I Lived to Tell It All Page 22

  But that didn’t always happen, and a hit country record didn’t pay as much twenty years ago as it does today. I could sell thirty-five thousand copies of a song in 1975 and see the song go number one. A song just about has to be a gold record (sell 500,000 copies) in order to go number one today.

  I was constantly in and out of Peanut and Charlene’s house and lives in the mid-1970s. One day in 1975 I went to their place and was introduced to Charlene’s sister, Linda Welborn. She seemed to be a down-to-earth country gal, and I liked that. I always have. I don’t think I’ve ever been interested in a high-minded woman.

  I asked Linda out to dinner, but she turned me down, saying she already had a date. Then she introduced me to the guy. He was kind of a geek, and I couldn’t understand why she’d rather go out with him than me. I told her to break her date, but she wouldn’t and the guy began to rub it in that she’d rather go out with him.

  I reminded him that he was visiting and had to return to his home in another state the next night. I assured him that I’d take Linda out then, and I did.

  That was the first date in what became a six-year relationship. Linda lived with me in each of the seven houses I owned during this time. I didn’t know that Alabama acknowledged common-law marriages, and when Linda and I broke up, she sued me for divorce.

  I had to give her a cash settlement, even though we were never officially married. Once again I didn’t argue the divorce case. I didn’t even go to court. The whole affair seemed like a joke to me, but the judge who ruled against me wasn’t laughing.

  I don’t think I was ever in love with Linda. I was in love with her ways. Life with her was completely different from life with Tammy. Tammy was a star and wanted everybody to know it. She got upset if people didn’t recognize her or want an autograph. Tammy liked fine restaurants, diamonds, furs, and the shine that goes with show business.

  But Linda was down-home. She went fishing with me. She didn’t have to have a manicure. And if she got one she didn’t mind getting dirt under it. We cooked on the grill more than in the oven. We went bowling more than we went to the movies.

  Linda had been taken out of the country, but the country hadn’t been taken out of her. She made a lot of mistakes with her English, and I liked that. It made me think she was genuine. I had sensed that same kind of reality years earlier in Melba Montgomery. In the country, if you pretend to be something you’re not, it’s called “putting on the dog.” Linda never put on the dog.

  My early days with Linda were good for me. I still missed Tammy more than I ever let on to Linda. And if you have to miss somebody, it’s sometimes easier to miss them with somebody else. I hadn’t handled Tammy’s absence too well by myself. I’d see how well I handled it with Linda.

  Once again I went on the wagon, and once again it was a ride that lasted for weeks. Looking back, I don’t think I ever got sober entirely for myself but always for a woman as well. I just never got sober permanently for one until I sobered up for Nancy and me, although I had been mostly dry for months before that.

  I really did try to make my relationships work, and every woman I ever had said that nothing would help things more than my getting sober.

  Because I was temporarily sober with Linda, I was able to work more, and I quickly accumulated a few thousand dollars. The Possum Holler club and my business interests remained in Nashville, where my going on extended dry spells was always news in the music community.

  “Maybe this time he’s quit for good,” people would always say.

  Whenever that kind of talk began to circulate, I didn’t have much trouble borrowing money. Lenders knew I could always work a show somewhere to get cash, and I always had a manager who could convince them that I was once again serious about working.

  I borrowed fifty thousand dollars in 1976 and built an A-frame house, my second house in Florence. If Linda and I were going to play house, we might as well do it in as nice a place as I could afford, I figured.

  I had started drinking once more and realized once again that a bus is a terrible place after a binge. The sun reflects off of the highway into pained eyes. The constant motion aggravates an upset stomach. But the confinement is the worst of all. After you’ve done a show, done your drinking, gone to sleep and awakened, you want to get off of that motorized prison. Yet you might have another hundred miles to go before getting home. If you don’t want to get drunk to ease the pain of having been drunk, it can be a long and desperate ride.

  In December 1975 I had come off a two- or three-day tour, a long trip in my heaviest drinking days, and was ready to bust out upon arrival one morning in Nashville. My fatigue and restlessness were compounded by the fact that I had to drive another two and a half hours to Florence. To this day, after a long trip, I want to do no more than go home. Anything else is a bother.

  Billy Wilhite was working as my substitute manager. I think I had fired Shug for a few days. I went into Billy’s Nashville apartment to shave and clean up. Despite my hurry to get home, I didn’t want to go to Linda and Florence needing a shower.

  My layover at Billy’s resulted in publicity that clearly shows how unfair the press was to me in those days. A newspaper story claimed I had battered two women, and that was all wrong.

  It was only one woman. And I didn’t batter her. I didn’t even hit her. I tried and missed.

  Two women came uninvited into Billy’s place. I’d never met them, and Billy barely knew them himself.

  Someone played country music on the stereo, and one of the women began to complain. She hated country music.

  I asked her why she didn’t leave.

  “Nobody invited you in here anyhow,” I said, “and if you don’t like country music, why don’t you go somewhere and hear what you want to hear?”

  I was too tired to be polite with people whose presence was unwanted.

