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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.
Rickie Lee Jones has released seventeen record albums and received two Grammy Awards. She lives in New Orleans.
Howie Klein grew up in a working class family in Brooklyn. After college, he went to Europe for the summer and stayed away for nearly 7 years, 2 of them driving across Asia and living in places like Afghanistan, Iran, Nepal and India. When he returned to the U.S. he was a radio dj on the first punk rock radio show in America and then co-founded an indie record label, 415 Records. Eventually he went to work at Warner Bros Records where he was general manager of Sire Records and then president of Reprise Records. He retired from the increasingly corporatized, artist-unfriendly record business about 3 years ago. After a couple of years as an Adjunct Professor at McGill University in Montreal, he settled down in Los Angeles where he works trying to help elect progressives to Congress, cooks, hikes and swims. He serves on the Board of People For the American Way and blogs under the nom de guerre "Down With Tyranny." He likes Bernie Sanders, raw food, and grassroots activism and has a new favorite band every week; this week it is East L.A.'s Las Cafeteras. He hates fascism.
