The Grand Tour

by Rich Kienzle

  McCready remembers, “I was in New York making the rounds, [seeing] Patrick, everybody, and having dinner with Chet and Martha in this funky restaurant. It was great. And that’s where the idea—first country artist to headline the Bottom Line—that’s where that came from. That whole idea happened at that dinner. I was effusive, and I kept saying to Chet and Martha, I felt like if the critics in New York could hear George, that was the door that would open everyone to an interest in country music. That was the idealism, it was, hey, let George kick the door down, let’s let the critics fall in love with George and see if we can get somewhere with country music because country music was [seen as] a joke. The major music critics in New York didn’t care. So how to make ’em care?”

  I went back and asked Billy and he said, ‘If you can get him to show up . . .’”

  The Bottom Line, owned by Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, had opened in 1974 and earned a reputation as Manhattan’s hippest music club. To Flippo, Hume, and the others McCready consulted in New York, this seemed the perfect venue to showcase George for a new audience. McCready, Flippo, and Hume came up with an invitation list; Sherrill added names, as did Sue Binford, McCready’s assistant. Cincinnati-born Rick Blackburn, CBS Nashville’s new vice president for marketing, was also involved in the planning. Originally a pop record promoter, he’d been general manager of Nashville-based Monument Records before joining CBS. For the next decade, Blackburn would be a major player in George’s career.

  The CBS Nashville team organized a two-night event for September 6 and 7, 1977, showcasing George at the Bottom Line. No country artist had headlined there. Hoping a new audience would discover George, the invitees included media giants from CBS including Walter Cronkite and Texas native Dan Rather, the Saturday Night Live cast, as well as reporters from the New York Times and major publications. The label would fly journalists in for the show. It seemed an optimal opportunity to build George’s brand.

  It was little surprise that George viewed it all differently, realizing he’d again be out of his comfort zone. It was one thing to play for country fans in Manhattan. This was something completely different. “I kept telling people I didn’t want to do that show,” he later explained. “I was shy because of my old booze and cocaine-laced paranoia.” Blackburn remembered, “George excused himself from my office, left, and we didn’t see him for three weeks.” With one night gone and a second night booked, Shorty Lavender and Nashville attorney John Lentz traveled to Alabama, intent on finding him and getting him to New York to salvage the second night. No luck. Blackburn and McCready were mortified. “I was so absorbed in my pain and sadness that I don’t even remember how I handled that,” McCready said. “I was so, just, dumbstruck because we had put security on him to make sure he got there. I just remember the place emptied out and maybe twenty people stayed and the Jones Boys did a set.” She sat drinking with Binford and Bottom Line co-owner Pepper, everyone certain any mainstream media buzz over George Jones would fade quickly.

  To everyone’s shock, his failure to appear actually boosted his mystique, defining him as a different type of Nashville outlaw. “The funny thing was, the next day there was this press [that] George Jones is a no-show,” McCready said. “So he got this press. He got more press in New York than he’d ever gotten. It was ironic in a way.” For all the frustration, McCready even understood why he’d bailed. “I think he was so insecure and so ill-prepared for any kind of fame or recognition. If you look at him, he was always movin’ around, just like ready to get out, and I think he was just ill-prepared for fame. I think he wanted to go be George. He wanted to go to his comfort zone, and I think he was so far out of his comfort zone that he’d just run. I’m sure the thought of playing New York scared the shit out of him.”

  George’s skills as a duet singer led Billy to engage a number of George’s friends and a few artists beyond the country field to create an album of duets. One of the first involved a ballad, written in tribute to George, by one of his many admirers in the pop and rock field: James Taylor. Taylor wrote “Bartender’s Blues” with a traditional country melody and lyric custom-tailored to George’s approach, so elemental and authentic that it revealed Taylor was more than a casual listener. Taylor would later add harmony vocals, giving the song greater marketability without compromising it. Recorded in October, released a month later, it would reach No. 6 in early 1978. It was George’s first duet with a pop singer since the Pitney recordings.