  The woman told me what she thought about country music and me after the other one bolted out the door. As she went through the door herself, she said something obscene, and that set me off.

  I had a shaving kit that must have weighed two pounds. I tossed it at her. It hit the wall as she went out. But my throw made her furious.

  “I’ll get even with you, I promise you!” she said. And she did. She and her buddy sued me for $102,000. The pair claimed I had assaulted them and forced them to drink alcohol.

  Why would I have forced somebody to drink when I was staying sober myself for the last leg of my journey home?

  But the woman lived up to her promise. She got a default judgment against me, and I got a lot of bad publicity. I didn’t see the need to respond to such a ridiculous accusation. I know now that I should have gone to court. After all, I had Billy and his wife as witnesses, and I might have won. But the plaintiffs agreed to a significantly smaller settlement (about ten thousand dollars), and I can’t remember if I even paid it. Court judgments against me were becoming pretty plentiful, and many were reduced in a bankruptcy that I’ll tell you about later.

  But I hated that particular judgment because of the way it made me look in front of fans. Country fans back then would put up with my drinking and missing shows. But they didn’t like men who hit women. I didn’t like them either, and the point is I wasn’t one who did.

  I’ve never gotten to tell my side of that story until now.

  * * *

  Shug was back on my team in 1977, and I have to say that he became very aggressive with CBS in Nashville about promoting my career. He decided that the label should showcase me in front of a national press corps in New York City. His idea eventually worked.

  The Village Voice wrote that I should be on a list of America’s Top 10 singers in any category. Penthouse called me the “Holy Ghost of country music.” Several publications, including The New York Times, called me the greatest country singer who ever lived, or of all time, and stuff like that. Rolling Stone bragged on me real hard, and that was a big deal because a lot of country singers weren’t covered by that magazine in thos
e days.

  I want you to know here and now that I was mighty flattered. No singer would ever get tired of praise like that. And I don’t repeat it to brag but to make a point.

  Those things were written about my singing after a showcase I didn’t attend. I might have been better off because I missed the show. The fact is I stood up some pretty important people, and the press called me a flake, then went on to say that it was too bad because I had such tremendous talent. Seems to me that I came out all right on the deal, but no one around me agreed. I really made folks furious when I blew off two shows at New York City’s Bottom Line club.

  The guest list included Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, the cast from “Saturday Night Live,” all three commercial television networks, news wire services, and virtually every print publication in New York.

  Rick Blackburn, who was still vice president of Columbia’s Nashville division, saw to it that big shots from Columbia’s home office in New York were there. The label bought a bunch of big newspaper advertisements that said, GEORGE JONES AND COUNTRY MUSIC COME TO NEW YORK.

  I kept telling people I didn’t want to do that show. I was shy because of my old booze and cocaine-laced paranoia. Again, I was no exception. And I had it in my mind that those big-city Yankees would laugh at country music and at me. When I played Madison Square Garden in the 1960s, the big audience was filled with working folks who had gone north to find jobs. I played New York City again sometime in the 1970s, but that audience wasn’t comprised of big shots either.

  The Bottom Line audience was mostly intellectuals. With the exception of a few singers, I knew that no one there had ever heard of George Jones. I was afraid that once they saw me in person they’d scratch their heads and say, “What’s all the fuss about?”

  But nothing would do Shug, and he did his job. He persuaded CBS’s main office to spend about twenty thousand dollars on rolling out the red carpet and providing a Learjet to fly me to New York.

  I was sitting in Blackburn’s Nashville office at about one o’clock and told him I’d see him that night in New York. No one in the music business saw me again for three weeks.

  Recording artists struggle to get promotional support from their record labels. I had received one of the greatest promotional thrusts in the history of Nashville music and had flatly turned my back on it.

  I wanted to do a good job. I really did. But in those days my best work was disappearing.

  I was booked a second night at the Bottom Line, and you already know I missed that date too. (I finally played the Bottom Line months later.)

  I guess that my nickname “No Show Jones” was furthered more by the missed New York dates than anything I’d done to that point. Doesn’t that prove the power of the press? I’d missed dates throughout the South for years. I missed two at one nightclub and the press circulation about “No Show Jones” branded me more thoroughly than all of my previous misbehavior.

  I had told them I didn’t want to do those shows.

  Shug and I temporarily parted, and I was briefly managed by a guy from Dallas, Caruth Bird. He knew about my reputation for missing dates, and by this time so did anyone who was interested in me anywhere in North America. Caruth decided that guaranteeing my arrival for a show was too much to ask of any road manager whose hands were full trying to get a half-dozen members of my band from show to show. So he got the idea to hire a full-time companion and put him on my payroll.

  A string of guys tried to fill that role. The first was my buddy Jimmie Hills. Caruth let me pick whoever I wanted for the job. If I picked Jimmie because I thought he would go easy on me, I made a big mistake. He’d laugh and carry on like he was one of the boys. But when it came time for me to make a show, he turned from a pal into a drill sergeant.

  But it did little good. I just had to work harder at running off. If I had worked as hard at putting on shows as I did at running from them, I would have been a terrific performer. That’s the obvious logic to a sane man, which I wasn’t in 1977.

