by Rich Kienzle
Even relieved of that pressure, George continued imploding. When visiting Nashville, he stayed at two hotels: either the Hall of Fame Motor Inn or Spence Manor Inn. He often hung around in the lobby, sometimes singing with his guitar like a common street busker. Unpaid room bills got him banned from both places. He moved to an apartment. His support system in town was shaky by then. In August it became even shakier when Shug was busted for selling two pounds of coke to an undercover federal agent, bringing his time with George to an abrupt end.
Simon & Schuster released Tammy’s autobiography, Stand By Your Man, cowritten with Joan Dew, who was introduced to her by Dan Beck at Epic in 1979. Channeling Tammy’s memories and viewpoints into a narrative, Dew later told Tammy biographer Jimmy McDonough, “I don’t know if Tammy even read the book.” It was optioned for a TV movie. Don Chapel was especially unhappy. In late October he filed a lawsuit under his legal name of Lloyd F. Amburgey, demanding $12 million in compensatory damages and another $12 million in punitive damages, citing harassment and humiliation from “fans, co-workers, peers, employers, agents and managers.” At issue was Tammy’s contention he didn’t contribute financially or emotionally to their marriage, and her account of the infamous photos, which he insisted were taken with her permission. The suit was eventually dismissed.
In Alabama, George continued to dodge drug dealers and, he later claimed, cops friendly with said dealers. He rarely ate actual meals but indulged in sardines, beef jerky, and other junk food. The psychodramas with the Duck and the Old Man continued. Despite the shooting incident, Peanutt and Charlene Montgomery kept tabs on their friend and grew more alarmed seeing him heading for the abyss far faster than anyone could have expected. On December 10, 1979, Peanutt filed legal papers in Lauderdale County, seeking permission to commit George involuntarily to the Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Muscle Shoals, to be treated for substance abuse. Probate Judge Ralph Duncan agreed. George was admitted on December 11. Four days later, he was transferred to Hillcrest Hospital in Birmingham, better equipped to deal with his drug issues and alcoholism. The hospital staff had a challenge. Peanutt later said George talked the ambulance driver into stopping en route to Birmingham to get him a pint of booze. After treatment he was discharged, and like George Washington Jones, he quickly fell back into old habits.
Things appeared to turn a corner in 1980. Relations with Tammy began to mend after she attended one of his recording sessions. He signed a deal with her agent, the most highly regarded country music booker of his time: Tulsa’s Jim Halsey. Halsey was still attending college when he got his start booking and managing Oklahoma-based honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson in the fifties. Roy Clark later became another of his clients. Halsey expanded his agency, booking the Oak Ridge Boys, Mel Tillis, Don Williams, Tammy, and many other top-echelon acts. George’s business affairs would be handled by Tammy’s brother-in-law Paul Richey, George Richey’s brother and part of Tammy’s organization. Plans were made for George and Tammy to begin performing together and resuming their duets.
The media buzz was substantial. The couple was featured, George looking particularly bad, on the June 1980 cover of Country Music magazine, with the cover line “Tammy Interviews George Jones.” Inside was a nine-page Q&A interview. The dialogue, while colorful in spots, sanitized George’s issues as he talked of possibly returning to Nashville to live. Asked by Tammy about her book, he said he hadn’t “been able to get a hold of a copy. I wasn’t offered one.” Tiptoeing around the truth, he insisted, “I believe you’d be fair,” adding, “I don’t shy away from the truth, as long as it’s the truth.” He called past problems “water under the bridge.”
