by George Jones
So what did she do?
She did her tune to thunderous applause, then brought the final verse to the point where I had come in on the recording. And she spotted me in the audience.
Microphone in hand, she came off the stage and walked down the aisle to my seat. A portable television camera followed her.
When it came time for my lines, she shoved the microphone in my face and hollered, “George Jones!” I was taken totally off guard in front of perhaps twenty million people.
Here’s all I was supposed to sing:
I was country, when country wasn’t cool
Yeah I was country, from my hat down to my boots.
Not exactly the Gettysburg Address, is it?
I couldn’t remember one word. I fumbled and mumbled and said I don’t know what. I botched the thing entirely. Barbara headed back to the stage, still singing, and brought the song to a close.
I sat down and wondered where Rick had gone. Embarrassed, he had sunk so low in his seat that for a moment I missed him. Then I decided he might be sick.
“This is great,” I thought. “I’m drunk, and Rick has had a heart attack.”
I started to ask if there was a doctor in the house but wasn’t sure if the live camera was still on me.
“If I ask for a doctor and it goes out over television they’re liable to come from everywhere,” I thought.
Eventually, Rick sat up and the color returned to his face.
The show went on, and the award was given for “Song of the Year” or “Male Vocalist of the Year,” I can’t remember which. My name was called.
When Barbara had come to me, I had stood while holding on to the chair in front of me. Now I had to walk down a sloped aisle to waiting stairs that I had to climb on live television while still drunk—very drunk.
I got onstage, was handed my award, and couldn’t think of anything to say. So I thanked Johnny Wright and Kitty Wells. Johnny had recorded a number-one song in 1965. Kitty Wells is a true country pioneer who broke a lot of ground for today’s female country stars. She was the first woman to record a million-selling record, and it became her biggest hit. That was in 1952. Neither Johnny nor Kitty ever had a thing to do with my career.
“George,” Rick later fumed, “of all the people you could have thanked, of all the people who have worked to rebuild your career these past few years, why did you thank Johnny Wright and Kitty Wells?”
“The television lights got in my eyes,” I said. “They were the only people I could see.”
Rick told that story in a tape-recorded interview fifteen years later and finished with five words: “I’m not making this up.”
The continuing success of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” prompted CBS to renew my contract in 1981. The wonderful thing about that song is that anytime anyone wanted to hear it, they had to hear it by me. Another artist had cut it before me, but his version was an album song and did nothing. To my knowledge, I recorded the only single record on that tune.
So Rick set up some high-level negotiations with CBS big shots in Los Angeles, where I was to sign a new contract. The good news is that I was to get a $500,000 advance, a figure that was mighty stout in those days. The bad news is that CBS wanted to be sure the money went to pay my new debts.
After having been awarded bankruptcy, I formed an enormous group of new debts. Tom Binkley said he never noticed a change in my spending habits. Before long, I owed about a half million in back taxes, back salaries, a few default court judgments, and more.
CBS didn’t want to go through the legal hassle of having creditors garnishee my royalties. So they agreed to pay me the $500,000 but not let me see a dime of it. All of the money was to go to my creditors.
I agreed to the program, and Rick chartered a jet for Tom, him, and me to fly to Los Angeles for the signing. By this time I had yet another new manager, Wayne Oliver, and he was on hand for the summit too.
Those guys hammered out contract terms for several twelve-hour days. Meanwhile, I sat in a hotel suite, drank champagne, and snorted cocaine. I’m not sure they knew about the cocaine.
At last they sent for me. My new contract was ready for my signing. Rick or somebody ordered new champagne. I was supposed to sign this giant record deal, and then we were all supposed to toast it with raised glasses.
I walked into the room, looked down the length of the long rectangular table, accepted a polite patter of applause, and then said I had something to say.
“I ain’t signing a damn thing.”
And then I left. I closed the thick door behind me, but I could still hear men coughing and spluttering.
“What the hell is going on here?” the industry big shots demanded of Tom, Rick, and Wayne. “I thought we had a deal. Why the hell have we been out here for all these days?”
Wayne and Tom came to my room. Their faces were real white. I was drunk and still packing cocaine when I told them they didn’t look too good.
“Let’s talk,” they said together.
“Fine,” I said. “We can talk on the way back to Nashville.”
“What do you mean?” they pleaded.
“I ain’t signing no damn contract that gives money to everybody but me. I want one hundred thousand dollars of that half million for myself, in cash.”
They began to pat their chests in half time.
I wasn’t bluffing. I was tired of not having any money. Admittedly, I didn’t have any because I pissed it away, but I was tired nonetheless.
“You go back and tell those sons of bitches that I’ll fly back to Nashville on their Learjet and they can pick up the tab for the high life I’ve lived while I’ve waited for them to come up with an agreement that screws me,” I said.
I went downstairs and got into a limousine. I told the driver to take me to the airport and the waiting Lear.
I don’t think lawyers and executives have ever worked so quickly. I pulled onto a private runway at Los Angeles International Airport and was preparing to step from the car into the waiting airplane.
Brakes suddenly screeched to a halt beside me. Wayne, Tom, or Rick, or maybe a combination, had a new contract, already written and printed. It gave me $100,000 cash.
