I Lived to Tell It All Page 20

  Then I found out that one of the places where I was booked had just been bombed. Glen Campbell had played a performance hall where he was escorted by military police with machine guns into an auditorium that was surrounded with a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and razor blades.

  My band, which hadn’t been paid in weeks, was in no hurry to play a safe Iowa fair with me. The members had a fit when asked if they’d wait on their money while playing a war zone, and we had a serious discussion about wearing bulletproof vests onstage.

  Northern Ireland could give us no guarantee of protection. Its officials even urged us not to come, saying our lives would be in danger. I wouldn’t have wanted to play that tour if I had been sober. I certainly didn’t want to play it while living with the paranoia that every hard-core drunk and cocaine user has. I told Shug I wouldn’t go. He demanded that I did.

  The promoter sent the band airplane tickets. They were told they were going to England but, when they got in the air, learned they were en route to Dublin and then war-torn Belfast. There was no turning back. Six of them got so drunk that they consumed every bottle of wine on the Boeing 747. Not one other passenger got one drop.

  Back in the States, I’d told Shug I’d meet him at Nashville International Airport. He thought I was going to fly with him to Ireland.

  “Just let me stop by Tammy’s house so I can see my daughter, Georgette,” I told him. “Then I’ll be along to the airport in plenty of time.”

  He believed that, and I got in my car and tore out for Florence, Alabama, to Peanut and Charlene Montgomery’s home. Florence is about two and a half hours from Nashville. I figured Shug would never find me.

  I had always told him that I was never late. “If I’m not there on time I’m not coming,” I had said.

  I was supposed to meet him at 3 P.M., and at 3:15 P.M. he remembered my words. At 3:45 P.M. he was in his Music Row office, and he launched a telephone search for me. Between those calls, he called the overseas promoter and told him that he didn’t want to bring me to Ireland because it wasn’t safe.

  The next day Shug called the promoter again and told him I was ill. He asked the promoter if he could send Merle Haggard as my substitute. The guy didn’t go for it.

  “Jones is drunk, isn’t he?” the promoter said. “That’s why he isn’t coming.”

  I probably was drunk, but that had nothing to do with my absence. I was holed up in Florence, where there was strong whiskey, cool air-conditioning, and no gunfire or grenades.

  Shug found out that I often visited the Montgomerys, and then someone reported having seen me on a street in Florence.

  I still can’t believe what happened next.

  Shug gathered his cronies, enough men to fill eight limousines. The cars, accompanied by an airplane that flew on ahead, drove in a convoy from Nashville to Florence to find George Jones. It became a full-blown manhunt.

  After Shug arrived, he enlisted additional people from Florence along with a helicopter. I was the target of a search that couldn’t have been any more intensive if I had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  And all I wanted to do was go fishing with friends in Alabama.

  Shug set up a command post at the Florence Holiday Inn. He put a stakeout on Peanut and Charlene’s house, my barbershop (I sometimes used to drive there from Nashville just for a haircut from Jimmie Hills), at the grocery store where I shopped, at the liquor store, and at every bar I had ever visited. Shug gave a description of my car to anybody who would listen. That helicopter flew all over Florence looking for it.

  I had a citizens band radio and listened to searchers as they unfolded their dragnet. Some of Shug’s associates were big and muscular. They were driving Cadillacs and Lincolns. They resembled the Mafia, and someone called the Florence police thinking that’s who they were.

  So the cops raided Shug’s command post.

  Officers bearing guns charged into their motel headquarters and demanded to know what was going on. Shug, like many nightclub owners, had friends in high places. He called someone with the highway patrol, who overruled the Florence police. The officers were pulled off of their investigation of Shug Baggott.

  I had swapped cars with Peanut and Charlene, and they had swapped with someone else. Searchers didn’t know who was driving what. By late the first night I was tired. Knowing that I’d be spotted at the Montgomerys’, I tried to get a motel room. Each time Peanut, Charlene, and I pulled into one of Florence’s few motels we saw a limousine with Tennessee tags. I was running, but I had no place to hide.