  The album also featured collaborations with Waylon, the Staple Singers (whom Sherrill had produced earlier for Epic), Willie, Paycheck, Ray Sawyer and Dennis Locorriere of Dr. Hook, and Tammy (on “It Sure Was Good”). It took Billy two years to assemble, given George’s issues and the coke’s effects on his voice and stamina. Another longtime Jones fan from the rock field was London-born Elvis Costello, one of the major exponents of the punk and new wave movement. Costello had the punk ethos but was also a serious music scholar with deep interests in varying forms of music, and he had a special affection for George’s music. He’d written and recorded “Stranger in the House,” the melody and lyrics clearly inspired by George’s style of honky-tonk. Bonnie Garner, a music business veteran formerly employed by rock impresario Bill Graham, came to Nashville to help CBS establish a pop division, a short-lived notion. Garner, who handled much of the A&R bureaucracy for Sherrill, helped him engage and coordinate artists for the duets album and brought Costello into the project. Billy was to record George and Elvis singing “Stranger” together. Making it happen required some added effort on Garner’s part.

  “George didn’t have a clue who Elvis Costello was. He didn’t know who James Taylor was, either, but he kind of liked [‘Bartender’s Blues’]. The whole thing is set up with Elvis. Elvis comes in. He’s at the studio. Session’s set up, musicians and everything else. And we’re waiting, and we’re waiting and we’re waiting. No one can find George.” Irritated, Garner got in touch with Pee Wee Johnson, George’s assistant and buddy. “I called Pee Wee and I told him to tell George that his mama raised him better than that, and he was being rude and ill-mannered because Elvis Costello had come all the way from England to do him the honor of singing with him on this record and he sure as hell better show up. And he did. It took about an hour. I think the ‘mama’ and ‘rude and ill-mannered’ references [did the trick]. I just was so angry. And I usually would blow everything else off, like, ‘Oh, that’s George.’ But this just set me the wrong way. But George came in and showed up and he did a great job. He was not in great shape when he finally got to the studio, but he did it. And Elvis was such a gentleman. And George was sweet to Elvis, apologizing and everything else. And Elvis didn’t care if he had to sit there for twenty-four hours.”

  McCready witnessed the session itself as Jones and Costello recorded “Stranger” at the same microphone. “It was so funny watching them in the studio, because their downbeats were completely the opposite. I couldn’t take my eyes off of their feet, because George would go down on the beat, and then Elvis would go down on the beat right after that. They were in complete opposite beat modes. I remember when Elvis started singing . . . that was unreal.”

  George wasn’t terribly familiar with many younger fans of his music. Emmylou Harris was making a name for herself in the mid-1970s with solid, traditional country albums like Pieces of the Sky, Elite Hotel, and Luxury Liner, produced by her then husband Brian Ahern. A few years earlier, she’d become a George fan while harmonizing with Gram Parsons as a member of his band. Mary Martin, the Warner Bros. Records executive who’d signed Harris to the label, knew she wanted to meet George. Bonnie Garner did the honors at Possum Holler. The two sang together for the first time. “I was the one who introduced him to Emmylou Harris. She was a nervous wreck, and I don’t think George had a clue who [she was] or anything else about her. And he introduced her as ‘Emmalou,’ and that’s what he called her from then on, and Emmy was not going to correct him. She said, ‘That’s George Jones. He can call me
anything that he wants to.’ So it was ‘Emmalou.’ But when she opened her mouth and sang with him, it was like, Whoa, okay. And I think George was impressed.”

  As the cocaine sent his behavior and outlook far into the stratosphere, he often brought forth two alter egos: the Duck, or Dedoodle, and the Old Man, the first based on Donald Duck, the second on Walter Brennan. He did both voices, the two constantly arguing. At times he’d argue with both of them. The pair emerged at various times—when he was hanging out, recording, being interviewed on radio, and even when he was onstage. But what seemed hilarious to him wasn’t so amusing to friends. It merely proved that the combined booze and coke seemed to be loosening his grip on reality. After her fling with Burt Reynolds and a four-month 1976 train-wreck marriage to Florida real estate developer J. Michael Tomlin, a marriage George counseled her against (Tammy told him to mind his own business), Tammy found a husband in someone she already knew. George Richey, a former gospel sideman and onetime producer for Capitol Records, was part of Sherrill’s inner circle at Epic as a writer. The couple married July 6, 1978. Over time, given Tammy’s physical and emotional fragility, Richey, her husband until her death in 1998, turned out to be the most Machiavellian and toxic of all her spouses.

