by George Jones
Nancy and her daughter came safely home. She put her key in the lock, but the door eased open by itself. The thugs had come in her absence and given me a little cocaine until I had a buzz, then mercilessly crammed it up my nose repeatedly until I was out of my mind.
It had been another day and night in the early courtship of George and Nancy Jones.
Chapter 22
In 1981 I had a hit record entitled “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will).” Much of the public thought the tune was about Tammy Wynette, although we had been divorced for six years. Most people hadn’t yet heard about Nancy and never really knew that much about Linda since my profile with her was always low.
Knowing what people thought about Tammy and me, I often changed the words of “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me” when I sang it publicly, particularly on national television:
If drinkin’ don’t kill me
Tammy’s memory will. I sang.
The song rode the Billboard country survey for fifteen weeks. I followed that with my one hundred and second single record in twenty-five years. It was called “Still Doin’ Time” and was about a man who lived in a cage of taverns from which he could not escape. He was “still doin’ time.” The song became my second number-one record in less than two years.
Some folks might be disappointed because I haven’t put more information in this book about my recording sessions and song selections. I usually let whatever producer I was working for select the songs, then I selected from his selections. I’d usually pick ten from about twenty-five prospective songs. Why not? I wasn’t writing myself anymore, and my producer, whoever he happened to be at the time, always brought me songs from the best writers in Nashville. I’ve never understood singers who listened to hundreds and hundreds of songs before deciding which ten or eleven to record. Do they really think their own judgment is that much better than the accomplished producer and songwriters working with them?
I can’t tell you a lot about my recording sessions either. First of all, I’ve worked so many of them too drunk to walk but not too drunk to sing. I can’t remember much about them. Secondly, there have been so many at this point in my career that they seem interchangeable. Thirdly, I’ve always believed that once you sing a song your best, you go on to the next song. The only time I rerecorded and rerecorded a tune was when I was too drunk, high, or both to get my part right. I’ve already told you about some of those songs.
Billy Sherrill had nervous obsessions about retakes. He’d call me at home and say my version of a song had some flat notes or improper phrasing or something.
I’d tell him to listen again.
He would, but then he’d call again, insisting that I come in to rerecord. I complained a lot, but I always went back to grant the producer’s wishes. Then, if the record flopped, no one could say it was my fault.
I could not help but be astonished about the reverse parallel of my life and career. The more anguish I underwent in my personal life, the more my career flourished. Somebody suggested that was because my songs were autobiographical. Each time I came up with a new single it was as if I were giving a confession set to music.
Those songs, in many ways, did reflect the circumstances of my personal life. I didn’t care. The press had made my personal life so public so frequently for so long I didn’t care what people knew, didn’t know, or thought they knew about me.
If folks bought my records because they thought I was breaking down, which I happened to be, then so be it. When all else failed, I could always get as many shows as I wanted because I was hot on the radio.
My bouts with paranoia, in fact, became worse, although that seems hard to believe. I suppose, at this point, much of my entire life story seems hard to believe. I’m fortunate that there were always a few musicians, managers, road managers, old friends, girlfriends, record executives, hoodlums, songwriters, ex-wives, ex-cons, and others who can verify my story.
I’ve often thought that the biggest criticism I’ll get of this book is that people will swear no sane man ever lived as I did. Well, you must have realized by now that there were times when I was totally insane. But I lived through all I’ve told, and I lived to tell it all.
I was more “sure” than ever in 1981–82 that I was being followed, and I had some days when I simply had to get out of town to run from my pursuers, real or imagined. I would demand that Nancy take Adina out of school so we could drive. We had no destination, I just wanted to be in motion. That’s when I felt safest.
If we became hungry, we would check into a motel and eat what little food we had taken along, such as canned sardines or fast-food hamburgers. I was too frightened to go out for food. I just knew the bad guys were on my tail.
My cocaine-induced paranoia had reached hysterical proportions, and the only thing I did to lessen that was to take more cocaine. I’ve already explained that the cocaine user wants nothing but more cocaine. Once he gets really high, he thinks the only thing he needs is more cocaine.
God, I was sick.
Whenever I disappeared from the Muscle Shoals–Florence area, the gangsters who had invaded my life became worried. I had additional reasons to suspect by then that they had formed an alliance with my management. I wanted to interview some of those people who were on my former management team for this book. Many apparently did not want to be interviewed. One did not return calls on three occasions.
I told Nancy that there was no point in our slipping out of northwestern Alabama to find peace when I was convinced I was being followed wherever I went. What kind of peace would we find?
So, I decided, we would leave by dark of night. I told Nancy to pack everything she could. We left a lot of things behind, intending to fetch them later.
Adina, still too young to legally drive, followed in another car. There was no room in Nancy’s and mine. It was jammed to the roof with belongings.
We eased through the late-night, quiet streets of Florence-Muscle Shoals. We stopped at a red light, went forward, and I did what I did about every fifteen seconds, which was check over my shoulder for Adina. I didn’t see her car. The young and inexperienced driver had somehow gotten lost.