I climbed the steps to the airplane with men waving ballpoint pens behind me.
It was the eve of Thanksgiving Day, and the sun was setting in the west. I signed a new contract with CBS Records and got my $100,000. The other $400,000 went to my debts, which were paid with an accounting I never saw.
I didn’t care. I figured that I, or rather my creditors, probably got screwed out of about half of it anyhow. I took my $100,000 and bought a new Corvette, a lot of cocaine, and spent the rest on foolishness.
Soon after I recorded “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” and before Wayne became my manager, five of the guys in my six-member band quit me forever. They had had it. The guy who stayed, but whom I later fired, Clyde Phillips, had once called Tom Binkley the day before a big Fourth of July festival. He said the band wasn’t going until they received their back pay. Tom said he knew who was handling my money, but didn’t know where it was going, and miraculously persuaded the band to go to the show, promising them their pay after our performance. The show was one of their last. We were somewhere out west, I think in California, when we had a band meeting. Little was resolved, and we knew it was the beginning of the end.
Those players were among the finest I’ve ever had. It hurt me to lose them, and it hurt many of them to go. So they got shit-faced twenty-five hundred miles from home. They had done that before, and the bus driver had brought them to Nashville. But there was a problem on this trip. The driver got drunk too.
It was decided that Ralph Land was the least drunk of all after he passed a strenuous test: He remained conscious.
But there was also a problem with Ralph driving. The band, you see, was blind drunk. Ralph was just blind in one eye. And he was only partially sighted in the other. But he squinted through his adequate eye and drove most of the w
ay for most of the length of the nation. When his sighted eye got tired, he covered it after centering the bus between the asphalt and the right lane on the interstate at highway speed. The feel of the asphalt shoulder under the tires as opposed to the smoothness of the concrete told Ralph when he was veering off the road. He knew then it was time to reopen his “good” eye.
Ralph didn’t show a lot of sense, but he did show a surplus of courage. And, for the final time, he brought the Jones Boys home.
Chapter 20
In 1980 I went to New York City, where I finally did a show at the Bottom Line. Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt were there and even sang a couple of tunes with me. I went to Radio City Music Hall not long afterward and got a Grammy Award for “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Then the New York press blessed me again. “The finest, most riveting singer in country music,” said The New York Times. That went over the Times news wire, and country promoters across the nation were impressed. Country music’s popularity, although worldwide and pushed by about two thousand radio stations by then, was still eight years away from the popularity explosion, led by Garth Brooks, that practically registered on the Richter scale.
So anytime The New York Times or a major publication such as Time or Newsweek acknowledged one of us from Nashville as early as 1980 it was taken seriously by concert promoters everywhere.
Perhaps that’s why I was invited to Logan, Ohio, on May 24, 1981. Promoters wanted to throw a gigantic outdoor festival and give me top billing. The show was to be an all-day event. My then manager, Paul Richey, Tammy’s brother-in-law, had hired Wayne Oliver to help put together a new band for me that included Tom Killen on steel guitar and bass guitarist Ron Gaddis. Both are still with me.
About the same time, I hired a female background singer whose father, George Morgan, a Grand Ole Opry star, I had known for years. Lorrie Morgan is today, of course, a star in her own right. The recording of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” had a background part sung by a soprano. Lorrie is an alto, but she covered the recorded version perfectly.
People everywhere seemed to regard me differently after that song. I had missed shows due to drunkenness since the beginning of my career. I was still nicknamed “No Show Jones” and probably always will be. People knew if they bought a ticket to see me they were taking a chance that I might not appear. It wasn’t an open secret. It was an open fact.
Occasionally, people got vocal or threw things at the stage when I didn’t make a date. But after “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” their expectations for me were higher, their frustrations more dramatic.
Before the Logan date, the new Jones Boys, Lorrie, and I played Manassas, Virginia, in the spring of 1981. Paul asked Wayne to charter a private jet for Wayne and me, while the rest of the group traveled by bus.
After the Manassas show I told Wayne I didn’t want to fly to the Logan date. “I’m tired,” I said. “If I can ride the bus, I can get a lot of sleep. And it’s been a long time since I’ve traveled with the band. I think I’ll just hang out with them.”
Wayne was familiar with my ways. He had promoted some of my shows in the 1970s before Paul hired him to travel with me to try to ensure my arrival at the dates. He’d had a stint as my manager and would eventually have another. Wayne was afraid that if he let me out of his sight, I might not make the Logan show.
“But I’ll be on the bus with the band,” I insisted. “There is no way I can get away from them. Of course I’ll be at the show.”
So he trusted me and flew on without me.
Some members of the band had a few drinks after the Manassas show, and I had one or two with them. Then they went to their bunks, and I went to my room in the back of the bus. There, I polished off a fifth of whiskey and got into a hidden bottle of cocaine.
I was not scheduled to perform until 3 P.M. the next day, as the first headline attraction at the grand opening of the Possum Holler Music Park. Possum Holler was obviously a takeoff on the nightclubs I had owned in Nashville. The park’s owner, Jim Ryan, owned several other enterprises named Possum this or that or other names that implied an association with me.