  George’s state of mind wasn’t great when he received a new Bible his mother intended him to have that Tammy hadn’t promptly turned over after their divorce. He found Clara’s written message inside, desiring that “George Glenn” get this particular Bible and declaring, “I made a failure, but I hope we all meet in Heaven.” The message, given the place George was in, crushed him, but it didn’t slow his recklessness. His coke use spiked as dealers did everything possible to keep him onstage, the better to earn more money to fund his habit. They physically forced him onstage in some cases and at times, he remembered, packed his nose with the powder. When he ducked shows, he became adept at eluding Shug’s associates as they pursued him around the Muscle Shoals–Florence area. George, assisted by the Montgomerys, sometimes taunted his adversaries on the citizens band radios popular in so many vehicles during that time.

  Amid these hide-and-seek games, he didn’t seem to concern himself with his worsening finances. That side of things hit the fan on September 1, 1978, when Davidson County judge Hamilton Gayden issued arrest warrants for George. He had $86,000 of debt accrued over missed concert dates, and Tammy’s lawyers sought $36,000 back child support for Georgette. Since George’s residence was in Alabama and the civil judgments were in Nashville, he was subject to arrest if he set so much as a boot heel in Nashville or surrounding Davidson County. George’s attorney Jack Norman claimed George was addicted to alcohol and had placed himself under psychiatric care. Shug told reporters the child support would be paid in full “by the end of next week.”

  Those psychotic episodes and paranoia led him to turn hostile to Peanutt, whose conversion to Christianity and decision to become a minister lit a fire in George’s coke-addled mind. Peanutt’s new beard became a target when the two met. George began referring to him mockingly as “Little Jesus” and repeatedly threatened to pluck the beard one hair at a time. Peanutt, who still loved George, tried to be philosophical about it as he watched his buddy and onetime boss continue flying beyond any level of reason. It came to a head between them on the night of September 15, 1978, near Florence, just off the Savannah Highway, on a pull-off next to Cypress Creek, a place George, living at the Georgetown Apartments on Chisholm Highway in Florence, sometimes went seeking solitude.

  Peanutt had heard that George, who’d been spewing anti-Peanutt tirades all over the area, wanted to see him. He told George to meet him at the pull-off and found himself facing his longtime friend, enraged, irrational, and coked up. Peanutt, sitting in his Pontiac Trans-Am, realizing his friend was in a severely altered state of mind, tried to calm him, urging George to repent and see the Light. Clara could talk to him about such things. But Peanut was not Clara, and George was in no mood to be placated. He screamed, “All right, you son of a bitch! See if your God can save you now!” and fired his .38-caliber pistol toward Peanutt. Contemporary photos show Peanutt sitting in the vehicle, a bullet hole in the door just below the driver’s-side window. After firing, George raved some more, jumped into his own vehicle, and took off, seemingly oblivious to what he’d done. In his 1996 memoir, George, again denying gunplay—as he had with Tammy during their Florida days—claimed he never fired a pistol at his friend.

  Local law enforcement thought differently at the time. Concerned as he was about George, Peanutt saw this as a step too far. The next day he went to Lavern Tate, the Lauderdale County district attorney, and filed charges of Assault with Attempt to Commit Murder, insisting his main goal was to see George forced to get desperately needed professional help. On September 17, Lauderdale County sheriff’s sergeant Milton Borden took George into custody at his apartment. He was freed on $2,500 bond. The charges were later dismissed, with the understanding they could be refiled if he acted up again.

  Tammy had her own drama going in Nashville. On October 4 she told police she had been kidnapped and hinted that either George or Shug was involved. Local police found no evidence of a kidnapping, nothing to support claims of a beating or Tammy’s account of being forced to drive eighty miles. When skeptical officials suggested she might take a polygraph, she refused, raising further doubts. Meanwhile, George was in court October 10 regarding back child support. With his attorney present, he asked the court for mercy, admitting he was “addicted to alcohol.” He later claimed he had assumed Shug cut a check for Tammy, which apparently hadn’t happened. Nashville lawmen remained ready to move if he showed up in town, which led to complications when Shorty Lavender, still booking George, called him about Mel Street.

