San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Singer Rickie Lee Jones gets candid in new memoir.
Grammy-winning ‘Chuck E.'s in Love' troubadour pulls no punches in the intensely personal ‘Last Chance Texaco,' which chronicles her impoverished childhood and quick rise to fame
Rickie Lee Jones cuts right to the chase on the first page of the introduction to “Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour,” her well-crafted and intensely candid new memoir.
Its second paragraph reads: “When I was twenty-three years old I drove around L.A. with Tom Waits. We’d cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blonde hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.”
Jones devotes an additional eight sentences to San Diego-bred music legend Waits, who posed with her in the photo on the back cover of his 1978 album “Blue Valentine.” Tellingly, Waits is not mentioned again until 270 pages later, in Chapter 17 of “Last Chance Texaco.” No less tellingly, the book — published by Grove Press — has no index for readers to use to skip to other Waits-related entries.
Might this be a carefully plotted way to get people to dive in — and to first learn a fair amount of Jones’ story — before she returns her attention to Waits, who she met Los Angeles in 1977?
“That’s totally accurate,” she replied, speaking by phone from her home in New Orleans.
“My friend, (Big Easy music radio veteran) Jamie (Dell’apa), said: ‘You have to invite people into the book. You have to tell them what they’re going to read. Because most people aren’t going to read the (whole) book; they just read the intro — and most journalists, that’s all they’ll read! So, tell them what the book is like.’ ” Jones, 66, chuckled.
“I was like, ‘Really? That’s so weird,’ ” she recalled.
“So, I set about to write the most sexy, inviting, interesting introduction I could to create an environment, rather than write something (self-indulgent) from an egotistical point of view. I’m glad you noticed that. Because that introduction was thought out, with — might I say — a kind of professional point of view to write the introduction that way.”
Candid stories
As might be expected from an artist whose music has bravely avoided compromises and easy categorization, Jones doesn’t pull any punches in her book — although she did choose to omit some especially violent incidents.
Or, as she puts it in the compact, two-page prologue that precedes “Last Chance Texaco’s” Waits-fueled introduction:
“Here are the histories of my parents and siblings, whose 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 ...”
An Illinois native, Jones grew up in Arizona, California, Washington and points in between. Her mostly impoverished upbringing was often dismal, but she soldiered through. With a vivid flair for detail, yet a consistently matter-of-fact tone, Jones writes about her father beating her mother and her, and how her teenage sister, Janet, gave up two children for adoption. Jones also writes about being arrested, at the age of 14, for stealing a car with her then-boyfriend, Ricci, and her total embrace of the peace-andlove hippie ethos.
That was the same year she had her first bad acid trip and ran away from home, stopping in Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Santa Cruz, Seattle and Sunnyvale, where she was arrested and booked into a juvenile detention facility. The rest of her teen years were no less tumultuous or soulsapping, but she persevered.
Music was Jones’ guardian angel. Her precocious sexuality was her ticket to adventure and to being taken advantage of and abused. Recalling being 14, she writes:
“People did not realize I was an immature teenage kid, because I looked so much older. It was my large breasts, they were a ticket into any psychological door. People, whether men or women, assumed so much because of their relationship with breasts. And I let them. If I got fed and people were nice to me, then let them think my age was related to my bra size.”
Jones also writes about some of her esteemed musical collaborators. She had affairs with several of them, most notably Dr. John and Little Feat mastermind Lowell George. His 1979 recording of Jones’ song “Easy Money” led to her signing an album deal with Little Feat’s record label, Warner Bros. Her debut single, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” quickly propelled her to stardom.
Her sudden fame changed the dynamic between Jones and Waits. So did her 1979 confession to him, which she recounts in her book, that she was using heroin. It was an admission that shocked the then-hard-drinking Waits and prompted him to end the relationship.
Within a year, Waits was sober and had married Kathleen Brennan, with whom he has collaborated ever since. Jones’ drug use continued until 1983, a year after the release of “Pirates,” her acclaimed second album, some of whose songs were inspired by the breakup with Waits.
Jones discussed her book with The San Diego Union-tribune for nearly an hour recently. Here are excerpts from that interview. An extended version of this Q&A is available at sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music
‘I was a good-looking girl’ Q:
You have a great recollection of very specific details throughout the book, be it Midwestern truck drivers buying Mahavishnu Orchestra bootleg tapes that your boyfriend made, the uber-bleakness of being in the City of Industry — even before you were arrested there as a 14-yearold runaway — or the canapes eaten by a nun and a cowboy you were seated between on a plane. Do you have a photographic memory? Did you keep journals?
A:
Well, I do remember incredibly detailed parts of my life and I can follow the thread into even more details. It’s not a photographic memory, but I have a wonderful recollection of details. I also have a great ability to push incessant and terrible events from my life into a place where they won’t get in my way until some time in the future, when I’m ready to look at them.
Q:
You are unusually candid in your book, and you vividly share experiences and feelings in a completely unaffected, no-nonsense way. Was that easy, difficult, cathartic, or all three?
A:
Yes, a combination of all of them. There have been some things in me that have healed, even (as recently as) in the months before the book came out. The first drafts had a lot of old wounds, a lot of bleeding, and “I’m gonna get even for this.” In 2016 and 2017, I was reading what I wrote and thinking: “You know, this kind of makes me look bad, but I want to say it.” By 2018, I just wanted to serve the momentum of the book. I know everything that happened to me, but you just need to know the picture I’m creating in the book is for you. So, it’s an evolution.
Q:
What did you learn from that?
A:
The writing is an evolution that has been life-changing for me. Every time I saw how bitter something in my book is, I tried to correct it. It was a powerful process, and one in which I learned how to write literature instead of songs. ... While it’s different than songs, I recognize something in the book that is who I am. I recognized myself a little better after I finished writing it, so it was easy, hard and cathartic.
Q:
The cover of your book features a black-and-white photo of you from the 1970s. You are leaning against a convertible, wearing a white beret, a dark sleeveless top, and a knee-length skirt, with a brown paper bag in your left hand and a cigarette in your right hand. What do you think of when you look at that photo?
A:
(laughs) I think that it’s a very evocative photo. It captures the feeling of being kind of sexy, inviting and provocative. I think I was a good-looking girl, leaning on a car, a writer, telling a story about all these characters I know. That’s what I see.
Q:
The last chapter of your book jumps from 1984 to 1988 in two pages, then moves forward to your mother’s stroke in 2006. Did you save the last 30 years for a second memoir, or did you want to keep your more recent life for yourself?
A:
Yeah. Both those things. What I didn’t want to do, initially, was to write about the “famous” part of my life and not tell you about the rest. But I spent so much time leading up to the “famous” part that, by then, I’d written 350 pages, but it was really good. The second or third part of my life, I have hopes of making a TV show about. That’s how I’d like to tell some of that, a limited TV series.
Q:
What is a better creative impetus for you, success or failure?
A:
Success is good! (laughs) You can quote me on that! Failure hurts me. A little failure is OK. But a lot of it is not so good, years of it. And what is failure? It’s: How you access yourself, did it succeed or fail on those grounds, and how do other people treat you? Otherwise, there are no failures. You make your art and you do it.