I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  The divorce had triggered my renewed drinking, and I drank during the entire day it was granted. Everyone predicted I would miss the grand opening, a gathering of the most important music industry people in Nashville. I fooled folks by showing up and even more by performing.

  It had rained all day before the opening. Streets were flooded throughout Nashville. Everybody thought the first-night festivities would be a flop. But so many folks turned out you couldn’t have stirred them with a stick.

  A lot of country stars were on hand, and they jumped onstage. The club, located in historic Printers Alley, the hotbed of Nashville tourism during the 1970s, had the spirit of the Possum Holler of a few years earlier.

  And its layout was very clever. A VIP Lounge was built at the same level as the stage. That meant that if a celebrity was sitting in the lounge he or she had to do nothing but take a few steps in order to be onstage. The stars usually sat together, so it was tempting for several to make their way to the stage after the first one broke the ice. Once again I had a place whose customers were the Who’s Who of Nashville entertainers.

  I didn’t actually own it. Once again I simply put my name on it and was supposed to be paid for that.

  As so often has been the case in my life, I didn’t get my money. People have asked why I haven’t hired people through the years to handle my money. I have. And some of the handlers turned out to be some of the biggest thieves. I don’t have the greatest financial mind myself.

  The new Possum Holler was intended to be a place where my band could perform on the nights we weren’t working the road. That was a lot of nights.

  I missed more personal engagements than I kept from 1975 through 1980. The nickname “No Show Jones” really became solid. I now go along in stride with my old reputation, which I’ll never live down in some folks’ minds.

  Today I own several cars and trucks for Nancy, my staff, and me. Each has a license plate that reads NOSHOW 1 or NOSHOW 2 and so forth. A lot of country stars put their names on their touring bus. Not me. I simply have NO SHOW on the front of mine. Traffic directors at my concerts always know it’s my bus, and I’m waved right through.

  Most of my concert promoters and disappointed fans in the middle to late 1970s blamed my absence on alcohol, and they were right. I had drunk heavily for years and had pitched benders that might last two or three days. But in the 1970s I was drunk the majority of the time for half a decade. If you saw me sober, chances are you saw me asleep. It was a five-year binge laced with occasional sickness from sobriety. The hangovers start to hurt real badly when you pass forty.

  Some folks think they’re in pain if they’ve had one too many cocktails the night before. They have no idea how it feels to have one too many pints. It’s like going through a violent food poisoning with an ax in your skull.

  The second Possum Holler was managed by Alcy Benjamin “Shug” Baggott, a veteran Nashville nightclub operator who had owned five or six clubs before Possum Holler. Shug decided he wanted to open a country music nightclub that catered to tourists. That might not seem like an original idea in Nashville, but, in 1975, it was. Tourists used to complain about the absence of live country music in Nashville. It’s largely absent to this day. With the exception of the Grand Ole Opry and the concerts staged at Opryland during the summer, there is little live country music in the capital city of country music.

  Maybe I should open another Possum Holler. Not a chance.

  Shug, by his own admission, didn’t like country music. But he liked the money he thought he could make off of it. He asked a friend whose name he should put on the marquee. The guy suggested Faron Young, Webb Pierce, or George Jones.

  I wish Faron or Webb had gotten the deal.

  I got it not because I had sold a certain number of records, and not because my shows drew a certain amount of people, but because Shug and I had the same barber.

  I didn’t know Shug, and he didn’t know me. But whenever I went for a haircut, which I’ve done almost weekly for many years, the barber would play my records. Whenever Shug was in the shop he had to hear me sing, and he didn’t like it. If I left the shop before Shug, he always asked the barber to take my records off.

  Shug had gone to a benefit show for Ivory Joe Hunter at the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974. Tammy and I were on the bill, one of the last we worked before our divorce. Shug later told a lot of folks, including me, that Tammy and I were his favorite part of the program. He even said he became a George Jones convert.

  I had no idea, at that point, that Shug and I shared the same barber or that he had seen me perform. I still hadn’t heard his name.

