The Grand Tour

by Rich Kienzle

  During that time, George’s binges were fewer and his contentment, except for a few lapses, seemed higher than in the past. Along with touring, the couple made guest appearances on Hee-Haw, the new CBS prime-time country music/comedy show based on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Their tour bus roamed the country, emblazoned with the billing MR. & MRS. COUNTRY MUSIC. They cowrote songs like “Never Grow Cold,” a tune George recorded for Musicor on which Tammy sang prominent harmony. Pappy’s desire to avoid problems with Epic Records may explain why he buried the song on an album.

  Back in Nashville for the 1969 CMA Awards, Tammy was again nominated for Best Female Vocalist. When George returned to his old haunts, he started drinking again and, she claimed, knocked her against a wall. She attended the ceremony with makeup covering the bruise and won the award. As her star rose, George hadn’t had a No. 1 single since “Walk Through This World with Me” two years earlier. Jerry Chesnut’s ballad “A Good Year for the Roses” was the standout song at his February 1970 Musicor session. Behind spare, understated production, George gave the song a searing rendition, his passionate vocal making it among his most enduring efforts at Musicor. Released later that year, it fell just short of topping the country charts in early 1971. His continuing successes with the label didn’t diminish his desire to record with Tammy and to finally free himself from Pappy.

  George was delighted when Tammy discovered she was pregnant in early 1970, especially since she’d suffered a miscarriage the previous year. Around that time, he made his own discovery in Lakeland: a dilapidated seventy-year-old white-columned home. It was built in 1902 by H.B. Carter, who made his fortune in lumber, on the lake that occupies the center of Lakeland. Another owner moved the home several miles south to a five-acre lot. The couple purchased it for $100,000. Vast amounts of additional cash would be required to fully restore it. With his usual zeal, George set to the task, revealing an uncanny eye for color coordination and interior decorating, an unusual skill for a honky-tonk singer from the Thicket. Tammy marveled at his talents in this area, though one finishing touch wasn’t so original: the estate’s guitar-shaped swimming pool, not unlike the one Webb Pierce installed at his Nashville home years earlier.

  Asked by Country Music magazine to interview George in 1980, five years after their divorce, Tammy questioned him about that skill. While he never explained how he developed it, he said if he had to make his living doing something else, decorating was “something that would probably be one of my favorite choices, to try to get into.” He added, “When I used to decorate our houses a lot, back then [my taste] was Spanish . . . I have different tastes for a lot of different furniture now.”

  George actually had a plan to pay for all this spending involving another investment: buying more than thirty acres of land adjacent to his new home to build yet another outdoor music park. The Old Plantation Country Music Park would put the short-lived Rhythm Ranch to shame. His extravagance in overdrive, he imported exotic plants and palm trees and spared no expense for stars and the public. Unlike the shithole dressing rooms he and his fellow performers often encountered on the road, Old Plantation’s would be classy and well appointed. There’d be bleacher seating for the public, with a roof later added to protect everyone against Florida’s quick-changing weather. George supervised the workers and again did some of the labor himself. He also had to deal with local government, particularly zoning officials who insisted he follow regulations. Nearby residents feared the park would prove intrusive and cause them ample problems.

  As Tammy neared her due date, George went on another bender that took him to Texas, but he was back and ready when their daughter was born on October 5, 1970. George drove Tammy to the hospital, doing everything he could to keep her calm. Ecstatic, he called his family, exclaiming, “Hot a-mighty!” When the couple’s daughter was born, Tammy feared George would be disappointed it wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t, and the happy parents named her Tamala Georgette Jones. Two weeks later, they moved into the restored home as construction continued on the park, set to open that spring.

  In 1954, Pappy had taken a young, unschooled, and ambitious George Jones under his wing. The two had made money together and, at least for a while, enjoyed a father-son relationship George had never had with his own daddy. When he was carrying on, ranting, raving, drunk, and dissolute, Pappy stood by him, no doubt motivated as much by his bankability as affection. But the George Jones and Pappy Daily of those early days were long gone. George may have been unsophisticated regarding business, but he’d seen enough to want to sever ties with Pappy and with Musicor. It would take time—and considerable cash. “I was still under contract to Musicor, and its executives wouldn’t let me record with Tammy on her label, Epic, unless I bought out my contract,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I paid $300,000 to get out of one contract so I could enter another. Had I not paid the money, there might never have been any duets by George Jones and Tammy Wynette.”