  And so we got a tent.

  The three of us fled to the woods, where someone had the idea to send up a decoy. Charlene or Peanut sneaked to a pay telephone, called long-distance directory assistance, and asked for the telephone number of any Laundromat in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A Laundromat was called, and whoever answered was asked for its street address. Then Charlene placed an anonymous call to Shug’s command post.

  George Jones is at such and such Laundromat, she said. It’s at such and such address in Chattanooga, she added.

  “He won’t be there long, and he’s in pretty bad shape,” she said. “I don’t think you can take him by yourself.”

  Within seconds a helicopter lifted off from Florence, and a few limousines raced under it. Shug continued to direct all the activity on his CB, and I continued to listen on mine. He and his searchers had no idea that I was hearing their every move.

  I guess the helicopter pilot landed his craft on the lawn or in the street next to the Laundromat one state away. I was listening when Shug got on his CB to all of his units and told the searchers they had been fooled. I laughed out loud and then decided to increase my fun. I got on the CB.

  “You guys are looking for me, but you can’t catch a Possum,” I said. (My other nickname, after “No Show Jones,” was “Possum,” as it is to this day.)

  “George!” yelled Shug. “Where are you? You’d better get in here right now!”

  “You guys are looking in the wrong place,” I said. “You need to be about five miles to the northwest.”

  From a vantage point on a hill, I could see men running out of the motel and jumping into limousines. They burned rubber racing to where they thought I was.

  It was a circus, and by now Florence radio and television had picked it up. For all I know Shug had enlisted their help.

  “Anyone who has seen country music star George Jones, believed to be in Florence tonight, is asked to call this number,” the newscasters said. Digits were flashed at the bottom of the screen.

  By the second night of the second day I weakened. I had been awake the entire time. Our tent leaked, and we had gotten drenched in a blinding rain. We were hungry but couldn’t go for food. My picture had been plastered all over television, and a lot of folks knew me by sight anyhow.

  Peanut and Charlene had lived around Florence all of their lives, and Peanut was a local recording artist. They would also be spotted if we left our tent, which was hidden safely in the Alabama woods. We had no food or water. The ground was our bathroom.

  Cold, wet, filthy, and mentally spent, I called Shug. He had beaten me down. I could hardly speak for crying. I had run to Alabama to keep from going to Ireland. All I could think was that Shug was going to run me to death in the United States instead of me being shot overseas.

  I asked Shug if he would hurt me if I came in. He said he wouldn’t. (Someone, not Shug, later beat the shit out of me as punishment. I won’t say who.)

  And so I gave up. More accurately, I turned myself in to my manager. I promised Shug I would meet him at the Nashville airport if he would call off his dogs.

  “Just let me have a shower and a meal and a night’s sleep and I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.

  Everybody in his group urged him not to believe me, he said years later. I’ll bet they did.

  But he could hear the fatigue and fear in my voice and knew I wouldn’t try to run from him again. He told
me he’d take his people and leave town and would see me the next day at the airport.

  Remember the television footage in June 1994, when thousands of people were standing along Los Angeles streets waving at O. J. Simpson and the police who were chasing him? That’s what Florence looked like when Shug took his henchmen and their convoy out of the city of thirty thousand. That chase seemed to have tapped the fascination of everyone in the community. People stood along streets and cheered the limousines as they eased out of the city.

  Reporters and others who had participated in the search probably thought they had done a good thing. I don’t know what they were told as to why I was “missing.” I’m sure they weren’t told that I was hiding from a manager who was going to make me go into a battlefield. But by fleeing to Florence, I had missed the shows I wanted to miss in Ireland.

  So the limousines went on to Nashville, the people of Florence went to their homes, and I went to bed.

  The next day I went to Nashville and then on to the safety of England. My overseas tour, late though it was, was finally under way.

