Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour

Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour

by Rickie Lee Jones
Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour

Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour

by Rickie Lee Jones

Hardcover

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Two-time Grammy winner Rickie Lee Jones has led an interesting life starting with being a teenage runaway, chasing gigs and having a love affair with Tom Waits. But her life story gave her the fuel to create amazing lyrics. Besides reading about her storied musical career, her somewhat notorious family history could fill a book. Fans will love her tenacity and showmanship, one of the many reasons she's still just as relevant today.

“Book of the Year.” — MOJO Magazine

"Outstanding Book of the Year.” —The Herald (Glasgow)

A Best Book of the Year by NPR, Pitchfork, The Telegraph, and Uncut

A tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music, the two-time Grammy Award-winning “premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation” (Hilton Als), Rickie Lee Jones.

This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.

Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner Rickie Lee Jones in her own words. It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music.

With candor and lyricism, the “Duchess of Coolsville” (Time) takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, to her years as a teenage runaway, through her legendary love affair with Tom Waits and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs – "Chuck-E's in Love," “Weasel and the White Boys Cool,” “Danny’s All-Star Joint,” and “Easy Money”— but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, a pimp with a heart of gold and tales of her fabled ancestors.

In this tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music are never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, a singer-songwriter whose music defied categorization and inspired American pop culture for decades.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802127129
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date: 04/06/2021
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 368,599
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

RICKIE LEE JONES has released seventeen record albums and received two Grammy Awards. She lives in New Orleans.

Read an Excerpt

The day of the show . . .




I showed up early for the rehearsal. a lot of sitting around. The artist early in the morning, let’s be sure to make them as uncomfortable as possible. I wore a blue kimono and my sweat pants. I just realized I dress about the same today. My Chinese shoes and my red beret. There was a photographer there, he introduced himself, “I was hired by your record company,” he said. So I did not kick him out. I was telling jokes to the crew guys, I was really calm, and loved the feeling of excitement that just about was overwhelming. It was my day.




Sound checks over, I went to eat and came back . . . one more run through with the whole show, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, while the two blues brothers were gone making a movie. I was not a fan of SNL, I didn’t dislike it, I just didn’t care about the silly skits. The bees. The sharks. I didn’t get it. But it was huge. Huge, the single most influential show—musically—on TV, for many years. My debut was about to make all that had come before child’s play.

Table of Contents

Prologue ix

Introduction: A Prelude to Gravity xi

The Back Seat

Chapter 1 What Were the Skies like When You Were Little? 3

Chapter 2 Juke Box Fury 10

Chapter 3 On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 24

Chapter 4 A Summer Song 50

Chapter 5 The Winston Lips of September 60

Riding Shotgun

Chapter 6 The Moon Is Made of Gold 85

Chapter 7 Gravity 99

Chapter 8 You Never Know When You're Making a Memory 112

Chapter 9 The Summer of 1969 133

Chapter 10 Walk on Guilded Splinters 147

Chapter 11 Olympia 167

Chapter 12 Surfer Girl on the Waterbed 175

Chapter 13 Turn Her Over and Go … 187

Chapter 14 Doyt-Doyt-Venice Beach 199

Driver's Seat

Chapter 15 Easy Money 213

Chapter 16 Young Blood 227

Chapter 17 The Man with the Star 246

Chapter 18 Rickie Lee Jones 278

The Way Back Seat

Chapter 19 Saturday Night Live 291

Chapter 20 The Bus Stop Blues 305

Chapter 21 Jazz Side of Life 327

Chapter 22 It Must Be Love 342

Epilogue 355

Acknowledgments 357

Glossary of Songs 361

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