Good news: Rickie Lee Jones’ prose is very much like her lyrics – poetic, 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.
Half of the book deals directly and quite harrowingly with a childhood that is equal parts Dickensian and Dionysian. It begins with stories of a young artist in a car rambling around Hollywood, New York City, and New Orleans, but it is only a hint at what these pages reveal; a child on the run with and without her family, hippie communes, wild street marauders, pimps, exiled Mexicans, drug dealers, and reckless dreamers. Also, a young woman as symbol, the 1960s idealism devolving into the 1970s well-earned cynicism, and finding in this peripatetic, free-flow dementia, brilliant songs. Lots and lots of songs, and an anguished and sensuous woman’s vocal prowess to bring them home.
The second half of Last Chance Texaco introduces a new cast of sordid characters, many you know, as they are all great artists and lovers: Lowell George, Tom Waits, Dr. John, along with a painfully honest rebuke and celebration of stardom within the music biz labyrinth. Jones’ description of her epic appearance on Saturday Night Live is worth the entire ride. There is a resignation of sadness in Jones’s writing that gives way seamlessly to philosophical depth and finally an embrace of contentment that works as a beautiful addendum to her music, which always featured a refined madness.
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.