I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  “No we’re not,” one argued.

  “Yes you are, you’re fired, now get out!” I hollered.

  “Bullshit, you can’t get rid of all of us like that,” one said.

  “The hell I can’t,” I stated.

  “Oh yeah, well, then you have to whip us all,” one said. “And even if you could whip us all, we’d show up at the next show. If you hire another band, well set up our equipment in front of them and play louder.”

  “Goddamn,” I said, “I got a band I can’t even fire.”

  I was drunk, of course, and one of them said I started to cry.

  Through the years there have probably been about two hundred Jones Boys. Because we worked, traveled, and lived so closely together, they came to know me pretty well.

  I don’t think that was ever more evident than one night when the band and I played somewhere in Texas and then rode over to Houston. As you know by now, I sometimes got mean when I drank. I got meaner when I drank and took diet pills.

  The band and I played Dewey Groom’s Long Horn Ballroom, and I was drunk and full of pills. I felt like I could whip the crowd and offered to do it.

  “And if you don’t like it, piss on you,” I said into the microphone.

  The place was filled with drunk and tough cowboys. Two or three came over the footlights onto the stage, but I was long gone.

  James Hollie and some of the other guys had already begun taking down their instruments, wanting to get out before the place erupted into a brawl. The band used the four chrome legs from the steel guitar to defend themselves against some angry crowd members as they backed off the stage and out the door.

  Amphetamines were very popular among Nashville musicians in the 1960s. One variety was yellow, and we called those pills “old yellers.” Another was speckled, and we called those “speckled birds.” Another was black, and we called those “black beauties.” Another was nicknamed “L.A. turnarounds.” The joke was that you could take one in Nashville, drive to Los Angeles, and turn around and drive back without sleep.

  Those pills gave their user artificial energy, making him feel peppy even if he was exhausted. One Nashville doctor prescribed them for most of us. A lot of hit songs were written, and a lot were recorded, by musicians taking those pills.

  Ralph Emery said one time that half of Nashville’s songwriting awards should be shared with that doctor who handed out those pills in the 1960s and 1970s, before Nashville’s amphetamine use was replaced by cocaine.

  I fumbled in my shirt pocket and got two black beauties on that Texas tour that included the Long Horn. James and some other guys begged me not to take them. They had seen how violent I could become when I mixed pills with booze.

  I let them plead with me, knowing full well that I was going to take the pills, no matter what they said. I was too drunk to keep on drinking. I knew the pills would “wake me up” enough to let me get a second wind and continue drinking. I put the pills on my tongue, stuck it out at the band, and swallowed.

  “That’s it!” somebody said. “Let’s get off this bus before he gets crazy.” They figured they had a few minutes before the pills took effect.

  The band got off at a Holiday Inn, and by then I was feeling the black beauties. I was beginning to level out, getting that new energy that was overtaking the alcohol-heavy sleepiness. I stayed on the bus by myself and told the driver to keep driving—anywhere. He just drove around Houston, and I just drank and let the pills do their thing.

  It should be said that there is a big misconception about my notorious years of drunkenness. Some folks think I was on a nonstop party. They think the good times always rolled.

  But drinking wasn’t always fun. My life, at times, was miserable because of drinking. So I drank to escape the misery caused by the drinking. At that point the loneliness and emptiness would overtake me. It was as if I were running from something, but I didn’t know what. As if I were running from someone, but didn’t know whom. I used to tell interviewers that I’d felt that way for most of my life.

  I was haunted by ghosts and demons of my own making.

  When the effects of amphetamines begin to wear off, and the user starts to come down, he often gets depressed. He can take another pill, but a time finally comes when his body is too tired and won’t respond to the stimulants.

  That’s what was happening to me as I rode in the dark with no one but the bus driver, passing Houston’s flickering streets. In the back, by myself, I watched the houses go by like the wasted years of my life. I had a hundred crazy thoughts, but none of them helped. I had as many crazy questions, but not one answer.

  I finally decided the answers were that there were no answers. So I said to hell with it. I loaded my pistol and fired six rounds into the floor, walls, and ceiling. I reloaded, emptied the pistol, reloaded, and emptied it again.

  I was careful not to shoot near the driver, who never said a word. I always seemed to hire drivers who looked straight ahead and never stopped driving when my shooting started.

  I ran out of bullets and no longer had noise as my only companion. I was tired and felt totally alone when I told the driver to take me to the motel.

  He parked the bus, and he and I went to our rooms.

  The Jones Boys and I were off work the next day. I had time to sober up before climbing back aboard the bus to head to the next show. I was the last one to get on board and was ready for all the remarks about the bullet holes.

  No one said anything. I didn’t know the band had come up with a strategy. Nothing they had ever said had prevented me from going out of my mind when I took a notion. If nothing spoken had worked, perhaps something visual would.

  Across every bullet hole the band members had pasted a Band-Aid. They had found children’s bandages, the kind with clowns and colors and happy faces on them. That many conspicuous Band-Aids made it look as though the bus had been through a firing squad. But it had only been through one of my fits. I couldn’t look any direction without seeing a reminder.

