The Grand Tour

by Rich Kienzle

  The recording situation was soon on the upswing, resolving with the help of friend and veteran Nashville publicist Evelyn Shriver, who was working for Asylum Records. Asylum became George’s new label. He was soon back in the studio recording an album that became Cold Hard Truth with Alan Jackson’s producer Keith Stegall. The material was impressive, particularly “Choices,” a powerful autobiographical ballad written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis. It was a subdued effort, but one that showed George both restrained and introspective.

  He continued to drink in secret, as he was likely doing on the afternoon of March 6, 1999. Driving on State Route 94 not far from the entrance to his estate and horse farm, known as Country Gold Estate, in Franklin, he stopped to assist a motorist. With that finished, he returned to the wheel. Back on the road, delighted with the rough mixes of the album on cassette in his black Lexus LX 470 SUV, he was so excited that he spoke to Shriver on his cell phone, wanting to play her some of the songs. He couldn’t get the cassette player to work. He called home, spoke to Adina, and let her know he wasn’t far away.

  Then she heard him scream, “Oh my God!”

  The time was 1:30 P.M.

  CHAPTER 8

  1999–2013

  The Lexus slammed into the concrete bridge abutment over the creek. George wasn’t wearing a seat belt. It took first responders two hours to extricate him, unconscious, from the wreckage. He arrived at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville by helicopter in critical condition, unconscious, suffering from a collapsed right lung, ruptured liver, and, not surprisingly, internal bleeding. Doctors decided to keep him under heavy sedation in the ICU. He was placed on a ventilator. Nancy arrived, and when she held his hand, he squeezed. Within a day he improved to the point that doctors indicated he might be removed from the ventilator.

  On March 9, he seemed to be improving. Not only did he sing some gospel numbers, he asked to see gospel vocalist Vestal Goodman of the Happy Goodman Family, whom he’d met just a few months earlier. A day later, he was sitting up in his room, a dramatic improvement. It turned out to be a bit too fast. Diagnosed with double pneumonia, which he’d suffered some years earlier, George required a respirator and meds to reverse what could have been a serious situation. He later claimed that when the breathing tube was pushed down his throat, a vocal cord was bruised, which had long-term repercussions for his voice. The crisis eventually passed. On March 19, he was discharged and returned to the farm. At the family’s request, there was no announcement, which allowed him to depart quietly. An irregular heartbeat brought him back to Vanderbilt April 8, with dehydration blamed as a possible factor. He returned home a day later.

  Accident investigators, meanwhile, were busy. On March 11, Tennessee Public Safety officials revealed they found a half-empty pint bottle of vodka in the vehicle. They also alluded to his being on the cell phone and fumbling with the cassette. The investigating trooper expressed a view that alcohol was not a factor, and initially there was no evidence George was intoxicated, despite the vodka. George also didn’t seem impaired to the motorist he had assisted just before the crash, nor to EMS personnel on the scene. The Tennessee Department of Transportation later billed him $2,492.44 for repairs to the bridge he hit.

  Enough uncertainty remained for the accident investigation to be turned over to a Williamson County grand jury. District Attorney Ronald Davis announced his intention to subpoena George’s medical records and call witnesses. Speaking on behalf of the family, Shriver initially insisted they would resist subpoenas, a vow that eventually evaporated. As George’s condition improved, media interest grew. When Nashville station WKDF had interviewed him, he claimed he had no memory of the crash, citing the amount of pharmaceuticals doctors had pumped into his system while treating him, insisting he woke up in the hospital with no idea of how he got there. That was certainly plausible, and it became apparent everything was in a gray area. There was little doubt he’d been nipping at the vodka, but his exact level of intoxication was not clear. The drinking surely contributed to his inattentive driving, as did using a cell phone and fiddling with the cassette player. There was enough wiggle room for prosecutors and George’s lawyers to negotiate.