  He later took direct—largely accurate—aim at Pappy in comments to Nick Tosches, saying of his old mentor, “We were fairly close at one time. Then the truth comes out. He was pitchin’ me around to different labels and I kinda got tired of that. Made deals on the side for extra money for hisself, which I never found out till later.” The exact financial cost may never be known. A six-figure amount is certainly credible. George had to fulfill remaining obligations to Musicor as he became acclimated to Billy Sherrill, whose techniques were the inverse of Pappy’s.

  He got his feet wet with Billy by recording with Tammy for Epic in 1971 as he continued winding down his Musicor commitment with his final sessions. In the famous Quonset Hut, part of the Bradley studio complex Columbia had purchased from the Bradley brothers in 1962, the session was a different atmosphere given Billy’s careful, hands-on control of every aspect of an arrangement and sound on the singles. And he favored A-Team musicians who gave him exactly what he wanted, including ideas he could adapt. Contrary to popular belief, Billy did not exclude the pedal steel, despite his more sophisticated approach to arrangements. The producer often used Pete Drake, who’d done some of George’s Musicor dates. If Drake was unavailable, he often turned to another A-Teamer: Lloyd Green, who’d briefly toured with George and played steel on “Too Much Water” in 1957. One of the most cerebral and perceptive musicians from that era, Green, who worked with Nashville’s greatest producers from the fifties into the eighties, explained Sherrill’s technique from a session player’s perspective.

  “I always thought that Sherrill was the best producer in Nashville. I agree some of it was a little pretentious, but Billy Sherrill records were the only records that were created by Billy Sherrill. He literally choreographed the entire song, every song he did. He didn’t tell you exactly how to play it, but he gave you the idea of how he wanted you to play it and it was always right.”

  Norro Wilson, the Kentucky-born singer, songwriter, and producer who wrote some of George’s most enduring material at Epic, had listened to country and pop music in his youth and later sang in a gospel group before becoming a country vocalist. Even while recording for various labels, he became one of Sherrill’s stable of writers along with Carmol Taylor, George Richey, Glenn Sutton, and Bobby Braddock. Among the hit compositions he cowrote for Tammy were “I’ll See Him Through” and four No. 1s: “He Loves Me All the Way,” “My Man (Understands),” “Another Lonely Song,” and “(You Make Me Want to Be) a Mother.”

  Wilson became a keen student of Billy’s production techniques, comparing them to those of his other hero: Decca producer Owen Bradley, responsible for Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Conway Twitty, who for years led a Nashville-based big band playing pop and swing music. “I learned more from [Billy] than anyone,” Wilson said. “I learned all my production things from him. Billy’s [use of] dynamics in making records changed the sound of Nashville music, I think. I got a lot of thoughts and ideas to emphasize something, play a little louder, play a little harder. That’s color. Nobody made a record better than B
illy. He played saxophone. He played really good piano. He’s a learned guy. I don’t know if he was as learned as Owen with musical knowledge because of [Bradley’s] big band stuff, but he was damn close. He knew where he was all the time. He was also able to communicate with the players. . . . You won’t talk to a player who won’t tell you they had the utmost respect for Billy. His ears were marvelous.”

  Sherrill had a profoundly different vision for how to frame George musically, and, not surprisingly, lavished special attention on the songs he planned to release as singles. Beyond singles, however, many of George’s Epic albums include numbers produced with the traditional accompaniment he always preferred. Jones told Jimmy McDonough as much when he said, “If Billy believed in the song, he was there every second. If it was an album cut—a good song, but it wouldn’t make fire come out your butt, he wasn’t interested.” George added that Sherrill wasn’t always present when he and the band recorded those numbers. He would have the proceedings in the studio piped into his office.

