I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  They were coming over the footlights as band members dropped their instruments and ran. Some of the people hurled steel folding chairs onto the stage while others threw bottles. A few instruments were broken.

  In about one minute I could hear the sound of sirens as I saw the sight of neon. I was running for a bar I could see about a block from the hall. I went inside, found a stool, and didn’t go any farther.

  I don’t know why it took the entire band and half of the Fairfax police department at least three hours to find me.

  * * *

  On March 13, 1965, I saw the release of “Things Have Gone to Pieces,” a song that was listed for twenty-one weeks on the Billboard survey, peaking at number nine. That song was historic in that it was my first single record for Musicor Records, my fourth record label in eleven years. I had been on United Artists from 1961 to 1964.

  During the next seven years, I recorded a whopping two hundred and eighty songs for Musicor. That kind of output, even in those days, was unheard of. Thirty-two of the songs were single records. That means I had an average of almost five single records each year.

  Norro Wilson, who coproduces some of my albums today, was talking recently about the technical perfection of today’s records. If a line, for example, will fit in one verse better than another, it is electronically moved. If a guitar player wants to redo his part, his part alone is rerecorded until he and the producer are happy.

  Today’s records have more mechanical perfection than any recorded at any other time in history.

  Some also have less heart. Artists today might take two or three days to record one song. When I was at Musicor, I might record an entire album in three hours, a practice that violated the musician’s union’s rules. I’d go through one take, Pappy Daily would play back what I had done, and then he’d usually holler, “Ship it.” It would be at the pressing plant the next day.

  Yet I recorded some of my biggest songs in that casual fashion, including “Take Me,” “Walk Through This World with Me,” “When the Grass Grows over Me,” “A Good Year for the Roses,” and “Sometimes You Just Can’t Win.”

  Yet only one of those thirty-two songs went to number one. “Walk Through This World with Me” topped the charts for two weeks during the spring of 1967.

  At first I fought Pappy, telling him consistently that I thought the song was weak. He kept pitching it to me, and I kept telling him no. He regularly brought it to me at recording sessions, which meant that he brought it to me often.

  “I’m only cutting this here song to get him off of my back,” I told the musicians at the session when we finally recorded it.

  Pappy gloated when he finally got his way, and I was thrilled to have my first number-one tune in five years. (The last one had been “She Thinks I Still Care.”)

  I couldn’t believe that a song I had resisted so much had done so well. I was thirty-six years old, had been singing for money for more than half of my life, and was still learning.

  I still am to this day.

  Chapter 9

  In 1966 I tried to do something I’ve been trying to do ever since—slow down. People who’ve never rushed from city to city doing show after show think it’s glamorous. Those people usually have seen the entertainment business only from the audience. They don’t know what it’s like to finish at 10:30 P.M., leave the auditorium at midnight, ride a bus four or five hundred miles to a sound check at 4 P.M., and hurry to a chain hotel to grab a quick shower and gulp fast food. After all, you have to get to a venue in time to repeat the madness during the next twenty-four hours.

  All the while, you travel with the same dozen or so people you’ve seen every day for weeks as prisoners of a bus’s cramped quarters. When that many personalities are mixed with that many miles under that much pressure, tempers flare and moods change.

  And somebody always wants to be awake when others want to sleep. When I got my fill of that life, I often disappeared with just a bottle. I didn’t turn back up until I was ready, and by that time there were usually a few lawsuits waiting from promoters whose shows I had missed.

  My traveling today is considerably different. I try to work only three or four days a week and fly to the week’s first date on a private jet with my wife, Nancy. My band, whose members travel in their own bus, does the sound check for me before I arrive at each show. After the performance, I ride a new bus with no one but Nancy and my driver, Pee-Wee Johnson, who’s been with me for years.

  As early as 1966 I decided I’d try to lessen my marathon lifestyle by sometimes bringing the fans to me instead of my always going to the fans. My wife, Shirley, and I got the idea for a musical theme park. Musical theme parks are all over the country today, but thirty years ago the idea of asking country fans to drive to suburban Vidor, a medium-market city, was new.

  Today’s theme parks provide showers and electrical hookups for recreational vehicles. So did ours, and it was therefore ahead of its time because recreational vehicles weren’t as plentiful in 1966 and other camping facilities weren’t as nice. Until then I had never commercially developed a piece of property in my life, and neither had Shirley. We just had a good idea that was ahead of its time, and we relied on some people, who may have inflated the construction costs, to do the work for us.

  And, looking back, I realize I was too busy with my career to have the time to build a major tourist attraction. Without taking enough time off of the road, I tried to build a place for me to work off of the road.

  I bought several tracts of land that lay side by side on Lakeview Road, not far from my house in Vidor. The first thing I did was build a ranch house on the new land. I spent more than $100,000, which built a lot of house in those days.

  By then I had several quarter horses, a few Appaloosas, and some cattle. I had always had a special fondness for quarter horses. One of the most prestigious quarter-horse tracks in the nation is Ruidoso Downs near Roswell, New Mexico. A race named after me was held there for years.