  On May 12, a plea agreement was announced. George would plead guilty to driving while impaired, reckless driving, and violating the state’s open-container law in Williamson County Court. The reckless-driving charge would be discharged in a year pending completion of an alcohol treatment program and good behavior in the interim. George, who arrived wearing a purple short-sleeved shirt, was fined $550. In court, he admitted to presiding judge Donald Harris that he remembered little about the accident, but he assured Judge Harris, “There will be no more problems at all out of me.” He made no attempt to sugarcoat his lapses. “I do know I was drinking and obviously my driving was impaired,” adding, “I did wrong and I take full responsibility for what happened” and promised to “get my mind straight.” “Truthfully,” he added, “the struggle never ends, and I will get treatment to help me cope better.” He’d admitted in his autobiography that he still drank and had not embraced total abstinence. But he clearly had lost the control he’d had for sixteen years, leading to two weeks in alcohol rehab.

  He returned to the stage June 5 at the Kiwanis Community Center in Andalusia, Alabama, an area Hank Williams Sr. played in his early days. Cold Hard Truth was released June 22, and “Choices,” the first single, would make it to No. 30, a modest success surely fueled by his brush with death. Mike Martinovich, a veteran of Columbia Records in New York who moved to Nashville in the 1980s after George had stabilized, had known George and Nancy quite a while. Doing consulting for Anderson Merchandisers, a huge corporation that handled music marketing for Walmart, he proposed a release-day idea to Nancy. “There was a big Walmart Supercenter on Franklin Road here in Nashville. I asked Nancy if Jones would do a CD signing on the day of release of that album. She said, ‘Well, only if you can guarantee us a crowd.’ I said, ‘I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem.’ It was on the heels of all the press about the accident, plus he’s George Jones, plus he has a single on the radio.”

  When George arrived, he found a line snaking around the outside of the store.

  Martinovich marveled at Nancy’s approach to handling the fans. “They had a system whereby Jones would just sign his name, one of Nancy’s daughters would customize it [with the] person’s first name, and Nancy would take a picture at the same time. And this happened all in a matter of maybe five seconds. It was a machine like I’d never seen before. And he sold over a thousand albums that day. Just that one store enabled the album to debut in the Top 20 on the Billboard album charts.” The experience was satisfying and Martinovich was delighted. Jones, on the other hand, was restless. “On the way out, I escort them back to their car, and I said, ‘George, why don’t you and I just go down on Second and Broadway and have a couple of beers together?’ He couldn’t wait to get out of there. He couldn’t wait to get back to his television. He says, ‘Are you goofy?’” Ultimately, Cold Hard Truth would reach No. 5, George’s biggest album success since the Wine Colored Roses album on Epic thirteen years earlier.

  At his 1999 Fan Fair performance, he thanked everyone for their prayers. An Associated Press account noted he appeared thin and “had trouble hitting low notes,” likely due to the bruised vocal cord. He also admitted three factors leading to the relapse: Tammy’s death after the two had finally reestablished mutual respect, MCA dropping him, and Nancy’s health issues. He’d drunk half a pint of vodka and its effects hit him hard since he hadn’t been gulping down booze that way in a while. Another story also noted him as “thin and frail,” not all that surprising. The incident, which would have produced a shrug and another bender had it happened in 1980, had deeply shaken him. Still depressed, he spent time talking to Vestal Goodman about himself, his life, and his brush with mortality. That September, they did a video singing the gospel tune “Angel Band.” One segment features George, wearing a pink shirt, standin
g on the very bridge where he nearly met Jesus firsthand. The video would be nominated for a 2000 Dove Award.

  The George Jones Show came to an end, but the tours continued. That George had been scared straight seemed clear. “I like to died two or three times,” he admitted. “And it put the fear of God in me. I knew I wasn’t no spring chicken anymore. I quit smokin’, I quit drinkin’. I even quit drinkin’ coffee. All I carry with me now is a bottle of water. I’m clean cut anymore and I want to enjoy my final days and know what life’s all about for a change. I’m tired of being in a foggy jungle.” Interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network, he described his dark period as a “twilight zone.” The saga wasn’t quite over, however. In June, the demolished Lexus that nearly became his death car had its own run of stardom, offered for sale by a local salvage company for $22,000. A local physician purchased it as part of a campaign against drunk driving. It was suspended one hundred feet in the air from a crane with a warning to drive safely over the upcoming July 4 weekend.