  I went into the Hall of Fame Motor Lounge one night with Billy Wilhite, and Shug sat down at our table uninvited. He introduced himself and explained what he wanted to do with a nightclub and me. But I was too drunk to talk business, he said later. I know I was too drunk to remember.

  Shug suggested that Wilhite, he, and I meet the next day when I was sober. Little did he know.

  I made the meeting but not the sobriety. Once again I was too wasted to talk seriously about anything. That happened about four times.

  Shug finally caught me sober, and we struck some kind of handshake deal. Nothing was ever put in writing. I’ve always been overly trusting of people. And I’ve often been taken to the cleaners. Possum Holler Two proved to be no exception.

  I’ll never know how much money was made or who got it all from a watering hole bearing my name. The power of endorsement has always been strong. And George Jones endorsing a tavern in the 1970s would have been like Michael Jordan endorsing a basketball in the 1990s. It couldn’t miss.

  Shug took me to the club’s intended location, and I started walking through the place. It had previously been a nightclub under another name, and I started telling Shug how he should remodel.

  “Take out this wall here,” I said. “Put up a wall there. Paint here, and lay some red carpet here.”

  I was full of ideas, and Shug loved them. He just couldn’t afford them. He estimated that my ideas would cost about $100,000 and said he didn’t want to spend that much money.

  I told him I’d put up half. I didn’t tell him I was broke.

  I sent him to Jerry Jackson, my accountant at the time, and told him Jerry would write him a check off my account for $50,000.

  Shug went to see Jerry, and Jerry laughed at him.

  “George doesn’t have any money,” Shug was told. “He’s broke.”

  Wilhite pointed out that I had never contested any of my three divorces and that I had never gotten a fair settlement out of one. I don’t know why I always did that, except that I don’t like to argue with people about money, especially folks who used to care for me. At the time of my divorce from Tammy, I was still in love. I thought if I gave her everything in the divorce she might give me another chance.

  So I had no money except the cash in my pocket, perhaps a couple of thousand dollars. I could have gone out and worked a road date and picked up a few thousand, and occasionally I did that. But I was usually too drunk to make the trip or too drunk to perform after I arrived. I blew off more shows during the 1970s than most country singers were offered.

  All of my life I hid when I hurt. At that time I hid in a bottle.

  Since I wasn’t traveling to a lot of shows, my old bus was parked outside the Possum Holler club. Tourists saw the bus, saw my name on its side, saw my name on the marquee, and assumed that if they came inside they could see me. We had a lot of human traffic. After a while, I decided that Shug Baggott, who had walked into my life through a barbershop, was a pretty smart guy.

  I asked him to become my manager. He said no.

  I said I would pay him five hundred dollars a week plus expenses, not bad money twenty years ago. He asked if I was going to pay him out of the money he was loaning me. I got his point.

  My business affairs were in as much of a mess as my personal life. My band hadn’t been paid in about fifteen weeks. Shug had no eagerness to jum
p into my personal and career management for me. But I was vulnerable, and perhaps he recognized that. Shug could be very persuasive, and he was obsessed with getting cash.

  “At that point in my life my first priority was making money,” he said in 1995. In time he made a believer out of me.

  At first, things between Shug and me were fine. He eventually became my manager. His brother, Sandy Baggott, became my road manager and got me to some of my dates. I went several weeks without missing a show. I often arrived drunk, but I arrived nonetheless. Then Shug came up with a rich guy who wanted to invest in my career. He offered me one million for a one-year exclusive performance contract on me. I was already under a booking agreement to AQ Talent, owned by Queenie Acuff, an old friend, and Billy Wilhite. Queenie and Billy graciously tore up their contract with me so I could take the million-dollar deal, which offered a quarter million dollars up front.

  I got my $250,000. But I was heavily in debt to my band, accountant, lawyers, and others. My quarter million dollars didn’t last long.

