Last Chance Texaco (Chronicles of an American Troubadour) - 9780802159854

“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.