  My new spread was named the George Jones Rhythm Ranch.

  Many years later, Conway Twitty opened Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. He and his family lived on the property, which was also a tourist attraction. I had planned something similar in East Texas.

  There is no telling how much money I spent building a performance stage, grandstands, and rodeo grounds. There was the cash I laid out, along with the money I missed because I passed up performance dates to oversee the construction of my theme park.

  On July 4, 1966, three years before man walked on the moon, I stepped foot on an outdoor performance arena intended to offer the world’s best country music on a regular basis.

  I’ve never been too good with money. I’ve always been able to earn it better than manage it. And I’ve always had a hard time saying no to people who needed it. A doctor once said I had deep-seated guilt about prosperity—that I felt unworthy. I don’t know if that’s true. But there has to be an explanation for the casual approach to money I once had.

  There are all kinds of stories around Nashville about me getting drunk and throwing cash out the car window or flushing it down the toilet. That’s something I don’t want to believe, but I suppose if there’s that much smoke there has to be a little fire. I probably did that a time or two.

  Merle Kilgore said he once saw me get drunk and flush money down the toilet, then decide I should flush the empty whiskey bottle too. He said I threw it into the toilet, and the bottle shattered the commode. Water, he said, ran everywhere.

  As far as my George Jones Rhythm Ranch grand opening, well, you never realize how many relatives, relatives of relatives, friends, and friends of friends you have until you have tickets for sale. They all want a free one. And everybody in the world seems to have cousins who want them too.

  Those folks just seemed to come out of the woodwork, and I couldn’t say no. I gave away about as many tickets to my grand opening as I sold. But still I made money because the debut was a financial suc
cess.

  The talent was Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, and several local acts. I had to pay all of them, as well as my own band, because I performed too.

  And to all of those folks who believe I don’t show up for shows, let me say that I was on hand for the very first, very last, and all shows in between at the George Jones Rhythm Ranch. That’s because there was only one.

  Dust collected on the grandstands, which were never used again after Independence Day, 1966. A sign that said CLOSED FOR THE SEASON was hung in a ticket booth. The season is still under way.

  Each performer was paid, then Merle and I and our bands took off. We went to a motel where Merle dragged out a reel-to-reel tape recorder and played a new song that he said would be his next release. It was called “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” and it came out five months later. It became Merle’s first number-one record.

  Not too long ago some of the old Jones Boys were talking to Tom Carter, who helped me write this book, about watching Merle thread his old-fashioned portable recorder to get their opinion of his tune. My band and I were probably the first people outside of Merle’s organization to hear the song, so we observed history in the making.

  But I wasn’t thinking that way on July 5, 1966. By then all of the fireworks had been exploded and the nation had gone back to work. I should have done the same thing.

  Instead, I went drinking. Somebody said I left home and didn’t return for four days, but that isn’t true.

  I was gone for about four weeks.

  Shirley had people looking for me everywhere. Pappy Daily was having a fit because I missed a recording session and no telling how many show dates. My band members, who were paid by the day, were unhappy because they missed so much work. All these years later I don’t remember specifically where I was for that month or so. I mostly just floated around Texas on my earnings from the big Fourth of July show.

  I was too often gone, and too often drunk, to fully realize the first signs that led to my second divorce. Don’t get me wrong. I knew Shirley was unhappy. We argued a lot, and when she moved to Nashville, she only lasted three months before returning to Texas and her friends and relatives. She suspected there were other women, and there were. One-night stands were a way of life for my friends and me in those days. Shirley once caught me in the backseat with a gal outside a Texas honky-tonk. On more than one occasion, a member of my band took me home after an extended tour because I was too drunk to get from the airport to my house. I was a bad husband and an absentee father to two boys. But no matter what I do now, I can never recover their boyhood years. It’s too bad that while they were undergoing a young childhood I was undergoing an old one.

  Shirley finally had enough.

  I had been taking strong drink for about twenty years and had not realized that the drink was finally beginning to take me. A lot of doctors would tell me years later that I was an alcoholic—that I had a sickness. Such thinking wasn’t popular in 1966. Heavy drinking wasn’t thought of as a disease. It was thought to be a character flaw. People didn’t say with compassion that someone had a drinking problem. They said with disgust that he was a drunk.

  I know that’s what folks were saying about me.

  Two things happened while I was married to Shirley that I can laugh at now, years into my sobriety. But no one was amused at the time.

  Once, when I had been drunk for several days, Shirley decided she would make it physically impossible for me to buy liquor. I lived about eight miles from Beaumont and the nearest liquor store. She knew I wouldn’t walk that far to get booze, so she hid the keys to every car we owned and left.

  But she forgot about the lawn mower.

  I can vaguely remember my anger at not being able to find keys to anything that moved and looking longingly out a window at a light that shone over our property. There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistened in the ignition.

  I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did. A lot of cars whipped around me on the two-lane highway leading from our house to the store. I wonder if the old-timers around East Texas still wonder about a guy who they swear they saw mowing the concrete.

