in the living rooms of managers who would load him up with drugs for the chance to put his signature on paper. He flirted with them all like a child flirts with the devil, toying with their furious drugged-up machinations and escaping, like a child called home by his mother, just before he signed his soul away. Lowell seemed unconcerned about his own mortality. The play was the thing, and that boy could play the guitar.