Rickie Lee Jones - Last Chance Texaco: Mojo magazines Book of the Year

Praise for Last Chance Texaco

[A] gripping, lovely memoir... Thrilling, funny, scary, sad, packed full of life and extraordinary characters. I loved this as much as I loved Dylans Chronicles and Patti Smiths Just Kids.

Nick Hornby, Believer Mag

A testament to the joys and the chaos of a life of travelling.

New Yorker

A classically American picaresque tale.

New York Times

Im reading Rickie Lee Jones Last Chance Texaco right now... and Im really enjoying it... I have a weakness for books by hard, radically honest women with an unusual antenna for magic, language and scenery.

Maggie Nelson, New York Times, By The Book

In this raw and roving life story, Jones depicts a child who recognized her humanity and worth even when others wouldnt, and a woman whose confidence helped her rise above heroin addiction, music industry sexism and the traumas of her youth... In a book about the past, Jones has no problem moving on. Its a neat trick.

Jake Cline, Washington Post

An impassioned and cinematic trip through Joness eventful life. I shouldnt be surprised that Jones manages to carry her originality, intimacy, and volcanic expressiveness into book form.

Boston Globe

The prose is rich and rhythmic, filled with lines that are pithy (Rickie Lee is a Frank Capra movie that had been overtaken by Stanley Kubrick) and poetic (childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints on the fresh white snow of our happy-ever-afters).

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

[Rickie Lee Jones] opened every door and she never flinched... Shes a storyteller.

San Francisco Chronicle

Jones has lived a life as brave... and rich as her musicwith love, heartbreak, addiction, and magic sprinkled throughout.

O, the Oprah Magazine

Well-crafted and intensely candid.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Vividly cinematic... Sexy and moving and sad.

Bookforum

Last Chance Texaco chimes with the bittersweet experiences of many of her peers who have written about their lives over the past few years. But there are elements here that set it apart: Joness refreshing gift at improvisation, her eye for vivid detail, and her rhythmic, poetic writing style.

The Arts Fuse

Good news: Rickie Lee Jones prose is very much like her lyricspoetic, symbolic, penetrating. She writes like she sings. There is a free-flowing, jazzy, impish honesty delicately balanced between confessor and voyeur... and this is before you ever get to the music... This may well be the finest rock memoir I have reviewed here. A unique entrance in a disquieted creative mind that finds its solace in experience.

The Aquarian

[A] riveting, often harrowing, memoir... With the free-flowing sonic patterns of jazz, Jones memoir swirls across time, moving backward and forward with reckless abandon, hardly pausing as the breathlessness of her journey overtakes us (and her). In staccato prose that echoes her scat singing, Jones holds nothing back as she chronicles her adventures on the road and the ragged ups and downs of her family life and fame.

No Depression

One of the most compelling memoirs Ive ever read... What really sucks you in, and lifts you up, is the dazzling magic of her prose.

Please Kill Me

She cant help it: Rickie Lee Jones creates poetry wherever she goes. Last Chance Texaco was written in the same rich, entrancing, dusty language as her songs. From all of her beginnings to endings, theres a Rickie Lee Jones romance to it all.

SPIN

What makes this a most inspiring memoir is her absorbing storytelling, facility with language (no surprise there) and her fealty to integritycommerce be damned.

Michael Simmons, Mojo

Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart... but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.

Kirkus (starred review)

Lyrical... With gorgeous prose... interspersed with her lyrics, this is as distinctive as she is, a rich, bracing, and candid memoir dancing with the love of language.

Booklist

Like her music, Joness anecdotes bop with immediacy and are filled with unsavorybut somehow sweetcharacters such as bank robbers, pimps, and drug dealers. Fans will enjoy this buoyant coming-of-age narrative by one of musics most idiosyncratic performers.

Library Journal

First published in the United States of America in 2021 by Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2022 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright Rickie Lee Jones, 2021

The moral right of Rickie Lee Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 445 9

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 888 4

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

This book is dedicated to my family
On whatever stage they call their own

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. 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.