Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles Of An American Troubadour

Rickie Lee Jones GROVE PRESS UK. £17.95

The uncompromising Duchess Of Coolsville’s revealing memoire.

Rickie Lee Jones had a troubled childhood, but The Beatles landed in the US when she was nine and she found something “that would hug me back”. Pursuing music, she created a “Barbra Dylan” persona, a Streisand-Bob hybrid. Her youth flowered psychedelically in the late ’60s. (Her hippy adventures are vividly and accurately evocative.) She became the beret-wearing neo-beatnik rock star with ’79’s debut, yet is as much a jazz artist devoted to technique. She colourfully delineates her working process (the part where she develops her singing inside closed windows of her Chevy Vega is priceless) and relationships with Tom Waits, Dr. John, Lowell George and Van Morrison reveal intimate biographic details. But what makes this an inspiring memoir is her absorbing storytelling, facility with language and fealty to integrity – commerce be damned.