by George Jones
I know all of this from newspaper accounts and reports Wayne and my band gave me. All the while the riot was going on, I was happily singing ballads to a cabdriver I’d never met before and haven’t seen since. He and I had a big old time. Neither of us got mad like those people back in Ohio.
The bikers stayed with the bus at a nearby service station to hold off the angry fans still trying to get on board. The motorcycle gang kept up its protection the entire time the bus was being repaired. Occasionally a pickup filled with hostile fans would pull into the service station lot and the bikers would knock the hell out of a few of them. Then the pickup would speed away with its bloody passengers.
Wayne and the pilot raced to the airplane but not in time. Furious fans had gotten to the runway first and stolen the alternator and other parts of the aircraft. The plane wouldn’t crank. Wayne chartered a jet out of Cincinnati to fly parts to the stranded airplane.
Soon afterward, I was a codefendant in a $10.1 million breach-of-contract lawsuit. Also named were Paul Richey and Jim Halsey, my booking agent at the time.
Jim finally told me that he thought I was a tremendous talent and that he enjoyed representing me. But, he said, he spent more money defending lawsuits I brought on than he earned in commissions in booking shows. He let me go.
I was so wasted in those days that I didn’t even know. I saw him one night backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House and told him I appreciated all of the work he had been getting me.
“But,” I said, “the miles between shows are killing us. Can’t you make the jumps a little shorter?”
“George,” he explained, “I haven’t been booking you for more than a year.”
“Then who’s been getting my commission checks?” I asked.
Neither he nor I knew.
When Wayne told me about the riot, he said that if the promoter won his lawsuit, it would put me out of business. The promoter, he said, could garnishee my boxoffice receipts for years to come.
Wayne and Tom Binkley put their heads together and worked out a deal with Jim Ryan in which I would work a free show if Jim would pay the band’s and my travel expenses and drop his lawsuit. He would keep all the gate receipts.
I consented.
I worked a noon show on the day of my makeup show for Jim. He sent a jet for Wayne, the band, and me to Florida, then flew Wayne and me in a helicopter to Possum Holler Music Park. As we flew over the arena, I could see that the crowd for the makeup show was far bigger than the crowd for the show I had missed.
I was high in the helicopter but higher on cocaine. And there was no way I was going to do a free show when that many people had bought tickets. Wayne estimated the crowd at between ten and twenty thousand. That meant gate receipts could be as high as $200,000, I thought, plus the promoter was selling food and other concessions.
“I’m not going onstage unless he pays me,” I told Wayne.
“We made a deal, George,” he thundered. “You can’t stand the negative press of another riot, and this time your little ass won’t be safe in a taxi, it will be right out there in the middle of the fight.”
He had a point. So I lived up to my promise and did a free show for some folks who might have torn my head off if I hadn’t. They tell me my performance was one of the best of my career.
* * *
I don’t think I’ve ever pleased an audience more than in a show I once did out of spite. I’d wager that Tammy Wynette and George Richey, her fifth husband and her manager, still fume about it today.
Tammy and I worked shows together long after we were divorced. That wasn’t my idea. In fact, I hated to work with her. It brought back too many unpleasant memories, and when some fans saw us together, they got it in their heads that we were going to get back together romantically. But our record company felt that our appearing on the same package would sell a few of our albums.
We were playing an outdoor show somewhere in New York State, and although it was a matinee, the weather was blue cold. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me because I’m from the South.
I told my bus driver to turn up the heater as I waited for my turn to go onstage. He made the bus real hot. That was not a good environment for someone swilling booze straight. I got bombed very quickly.
“I’m too drunk to go on,” I told Wayne. “Let’s pull off of this job and head for Nashville.”
He wouldn’t hear of it. He reminded me of riots and near riots in the wake of my hasty departures and ordered the bus driver not to move the coach.
Tammy was supposed to open the show. It was an old custom in country music for “girl singers” to open for men until Reba McEntire became so popular. A few other girl singers had violated that tradition, but Reba permanently broke it. Now there aren’t many men in the business who wouldn’t give their left arm to open for Reba just for the exposure to the masses who attend her shows. She staged the highest-grossing country music show of 1994.
But back to New York. George Richey said it would be fine with Tammy and him if I went on first. They knew I was drunk and probably preferred to see me open the show rather than miss it.
Wayne helped me out of my dressing room and I staggered down the bus aisle. When I got to the front, I saw two cops. Something about that sight made me feel sober immediately.
“Now, George,” Wayne said, “you only have to do forty-five minutes. Tammy has rented an airplane, and it’s waiting at the airport. She’s paying for it by the hour, and she can’t be late. So go on and get off so she can do her show and make her plane.”
His orders rubbed me the wrong way. First of all, I wondered, who was he working for, Tammy or me? Second, since I suddenly felt sober, I didn’t like the idea of opening for my ex-wife.
“Forty-five minutes, eh?” I thought to myself.
I went onstage and sang every song I could remember that I had recorded. Then I sang every one I could recall by Hank Williams and then Roy Acuff. The people were going crazy.