  Another of my stunts has to do with a beautiful wooden fence that surrounded our house. I had had it built myself. I came home once just before dark, stopped my new Cadillac in front of the fence, looked it up and down, and drove through it. Then I turned and drove through it again. And again. And again. In the space of a few minutes, while drunk, I intentionally destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of fence and a new Cadillac.

  All of my valuable livestock got out. I was sound asleep on my living room couch the next day when my brother-in-law Dub woke me and demanded that I help round up the animals. I was too sick and too ashamed to help, but I did it anyhow because I don’t think I ever told Dub no.

  Those are just two of the many reasons I was divorced. Here is one thing that wasn’t a reason.

  I didn’t shoot J. C. Arnold.

  For years, numerous publications about me have talked about my shooting Arnold in the ass with a shotgun after catching him with my wife. The publications have also said that I later took Arnold to a doctor myself and paid the physician to dig buckshot out of his butt. Many said that I paid the doctor additional money to cover up the incident.

  When Tom Carter interviewed many of my old cronies for this book, even they insisted that I had shot Arnold because I was jealous over Shirley.

  Arnold, Shirley, and I were in a small business together. When I was gone, as I frequently was, Arnold and Shirley became “close.” I spoke to them about their situation, and I spoke harshly, to put it mildly. But all of my wrath came as words, not as buckshot.

  I wasn’t served any divorce papers. Shirley and I called her lawyer to our house, and I told him to give her what she wanted. I didn’t think she asked for enough, so I gave her more. Nancy recently found a copy of my old divorce papers. They show that Shirley got that new ranch house plus three other houses we owned in Vidor. I had fifteen thousand dollars in cash and savings bonds, and I forked that over. I had a quarter horse that I gave her, a couple of cars, our house in Florida, and my touring bus. I even gave her all of my band equipment. I was earning some songwriting royalties at the time, and I gave half of them to her, along with five hundred dollars a month in support for each boy.

  The only reason I didn’t give her more was because I had no more to give. After all, to hear her tell it, she had given me the best years of her life. And that was true.

  I moved to Nashville as an established recording artist and a failed man. I had made a ton of money by the standards of the day and was essentially starting all over again. I went from life at the George Jones Rhythm Ranch to living with Billy Wilhite at the Executive Inn. We had a two-bedroom apartment that was okay. But it was no more than a glorified closet compared to what I had owned in Texas. I started drinking virtually every day.

  I began each day with Bloody Marys to get rid of the previous day’s hangover. I ended each with Jim Beam to guarantee the next day’s hangover. Night after night, when I wasn’t on the road, Billy helped me up the stairs. We were two men in midlife living like roommates at school. Billy remembers that each time he put me to bed he struggled to remove my boots, which I made difficult by bending my toes. He then took his fist and clobbered my foot. I straightened my foot, and the boots came off.

  That’s a pretty simple recollection. It illustrates how I was searching for any little thing that, in those troubled days, might make for a smile.

  There are certain days that will always stand out in people’s minds. Most folks can remember where they were or what they were doing when they heard that President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elvis Presley had died.

  I have a vivid recollection of where I was when I first heard that I had lost my blood. That’s what they calle
d it back then—losing your blood—when you lost a close relative.

  I was playing a little town in Michigan on September 6, 1967, when my sisters Helen and Ruth called before the show, which was at an outdoor park. They said they had tracked me down through Pappy Daily, and that I should come home.

  “It’s Daddy,” Helen said. “He’s in a coma or something. We’ve had to put him in the hospital.”

  I drove to Detroit, where I caught the first plane for Houston. I drove from the airport to the hospital.

  I told you earlier how my dad never drank until after the death of my sister Ethel. After that, he had as much of a problem with alcohol as I did later.

  I was braced with booze when I went into the hospital room where Dad lay surrounded by Helen, Ruth, Herman, Dub, and a nurse. I stood there, drunk and dumbfounded, listening to the weakening breathing of the man who had sired me. Before long I noticed that he and I were the only people in the room.

  Old friends and relatives I talked to while writing this book said that my grief was too much to bear and that I tore up Dad’s hospital room as he lay dying. My memory isn’t the greatest, but that simply isn’t true either. Believe me, I knew what it was like to get angry and tear up a room. It required a lot of inner fury and hostility.

  I was hurting too much to be hateful.

  It’s funny what will go through your mind when your flesh and blood, who once would have done anything to help you through this world, is leaving it—and you’re powerless. During the long hours on the propeller plane from Detroit to Houston and the car ride to Dad’s bedside, I might have remembered that fine physical specimen of a man who could once chop an entire forest one tree at a time. Over the years he no doubt had toppled thousands of pounds of lumber.

  Yet the whiskey got him ounce by ounce.

  In his final days there were several problems. But one doctor stressed the hardening of arteries from the years of drinking. He said they were just too destroyed to be replaced.

  “If only I had seen him sooner,” he said to me.