When she brought up the reason their marriage ended, he said, “We were smothering each other.” Discussing the Special Guests album, he was more candid, admitting, “I did a bad performance of a lot of the things on there, but some of them came out good, and some of them came out bad. I wasn’t in very good voice at all.” Discussing his hospitalization, he spoke kindly of his treatment, saying the staff “really know how to work with you and take care of you, and get your thinking cap on right.” As for missing concerts dates, he admitted it, adding, “The people I was involved with were booking me, a lot of times, for two or three shows on the same date.” But he also added a telling bit of contrition when it came to the fans he’d let down, saying, “These fans, who might be walking a country mile with their children just to get to the show and they get there and . . . no George,” adding, “It breaks my heart now that I realize this and think about it.” For the most part the interview soft-pedaled the problems, trying to create a buzz about the couple’s professional reconciliation, and both mentioned their next duet (“Two Story House”) and George’s single: “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
At Columbia, Rick Blackburn’s stellar track record handling CBS Nashville’s music finally elevated him to the top job: vice president and general manager of the whole Columbia-Epic Nashville operation. For some time, George and Sherrill had been sparring over “He Stopped Loving Her.” Written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, Johnny Russell had recorded it on an album, but Sherrill knew how he wanted it tailored for George and had the composers rewrite to get it as he wanted it: as an epic ballad, a sorrowful tale of unrequited love centered on a man who never stopped loving a woman who’d spurned him. His yearning for her ended only with his death.
Recording George during that time was complicated, Pig Robbins remembered. “When he started doin’ that cocaine, he went down the drain. George’d be there a lot of times, but if we saw he wasn’t gonna be able to get anything that day, we’d just lay the track down and move on to another song. We’d just make tracks and they’d put [his vocal] on later. They’d catch him halfway fit [to record]. The background singers were there with the rhythm section. [Billy] used the [vocal group] Nashville Edition on a lot of them.”
In spite of his dissolute state, George’s skepticism when it came to songs remained in force and, as before, he wasn’t always correct. He’d initially blown off “She Thinks I Still Care” and “When the Grass Grows Over Me.” He complained that the melody for “He Stopped Loving Her” too closely resembled Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and mockingly sang the song’s lyrics to the Kristofferson melody to drive home the point to Billy, who would not relent. The final, Billy-approved rewrite of “He Stopped Loving Her” connected with George’s situation at that moment. Braddock and Putman’s final rewrite belied George’s misgivings. The man being dead, “all dressed up to go away” and “over her for good,” was in many ways a thematic and superior variation on the message of “When the Grass Grows over Me,” one speaking to George’s faltering condition at the time.
Sherrill insisted he had to record George’s version bit by bit, that the singer’s diminished physical state made it impossible to get a complete take out of him. He envisioned the song as a virtual drama in miniature, complete with symphonic strings and the flawless soprano voice of session vocalist Millie Kirkham, infusing the song with gravitas above and beyond his usual work with George. The drama was carefully constructed, complete with a feature rarely heard on the country records of that time: a spoken recitation in the middle as Kirkham’s soprano soared above his words.
From the forties to the sixties, some country hits included vocals with recitations, like Red Sovine’s “Little Rosa” and Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.” Porter Wagoner made recitations an art form with songs like “The Carroll County Accident.” A few, like T. Texas Tyler’s “Deck of Cards” and Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” were totally spoken. The idea had largely fallen out of fashion, but George’s performance revived it. The spoken interlude, despite Billy’s uptown production, left no doubt it was a deep, emotional, and unabashedly country record. The final vocal revealed George totally at one with the lyrics, conveying all the pain and tragedy in a way that made his performance transcendent. It seemed as if he’d effectively summed up his entire career in
one recording. Billy’s arrangement became a foil for George’s primal, passionate vocal, the culmination of the sound he’d first pursued on “Tender Years” nearly twenty years earlier. Still not convinced, George, insisting the song was too maudlin, bet Sherrill $100 nobody would buy it.
“Two Story House” entered the Billboard charts in March. It would reach No. 2. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” made its first chart appearance a month later, and on July 5 it knocked the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Trying to Love Two Women” out of the No. 1 spot, remaining there just a week before it was knocked off the top slot by, ironically, Charley Pride’s cover of Hank Williams’s “You Win Again.” The buzz around the song, however, did not die down. The many artists who revered George and everything about him were dazzled by it. One night Emmylou Harris and her Hot Band had pulled into a truck stop near Oklahoma City. “Hey,” she told Tony Brown, her keyboard player and a former Elvis Presley sideman, “go to the jukebox and play ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.’ It’s gonna kill you!” Brown never forgot that moment.