  Nobody would let me remove those bandages. So we sat there, me looking at the Band-Aids and everybody else looking at me.

  “Where the hell is the driver!” I finally fumed. Somebody went to the front desk to ask about him and discovered that he had never checked into the motel. Clearly he had taken off after he got safely away from the bus and my shooting. None of us ever saw him again.

  The band always had its own way of getting even with me when I embarrassed them or made them angry. Six or seven musicians, creative by nature, can come up with some original ways to get back at a man.

  And remember that practical jokes have always been a big part of life on the road for country music players.

  I remember playing a great one on Charley Pride, the first real popular black singer in country music. We were in Waco and went to the home of a disc jockey after our package show. Like most heavy drinkers, I wanted everyone else to drink when I drank.

  I told Charley he’d have to match me drink for drink, and he argued about it. But I was insistent and told him he could keep pace with me or do his drinking somewhere else. Not having my kind of tolerance, Charley got drunk and passed out.

  That’s when the disc jockey and I crept out to Charley’s car. I painted the initials of the Ku Klux Klan on its side.

  Realize this was in the middle 1960s, not long after passage of the Civil Rights Act. Remember that a lot of country fans in those days were rednecks and didn’t cotton to the idea of a black man singing their music. Charley, in fact, had had two hit records on RCA before the label would even let it be known he was black. Record executives were afraid that the color of his skin would hurt record sales, and they weren’t too sure that a bigoted fan wouldn’t try to hurt Charley.

  Charley staggered out of bed the next morning with a head that would barely squeeze through the door. I told him the KKK had come for him during the night.

  He went to the window and saw those white K’s painted on his car. He put his hand over his
heart and held his chest a lot before we could get him to have some orange juice. He figured out what we had done and called us some names. He would have figured it out sooner if he hadn’t been groggy with a hangover.

  My own hungover thinking was slow when the band decided to get even with me for perforating the bus with bullets. We rode from Texas to California with those Band-Aids before anybody even talked about taking them off.

  I had seen enough Band-Aids and enough of the inside of the bus. I loved the Pacific Coast Highway and the California countryside. So I told the substitute driver to pull over when we rolled past a car lot somewhere in Los Angeles, and I bought a new Buick convertible just so I could absorb the sunshine.

  I had pitched another good drunk between Texas and California. I had felt no pain when I laid down the cash for that new car. The next day I was hungover when the band went to the bus and I went to the convertible. I had decided that I would follow the bus in the car and be refreshed by the time we reached the place for the show.

  People who have alcohol and drug hangovers are jumpy. They irritate and excite easily.

  Unbeknownst to me, the band had fixed a bomb to each of the Buick’s eight spark plugs. I turned on the ignition, and they all went off. The blast shook the car, and smoke boiled from under the hood.

  There is no telling what went through my hungover mind—perhaps I thought I was in an earthquake. I leaped out of the convertible. I didn’t open the door, I sprung over it.

  The band members were bent over laughing at me. They had to raise the hood and remove those contraptions before the car would start. Then the George Jones Show went down the road with most members riding the perforated bus and me trailing in the convertible. To this day I’ve forgotten who drove me.

  About this same time I had a week off and Billy Wilhite and I went to Winchester, Virginia, for some rest and relaxation. I think we knew some folks there through Melba Montgomery. We wound up doing some heavy drinking with the police chief and went out with him on his boat. Word got out in that little town that we were there, and soon the chiefs house was filled with guests. An all-night party lasted for four days.

  One guy got so drunk he mistook the bare yard for a swimming pool. He stood on the banister, about ten feet off the ground, and dove into the “water.”

  Billy heard the man’s neck pop from inside the house, came running, and told me he was dead. A damper was put on the festivities until the guy began to moan.

  An ambulance was called, and I went back inside, where no one was mistaking land for wet stuff. They knew the real thing. The next thing I knew, some ambulance driver had me by the arm and said the diver was going to die if he didn’t go to the hospital. But the guy wouldn’t go unless he was accompanied by George Jones.

  A drunk I didn’t even know had put his life in my hands!

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

  They put an IV in the guy’s arm, a bottle in my hand, and we were off. I sat in the back with the patient and had no idea what to do. So each time he groaned I just took another swallow. His pain hurt me less than any I’ve ever felt.

  We got to the hospital, and an intern started hollering, “Who’s going to pay this man’s bill? I can’t look at him until I know who’s paying the bill.”

  “How much will it cost to get him looked at?” I asked.

  “Probably one hundred dollars,” he said.

  “Well, here’s three hundred,” I said. “Now fix him and buy yourself some socks.” I’d never seen somebody in medicine work without socks. I thought right then that the intern would never become a brain surgeon.

  Billy and I left there on a Wednesday for a Thursday-night show somewhere in New York State. We got to La Guardia International Airport and were supposed to take a connecting flight on Mohawk Airlines, a commuter service. I realized I had time to have a few drinks, catch a later flight, and still make the show on time.

  So Billy and I went to the bar.

  We eased onto our stools, ordered a round, and watched the plane we were supposed to be on crash. It took off, rose about a foot, twisted, and landed sideways. It flipped onto its side, breaking off a wing. There were no fatalities.