  Before long it was the same old story. I’d work, but I never had any money. My band and my creditors weren’t paid in full, just enough to keep them hanging on. The people who handled my money had explanations, but never any I could understand. There are a lot of ways to confuse a simple man who is as trusting as he is drunk.

  Given my intoxication and state of mind, it took all of my strength to work. Since I wasn’t getting ahead, I again didn’t care if I worked or not. It was all a vicious circle on a downward spiral.

  And so I drank more.

  Realize that alcohol, if consumed enough, will lessen hunger pangs. The hardened drunk will not realize how hungry he becomes. I had become like that, so it wasn’t overly hard for me not to eat for days. The little nourishment I had came from the few vitamins that hide in blended whiskey. Without anything close to a proper diet, I lost a lot of weight and I was extremely weak most of the time.

  I was booked one night into the Possum Holler club and arrived staggering drunk and exhausted. I told Shug I simply couldn’t go onstage. He reminded me that my appearance had been advertised. He also reminded me that I had missed other scheduled appearances at my own club. I had no credibility left in Nashville, he insisted.

  He was right.

  “But I just can’t go on tonight,” I said, pleading. “I’m too tired to stand up, much less sing. I’d do it if I could, but I can’t do it tonight.”

  Shug is a tall and forceful man who had a way of getting his way. Perhaps that’s why he’s been so successful in the cutthroat world of nightclubs.

  “You can go on, George,” he told me. “You just need some energy.”

  With God as my witness, I had no idea what he meant.

  He pulled a small bottle of white powder from somewhere and dipped into it with an extremely tiny spoon. Up to that point in my life, I had only heard of cocaine.

  He held the spoon under my swaying nostril and told me to inhale hard. I had no idea what I was doing. I must have done it too hard. I breathed forcefully, the stuff burned the lining of my nose, and went immediately into my empty stomach.

  I instantly began to throw up whiskey. The vomit streaked my jacket and trousers, and I didn’t know it.

  Something should be said about my clothes, and almost anyone who has ever known me will tell you it’s true. Even in my lowest hour I dressed neatly. I got to a point where I sometimes didn’t bathe or shave, but I almost always had a crease in my pants, a press in my jacket, and starch in my shirt. There were hundreds of times when I was too wasted to take clothes to the laundry or dry cleaners. So I simply bought a new outfit and left the worn one wherever I happened to take it off.

  Jimmie and Ann Hills, who later became my personal assistants, reminded me in 1995 that I always left clothes at their house, where I sometimes went to change. Ann mentioned recently that the last pair of pants I left there, in the late 1970s, had a twenty-eight-inch waist.

  “He got as skinny as a little boy,” she said, “ ’cause he simply wouldn’t eat. I’d get up and he’d be gone and there would be his dirty clothes. I’d tell Jimmie that those clothes would be our final reminder of George. I knew each time he left that we’d never see him alive again. And then I’d cry the rest of the day.”

  On my first night with cocaine, I became so instantly high that I didn’t care about clothes. I didn’t care about any aspect of my appearance. I was overwhelmed by the artificial energy the drug gives. I was staggering drunk but felt like I could go twelve rounds with Muhammad Ali.

  And so I went onstage.

  In the front row I could see people pointing at my clothes. I looked down and there, in the spotlight, I could see dried puke on my jacket and trousers.

  Embarrassment overtook me, and I couldn’t wait to get offstage. I had found another hiding place in a much smaller, but much more effective, bottle.

  My fondness for cocaine flourished instantly. Shug knew a guy who made runs to Florida to buy the stuff, so I had an unlimited supply. I shared the cocaine with others in the music business. All agreed I had the best in town. I used it heavily, off and on, for about seven years.

  I’d get drunk and slosh it around, and I’m convinced I spilled thousands of dollars’ worth. Then it was back to Shug to buy more drugs.

  Staying messed up on cocaine made me more manageable, some folks thought. Cocaine accelerates the user’s metabolism. It’s a stimulant. It made me think I had drive, so I wouldn’t pass out like I would when I was hopelessly drunk. Give me a blast of cocaine and I wouldn’t think I was exhausted from days of drinking.