As George’s contract with Epic neared its end, CBS took note of the near-universal praise for “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” That acclaim surprised George, who still perceived the song as the maudlin ballad he didn’t much care for. During the summer, Epic released the follow-up: his take on Tom T. Hall’s ballad “I’m Not Ready Yet,” about a man wanting to leave his woman but unable to actually do it. Nearly three years after ducking out on CBS’s gala, George finally played the Bottom Line in September. During his performance he brought Linda Ronstadt, who was in the audience, onstage to sing “I Can’t Help It” solo.
That fall, his personal life wasn’t in any better shape than before. The buzz over “He Stopped Loving Her Today” continued, and the Richeys were overseeing his affairs. As for Shug, he was out of the picture. On September 29, the coke arrest landed him a three-year prison sentence. As the CMA Awards ceremonies approached, publicists went to work, spinning the illusion that George was on the mend. In October, prior to the awards telecast, the Associated Press ran a story detailing George’s seeming recovery. “Less than a year after his life was devastated by alcoholism, sobered-up singer George Jones could become a major winner in tonight’s nationally televised country music association awards show,” it said, adding, “In fact, Jones has never won an award from the CMA.” That night, he won two: Single of the Year for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Male Vocalist of the Year. Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman shared Song of the Year. It would have been a night of triumph for anyone. But given George’s condition, he was barely able to savor it.
George’s Nashville friends did what they could to get behind him. Late in the year they staged a special tribute at the Exit Inn titled “Nashville Loves George Jones.” Some in town feared it might be the last time he’d be seen alive. He and the Jones Boys did occasional concerts with Tammy and her band, but his reliability continued to be a crapshoot. He missed a show in Columbus in February, the same month “He Stopped Loving Her Today” earned a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. The year 1981 began with Epic releasing another tune seemingly ripped from George’s real life: “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” “her” yet another allusion to you-know-who.
George remained philosophical about throwing in with Richey, telling Chicago Tribune writer Jack Hurst in a March 22, 1981, profile that “sometimes, in this business, you have to bend over backwards. And sometimes when you do, you find it wasn’t that hard to do. Bein’ friends is better ’n stayin’ enemies.” He also admitted, “All my life, I’ve been runnin’ from somethin’. If I knew what it was, I could run the right direction. I know where I want to go, but I always seem to end up goin’ the other way. I know there’s nothin’ down that way. I been down there too many times.”
In March, the TV-movie adaptation of Stand By Your Man appeared with Annette O’Toole, at the time a young actress just starting her career, in the starring role. Character actor Tim McIntire, who portrayed pioneering rock disc jockey Alan Freed in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, was cast as George. O’Toole, who immersed herself in Tammy’s records, did a respectable job approximating the star’s vocals. But overall accuracy was not a top priority. The characters were dumbed down to simpleminded, one-dimensional caricatures. McIntire was miscast as George. Billy Sherrill, played by James Hampton, is shown not as a CBS Records executive but as an independent Nashville producer-manager, his screen personality worlds away from Sherrill’s often acerbic cockiness. It was one more fictionalized, simplistic music biopic like the bizarre Your Cheatin’ Heart, starring George Hamilton as Hank Williams, and barely rose above the crappy B or C country-music films shot around Nashville in the sixties, released to small-town southern theaters and rural drive-ins.
The buzz continued on April 30, 1981, when “He Stopped Loving Her Today” won three awards from the West Coast–based Academy of Country Music: the same three that came from the CMA, Male Vocalist and Single of the Year for George and Song of the Year for Braddock and Putman. The honors meant little to George at this point as the dissolution continued both off and on the road. With no concern over the consequences, oblivious to the havoc he wreaked on his own life and those of everyone in his hemisphere, he drank and rammed powder up his nose, or local coke dealers did the honors. He’d later claim situations where others filled him up, sometimes involuntarily, particularly among the Alabama drug dealers he seemed at odds with. His shaky stature didn’t prevent the occasional cameo on others’ recordings. His friend Barbara Mandrell recruited him to add a vocal on her single “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” released that spring.
