I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  I actually worked a few shows for no money at all. Somebody else got my performance fee, and I got cocaine. It kept me high and, more important to management, it kept me quiet about money. That trend continued intermittently for years.

  I couldn’t pay my bills, the band couldn’t pay theirs. Lawsuits were coming at me from all directions, and again I didn’t care whether I worked or not.

  “It’s pointless,” I thought. “No matter how many tickets I sell I don’t see any money. I’m always broke and in debt.”

  My reputation for missing dates got so bad in the mid-1970s that I worked some shows for as little as twenty-five hundred dollars when I should have been getting fifteen thousand. Promoters just weren’t willing to take a chance on my showing up. On the occasions I did get my money, by the time I had paid a six-member band, 10 percent to a booking agent, 10 percent to management, bought diesel fuel for the bus, paid for motel rooms, and financed the rest of the overhead, there was little left for me.

  There were always plenty of creditors from the lawsuits and money to be paid for child support. I saw no point in working just for my creditors. So instead of paying old debts I often got new ones on impulse.

  I again fell into the habit of buying new cars, sometimes once a month. I took a terrible loss each time I traded. I couldn’t always qualify for credit, but I was always George Jones. You’d be amazed at the car dealers and other merchants who cater to people in show business. I got to where I expected that.

  Waylon Jennings, in 1995, remembered that I was riding in a car with him years ago when I broke out a bottle of cocaine at a traffic light and snorted.

  “You can’t do that in broad daylight!” he said he told me. “We’re going to get arrested!”

  “No,” he said I said. “There is no way they would arrest you and me.”

  People who do cocaine regularly think they’re above the law. In the words of Hank Williams Jr. they think they’re “ten feet tall and bulletproof.”

  I didn’t know that I was on the brink of learning that justice is blind and that I was just as susceptible to harsh law enforcement as anybody.

  I had moved to Florence, Alabama, right after the divorce from Tammy and lived there for six years. I bought and sold seven houses during that time, moving on the average of every ten months. I think a lot of that moving had to do with my inner restlessness. I simply couldn’t find peace of mind.

  I would go on three- and four-day binges during which I took nothing into my body except alcohol and cocaine. I totally refused food. Some folks used to say that I’d gotten so skinny I wouldn’t look any worse in my coffin.

  I was constantly lonely and confused. Once again I was always by myself, even in a crowd.

  I was sitting in the back of my bus one night with my bass player, Ernie Rowell, while traveling to a show. I hoisted a bottle of whiskey, chugged it like water, and threw up, only to blast into another drink. I had become totally self-destructive and fueled largely by self-hatred.

  In an interview for this book, Ernie said that during those days I did everything I could to destroy my career and everything I could to destroy my life.

  “He hurt both real bad, but neither one would die,” Ernie concluded. “The way he lived would have killed any other career or any other life. None of us thought he’d pull through.”

  Ernie kept pleading with me to eat, saying he didn’t understand why I was doing this to myself. I told him I had no peace and that I never would. I told him not to worry about me because I was beyond any hope. Ernie said the sight of me and the sound of those words was the most pitiable scene he had ever encountered. He finally went to a brokenhearted sleep that night, and I went into the next day drinking.

  The press kept clobbering me for missing shows, and I finally got back at them in the mid-1980s when I wrote a tune with Merle Haggard called “No Show Jones,” which became an album cut and novelty song about seeing me one minute, then missing me the next.

  Merle cut it with me, and the song got a little airplay. It only reinforced my reputation, but what the hell? If I’ve got the reputation, I thought, why not make a dollar off of it?

  My reputation for missing dates got so bad that a few gamblers made book in various cities as to whether I’d show up. I wonder now if my management ever placed a bet on whether I’d make the dates. All they had to do to ensure I’d miss was get me drunk and full of cocaine.