  I didn’t cotton to the idea of having a glorified baby-sitter, and that’s what Jimmie was, no matter what Caruth called him. Jimmie was paid two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses, not bad wages in 1977, to stand outside men’s room stalls to be sure I didn’t slip into the adjoining stall. Many times I was in a stall while Jimmie was hollering through the door, “George, you still in there?” He also stood outside my motel bathrooms to be sure I didn’t go through the tile ceiling above the commode.

  How would you like to live like that? I didn’t like it one bit and decided to test Jimmie’s skills about midway through my first tour with him. We’ve laughed about it many times since, but he wasn’t too amused at the time.

  I played two shows at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, then decided I wanted to go to Las Vegas on a night off to see Willie Nelson. I was feeling feisty and lonely. My mischief stemmed from determination to give Jimmie the slip. My loneliness stemmed from whatever it always did.

  So I paid the Palomino hostess three thousand dollars to go with me to Las Vegas and promised her all I would do was talk. I kept my word. Trouble is I got full of cocaine and wouldn’t stop talking, and she went to Jimmie and asked him to pinch-hit as a listener. He reminded her that listening is what she had been hired to do. And while I was figuring out a way to ditch Jimmie, she ditched me—and kept my three thousand dollars!

  Meanwhile, my band took the bus and went to San Jose, California, where I was supposed to meet them the day after my day off.

  I sat up all night with Willie in Vegas, driving him crazy, I’m sure, with my constant cocaine babble. Caruth had sent another guy, Bill Starnes, on the road to help Jimmie be sure I wasn’t waylaid in Vegas. The next morning the two of them physically walked me from a taxi across a runway to a jet waiting to take me to San Jose. One gripped each of my arms and pushed me toward the plane, as if I were a prisoner.

  I hated that. Suddenly, my determination to escape was no longer funny. I lost those guys on the runway. I left them standing with the wind from a jet engine messing up their hair. I wish I could remember how I did that.

  Jimmie, years later, couldn’t remember how I did it, just that I did. He could only recall that he had only seven dollars in his pocket when I gave him the slip. Having no more than seven bucks in Las Vegas, when you’ve just had your first failure at your new job, can be pretty scary, I imagine.

  Jimmie didn’t know at the time that I had watched him go into every bar, restaurant, and men’s room at the Las Vegas airport. I didn’t really want to abandon him that easily. I didn’t want him to get fired. Besides, I feared that Caruth would hire another watchdog I couldn’t trick as easily.

  Jimmie gave up and started to walk from the airport to downtown, a distance of several miles. And a long walk in the desert is painful. Some folks were charging for ice water in Vegas in those days, and I was afraid he’d get overly thirsty. So I let him find me as I stared at the sky outside the airport’s main entrance.

  “George, where are you going?” he said.

  “I’m going back to see Willie,” I said. “Are you going with me?”

  “I’ve got to,” Jimmie said. “I don’t have no money to go nowhere else.”

  We took a taxi to the Golden Nugget after I promised Jimmie that I would take a later flight to San Jose. He thought he was really on his toes when he told the hotel doorman and valet to watch me.

  “I’m with George Jones,” he said. “He’s in that there cab. You watch it and be sure he don’t go nowhere while I check in.”

  The doorman and valet would have failed as private detectives. Both stood on the same side of the taxi, and both watched the same door. All I did was lower myself, open the opposite door, and hunker down while I crept alongside a convoy of waiting taxicabs. When I got about three or four cabs away from them, I looked over a taxi’s trunk. They were still looking at the same closed door.

  I could have
robbed one of the cabdrivers, slipped back to my waiting taxi, and the doorman and valet would have sworn I’d been inside all along.

  I watched Jimmie open the door to an empty taxi. He looked pretty pitiful as he pulled our luggage out. He sat our bags on the curb and asked the doorman to watch them.

  “Oh no,” I thought. “Don’t let that guy watch them. He can’t even watch me inside an idling taxi.”

  So for a few minutes I watched the guy watch my bags, all the while watching Jimmie look high and low for me. I was still ducked behind a taxi.

  But here’s where the story becomes sad.

  I’ve said that the only thing a cocaine user wants is more cocaine. Eventually, more and more gets him less and less high. And out there in the Las Vegas sun, between the taxicabs, I knelt down and packed my nose with white powder. I began to wander aimlessly, and I’m glad now that I did. I became no match for Jimmie, who soon saw and caught me. He said I was about five blocks away.

  “George,” he said, “where are you going?”

  “I’m going to Colbert Park,” I told him.

  Colbert Park is in Alabama. I had no idea where I was.

  Jimmie somehow got me into bed, and I somehow got to sleep. It must have been from sheer exhaustion, as I had been up for about two days drinking and doing cocaine. Jimmie sat by my bedside until I fell asleep, then he took every stitch of clothes I had and put them in another room. He turned out the light and left me in an intoxicated sleep.

  I felt refreshed the next morning. I had missed the San Jose show but was still booked in Amarillo. I didn’t want to go there either. I showered, shaved, and told Jimmie to order breakfast from room service.