  Chapter 15

  The band had gone abroad without me, thinking they were going to England. They were. They didn’t know they weren’t immediately destined for England but routed through it on the way to a war zone. They were halfway over the Atlantic Ocean before someone noticed the last ticket in his ticket book. It said: BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND.

  Everyone in the group had shared my position, agreeing to go to England but not to Ireland. They had insisted on a promise of no Ireland dates before they boarded the aircraft.

  The top tickets in their books all pertained to English shows. The band was furious when they found the bottom ticket. They had been fooled.

  The band’s midair discovery prompted their excessive drinking. They not only reproduced my music but also my personal behavior after learning they were preparing to enter war-torn Northern Ireland. I heard about some of their escapades later and even received some of the blame, although I was on the other side of the ocean. Most of the guilty band members weren’t identified by name but just as “George Jones’s band.” But in light of the way they were tricked, I don’t blame them for anything they did.

  The band staggered off the airplane at Heathrow in London and went noisily to the baggage claim. Their instruments were steered down a shoot onto a baggage carousel. Ralph Land, my drummer, noticed that a man assigned to catch the luggage was simply letting bags slam into each other. Ralph became concerned about his drums.

  “Are you going to catch my trap case when it comes down?” Ralph asked the guy.

  “What’s a trap case?” the baggage handler wanted to know.

  “It holds my drums and cymbals and everything else,” Ralph answered.

  “How much does it weigh?” the man asked.

  “About one hundred and twenty pounds.”

  “No,” the man yelled above the crowd and loud machinery. “I’m not going to catch it.”

  “Then get out of the way!” Ralph ordered.

  Ralph, who was still drunk, climbed on top of the baggage apparatus. His drums sped down the steep chute almost with the force of gravity. He braced to catch them, but the impact was overpowering. He spun around and around, and because he was slightly elevated, people throughout the terminal saw him. He just about threw up from spinning while drunk. What he did next resulted in total chaos.

  Ralph Land, key member of my band, single-handedly shut down the baggage flow at the world’s busiest airport. A whistle sounded the instant Ralph picked up his bag. Ralph had performed the job of a baggage handler, who belongs to a union. Only members of that union were allowed to touch luggage.

  The entire union membership stormed out on strike. Thousands of passengers and their bags were left behind.

  The Jones Boys had arrived.

  Baggage handlers carrying suitcases for old ladies instantly dropped their bags. Electric conveyors transporting bags from airplanes were turned off, stranding luggage in the depths of Heathrow.

  The Jones Boys hurriedly grabbed their own bags and walked quickly out of the airport to taxis. Thank God they didn’t offend the cabdrivers or they might have brought the entire country to a halt. A few more minutes inside the airport and they might have found a way to trigger an international incident!

  My band was met with astonishment everywhere they went in Ireland. Residents couldn’t believe that Americans had come to entertain in the sensitive political climate. Taxi driver after taxi driver told my musicians about musicians who had been shot from the audience while performing.

  Ralph and my fiddle player, Zeke Dawson, were Vietnam veterans who were leather-tough and didn’t frighten easily. Neither did the other players, who had worked many rough-and-rowdy honky-tonks with me. But after the third soldier carrying a rifle warned my boys that they might not leave the country alive, they became believers.

  In Belfast, my band saw soldiers with .50 caliber machine guns posted on rooftops. Zeke was carrying his fiddle case, not knowing that military rules didn’t allow that.

  All of a sudden a soldier put Zeke up against the wall while others pointed their rifles at him. They thought he had a bomb inside the case. When Ralph saw how Zeke was being roughed up, he tried to help him. Instantly, another soldier hit Ralph in the back of the head with the steel butt of a rifle.

  But the Jones Boys were troupers and went forward with plans to perform.

  “Whatever you do,” they were repeatedly told when they were in Belfast, “never talk about the war between the Protestants and Catholics. Just keep playing no matter what happens. In fact, don’t even mention Protestants and Catholics.”