  In Sherrill’s heyday, smoother production style stirred intense debate between those who appreciated his work and those who felt his approach entirely too slick for country artists. My own views on his production have evolved. I’ve noted that he was a total control freak in the studio, far more hands-on than other renowned Nashville producers who gave the famous A-Team session players latitude in working out arrangements. He didn’t always get the best results with some artists, yet he stopped at nothing to get the arrangement he envisioned for a given recording, carefully controlling his singers’ delivery and calling the shots on material. He used a select group of A-Teamers whom he trusted to give him precisely the sound he desired, or who could develop original ideas he could adapt to the arrangement. But if the arrangements seemed slick, with strings and backup singers, George’s vocals were far from smooth. Sherrill wisely convinced George to focus even more on his lower register much of the time. Maturing into middle age, George’s voice still conveyed magnificent, unvarnished emotion, amplified and enhanced by Sherrill’s arrangements and smoother production values. Instead of softening George’s impact, the glossy background gave him even greater clarity and bite, the equivalent to displaying a beautiful, weathered piece of wood against a velvet or satin backdrop that accentuates its unpolished qualities.

  For George and Tammy’s first duet single at Epic, Sherrill remade George’s 1968 Musicor hit “Take Me.” Hearing it in the context of rock-based, twenty-first-century country, the performance seems nearly as hardcore as George and Melba singing “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds.” True background vocalists coexist alongside Pete Drake’s pedal steel. Tammy begins, Drake adding graceful fills in between her pauses. George, in the lower register, handles himself ably, adding his trademark bends and cries. The song’s traditional feel echoes his past, yet the smoother background heralds a new era in his musical development.

  With local officials temporarily satisfied, Old Plantation Country Music Park, capacity ten thousand, opened on April 4, 1971, with a true all-star lineup. The couple headlined, as did two more of the era’s hottest stars: Conway Twitty and surprise guest Charley Pride. Billy came in from Nashville for the opening. Twenty thousand people, twice the capacity, showed up, many turned away once the park was filled to overflow. Traffic was reportedly backed up six miles, confirming the concerns of many of the neighbors. For that day, the crowd was mesmerized, and so was George. This was no repeat of the Rhythm Ranch fiasco. He had a $20,000 electric sign built, declaring the venue the HOME OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S GEORGE JONES AND TAMMY WYNETTE. The grounds had carnival rides for the kids, food concessions and other amenities, and examples of George’s continued free spending: a collection of expensive antique cars, one of them a vehicle used by Hitler’s staff. George drove around in a Nudie-customized Pontiac Bonneville (as had Webb Pierce before him) with four thousand silver dollars embedded into the leather upholstery. The door handles were six-shooters. On the doors, signs touted OLD PLANTATION COUNTRY MUSIC PARK, CENTRAL BARN RD. S540A, LAKELAND, FLORIDA. HOME OF GEORGE JONES & TAMMY WYNETTE.

  For the moment, he was proud and enthusiastic. On the road, he was delighted with his wife and enchanted by his infant daughter. He relished meeting old friends. In San Francisco, he crossed paths with Beaumont honky-tonk partner Luther Nallie, now guitarist with the Sons of the Pioneers. They were performing in California for Bob Eubanks, who, along with hosting TV’s Newlywed Game, promoted country concerts. Eubanks had booked George and Tammy for some West Coast appearances. In San Francisco, the Pioneers were on the same bill, and Nallie saw his old friend’s contentment, albeit briefly. “The last time I saw George was not long after he married Tammy. The Pioneers were one of the first ones to go on, and when we got off, we got paid and went on home, well, just as we were walkin’ out to our cars, George was walkin’ in. That was the first I’d seen him in a long time. And we were glad to see each other and hugged and all that and he said, ‘Look, I’m getting ready to go on,’ and said, ‘Come back to the bus for just one minute. I want you to meet my wife Tammy.’” Introductions were made and George headed for the stage.

  But a two-week engagement at the Landmark Hotel in Vegas served as a reminder of how fast things could sour. Billy and his friend, music publisher Al Gallico (Billy was one of his writers), flew in for the show, but George went off on another bender, leaving Tammy alone to headline on her birthday, May 5, 1971. George’s walkout exposed another problem that plagued him for decades: a malignant insecurity that made him feel unworthy of performing in higher-end places that welcomed such pop music giants as Sinatra, Streisand, or Presley. His absence affected Tammy’s performance, but with the help of Jimmy Dean, who was in the audience, she got through it. When George finally arrived, he behaved for the rest of their stay, though he later disputed her claims he’d misbehaved playing blackjack in the casino. The disparity between Tammy’s and George’s memories on this and other issues would grow as time passed.