My band cranked up their amplifiers but could barely be heard above the roar of the outdoor crowd as I started into my next song after two and a half hours. I was freezing out there, but I wouldn’t quit singing.
I occasionally looked at the bass and steel guitarists, who frantically dangled their hands, a signal that their fingers were sore.
I kept singing.
I could see George Richey jumping up and down at the side of the stage, yelling at Wayne to get me off. I chuckled as I imagined how mad Tammy must be getting. The clock was ticking on her rented airplane, stuck on the ground while my voice filled the air. Even my sad songs sounded happy to me that day.
“You’ve got to get him off!” Richey screamed at Wayne.
“Get him off, hell,” Wayne said. “I spend all of my time trying to get him on! I sure as hell can’t get him off!”
I did forty more minutes, pushing my set to well beyond three hours. And then George Richey pulled the plug on me. He disconnected the sound system! But I wouldn’t be outdone. I kept right on singing to thousands of people with no amplification.
By then the band had had it. They walked offstage, and I sang with just an acoustic guitar. The crowd’s attention level fell to a hush.
My voice, and my energy, finally gave out. “They ain’t gonna let me sing no more,” I said as my last shout of the show. The people went crazy.
Tammy had time to do only a few minutes, and she spent a lot of her slot bitching about me running overtime. But each time she complained about George Jones, the place erupted with applause.
I laughed a long time about that one.
A professional is someone who does his job whether he feels like it or not. Friends, by now you must realize that I’ve occasionally been unprofessional.
I was cold sober, but not too crazy about doing an outdoor show in the early 1980s at the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital, where I was supposed to be part of a Fourth of July program with the Beach Boys and other acts. Approximately seventy-five thousand
people were there. I was supposed to be paid fifty thousand dollars for only thirty minutes.
But I should have never been booked on that show. It was a Beach Boys crowd, a rock ’n’ roll crowd. My restlessness mounted all day. I was sure that the young people who had come to see the Beach Boys would make fun of me. By the time it was my turn to go on, I was a nervous wreck.
I would have gone on nonetheless if the Beach Boys hadn’t run twenty minutes over schedule. By that time the crowd was frantic with excitement, and I didn’t think a hillbilly singer could follow one of the greatest rock bands of all time. And twenty minutes is an eternity when you’re dreading something.
So I left.
There wasn’t much of a stink over my departure. I had been paid twenty-five thousand dollars up front, and I had to give it back. My taking off only got a few paragraphs in the Washington press. I don’t think anybody even missed me, which proves my point about my having no business being on that show in the first place. I was a duck out of water.
But I felt differently about a show I agreed to host to celebrate TNN’s fourth or fifth anniversary at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. That show was also in the early to middle 1980s, and again I was sober. But I took off from that show too, after riding a bus with my band all the way from Nashville for a program that was broadcast coast-to-coast over TNN.
Here’s what happened:
I walked into rehearsal with my band and there was a horn and symphonic string section onstage. I was supposed to sing with them. “I’m a country singer,” I said. “I don’t have no business singing with these here New York City musicians. I’ll be glad to host the show, but I want to sing my songs and sing with my band.” I didn’t think that was too much to ask.
I rehearsed with my boys, went to my hotel, and returned to Radio City that night to videotape the show. When I walked in, taping had already begun. My friend Ricky Skaggs was acting as host.
“What’s he doing out there?” asked Pee-Wee Johnson, my bus driver and companion for many years. “George is supposed to be the host.” Pee-Wee asked that question of a lot of folks affiliated with the show. Each time he got the same answer, which was no answer at all.
I figured I knew what the deal was. I had been unwilling to sing with an orchestra, so they ditched me as host and used somebody who would. And then they asked me if I would do a couple of songs anyhow.
“Now why the hell would you want a hillbilly like me doing songs on a big-city show like this?” I asked. “Hell, I might go on barefooted or something.”
I thought I was kidding, but then I got the idea to take off my boots. I was going to walk onstage at Radio City Music Hall that way, but instead I said “To hell with it” and left. Without my boots.
I was walking fast and barefooted in my jeans down New York City’s Avenue of the Americas with Pee-Wee running behind me waving my boots and dress pants. Pee-Wee is sixty-six years old. He kept hollering for me to stop, and I kept hollering for him to get lost. He was sweating, trying to keep up with me, and his hair was messed up from running. My bare feet were beaming in the bright lights. We must have looked like two old queers who’d had a lovers’ spat. But I don’t think one person cared or, for that matter, even noticed.
Pee-Wee and I are similar in many ways; we are the same height, have the same color hair and hairstyle, and are approximately the same weight. From a distance, a lot of folks mistake him for me. That cost him dearly one night at another show I didn’t want to do, in Augusta, Georgia.
I was drunk and coked up and did a short and terrible show. The people were booing, some were screaming for me to come back, and others were just cussing when I weaved my way off the stage. I didn’t get on the bus or into a limousine. Instead, I hopped onto a motorcycle with a sidecar that I had ridden to the show. I went immediately to my motel and parked the motorcycle. I went inside with my booze and cocaine and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.
It’s a good thing I didn’t. I might have been killed. As it was, I was too high to even know a mini-riot was under way.
