Troubadour recalls wild early years
“The Last Chance Texaco” is the name of one of the standout songs on the 1979 debut album from Rickie Lee Jones. For a moment there, Jones was about as hot as it gets for a pop newcomer — a recordlabel bidding war, a “Saturday Night Live” showcase, a Rolling Stone cover, a Grammy Award for best new artist and Bob Dylan’s imprimatur.
Jones, who is 66, named her autobiography “Last Chance Texaco,” she writes, because she has spent most of her life in motion, in “cars, vans, and buses. Back seats, shotgun, and driving myself.” Her book hurtles forward, chewing up the road, as if the gas is running low and there’s no time to stop.
She populated her early songs with the kind of streetwise characters who also lived inside the lyric gushers on Bruce Springsteen’s first few records and, crucially, in the songs that established the persona of Tom Waits, who was Jones’ boyfriend at the time of her emergence. (They nearly got themselves pegged as the “Steve and Eydie of hipsters,” she jokes.) Through her girlish jazzbo vocals, the world met the Bragger and Pepe, Woody and Dutch and Kid Sinister, and, of course, “Chuck E.” Waits once gave her a Damon Runyon shortstory collection as a birthday gift.
Almost all of “Last Chance Texaco” concerns Jones’ peripatetic upbringing. She was the middle daughter, plus one son, in a volatile “family of rebels.” Her parents, Bettye and Richard, were both “motherless children.” They were frustrated artists who moved constantly in search of stability, or something, from Chicago and Arizona to the Pacific Northwest. By the time she was 14, Jones was thumbing rides all over the country, getting herself into and out of perilous situations on the dark fringes of the hippie underworld.
She spent time living with a bunch of vagabonds in a cave in Big Sur; whenever she found herself in San Francisco, she set up shop at Caffe Trieste.
“I liked the thrill of living by my wits,” she explains with a shrug. Like watching a boilerplate horror movie, the reader wants to yell out to the hapless ingenue.
But she opened every door, and she never flinched. “The women who came after me would have a much wider palette from which to draw their colors,” she writes. “I did that. That was me. The girl in the red beret.”
The success of latelife reflections from Dylan and Patti Smith has crowded the shelves with the memoirs of rock stars of a certain age. Jones’ career may seem a remnant of the ’80s, and in fact she completely ignores the 10 or so albums she’s released since then. Still, she’s a storyteller.
Recalling how cold the winters could be in Chicago, she imagines an infant blowing out of her mother’s arms and across Lake Michigan.
“I suspect there are still babies frozen up there in the sky,” she writes, “and one day, thousands of thawedout infants will fall to earth with little Chinese umbrellas carrying them safely to the ground.”