  That was especially true in the case of one George explosion still debated more than forty years later. During his life, George was generally up-front about most of his dark side. Tammy was too, to a point, but her memories, including those in her autobiography, sometimes differ from the recollections of others, like the tale of George’s alleged violent, drunken rampage through their newly renovated home. There’s agreement that at some point, almost surely in 1971, a drunken George wound up being picked up for a ten-day stay at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland. After being discharged, he arrived home in a taxi to find everyone gone and the house looking like a tornado had hit the interior. Some accounts have George breaking down and crying, having realized what he’d done. While he was known for contrition after sobering up, George later disputed assertions he was responsible for the damage, noting his friend Cliff Hyder’s speculation that Tammy may have ordered others to do the damage. The truth may never be known.

  Regardless, he cleaned up the devastation, repaired the damage, and replaced what could not be fixed. Tammy returned to a home that looked much the way it did beforehand. She had her own issues involving her unexpected fame and wealth. She also had legitimate physical ailments that took a toll. Over time, her use of prescription medications caused her every bit as much personal and professional grief as George’s drinking did for him.

  Even if the facts and details are inconsistent, George was far from blameless, his antics often childish or simply absurd and impossible to fathom. When they returned to Nashville to do the Opry, he admitted being in a delusional, paranoid frenzy, thinking something was going on between Tammy and his longtime buddy Porter Wagoner. In the backstage restroom he came up behind Porter, dressed in one of his famous rhinestone Nudie suits and standing at a urinal. George declared, “I want to see what Tammy’s so proud of,” only to twist Porter’s cock as he tried to take a piss. Porter, caught off guard, tried to pull away only to urinate all over his pricey rhinestone outfit. He couldn’t go onstage until he donned a spare.

>   Back home, George and Tammy continued efforts to become part of the fabric of Lakeland. At one point, they taped a TV spot for the regional Badcock Home Furnishing Center chain—and for Old Plantation—that was a study in weird. Sitting at home, side by side on a garish yellow leather sofa, Tammy wore a white blouse, vest, and skirt with white go-go boots, while George sat smiling in a red shirt, gray pants, and shoes (not boots) complete with white socks. A small guitar sat between them and memorabilia was displayed behind them, as if to remind everyone who they were.

  GEORGE: Tammy and I would like to tell you about some friends of ours—the folks at Badcock Home Furnishing Centers!

  TAMMY: Here at our home at the Old Plantation Music Park in Lakeland, Florida, we count on Badcock for our furnishings!

  GEORGE: You know, we’re confident of quality merchandise from Badcock, and we also know that we’ll receive the best in service!

  TAMMY: Take it from us. Badcock will treat you right!

  IN NASHVILLE, GEORGE RAN OUT THE MUSICOR CLOCK, RERECORDING MATERIAL from Mercury and UA, even remaking songs he’d previously recorded for Musicor and laying down covers of others’ hits. Among them: Merle Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” Billy “Crash” Craddock’s “Knock Three Times,” and Conway Twitty’s “Hello, Darlin’.” One October session brought the relationship to an end. Repeating the drill where he sold Starday to Don Pierce, Pappy sold his Musicor interests to Art Talmadge, who released one final compilation of George and Melba duets before finding another label willing to license George’s Musicor material. The January 15, 1972, Billboard reported Talmadge turning over 230 released master recordings and 58 unreleased masters to RCA Victor for upcoming singles and releases in a three-year deal. Pappy was to select material, but by then was refocusing on his Texas music interests. Musicor would concentrate on other acts. RCA released sixteen newly compiled Jones albums over the life of the contract. But in a market still flooded with recent Musicor releases, plus the new music George and Tammy were creating at Epic, the RCA material never made any significant dent, except to add some Jones to RCA’s catalog for a few years.