Intro: From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.
David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
[music]
Right from the start, Rickie Lee Jones was a unique talent. Her debut album was nominated for five Grammys in 1980 and she won best new artist that year. Jones brought together a singer-songwriters attention to lyrics and storytelling, with the jazz artist Creative Freedom with her voice. One of her very best songs on that debut album was called Last Chance Texaco and Rickie Lee Jones made that the title of her recent memoir, producer Scott Carrier went to talk with her in New Orleans.
Scott Carrier: It's Sunday morning, March 21st and I'm in New Orleans, Louisiana. Walking down rampart, going over to Jimmy Dale Oppas House to talk to Rickie Lee Jones. Rickie and Jamie are friends and Jamie wrote to me and asked me if I would like to do a story about Rickie's new memoir, Last Chance Texaco, which, to me, was like a miracle, because I've always really loved Rickie Lee Jones' music and followed her career.
I started listening to her albums in college and I still listen to them now, and I'm 64. I've always felt like she's my guardian angel because her music makes me feel like everything's going to be okay and she's right, usually. They sent me her book and I read it and I really had no idea. The book is about her life as in growing up, leading up to when she makes it big. It's not really about being a rock star superstar, it's about, she had a really a rough childhood and she ended up running away repeatedly through high school.
The stories in the book are, in a way really sad, a lot of bad things happened to her when she was traveling around, she got thrown in jail quite a few times as a teenager, and I just had no idea from listening to her music what a rough life she had growing up but now that I've read the book, I can see how those rough experiences, those tough times are where her songs come from. She describes it as ripping out a piece of herself in writing her songs.
When I was reading the book, first thing I recognized that she writes with a sense of rhythm that comes from her music, but it also comes just from American literature. Rhythm, I think in American literature is the most important thing and she does it really well. She writes in a natural voice, saying more with less. I thought when I was reading the book, this sounds an awful lot like Huck Finn talking. It's the same clear, honest voice of someone traveling around the country, traveling around America trying to figure out what she's seen, what she's looking at, which is cruelty, stupidity, violence, mixed in with comedy.
Even though they're sad stories, it's very fun to read them. They're sad, but she writes about it in a way you can tell she just really enjoyed it, traveling around. I came here and got to talk to her and met her, interviewed her the first time. That went really pretty well. Then I talked to her again yesterday, was asking her to tell me some of the stories that are in the book but in telling them, I think I wore her out because the stories in the book are so sad and I was having her tell me some of the stories and she got to a certain point where she just couldn't do it anymore and we had to stop. At that point, I thought, man, I've really blown it but she's going to give me another hour today, before I leave town.
When I arrive at Jamie's house, Rickie is there waiting for me. She says, "Get out your tape recorder, I've got something I want to tell you."
Rickie Lee: There are sometimes all kinds of creatures who come in the guise of journalists and sometimes they're Succubus, and they come to eat you, and you leave high, leave in a short time feeling more worn out than any tour, or any album making or anything in two hours, a bad journalist can suck me from my life force. I wanted to say you are the opposite of that. I leave your presence feeling so [laughs] I would never set you up that way anyway, but I wanted to because I knew you'd. Listen to me now, I leave your presence so strong and on no part of me penetrated or touched, and everything I say to you is, I feel good about what I said.
Scott Carrier: Thank you for saying that. It really makes me less alert. What I would like to talk about is, did you enjoy traveling around? Let's just talk about travelling.
Rickie Lee: All I wanted to do is leave and when I talk about it from here, it seems like it was so horribly dangerous but I guess it wasn't because something called me out to these adventures. Yes. Even though I met terribly dangerous people and I brushed against their coats, they just passed on by because that writer was writing these stories.
Scott Carrier: Explain. Tell me about that.
Rickie Lee: Yes, this, since that I have that I'm not the only guy writing my life, that others are writing it too and I am escorted through horrible things right out the other side. It feels like the words I'm reading are put down by life itself, not just me.
Scott Carrier: Did you feel that when you started out if you're 14, and you take off from home in a Camaro, stolen Camaro with your boyfriend, and you drive to the beach, California is that when it started?
Rickie Lee: I'm sure. I was at the beginning of a great adventure. I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be a grown-up so I wanted to get out there and live grown-up things. I didn't want to sit in a classroom anymore and have people say, "Take your hat off," and I want to talk about arithmetic. I'm done with that.
Scott Carrier: There's that time when you took off, you're walking down electric Avenue, going home for dinner and instead you just stick out your thumb and decide to hitchhike to Big Sur.
Rickie Lee: I read somewhere that there's some maybe people who've been molested, or I can't remember what it was, but that this impulse control is a problem for a kind of people and it made me start really going, "Did something happen to me," because it was impossible for me to control. Suddenly I go, "I think I'll go to Big Sur," and I'm in a car going and the chaos and trouble that brings to life but I can't find any evidence of anything like that happening to me.
I just seem to be a creature that does well acting impulsively. "Let's go to the desert and see what's there." Other people need to plan it and that's good too, but for me, I find gold if I go right now. In my case, I think I'm just so deeply optimistic that I have a way of making all these events good. I just love living and I have actually suffered from depression but for the most part I just can't turn life into a bad story. [music]
We will fly
Way up high
Where the cold wind blows
Or in the sun
Laughing, having fun
With all the people that she knows
And if the situation
Should keep us separated
You know the world won't fall apart
And you will free the beautiful bird
That's caught inside your heart
Can't you hear her?