Adina, then and now, is bright. That child had the sense not to drive aimlessly through the night trying to find Nancy and me. She instead did what Nancy predicted she would do and drove back to the house we had left. But we weren’t sure of that at the moment.
When Adina arrived at our home, so had the drug-dealing thugs. They didn’t make their presence known to her. They knew that Nancy and I wouldn’t be far behind.
Nancy drove silently into the Florence city limits and came to a full stop at the first stop sign. She gently accelerated through the intersection. No one was in sight. We were not that far from the house we had fled—the house where we prayed Adina would be safely waiting.
Then the red lights and sirens came on. Police cars sped around Nancy and forced our car to the curb. Before she could turn off her engine, two cops stood at her window. I was sitting in the passenger’s seat going out of my mind. I knew she hadn’t committed any moving violation. I was sure, therefore, that the cops had stopped us on the hoodlums’ behalf. I continued looking over my shoulder out my window, thinking someone was going to walk up to our car and shoot me for trying to run from Alabama.
“Out of the car!” a cop yelled at Nancy.
“What for?” she said.
“You ran that last red light,” he said.
Nancy called him a liar and asked him how much he had been paid to stop her. With that, he spun her around and slammed her against the car. She was kicking and screaming when he locked her handcuffs into place.
Nancy and I were loaded into a police car and taken to jail. She was thrown into a cell by herself while I was left standing free. Nancy was sure she knew what was about to happen.
Adina, meanwhile, was still waiting in the car all by herself in our driveway, hoping we would return to the house she had no keys to enter.
Nancy continued yelling and cussing inside the police station, telling the entire force that it was accepting payoffs from the Florence and Muscle Shoals goons. She hadn’t run that light and everyone in that place knew it, she kept insisting.
“How much are they paying you crooked cops to arrest me?” she demanded.
An officer walked to her cell and told her that if she would simply calm down everything would be all right. She spat through the bars on him, and then she spat again. I’m glad the bars were between them. Otherwise, he might have hit her.
Then I joined in with the authorities. “Nancy, just calm down,” I said. “If you’ll calm down we can work this out. Everything will be fine.”
Boy, was I wrong.
“George,” she said, in front of the cops. “Don’t you realize what they’re going to do? They’re going to leave me in this cell and take you somewhere and fill you full of cocaine.”
She meant they would incapacitate me with the drug so I would lose the courage to try to leave town and their clutches again.
One of the officials said I’d have to step out of the cell area while Nancy’s arrest was being “processed.” I did, and in no time I was put into a squad car and whisked to the recreation hall. I was taken by uniformed officers to the back room.
Consciously, I’m sure I knew what was about to happen. But I couldn’t believe it, not with the cops wearing uniforms and all. In the shadows I saw familiar faces. On a table I saw a familiar sight—a pile of cocaine. I was put into a chair, and someone stood on each side of me, shoveling tiny spoonfuls of the powder up my nose and yelling at me to inhale harder.
I was back at the police station in about thirty minutes, Nancy figured. I was, she said, “higher than a kite.” I’m sure I was delirious.
Nancy, without explanation, was suddenly released from custody and told to take me home. A jailer opened her cell, and she kicked him hard in the leg. She continued to kick him, until another official grabbed her, then she kicked hell out of him too.
Why wasn’t she arrested for assault and battery on a police officer? They had done nothing to her except let her out of jail, yet no arrest was made and no charges were filed when she attacked them. Obviously, there was never any intention of arresting Nancy for anything. The cops had wanted to put her in a cell so they could take me to their bosses, men who controlled me through the strings of cocaine.
I think Nancy called Big Daddy to ask if he knew Adina’s whereabouts. He told her he had reason to believe she was safe, at home, untouched in our driveway. And she was. She never unlocked her car doors, and she never thought about leaving.
Then Big Daddy told Nancy what he had said earlier about certain people in Alabama holding a fat life insurance policy on me. He wondered aloud how much cocaine I could take without overdosing. There was more talk about what an autopsy would show, and Big Daddy asked, “How do you know there would be an honest autopsy?”
They could keep me wrecked and control my finances. They could kill me and collect from an insurance policy. Whether I was dead or alive, they couldn’t lose.
Nancy pulled into the driveway we had tried to run from and there, sobbing inside her car, sat Adina. Mother and daughter ran into each other’s arms. I did my best to struggle out of the car and to my feet. We went into the house that now, more than ever, seemed like our prison. My drug-soaked mind was even more altered by the stress of having tried to flee, only to get caught, only to be returned against my will.
Nancy called Big Daddy the next day, and he talked to her about the wisdom of my trying to run. He told her I should get out of town at any cost. If I stayed I would die because I had figured out too much about my associates’ ties to the drug world. He urged us to try to leave again, explaining what I already knew: I would have to quit show business. After all, how could I go underground if I was making public appearances in front of thousands of people?