  George’s anger in his drinking and coke days remained the stuff of legend, but his temper could flare when he was sober or in control of his imbibing, too, as it had at the Radio City Music Hall TNN concert in 1985. Still disgusted with the state of modern country, he was pleased when he was slated to sing “Choices” on the September 22, 2000, broadcast. Nominated for the CMA Single of the Year award, it only made sense for him to perform the song in its entirety. The idiots running the broadcast, however, had a change of heart. The show’s producers, clearly ignorant or indifferent to the song’s and George’s recent history, told him to drastically shorten the performance, citing “time constraints.” He wasn’t having it. Outraged and justifiably infuriated, George packed up and left.

  Alan Jackson would settle the matter on national TV. Set to perform Jim Ed Brown’s 1967 hit “Pop a Top,” from Jackson’s recent album of classic country covers, in the midst of the song, the band in on the protest, Jackson defiantly flipped into an entire verse of “Choices,” bringing applause from an audience aware of the slight. George, at home in Franklin, watched with tearful delight. One of many disgusted by the slight, Ricky Skaggs later commented, correctly, that “Country music doesn’t honor its elders.” “Choices” won a Grammy for Best Male Country Performance. Cold Hard Truth earned a gold record.

  Fed up trying to find major labels to sign George, he, Nancy, Shriver, and former Warner Bros. publicist Susan Nadler decided to form Bandit Records. From then on they would produce and release all of George’s new albums, starting with his next one, to be titled The Rock: Stone Cold Country 2001, an inelegant title by half. The album had three producers: Keith Stegall, Emory Gordy Jr., and Allen Reynolds. Garth Brooks approached George about a duet. Why he bothered is anyone’s guess. On July 30, 2001, the media reported George and Garth would record “Beer Run,” a weak, gimmicky song worthy of neither and questionable in the wake of George’s recent problems. His voice issues seemed to have resolved themselves enough that he could go back into the studio. In September, discussing his vocal control, he told the AP’s Jim Patterson, “I’m finally right now getting it back. I’ve had to learn almost over again to control my voice and not go sharp or flat. I’m getting back to the old George Jones, I guess.”

  George got along with some of the Opry’s Young Turks who used traditional country as a jumping-off point. His contempt for the continued watering down of the music he loved, however, did not abate. In a November 2001 interview I did with him, he continued to inveigh against the rock-and-pop-derived country movement even though it was, for better or worse, part of the music’s ongoing evolution. Asked about his disdain for younger country singers of the past decade, he replied, “It’s really not their fault. I talk to so many of them that would have loved to record a country album, traditional country. And the label people, the money people don’t want that. They can’t make enough money to satisfy ’em.

  “You can’t enjoy what you’re not raised on and what you’re used to feeling and singing, and I don’t know how—there’s some great country singers out there. It’s just that their voice isn’t being put to good traditional country music like they want to be, their own self. They have no say-so like we used to have. If they thought we could sing and make ’em any money, we had a long rope. We could do ’bout whatever we wanted to do. It’s all money. It’s all people who want to make money and make more of it. And they tried to change the record sales by [creating country styles like] crossover, middle of the road, and all that, and they take away the basics and that’s why it’s sounding like it is today. You don’t hardly hear any good traditional anymore except Alan Jackson and George Strait. Other than that, you got pop music. They should be in the pop field and get the hell out of country, let us get back to doin’ our thing.”

  George rarely sang songs about wars, except domestic ones. The Rock included Jamie O’Hara’s ballad about the Vietnam Memorial titled “50,000 Names,” a song that seemed right for the post-9/11 era. He declared, “People are a lot more patriotic today than they seem to have been in the past. We might have had a good wake-up call. I think it’s bringin’ the people a lot more and we’re not hating quite as much. I think we need to clean our lives up, what I’m talkin’ ’bout is the filthy films you have to watch on TV and all these things. I think we need to get our morals back.”