  Best known for his 1972 hits “Borrowed Angel” and “Smoky Mountain Rain,” Street’s vocal style was clearly modeled on George’s. On the morning of October 21, his birthday, Street sat down to breakfast with his wife, brother, and sister-in-law, then left the table. Moments later, he walked upstairs and shot himself in the head, just as his father had done. Jim Prater, Street’s manager, told the Associated Press the singer returned from a tour of Texas depressed and had failed to appear at a booking two days before his death. George, who deeply admired his talents, considered Street a friend. His grieving family wanted George to sing at the funeral. The services were to be held at the Cole & Garrett Funeral Home in Goodlettsville, a Nashville suburb straddling Davidson and Sumner Counties. The warrants for George’s arrest in Davidson County made things dicey. Shorty Lavender arranged special dispensation so police would look the other way while George entered, sang, and departed.

  Two days later, a disconsolate George appeared at the funeral home, where he shakily sang a pained, searing rendition of a gospel standard he no doubt learned in the Thicket: “Amazing Grace.” He asked for a bit of time alone with the coffin; friends had to coax him to leave before local authorities lost their patience. He stated that when he left the funeral home, a local police car followed him to the county line.

  Street was out of his misery, but George received another legal wallop early in November when the Third National Bank of Nashville sued him for $56,966.70 in unpaid loans. Regarding his finances, he had but one remaining option. On December 15, 1978, he filed for bankruptcy in Nashville, quoted by the Nashville Banner as saying he felt “rescued from death.” At the time it was reported he had missed fifty-four concert dates in the past year.

  It was a laundry list of financial irresponsibility involving the Third National Bank debt, $12,000 in credit cards, an unpaid $40,000 loan for a new tour bus, nearly $78,000 owed Columbia Records in advances against future royalties, $200,000 in attorney bills, and $300,000 in miscellaneous other judgments. There were, the filing stated, a total of forty-six creditors. George’s assets were listed as $64,500, his liabilities at $1,400,000. George’s explanation for the missed show dates was a memorable one. His attorney, S. Ralph Gordon, explained to the court that his client
“didn’t feel he was performing in such a way the fans were getting what they paid for.” George didn’t help his case (or his attorney’s arguments) by blowing off court appearances where his presence was required—or he if did arrive, appeared obviously coked up. Holed up in Alabama, he continued to miss show dates. In November, Linda alleged he roughed her up. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings gave him a total of $64,000 in cash that he turned over to the court as a token payment. While the court denied his bankruptcy petition, he no longer faced arrest if he came back to Nashville.

  George’s deteriorating mind was a mass of contradictions. When the press asked him about the canceled shows that had earned him the both affectionate and derisive nickname of “No Show Jones,” he continued claiming he wasn’t up to performing and didn’t want to give the fans less than his best, a line of bullshit given the less than pristine condition he was often in when he did appear. Early 1979 brought the release of the duets album My Very Special Guests. Solid as Billy’s idea was, even with the success of “Bartender’s Blues,” George’s vocals were subpar. Despite the mystique building around George, the album’s sales were modest.

  Shug had his own problems. The Tennessee Department of Revenue auctioned the contents of Possum Holler to satisfy back taxes on January 24, 1979. Baggott also filed for bankruptcy. Two days later, Shorty Lavender, one of the few during this time who actually seemed to give a damn about George himself, sued Baggott, claiming the manager had been in business for himself, booking George into venues in different places the same night. The financial issues took a turn for the better when new attorney Thomas Binkley took another run at a bankruptcy filing in a Tennessee District Court. This time, a new judge approved the petition, which had a flexible payment plan giving creditors twenty cents on the dollar. George would be repaying the debts into the 1980s, when he began to recover. To aid the repayment, songwriting and record royalties not tied with his previous divorces were applied to the debt, now at $1.5 million. A legal conservator would oversee his finances.