LAST CHANCE TEXACO

A memoir from the veteran singer and songwriter whose long career has involved plenty of ups and downs.

Born in Chicago in 1954, Jones begins with vivid stories of her early childhood in Arizona, where her family moved in 1959. Throughout, she proves herself as engaging a storyteller on the page as in her songs. A peripatetic family life took her through countless schools. “Constant moving was my parents' version of running away,” she writes, “and this inclination was reinforced in me every year of my life.” She began hitchhiking early in her teens and was kicked out of high school, labeled “an undesirable element” by the reactionary vice principal, “the real life version of Dean Wormer of Animal House.” But California hippie culture awaited, and more good luck than bad considering her propensity for taking risks and numerous illicit substances—though the latter eventually bit back hard. “I was living a life enchanted by impossible connections, narrow escapes, and the perfect timing of curiously strong coincidences,” she writes, recounting the time she bumped into her cousin at a Jimi Hendrix concert. The great passions of her pop-star years—Lowell George, Dr. John, and, most of all, Tom Waits—still inspire dreamy prose arpeggios. "Now we were religions, we converted to each other, we inspired each other and we spoke in tongues,” she writes about Waits. “He growled, I cooed. He softened, I growled….We were jellyfish, floating from day to night.” Sadly, however, "the apex of my love life corresponds to the apex of my career success, and unfortunately my success corresponded with my drug use.” The high times petered out by 1983, when she quit drugs and “headed to France.” She chronicles her life since then, including marriage and motherhood, in just a few pages—a wise editorial choice.

Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart…but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.