  In the interview, his opinions about rock musicians and their ties to country had clearly changed as he realized the depth of admiration went beyond Keith Richards and Elvis Costello. “The only rock-type music that I’ve ever liked at all was in the fifties: Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Little Richard was my favorite. That’s all we had to listen to back in the fifties. You had to listen to what you could hear. That rock was three-chord stuff like country music, and if you stop and analyze it a little bit it reminds you of country with a beat, really. You take Fats Domino, he didn’t sing nothin’ but country music. They get their ideas and styles from different places.”

  At the same time, he was flattered by the admiration he received from later generations of rockers. “So many of ’em that love country music, the traditional. That is really something to make note of because it’s amazing how they love traditional country music. Keith Richards, you can name ’em. Mick Jagger, he came to the hotel when I was in England wanting to meet me. I didn’t even know about it. You’d be surprised at the people I talk to like Elvis Costello who say, ‘I can’t sing it, or that’s what I’d be singin’.’” His belief in the future and integrity of traditional country music was unshakable. In February 2002 he joined other veteran entertainers protesting a pending format change that would convert WSM-AM to sports talk, ending the classic country format the station had adopted in the 1990s. In the end, classic country won out.

  Johnny Paycheck died broke on February 9, 2003. Following his release from prison, he’d attempted a comeback and even joined the Opry, but decades of hard living eventually left him with his own breathing problems in the form of emphysema, confining him to a nursing home. George purchased a burial plot for his ex-sideman and roaring partner and helped with the funeral expenses. On March 6, 2003, George and Smokey Robinson were each recognized with a National Medal of the Arts at the White House, presented by longtime Jones fan President George W. Bush, yet another validation of George’s stature.

  A month later, Bandit released The Gospel Collection, a double-CD set of sacred tunes that reunited George with the now-retired Billy Sherrill, who at Nancy’s request agreed to rejoin George (as a favor to her) in the studio. The twenty-four tunes were gospel standards like “Lonesome Valley” and “I’ll Fly Away,” with cameos from Patti Page and Vestal Goodman. The arrangements were based on Sherrill’s classic work at Epic, down to the backup singers and pedal steel. Johnny Cash died on September 12, George’s seventy-second birthday; his wife, June Carter Cash, had died in May. George and Cash had first met in the Hayride days. Dressed in a gray suit and blue-and-white-checked shirt, George, with Nancy, attended
the September 16 funeral and the November 10 Johnny Cash Memorial Tribute in Nashville.

  He also had yet another commercial venture, this one following in the footsteps of Jimmy Dean. It came complete with a new TV ad featuring George and Nancy in their spacious kitchen with their grandchildren sitting nearby. “I’m George Jones, and just like you folks, I think breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” he says. “My wife Nancy here, she serves only the best to the grandkids: George Jones Country Sausage!” In the next shot, holding a guitar, he sings (in a clear, strong voice) a bit of “Once You’ve Had the Best.” In the final shot, of the product itself, George’s voiceover says it all: “George Jones Country Sausage! Pure pork—no possum!”

  George had two presidential fans named Bush. Former president George H.W. Bush had endorsed renaming the Neches River Bridge for George in 1995. But despite the honor the younger Bush bestowed on him in 2003, George didn’t join Music Row’s overwhelming migration to the Republican Party, which had begun long before the controversy over the Dixie Chicks’ comments about Bush and the Iraq War. George had not openly endorsed a presidential candidate since he and Tammy performed for Wallace in 1972. But in February 2004, as Bush 43 sought reelection in an increasingly divided nation, George, his White House visit notwithstanding, backed a different man in a different party: retired general Wesley Clark, former NATO commander and a Democrat. George even recorded a campaign spot for Clark:

  Hi, this is George Jones. You know, I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel so strongly about where our country is headed, that I want to share with you why I’m supporting General Wes Clark for president. Wes Clark has dedicated his whole life to three principles: duty, honor, and country. And he shares the same values that you and I share here in Tennessee. Wes Clark knows what it means to put his life and career on the line for this country, and he’ll put the nation’s interests first—not the Washington special interests. I’m George Jones. Like Wes Clark, I’m no career politician, but I know a leader when I see one, and that’s why I’m asking you to vote for Wes Clark for president on Tuesday.