  The Jones Boys and I were booked outside of Washington, D.C., somewhere in Maryland about 1976 and somebody, unbeknownst to me, organized the gambling. Those who thought I would show up were asked to sit on one side of the auditorium, those who thought I wouldn’t on the other.

  I walked onstage, the house lights dimmed, and the spotlight temporarily blinded me. I thought I saw people stirring. I wondered why they were getting up to leave before I had sung a note. I wasn’t drunk and hadn’t had time to offend anybody. If they wanted to get angry they needed to give me a minute.

  Yet the fans were totally ignoring me, waving money, arid hollering and arguing. Was this a concert in a Mid-Atlantic state or a Southern cockfight? I was seeing, before my eyes, the settling of bets about whether I’d show up.

  “The son of a bitch made it!” somebody shouted. “This has cost me a hundred dollars.”

  “I knew he’d make it!” somebody else yelled. “Hell, he missed three other shows here. He was an odds-on favorite to show up this time.”

  Apparently, everybody was paid in about the time it takes to sing three songs. They sat down, and I could see folks counting their money and putting it in their billfolds. I just kept on singing. Those who won thought I did a pretty good show.

  I felt totally lost and without ties for months after the divorce. I had moved to Florence but wanted to be in Nashville, but once there I couldn’t wait to get back to Florence. I used to drive from Florence to Tammy’s Nashville house, pull through her circle driveway, drive back to Florence, then repeat the cycle. I’d make the two-hundred-fifty-mile trip three or four times a day, stopping only for gasoline. Sometimes I drove alone except for an open bottle of whiskey and a container of cocaine. Sometimes I rode with Peanut Montgomery. We put five thousand miles on his car in one week and never went anywhere except from Florence to Tammy’s Nashville driveway and back to Florence.

  I was running but not hiding from the demons of loneliness and plain old pain. I had no more money than the cash in my wallet. When I got totally broke, I’d work a show for a few thousand dollars and live off of that until I busted out again. If I was desperate, I’d ask somebody to call a nightclub where I’d packed ’em in during days gone by.

  Then they would ask if George Jones could come and play for the door. That meant I’d be paid only from ticket sales. I hadn’t worked that way since I’d started in Texas as a teenager. Since I’d take the dates on the spur of the moment, there was no time for advertising. Ticket sales sometimes weren’t many, and the money wasn’t much.

  And I spilled a lot of money.

  It’s true that I went for days drinking and taking cocaine by myself. But on those times when I went into taverns, I spent money like there was no tomorrow, picking up everybody’s tab.

  Cocaine was about eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars an ounce, and even with my heavy usage, an ounce should have lasted for weeks. But I’d get wrecked and share it with other people, some of whom I knew and some of whom I’d never met. I’ve gone through an ounce of cocaine in twenty-four hours.

  I went to Peanut and Charlene’s house once with forty-seven cents in my pocket. It was all the money I had in the world, despite the fact that I had earned millions of dollars. I had a record on the radio, royalties that were due, and an engagement to sing somewhere. All of that was in the uncertain future. At that moment, all I had was that forty-seven cents. Had I died, I would have left that as my entire estate, along with an obituary that called me the “greatest country singer who ever lived.”

  That title was suddenly being pub
lished as much as “No Show Jones.” The same press who were attacking my lifestyle were suddenly beginning to praise my singing like never before.

  “The more shows he missed, the more his records sold,” said Rick Blackburn, former vice president of Columbia Records’ Nashville division. Columbia owned Epic Records, which was the fifth label for which I recorded.

  Somebody said I fulfilled the Hank Williams mystique. In the mid-1970s people wanted their country singers to be drunk and rowdy, as Hank Williams had been. In that respect I gave the fans what they wanted and more. Hank lived drunk and rowdy. Trouble is he died the same way. The thought that I would go the way he did began to inhabit my mind. I can remember being too drunk to lie down because the room would spin. I was afraid I’d vomit and strangle in my sleep. Despite that kind of drunkenness, I rarely passed out in those days. I’d instead take a hard, blurred, and long look at the world before I closed my eyes, thinking each look would be my last.