I didn’t mind. The guy wasn’t just trying to capitalize off of my name. I was told that he was the biggest George Jones fan in the world and built the music park only after being assured I would be its opening act. And before my first show was even scheduled, I heard he had booked me for another, on July Fourth of that same year.
Logan, Ohio, is not a bustling community. Its official population was 6,557 after the 1990 census. When I was booked there nine years earlier, more than four thousand people turned out. Rarely had I played a town where two thirds of its residents tried to see me. Three other acts were on the show, but none had ever had a hit record, and to my knowledge none had a recording contract.
I never went to sleep on the overnight trip to Logan. When the band members began to sleepily rise from their bunks the next morning, I was lost in La-La Land, drunk and soaring on cocaine.
Wayne came from a private airport to the bus expecting to find me rested. Instead, he didn’t find me at all. I rode all the way to Logan, then decided I didn’t want to do the grand opening at an outdoor theater that had essentially been built in commemoration of me. I took off. I had drunk so much whiskey and snorted so much cocaine that I was too sick and exhausted to go onstage.
I staggered quietly off the bus, walked to the back, and inconspicuously lost myself amid the parked cars, traffic, and other activity at the arena’s rear entrance. I walked down a sleepy residential street and I came upon two old ladies. I think they were watering their lawns and puttering in their flower gardens.
By now the crowd back at the arena was getting restless. I was ninety minutes late for the show. They would have been even more restless if they had known that Wayne, my band, and anyone else affiliated with the show had no idea of my whereabouts.
Those two elderly ladies had some wine, and we shared it. One had an old guitar. While thousands waited for me to sing inside an arena, I sang for two old women on their front porch. Then I asked one to call me a taxi.
Wayne, meanwhile, had formed a dragnet to find me. I couldn’t have gotten very far, he thought, in such a short time. And after all, he wondered, how far could anybody go on foot in Logan, Ohio?
He walked down the same street I had walked a few minutes earlier and ran into the same old women.
“Ladies,” he asked, “did a man come by here who was wearing …” And he described my clothes.
“Why you mean that nice young man, Mr. Jones,” one said.
“That’s him!” Wayne said, “That nice young Mr. Jones. Can you tell me where he went?”
“Oh,” one of the women said. “He left in a taxi.”
Wayne was relieved. “So he took a cab back to the show grounds, eh?” he asked.
“No,” said one of the women. “He took it to Nashville.”
I was so high on cocaine, which I continued to hit, that I sang to the taxi driver for the entire ride from Logan to Nashville. When we arrived I gave him twelve hundred dollars and that old woman’s guitar. I told him to return it to her. He knew her personally and promised he would.
Things weren’t going so well back at the Possum Holler Music Park.
Wayne was explaining to the promoter that I had skipped out and was trying to work out some kind of deal. I don’t think the promoter was too receptive about dealing with anyone representing me, the person who had ruined his grand opening.
A disc jockey overheard the conversation and took it upon himself to run to the microphone in front of a drunken, impatient, and sunburned crowd. He told them that George Jones was not there, that his whereabouts were unknown, and that no one in the audience would be refunded his ten-dollar price of admission.
All hell broke loose. Furious fans stormed the stage. Wayne later said they “looked like a herd of buffalo in an old Western movie coming over the hill.”
JONES FAILS TO SHOW, SPECTATORS STOR
M STAGE, screamed a headline in the local newspaper. The story and photographs consumed most of the front page.
My band, which had already done a set, ran for the safety of the bus. Deputy sheriffs tried to restore order but to little avail. County sheriffs deputy Ken Berry was thrown to the ground and stomped by six men, according to Sheriff James Jones. Musical instruments and other equipment were bashed on the stage. Lighting fixtures and curtains were torn down.
Then the fans, five of whom were eventually arrested, turned on the bus. They formed a human chain with their hands under the rocker panels and began to rock the bus, perhaps thinking I was on board and too drunk to get off. I had missed two other shows in central Ohio during the previous year. When fans heard I wasn’t at the Logan date, they naturally assumed I was wasted somewhere. My band members were careful to stay away from bus windows after someone hurled a rock through one. A fan stood on top of another’s shoulders and tried to climb through the broken glass onto the bus.
The bus driver tried to drive out of the parking lot, but people lay down in front of and behind the bus. Had he left the bus in gear, some folks would have been crushed to death.
By then the bus was rocking more violently, as more people joined the attempt to turn it over. Some band members later said they truly feared for their lives.
Members of a motorcycle club happened to be there, and Wayne happened to know them. He yelled through the bus’s broken window to one he had met months earlier through Hank Williams Jr. His name was Spook.
“Can you help us?” Wayne yelled. “We’re not going to be able to get out of here.”
“No problem,” Spook yelled, and he and his buddies began knocking a few heads.
Then Spook led the bus away from the riot. About sixty bikers formed a V with their motorcycles in front of the bus, but not before hysterical fans slashed the tires. The bikers accelerated their engines and led the bus through an angry mob. It pulled out of a dirt driveway onto a concrete highway while rolling on steel rims. At that instant, the National Guard pulled into the park.