Pee-Wee walked outside to the Coca-Cola machine. He was supposed to drive the band back to Nashville, or to our next show, the following day. As he rounded a corner, he saw my motorcycle on its side, the sidecar pointed toward the sky. A group of angry fans had found the motorcycle and recognized it as mine. Then they saw Pee-Wee, who they mistook for me, and began to taunt him.
“Sign some autographs for us, you son of a bitch,” one said. “You did a shit show, so the least you can do is sign autographs.”
“You don’t want my autograph,” Pee-Wee said. “I’m not who you think.”
“So you’re too good to sign autographs,” someone else yelled. “You’re a rich son of a bitch who’s too good for his fans.”
“No I’m not,” Pee-Wee said. “You’re mistaken.”
About that time someone hit him, and he went down. Someone else hit him, and two guys jumped on the old man. Those locals beat the shit out of the most trusted and loyal friend I have and broke his jaw in two places.
The police came storming in, and the crowd ran like the cowards they were. I was watching an old cops-and-robbers movie inside my motel and was so high that I thought the movie had a wonderful soundtrack. I had no idea I was hearing the real thing in the parking lot.
Pee-Wee is an old scuffler. He used to own Nashville nightclubs and ran a numbers game and parlay cards. He has plenty of street sense. And so he remembered the faces, among all of the others, of the two men who had hit and kicked him when he was down. He told the cops which way they had gone and without invitation jumped into their squad car.
A high-speed chase resulted, and Pee-Wee was along for the entire ride. The two men were captured. Pee-Wee was hospitalized and underwent surgery that night in Augusta. He returned twice to testify against the men, each of whom was sentenced to eleven months and twenty-nine days.
I have caused a lot of havoc in my life because I didn’t go onstage. That Augusta stuff happened because I did.
Chapter 21
In November 1981 I was in New York City, but I don’t remember why. I thought I had done an outdoor show, but that’s unlikely in November in the North.
The previous day my former manager, Wayne Oliver, and I had been in Shreveport, Louisiana, where I was introduced to his girlfriend. I told him I thought she was cute and asked her if she had a friend. She did and said she would bring her to New York as a blind date for me. By this time it was over for Linda and me, but I hadn’t been home long enough to move out.
Wayne’s girlfriend’s friend was the former Nancy Sepulvado—the current Mrs. George Jones.
To say it was love at first sight is unoriginal. It’s also true. We began talking seconds after we were introduced, and we continued all night. I felt closer to her in hours than I had to many folks I’d known for years.
We saw the sun rise over Manhattan, and then Nancy went to her own room. Soon she went home.
I went back on the road, but her memory was calling me home. Home to me, already, was anywhere she was. So I sneaked out one night on Wayne Oliver and showed up in Shreveport, where Nancy lived and worked. For a few romantic days and nights we went to dinner and movies and spent time together just walking. She had no idea I was missing shows simply to be with her.
Wayne found me. He always could. It was as if he had a network of George Jones spies. I never had an associate who could track me down anywhere in the world more effectively than Wayne Oliver. He wasn’t too happy about my absence, and neither were the promoters and fans who had been expecting me. I was booking for fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars a night, and I often got a percentage of the gate. I probably missed about fifty thousand dollars in income just to be with Nancy. But I didn’t care. My career was hot, and I had once again reached that comfort zone where I could call my booking agent and tell him to find a concert promoter for a show the next day. Because I gave the promoter so little notice, I often agreed to pl
ay for the door. Even if I only played thousand-seat honky-tonks and set ticket prices at ten dollars, I could pick up twenty thousand dollars in a weekend. But I was usually broke by the next weekend after sharing it with everyone entitled to a cut.
Money has just never been that important to me. I always suspected that love was. That lifelong suspicion was confirmed in the person of Nancy Sepulvado.
I was immediately intrigued by her energy. She worked harder than most men, and I had no idea in 1981 that someday she would work that hard to rebuild my tattered career and shattered life.
Nancy was a divorced mother of two daughters and supported her household by building telephones on an assembly line. She was paid by the hour and received time and a half for overtime. She usually worked a forty-hour week, then fifteen additional hours. She had worked for her employer for twenty years, having gone to work when her first daughter, Adina, was three weeks old. Nancy wore work gloves and a shop apron and could assemble a telephone with all of its components in about one minute. Something about all of that impressed me, what with my family’s background in manual labor and all.
Wayne forced me to do the responsible thing and go back on the road to work my shows. I’d look at the crowds and, as always, see a sea of faces. But this time each was Nancy’s. No teenage boy ever fell harder for a girl than I fell for Nancy.
So I called her and asked her to quit her job. It was snowing in Shreveport when my long-distance voice suggested she become my constant companion. She never forgot that, and hearing her tell the story pleases me to this day.
Her boss tried to warn her. He told her that musicians were no good and I was the worst of the bunch. He said he had read about me and repeatedly told her I would leave her stranded. He said he couldn’t believe she would give up a job where she was a utility operator with seniority to run off with a country singer as if she were a silly, starstruck girl.
She told him she didn’t want to hear it. She told him she knew what she was doing. She told him good-bye.