  Wanda Jackson was on that tour. My band had agreed to play behind her. The first night during the first show after her first song, she told the capacity crowd that she had a question.

  “Why can’t you Protestants and Catholics get along?” she asked.

  My band dropped their instruments and fled for the wings. They feared machine-gun fire at any second.

  Wanda was enthusiastic to share the message of Jesus Christ as she saw it. Ralph said she began to preach the Bible to the hostile crowd. The boys began to look for more wine.

  If they hadn’t found it, they probably would have been converted themselves just to ask God to repeat a New Testament miracle and turn water into it.

  The boys eased nervously back onstage and backed Wanda on another song. She began to preach again. Once more, they sprinted off stage and out of sight. Wanda may have finished singing with only the shouts from the crowd.

  After the show and back at their hotel, the band was met by members of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who told them how much they appreciated their bravery in coming to Ireland and said they couldn’t persuade Irish musicians to get in front of an armed crowd to sing.

  Ralph asked reporters if they were covering the war.

  “Not really,” one told him, “we’re just up here counting cadavers.”

  Ralph went right back to drinking.

  “Are you guys going to Dublin tomorrow?” Ralph was asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t think I would,” Ralph was told.

  The reporter said that several musicians from Belfast had recently tried to enter Dublin where they were taken off a bus, lined up, and shot. My band forgot their bus, forgot the Dublin show, and took an airplane back to London and safety. All the time my band was working hazardous duty they weren’t getting hazardous duty pay. In fact, they weren’t getting any pay.

  My money continued to be mismanaged, and my band still had not been paid for weeks. They had refused to go overseas until they received back pay and payment in advance for the upcoming shows. So each player was given enough money to entice him to go overseas.

  And each check bounced.

  Those guys were thousands of miles from home and calling collect to wives who were threatening to leave because they couldn’t pay household bills or buy groce
ries. The promoter had paid my manager half of the money before the band’s departure and had made good on the rest each time they performed. So management got its money, but my players only got deeper into financial trouble. Two of the musicians were later divorced and blamed their marital problems on financial pressure from not getting paid while working for me.

  Ralph was talking to his wife from Belfast, assuring her that the bounced checks would be made good and that he was in no danger. She tended to disbelieve him after a bomb exploded and cut the telephone line, which did little to ease her fury.

  I didn’t handle the money and, too often, didn’t get paid myself. But I was too drunk, too filled with cocaine, and just too tired to sort it all out. I wanted to believe my management would handle things.

  In the middle of all of this, Shug, or someone in his group, decided I would be more comfortable if I had a female traveling companion. She wasn’t a prostitute. She was a Nashville woman hired to fly to England to finish the tour with me. Shug apparently thought that would calm me down and make me more willing to perform.

  Imagine what that did to morale! My guys couldn’t get paid, but my front office somehow had the money to hire this woman, pay for her round-trip airfare overseas, and even buy her a fur coat!

  The guys bitched each time she got on the bus. I didn’t want her there either and wound up sending her home.

  We returned to the United States, where my life and money continued their downward fall. I discovered years later that, once again, I often was told I was working for one figure when I had been hired out for a higher fee. I never saw the difference. I learned, once more, that I was being booked into several cities on the same night. As I could only be in one place at a time and thus didn’t show up at the others, my managers told promoters that my absence was in keeping with my reputation for drinking and missing shows. Promoters were again filing lawsuits against me for missing dates I didn’t even know I had.

  People wonder why I didn’t put my foot down and take hold of my career and personal affairs. It’s hard to answer that except to say that life had become a vicious cycle and I couldn’t see any way out. I knew that most of my problems were caused from drinking and taking drugs. Because I couldn’t handle what drinking and taking drugs were doing to me, I drank and took more drugs. I had quickly become addicted to cocaine, and Shug saw to it that I got it easily. It gave me an artificial high that kept me from complaining about the way he was handling my money and other affairs.