  Then, breathing heavily from cocaine, I’d finally yield to a fitful sleep. As soon as the drug began to wear off slightly I was up, sometimes in only two hours, and right back into the bottles.

  I told you earlier that Merle Kilgore had worked for Hank Williams when he was a lad. Merle talked recently about a show I did somewhere where I crawled into the backseat of Merle’s new car. I had begged to rest.

  Hank Williams died while resting in the back of a Cadillac. I guess I looked so bad that some folks actually thought I might be lying down for my last time. They gathered around Merle’s car, peeping through the windows to watch me nod off.

  “You’d better keep that car,” people told Merle. “Jones will surely die this time in the backseat. He’ll never wake up this time. That car will be worth a fortune to a collector someplace.”

  Being called the world’s greatest country singer didn’t mean a thing then.

  About the only thing that kept me semi-sane was the occasional humor from life on the road.

  It’s a measure of people who don’t understand

  The pleasures of life in a hillbilly band.

  Bob McDill wrote those words many years ago for “Amanda,” a hit song for Don Williams and later for Waylon. They’re true.

  Life on the road is monotonous, tiresome, and sometimes hilarious. Musicians are creative people. When you get six or eight under one roof where there is no entertainment except each other, practical jokes are often the result. Sometimes the jokes are hard. Hard jokes work best in emotionally hard times.

  Ralph Land had a date during those days with a girl he met at a Southern nightclub, where she was a singer.

  She came onto the bus, and I thought it was high time I had a date myself. I didn’t know she was with Ralph. I was drunk, and wild ideas came easily.

  “Who is this girl?” I asked Ralph.

  Before he could answer, she sat on my lap.

  “I’m the girl singer at this nightclub you’re playing tonight,” she told me. “I asked Ralph to bring me out to your bus so I could meet you.”

  The girl was blond and had a big bust. Her neckline was low, but my spirits were lower. I had a bottle in my hand and her on my knee. She had to know what I had in mind.

  She flirted and hugged for a long time, so I thought she had made plain what she wanted. I was agreeable, but she was a tease. She said she wanted to be sure she saw me after tonight.

  “Now, honey,” I told her, “that can be arranged.”

  The Jones Boys and I had to leave for another show in another town. I didn’t get to be with my little bombshell that night.

  I lay in the back of the bus thinking about her with every passing mile. Earlier she had sung a song or two inside my bus’s bedroom. I liked what I heard and saw. The girl was not only pretty but talented. She was everything a lonely country singer needed.

  Despite my hangover, I was up early the next morning. Maybe I could get Tammy off my mind if I could get a new woman into my life, I thought. So I called my manager, whoever it happened to be.

  I had several managers before and after Shug Baggott. He and I parted company once, I ran in a few more managers, and then he and I reunited. I can’t always remember who was with me when. Records that might indicate that are long gone to too many lawyers. I had as many lawyers as managers to handle all of my legal scrapes. I’ll tell you about some of them later.

  Billy Sherrill was one of my few constants during those troubled days from the middle 1970s through the early 1980s. He just kept producing those hit records on me, working with my on-again, off-again managers.

  “Jones,” he told me one day, “don’t introduce me to any more of your managers. About the time I get to like one you fire him and hire another. It isn’t worth my time to get to know one.”

  Anyhow, about the girl singer.

  “You know the nightclub where I played last night,” I told my manager over the long-distance line.

  “Yeah,” he said, “what about it?”

  “They got a girl singer there, and I want to get to know her,” I said. “You call that club today and offer her a job opening my shows. Tell her to fly out today because she starts tonight.”

  I think I agreed to pay her fifteen hundred dollars for each of four shows.

  Everything the girl had told me was true. What she didn’t tell me, however, was that she was one of two girl singers who worked at that club.

