Book Review—Last Chance Texaco

This book will have boomers comparing their own travels and adventures with those of this troubadour. More or less reckless. If you resisted the temptation to wander, you will get a strong sampling here of the teenage America you may have missed.

So many painful episodes here. Loneliness prevails during the school years. Steal a motorcycle. Steal a car. Dad was a struggling artist. Mom grew up an orphan where love was not present so unlearned. Without confidence and self-esteem, Rickie ran away and left school following a principal’s admonishment. The probable bad outcomes–no job, bad relationships and poverty awaited. Very risky but a common behavior this hitchhiking alone across California in the late sixties. In 1969 the road is full of hippies, but also some longhairs who are not as nice.

Parents are gone at time of writing and the child reveals everything here. Rickie Lee’s story is about her family–every member is important and the good and bad is very integral to this life story. That is the heartfelt part that will be very evident. She is a music star, but that is not the subject. The process of becoming herself is–that disadvantage, loneliness, despair and poverty was overcome.

Rickie Lee’s memoir writing style is poetry-like; it easily departs from the concrete into abstract soft phrases that sound related for a succession of lines and express a mood and bit of teenage fantasy–talk of fairies and magic aid the youthful effort of making sense of adult complexities. Rickie Lee had an active imagination and an exaggerated impulse to act.

A child’s view of life is much more interesting when a parent is able to tell stories of family members who are gone; a child’s understanding of one’s place in the world is formed by imagination and a caring parent. Mother gets credit for being the storyteller and her best tales are told in this book; Dad gets credit for being more understanding of Rickie Lee the adolescent runaway.

When I was fourteen I thought happiness lay in the arms of anyone but myself. It would be a habit of self-destruction that would follow me most of my life. . . we would steal a car and we would run away . . . I can still see the old man standing on the stage . . . the great flying horse of the Mobil gas station flashing . . . we did not have a plan. We were living a lyric. We had a map of maybes . . . the cops saw us at the same time we saw them. We started to run, but you can’t really run on railroad tracks . . . Even in my peril, my writer had my back . . . she kept it tough with a Peter Gunn and Naked City soundtrack . . .

Rickie Lee left her family again in Olympia, Washington, with her GED in hand and destination Los Angeles. She stayed in Seal Beach with a Navy friend and discovered his album collection (“don’t touch my records”). Her music aspirations took a turn. More passages from the author: Janis Joplin called women to suffer on behalf of their men in a very loud way that meant socially, we are fighting–but on the Man’s same old battleground. Dignity attached to our ball and chain. . . Laura Nyro was not like anything else evolving out of the 1960s, as if the singer of the Shangri-Las had been raised by Leonard Bernstein . . . when I was starving for musical direction, when I needed emotional enunciation. Her dignity didn’t transcend circumstances, it celebrated them. . . And Neil Young, . . there was something very un-California about Neil. Why did he write about heroin? Heroin was city-ugly, and I had not seen it here in hippie land. Later on the same page she would write: Heroin had come in the back door with the hippie pot smokers–just like “they” (straight people) always said it would! Commercialism and cynicism was to saturate the ensuing decade.

I cite two passages here quoting Rickie Lee the songwriter and singer. The first refers to her for-a-time co-writer Alfred Johnson explaining their separation: I think he understood better than I did that my music was deeply personal and ultimately my solitary exploration. I alone would live through my tragedies. I alone was responsible for laying bare my emotions. I alone lived my life into music. My deepest emotions are universal; the further inside myself I go, the closer I am to mankind. Later, with fame and fortune knocking on her life door she held on to her personal identity: From 1979 to 1982, Annie (Leibovitz, her photographer) documented my part of the greatest time in rock’s history. Me, Rickie Lee Jones, non-folk singer with an acoustic guitar, jazz singer who is as sexy as Mick Jagger, expanding the view of women in music. The women who came after me . . . no one could say they weren’t serious musicians, simply because they were dancing. I did that. That was me. The girl in the red beret.

The book is actually complete without the musician’s professional life surveyed in the final one hundred book pages; but, those career highlights help assure the reader that our heroine did survive so many tragic events when young.

Jones, Rickie Lee. Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Grove Press: New York. 2021.