  Billy and I stared at each other. I wondered if I was as white as he was.

  “Jones,” said Billy. “This is one time when your stop for a drink might have actually saved your life.”

  And so it went, the singing while soused from the drinking, drugs, and drudgery of it all. The women, nameless beauties in every town, were as easy as a three-chord progression. Those who visited rock ’n’ roll stars were called groupies. Those who came to country shows were called snuff queens. I don’t know why.

  In 1995 Waylon Jennings was writing his life story, and his editor asked him to name all of the girls he’d slept with. He thought the request was a joke and said so. Any editor who was around the country music industry during the freewheeling 1960s would have seen that asking most male country stars to count the women would be like asking a bricklayer to remember all the bricks.

  But there were some women who weren’t that way. They had a sincere interest in the music business, a sincere interest in me, or both. Many came to Nashville with an empty purse and a million-dollar dream. They just wanted to make it.

  I don’t remember where I was the first time someone brought a girl singer who had recorded one song that was a small hit on Epic Records onto my bus. I had heard and liked “Apartment # 9.” I’m not sure I even got the singer’s name the first time I heard it. I might have been drunk. But very soon I’d join the world in coming to know Tammy Wynette.

  Chapter 11

  I’ve been divorced from Tammy Wynette for twenty-one years. During that time I’ve never said an unkind thing about her publicly. I hate to start now but guess I have to because of this thing about telling the whole truth in my life story.

  The reporters hounded me for years after the breakup. I got to where I wouldn’t even talk to them. I’m from the country, and in the country a man doesn’t kiss a woman and tell, and he doesn’t disgrace her reputation, no matter what kind of relationship he does, or doesn’t, have with her.

  By now you might have noticed that I haven’t said many negative things about anybody in this book. I’ve tried to air no one’s dirty laundry but my own. I figure folks have the right to their privacy and to their own freedom of speech. If they choose to use that freedom to talk about themselves, that’s fine. They don’t need me to do it for them.

  I’ll point out the obvious—that it takes two to make a marriage work—and after six years Tammy’s and mine failed. It was a team effort for a team that went down in defeat.

  My wife, Nancy, called Tammy’s office twice during the writing of this book in 1995. Nancy, Tom Carter, and I agreed that we should give Tammy a chance to tell her side about our courtship and marriage. Nancy told Tammy’s secretary how we felt. Perhaps Tammy could have remembered things I’ve forgotten. But Tammy never returned Nancy’s calls, so I assume she didn’t want to participate in reconstructing the history of our lives together. If she didn’t want to tell the way she remembers it, I don’t feel she has the right to complain about how I remember it.

  My heavy drinking was largely responsible for our problems. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure that out. But in Tammy’s 1979 autobiography, Stand By Your Man, she wrote that she knew I had a drinking problem when she met me in 1966. I had made no pretense of slowing down when we were married. I never made a secret about my bouts with the booze.

  A woman who married George Jones and complained that he drank would have been like a woman marrying the Reverend Billy Graham and complaining that he preached. I’m glad Reverend Graham is still preaching and just as glad that I’m no longer drinking.

  Before I tell you what I did to damage my marriage to Tammy, let me tell you two things I didn’t do. I never beat her (although I slapped her once), and I never shot her or shot at her.

  There have be
en published and motion picture accounts claiming both as facts. The simple truth is they’re simply not true.

  Another story claimed that I once broke the heels off 150 pairs of Tammy’s high-heeled shoes, then told her, “Now that will keep you from walking out on me.”

  Another said that I, while “high on cocaine,” placed the barrel of a high-powered rifle in the small of Tammy’s back and forced her to stand for hours while I continued to take the drug.

  I suppose those kinds of lies sell newspapers and magazines.

  But Nancy got in her licks against one of the writers who printed false information about my treatment of Tammy.

  In 1983 I opened Jones Country, another theme park I’ll talk more about later. This writer came to visit, and Nancy immediately devised a plan. She asked if the writer would like to tour the property on the back of a three-wheeled vehicle. The writer was eager.

  The writer climbed on the machine behind Nancy, who handled the controls. Nancy drove the three-wheeler down to a creek and parked in shallow water. Then she took off abruptly.

  The machine reared up, throwing the writer into the water.

  “You did that on purpose!” the writer screamed at Nancy.

  “That’s what you get for that crap you wrote about George Jones,” Nancy said, and she drove off, leaving the wet writer on foot.

  And now, almost a quarter century after our divorce, some folks still think I’m married to Tammy Wynette. Not a week goes by when one of the Jones Boys isn’t asked about Tammy and me. Some folks are really out of touch.

  Nancy and I were in bed in the summer of 1994 when the doorbell was rung after midnight. That itself was disturbing since I live behind a high fence with an electronic gate in a house that’s several hundred yards from the road. I thought I had privacy.

  Nancy went to the door to face a drunk woman. Her hair was messed, her dress dirty, and she had torn her nylons while climbing over our fence.

  “I want to talk to George Jones,” the drunk said.