  My manager called the club and told someone that George Jones wanted to hire the girl singer who had sung there the night before. As it turned out, both had sung.

  “Are you sure?” the guy supposedly asked him.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” my manager said. “He can’t afford another person on the payroll, but that has never stopped George. Now send that girl on to our next show tonight. She has a ticket waiting at the airport.”

  Whoever took that call at the club called the wrong singer at home and told her she was going on the road with me.

  I was sitting on the bus in another town before my show.

  “George,” my road manager said, “that girl you wanted from last night is here. She wants to come on the bus.”

  I can’t tell you how happy I was.

  “Just a minute!” I said. “Let me get ready.”

  I ran into my bedroom and checked my shirt. I put on my suit coat and made sure my hair was in place. Then I hurried back to my seat and tried to act naturally.

  “Send her in,” I said.

  The girl I had admired had blond hair. This one was brunette. The girl I had admired was beautiful, like nature’s niece. This one was like Dracula’s daughter.

  “Who is this?” I asked Ralph. “Is this the girl from the club?”

  “Oh yes.” He grinned.

  I knew I had been drunk, and at that moment I also knew I’d been had.

  Then I found out that Ralph had been with the blond before I met her. When I latched on to her, he wasn’t pleased. He knew there were two girl singers at the club, and he knew that in the confusion somebody might send the wrong one.

  Somebody had. He was so happy.

  To make matters worse, the one they sent couldn’t sing. At that point I had a woman on my bus who I might get into my bed after she got onto my stage. I didn’t want her in any of those places!

  I let the girl work one show, paid her for four, and told her I didn’t think this was going to work out. I sent her and her money, along with plane fare, home that night after our show.

  I would have kept her if she could have sung.

  Not long afterward we were somewhere in the Deep South when someone told me that Onie Wheeler wanted to see me.

  Onie had been a harmonica player on the Grand Ole Opry and “Hee Haw” for years. Roy Acuff used him on his sets and rarely failed to introduce this veteran country music player to the Opry’s national radio audience.

  I came out of my bedroom on the bus where I had been well into the whiskey and cocaine. I looked at a guy sitting in my seat who didn’t look at me. I stared for a
long time, trying to focus my eyes.

  “Are you Onie Wheeler?” I asked, and immediately felt dumb. How could I ask the name of someone I’d known for years?

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m Onie Wheeler.”

  But he intentionally never looked my way.

  I still had the bottle in my hand as, staring and blinking, I began to circle him.

  “Are you sure you’re Onie Wheeler?” I asked.

  “I sure am,” he insisted.

  I knew my drinking and the rest had gotten out of hand. But if I was beginning to see things, or fail to see things properly, perhaps I was further along than I knew.

  “Well,” I finally screamed, “you’re not the Onie Wheeler I know!”

  The stranger turned slowly in his chair, letting light fall gradually across his face. I squinted hard. Then he suddenly stared directly into my eyes.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” he shouted. “You’re not the George Jones I know!”

  He was down the aisle and off the bus before I could say another word.

  The band swore they had nothing to do with that.

  Chapter 16

  My credit was largely shot when I bought a house in the Sherwood Forest subdivision of Florence in the fall of 1975. I put no money down, just assumed the mortgage. The real estate market was soft back then and leaned toward the buyer. A bank held the note on the property. It wasn’t making any money off a house it had repossessed, so if it let me take over the payments and I defaulted, it hadn’t lost any money. It just got its house back.

  Peanut and Charlene helped me decorate, and between times of selecting furniture, wallpaper, and the like we went fishing and camping. Peanut and I wrote songs, as we had for years. I have recorded thirty-eight that he or he and I wrote. Most were album cuts, but there were a few hits, such as “We’re Gonna Hold On” and “A Man Can Be a Drunk Sometimes.” There were times when it was easy money to get drunk and put thoughts into words and tunes with Peanut, then to record them and have a hit.