Oh she cries so loud
Casts her wild note
Over water and cloud
That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin'
We'll be riding on the horses, yeah
Way up in the sky, little darlin'
And if you fall, I'll pick you up, pick you up
Rickie Lee: When I was little, I never had shoes on and the days were so hot and so incredibly long that I think I lived years in a day. That was how I wrote that song, Years May Go By because when I think of that year, '61 when I'm six, it takes forever for the day to go by. You could start out in the morning in the backyard, making mud pies and eating mint and watching the garbage, and the men go by and then you go in and listen to the radio and then take a walk down by the well and find an animal, a live animal. Any animal was a thrill to me. If it was a frog, I didn't have any prejudice against the kind of animals that were magical to me.
Scott Carrier: How about the story where you're riding the bike down the street and a car stops right in front of you?
Rickie Lee: Well, I was riding my brother's bicycle and his seat was too high for me to sit on. I had to just pedal, standing up and so I couldn't get off the bike. I was down at the end of the street, riding around in circles when a car drove up really fast. Where I was riding, on the straight line here is where civilization ended and the farmers still had this big farm there. Our houses ran along the edge of the farm. Here's where the garbagemen were. Here's where that irrigation thing was where I put the frog and here's my school. I was riding around there and a car came up and had to stop at the field.
A car was riding back of it, pulled up too. I'm riding around in a circle watching. The man in the first car got out, red-haired man. The second car, mean angry man got out and started hitting the man from the other car. To me they were grown men. Later my mother told me that the redhead was 17 years old, but to me, they were all grownups. They were crying and swearing and, they must have indicated something in the backseat of the first car. I don't know. I walked over and looked in and there was a little girl there, a little tiny girl, about two.
She was laying in the backseat, but like I wrote, I don't know what I saw because she had been raped by the 17-year-old. The man hitting the 17-year-old was her father. The kid used to babysit her. Then one day, I don't know if he'd been molesting her all along, but he took her from the home, and the father got wised to it and went and tried to find him, chased him to that place where I was riding my bike around in a circle. They were all over the place and pedophiles were lining up to claim the innocent. You better believe it. They sure are a lot of them in Phoenix or were.
[music]
The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by
Scott Carrier: Your family moved a lot. Almost constantly. Sometimes you went to three different schools in one year. One year you went to four different schools in one year. Well, always moving from one place.
Rickie Lee: My imagination started to make me go, were they running from somebody? I can't really understand why two grownups would move their family so often, but they did it.
Scott Carrier: Maybe they felt free when they were moving on the road, felt freedom. Is that what?
Rickie Lee: I think you hit it on the head. I don't know why I never thought that, that her growing up in the orphanage being a prisoner as a child and him growing up without his mother which just destroyed him and that cruel father. I bet you that's exactly what it was and they didn't want to be itinerant. They didn't want to be bums. When I was 18, Mark Vaughn took a Polaroid of me and wrote, Rickie Lee, the itinerant stranger. For many years I saved that and went, "I wonder what that word means." Then I looked it up and it meant the one who has no home or always moves around, I think.
[music]
Here I'm going
Walking with my baby in my arms
Because oh, oh, oh, I am in the wrong end of the eight ball black
And the devil, see, he's right behind us
Scott Carrier: You've been all over the country and lived in Europe, so many different places. Why did you decide to come and move to New Orleans?
Rickie Lee: I have lived in a lot of places, Paris, Tacoma, California. I came here because I needed to leave there. I needed to leave LA. I was thinking of leaving the country again, but it's so hard when you don't speak the language and it's so isolating. I knew what I needed was to not be isolated anymore. I took a chance on this place and it was a bit of a struggle. I'm a solitary and reclusive I've been for some time. The human beings I know as well as the city itself says none of that and pulls you out everywhere you go. They want you to come out and live.
I went and stayed with Barry and Mary when I first got here. Barry had been my neighbor when I lived here before and he married this woman named Mary and I was staying up in their basement. I went out with them to a parade and I was thinking, or costumes or whatever they're doing. I was just thinking, this is stupid. Why are all these people walking around like what the? She said, "Stop being such a loser." I was like, "What did you say to me?" It was very rude, but her gruff and rough words were her way of saying, "Come out and play."
Scott Carrier: This is a big question. Do you feel at all, this is your home. Do you still feel like running away?
Rickie Lee: Yes, I do. It's in my nature and I watch for signs. I'm trying to teach myself to tough it out if it gets tough, but my nature is, if it gets too tough, you don't have to stay. You don't have to die. You don't have to die inside. There's a whole wide world out there. Just go somewhere new and start again. It's a flaw in my character because when push comes to shove them, I got my foot out the door but it's also a way to survive. Being watchful for the sign that the good things will be taken away. You asked me, I'm watchful. I'll always be watchful. Well, I can't say that maybe one day I'll go, aah, but not yet.
Scott Carrier: Watchful for time to leave ish?
Rickie Lee: Watchful for the time to leave. Yes.
[music]
Standing too good
You're there chance
To trust a man with a Stein
You found at last the chance
Take it and go
Last, chance
Scott Carrier: Rickie Lee Jones's new memoir, Last Chance Texaco is out now.
David Remnick: Scott Carrier reported for The New Yorker Radio Hour and you can hear more of his work on his podcast, Home of the Brave. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time.
Speaker 1: The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Britta Greene, KalaLea, David Krasnow, Louis Michell, Michelle Moses, Ngofeen Mputubwele.
Speaker 2: We had additional help this week from Andrew Dan.
Speaker 1: The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina endowment fund.
 
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Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.