I was willing to quit. I had told Nancy that the three of us would go away and that I could walk away from the music business forever if that’s what it took to save our lives.
Eventually, we did follow Big Daddy’s advice and leave Florence-Muscle Shoals, but of course I didn’t permanently quit show business. I didn’t have to do that.
Somehow, somebody apparently found out that Big Daddy had been supplying information to Nancy and me. We were living in Louisiana when we got the call from someone who said Big Daddy’s head was in a parking lot—detached from its body. His murder, to this day, remains unsolved except to the person or persons who committed it and the law enforcement officials who conspired to let them.
And still Nancy stayed with me.
Nancy and I tried again to leave Florence-Muscle Shoals. Leaving in the middle of the night hadn’t worked, so I decided we would rent a truck, load the furniture onto it, and drive to a place we had rented in Lafayette, Louisiana.
I think the bad guys must have been watching us load and were intent on not creating any problems until the instant we pulled away from the house. That approach, they might have figured, would be even more intimidating.
And that’s what happened.
We had loaded everything into a moving van, including Adina’s car, and the truck had departed for Lafayette. Nancy, Adina, and I were about to leave in Nancy’s car when some of my associates pulled up.
Nancy later recalled coming into a room once before, after they’d had me for two days. She found me crying and sitting on the floor as they forced me to ingest cocaine. They kidnapped me on our second moving day and gave me similar treatment.
Nancy had about twenty dollars when I was taken this time. She was crying and begging the men not to take me, and I couldn’t stand to see her that upset, although I knew it was justified. So I tried to comfort her. “I’m going to go with these guys for a few minutes. I’ll be right back,” I said.
She stopped crying, and I shouted, “Don’t leave me, Nancy.” She didn’t know what to do.
To make a long story short, Nancy was contacted by Pee-Wee, who found me and took me to my new residence.
Nancy had an insight into me that no other woman has ever had. She realized that, with my shattered nerves, I simply couldn’t take pressure. So she began to assume more and more of my business responsibilities. That wasn’t hard for her. She didn’t have to take them from me because I just let them go.
She learned about booking shows and how much money goes to a booking agent. She learned about recording contracts and when they come, up for renewal. She learned how to get the biggest advance possible out of a record label and how to commit that label to promoting its product.
The greatest mystery of the entire recording industry, to me, is that a record label will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars producing an album, then let it lie on the shelf without investing any money in its promotion.
The recording industry can be very underhanded. That’s hardly a secret. In the old days, I saw acts that sounded like current successful acts come to Nashville and record labels tie them up in contract so they couldn’t record elsewhere. The label might not record them at all or might not release their records if they did. But the new act, because of the manipulation, wasn’t a threat to the label’s established act.
Nancy learned the ins and outs of the business in both its legitimate and dark sides.
I worked a show shortly after the attempted move to Lafayette, and the drug dealers showed up. I was already high, and when they came with their stash I was ready to accept. Nancy tried to reason with me.
Let me say here and now that Nancy never really nagged me. She realized early in our relationship that when I was high, I didn’t like preaching and I didn’t like nagging. They served no purpose except to worsen things.
I’ve seen her get up and begin to repair a house that I had forgotten I’d totally destroyed the previous night. She never mentioned what happened, and I was too ashamed to ask. To this day, when women ask Nancy for her advice as to how they can help alcoholic
husbands, she urges them to do many things, but the one thing she insists they don’t do is nag.
Yet on this particular day, she didn’t want me to be with the men who had forced us out of Alabama. I wouldn’t have wanted to be had I been sober.
Nothing would do me, and I put Nancy out of our hotel and locked myself in with the dealers. I got too wrecked to do that night’s show, disappeared, and Nancy didn’t hear from me for two weeks.
She had no idea if I was dead or alive, except she figured my death would have made the television news. She watched the news many times, fearful of what she didn’t want to see. She read newspapers, looking for what she didn’t want to find.
I called our new home in Lafayette one day and told her I was coming home and told her to tell Adina. I said I wanted to get professional help. Nancy later said Adina was elated, thinking we were at last going to have a home and a drug- and alcohol-free life.
I was wrecked when I arrived, and Nancy later remembered that I looked like “death eating a cracker.” I don’t think she wanted Adina to see me with my weight loss, babbling and out of my mind. The duck and the old man were ranting uncontrollably.
Adina had been too optimistic. For some reason she had really believed this time my pledge to make a life for the three of us was sincere.
I don’t remember why I wanted us to stay at a motel that night. Perhaps I had no reason at all, or perhaps Nancy thought Adina wouldn’t see me on what she prayed would be my final binge.
I had come home as a filthy and mentally destroyed man. But, after fourteen days, I had come home.
Adina went into her motel room, and then Nancy took me to ours. I don’t remember anything else about the next several hours.
Nancy said I suddenly turned on her and called her by the names of the men who sold and forced drugs on me. She knew their names well. She said she told me she was not those men but that I insisted she was. I was mad at those men for providing me with drugs, and I was furious at her for pretending not to be them.