RICKIE LEE JONES

But as her new memoir reveals, some shades linger on. “Some people love people forever,” says Rickie Lee Jones, “and I’m one of them.”

As a new memoir lifts the lid on her picaresque family, bohemian adolescence and wilful recording career, the Duchess Of Coolsville unburdens.

AFAMILY WITH ROOTS IN VAUDEVILLE that bounced from Chicago to Arizona to Washington state and back. A wild ’60s adolescence thumbing her way up and down California, chasing rock festivals and rebellion. A youth spent riding shotgun around seedy ’70s Los Angeles with Dr. John, Lowell George and Tom Waits, plus years living in New Orleans, New York City, Paris and on tour all over the world. Rickie Lee Jones’s life has been one of such constant motion that it makes sense her new memoir, Last Chance Texaco, is divided into sections that evoke the road: The Back Seat for her childhood; Driver’s Seat for her fast ride to stardom with her self-titled 1979 debut album and 1981’s Pirates follow-up, coining her snappy, slinky jazz-pop persona ‘The Duchess of Coolsville’. If she’d been willing to stay under that beret, she might still be as famous. But instead, she followed her ear, carving out an eclectic career that’s careened from electronica to the Great American Songbook, and from Sunset Strip to the shadier end of Bourbon Street.

The big silver pickup truck parked outside a café in Bywater, east of New Orleans’ French Quarter, on this late January afternoon just took Jones on another important ride: six hours each way to Houston, Texas, where the 66-year-old had wangled a Covid-19 vaccination. It’s warm enough to sit outside and even shrug off our jackets, which in

Jones’s case reveals a bright blue peacock tattoo, spangled with tiny stars, on her right upper arm.

Although her songbook overflows with cinematic character studies, it’s taken years, says Jones, to get her own complicated life on the page. “I had to get over leftover bones to pick with people and using the book as a place to do that,” she tells MOJO in a solid, husky voice – somewhat lower than her girlish tones on record. “It took quite a few writings before I got all that crap out and just told the story without saying, ‘Oh, and then she said this…’”

What emerged is a tale more picaresque than any of her songs. An orphan mother. Her father the scion of a vaudevillian named ‘Peg Leg’ Jones. Her own creative swims against the tides of fashion. Plus doomed romance, heroin, motherhood, startling supernatural encounters and hundreds of thousands of miles of hard road.

“I sent the book to my friend, who’s also a musician and a hard-living lady,” says Jones. “She said, ‘Your life is like Persephone – every time, you keep coming back and surviving every trip to hell.’”

Your family moved around quite a bit when you were growing up. Was music the only constant in that life?

My family always leaned towards the arts. Everybody took dance and everybody learned an instrument – that’s what you were expected to do. It’s part of how we were, because my grandfather was a musician, so my father and my uncle and aunt were singers. [My dad] had a guitar, and when he played, he played with his thumb, which is something I remember very well. You don’t