On the road, high and indifferent, he blew off a concert in Manassas, Virginia. Paul Richey wanted to charter a jet to take George and road manager Wayne Oliver to the next stop at Possum Holler Music Park in Logan, Ohio, southwest of Columbus, named in George’s honor by owners Jim and Stellie Ryan. George said he preferred sleeping on the bus until he arrived. With the jet already chartered, Oliver flew ahead. George remained in his room on the bus boozing and coking. When the bus pulled into Possum Holler on May 24, as the Jones Boys began setting up, George, under no one’s watchful gaze and thoroughly wasted, pulled yet another vanishing act, slipping off the bus. As Oliver began hunting for him, George walked into the small town of Logan, met two elderly women, and was soon sitting on a porch, talking. When a guitar was produced, he sang to them. George asked the women to call a cab. The driver agreed to chauffeur George back to Nashville, George offering a private concert the whole way down. He took the guitar, promising the women the cabbie would return it. Back at the park, all hell broke loose when the announcement was made that George wasn’t performing. Some audience members rushed the stage, venting their anger on anyone seemingly tied to the show. The bus’s tires were slashed; one of its windows was broken. As police moved in, a sheriff’s deputy was seriously injured and seven people arrested. While in the past the mystique of No Show Jones was funny, even folksy to many, no one felt that way this time. George was so out of control he clearly didn’t give a damn about any repercussions.
Barely a week later, the Ohio State Fair canceled his scheduled June 2 concert appearance. Fair manager John Evans told reporters, “We try to run a family affair. We can’t take the chance of something happening.” Possum Holler’s owners filed a $10.1 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against George, Halsey, and Richey, seeking $1.1 million in compensatory damages and $9 million in punitive damages, claiming the plaintiffs suffered “adverse publicity which seriously damaged [their] reputations.” Jim Halsey did not need this. He dropped George as a client. Finally, everyone agreed to a makeup date. George, unhappy to be playing gratis, was flown in by helicopter so he couldn’t bolt.
He couldn’t even hold it together for the folks back home. A subpar June 2 performance at the Palace near Beaumont disappointed local fans. By then, family members staged their own intervention, forcing him to enter Baptist Hospital. The
public claim was he suffered from “exhaustion.” Days later, he left and headed for Alabama. The death watch ramped up as the media began trying to track him down. On July 8, WNGE-TV, Nashville’s ABC affiliate, found him at the barbershop run by his pal Jimmie Hills, a gentle man satisfied to be George’s friend. George talked to the reporters, telling them he had a total of $237 in his bank account. Hills was hired, at George’s request, as a sort of companion/hair stylist/chaperone, and found himself constantly challenged by George’s ability to slip away.
For a time, getting George back to the more familiar atmosphere of Texas, away from Nashville and its pressures, seemed like a sensible idea. Legendary Texas A&M football star and businessman Billy Bob Barnett had opened Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth in April 1981. Billed as the “World’s Largest Honky Tonk,” it was designed to be a larger, more dazzling version of Gilley’s, the massive Houston venue named for singer Mickey Gilley. Barnett and Paul Richey would manage George’s affairs. A July 29 show at Pee Wee’s, owned by George’s pal Pee Wee Johnson, was billed as his official farewell to Nashville. The plan soon collapsed when George unexpectedly pulled out of the Texas deal. By then Paul Richey, too, was out of the picture.
George found a new manager close to his Alabama homestead. Gerald Murray, a Muscle Shoals businessman and owner of Factory Outlet Mobile Homes, was a friend of Hank Williams Jr. and his then-manager James “J.R.” Smith. George’s business operations were consolidated in Murray’s facilities. George had a three-thousand-square-foot office in the building, with fancy leather furniture. An article about George’s organization in the Muscle Shoals Times-Daily was titled “New Day for George Jones,” even as his substance abuse rendered him cadaverous and seemingly near the end.