  Cocaine also keeps the heavy user confused. It stays in his system for three days, during which he doesn’t think as logically as he otherwise would. Since I was using cocaine almost every day, there was rarely a time when I wasn’t confused. I was easy prey for those who wanted to take financial advantage of me.

  Cocaine also makes the user extremely impulsive. If he sees something he wants, he wants it right then. I once traded a pair of Nudie Western boots, worth perhaps a thousand dollars, for a pair of used sneakers. The wearer took them off his feet, and I took the boots off mine.

  I once needed some cash and tried to sell a forty-thousand-dollar boat to Velton Lang, former road manager for Conway Twitty, for five hundred dollars. (Velton could have taken advantage of me, but he didn’t.)

  Cocaine also makes the user irresponsible. Using cocaine makes the user want nothing except more cocaine.

  Billy Wilhite, in 1994, said that he once gave me some chemical stimulants at a recording session because I had told him that taking them would eliminate my desire for booze. As it turned out, I took the pills, got drunk, then went home and had an argument with Tammy. The next day she showed people marks on her neck and said that I had strangled her. I hadn’t.

  So I was going merrily along in the spring of 1975 with cocaine, my newfound crutch, and released “Memories of Us” and “I Just Don’t Give a Damn.” Neither song did anything substantial. “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” was my eighty-sixth single record. It was on the Billboard survey for only four weeks and peaked at number ninety-two on the Top 100. I had never released a record on a major label that did so poorly.

  My counterparts, Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty, were setting the charts on fire. Haggard released “Always Wanting You,” “I’m Movin’ On,” and “It’s All in the Movies” the same year. Each song went to number one. Conway had “Linda on My Mind,” “Touch the Hand of the Man,” and “This Time I’ve Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me.” Each song went to number one.

  I constantly feared that my career, like my three marriages, was over. I had nothing left but my name, and my name was associated with missing personal appearances and not paying my debts. I truly began to feel that my reckless ways had caught up with me at last. Drinking and taking drugs had all but ruined the life of a man whose voice had been heard around the world.

  I became so scared about the consequences of drinki
ng and taking drugs that again I did what I always did when I was afraid—I drank more and took more drugs.

  Shug today says that he had my career in mind when he made decisions about my recording and touring. I believe him. Why shouldn’t I? He, after all, got a cut of everything I earned, so he certainly had the incentive to help me get back on top.

  And he got no winning arguments from me about where my money was going. I was too wrecked to make much sense. If I had valid questions about why I had nothing left after I earned twenty thousand dollars in a weekend, he had answers. He could always beat me in an argument because my drug and alcohol use kept me mentally crippled.

  Another reason my career was falling so dramatically was because I wasn’t getting promotional support from Epic. A record label won’t pump money into an artist who won’t make personal appearances.

  Jennifer O’Brien, who became a background singer and duet partner on the road with me about this same time, met a fan who told her she had bought a ticket to see me on seven different occasions. I missed every show, and to this day I don’t know if that woman ever saw me perform.

  I missed a New Year’s Eve show with Johnny Paycheck in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The promoter promised not to sue me if I would do a makeup show for free. I have played millions of dollars’ worth of makeup shows to avoid being sued.

  I told the Tulsa promoter I would, but I got drunk and missed the makeup. Shug or somebody talked him into booking me for a makeup show for the makeup show, and I missed that too. On my fourth attempt I made it. But I was too drunk to sing and only did thirty minutes. I left the stage to a chorus of boos.

  Because of my dwindling reputation in the United States, Shug thought I should play overseas, where I had not disappointed as many fans.

  So I told him I’d go. But he didn’t tell me that the first place he wanted me to play was Northern Ireland. The Catholics and Protestants were blowing each other up over there by the hundreds. It was the bloodiest religious war of the decade. It seemed as though every time I turned on a television set I saw innocent men, women, and children being slaughtered.