I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  “No,” I said, “I’ve changed my mind. Let’s go downstairs and eat. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. You go downstairs, and I’ll be right along.”

  I guess Jimmie trusted me because I was sober. He went down the hall, and I went out the hotel’s back door. I’d proven again that I could give him the slip, so I caught up with Jimmie and went to Amarillo, worked the show, got well into the booze and drugs, and gave him the slip once more.

  I chartered a plane and flew alone to Muscle Shoals, a town next to Florence, and told the pilot my money was inside my waiting car. He let me walk to it, and I took off, never paying him a cent.

  I never would have done anything like that sober, and my lack of consideration for others when I was wrecked bothers me to this day. I knew the pilot would sue me, and I knew he would win.

  I was right on both counts. I didn’t even attempt to defend the lawsuit. I simply said, “Pay the man his money and whatever damages he’s owed.”

  There is yet another of the several negative sides of cocaine use, and I experienced that too. Cocaine can sometimes let its user get a thought, no matter how outrageous, and hold it indefinitely. He’ll finally do something drastic, or even violent, to get rid of the thought. That happened to me more than once.

  One of the worst examples came one night when Linda and I were having a party. A man came up to her to say she had left her purse open. He said he could see inside and advised her to fetch the purse.

  “You never know who might be at a party,” he said. “Some of these folks have just dropped by. One might get into your purse.”

  He was right. I didn’t know a lot of the people who walked into my house when I was high, and I didn’t care. Cocaine limits the user’s concentration. He often hears only part of a thought. The only thing I remembered was that a man had been looking inside Linda’s open purse. I decided he was trying to steal it.

  I was totally wrong, but that didn’t stop me from confronting the guy in front of a bunch of other guests and embarrassing someone who had tried to do Linda a favor. She got between us, and the guy angrily left the party.

  Not long afterward I was riding somewhere with Jimmie Hills and decided I wanted to get something to eat. He quickly drove to a restaurant because he was pleased that I was actually going to consume food.

  I was full of cocaine.

  Jimmie and I walked into a café, and I saw the guy who had tried to warn Linda about her open purse. I walked up to him, pulled a pistol from under my coat, cocked it, and placed the barrel against his head. Waitresses dropped their dishes, and people throughout the diner began to scream.

  I told the man he was a thief and that he was going to die. He pleaded for his life, and so did Jimmie and others around him. That standoff probably lasted a minute or two before somebody said the police were on the way.

  I told the guy I’d kill him the next time I saw him, and Jimmie got me out the door. I don’t know why the cops didn’t come to my house and arrest me. The Florence police used to regularly look the other way in my behalf.

  Linda and I would have a fight, I’d sit in my car behind Jimmie’s barbershop, and the cops would call Jimmie.

  “Tell George that a new warrant is out for his arrest,” they’d tell Jimmie. “We’re on the way to get him, so he’d better take off.”

  Did they think they were doing me a favor? I needed to be arrested. I needed treatment. But it all goes back to the special rules by which show-business people are sadly allowed to live.

  I guess the most dramatic incident involving whiskey, cocaine, and me came in 1977 with Peanut Montgomery. My arrest made national news.

  I was sitting inside my car watching the river flow outside Florence. Moonlight danced on the churning waters, as black and as troubled as my mind. I had called Peanut to tell him I wanted to talk to him about something and asked him to meet me at the river.

  I should say right here that this was after Peanut had gone through a religious experience and become a self-appointed preacher. Here was a guy who had been one of my best friends and drinking buddies. Suddenly, he was telling me, and telling me, that I was going to hell because I drank and used drugs and all.

  I didn’t want to hear it, especially from someone who had drunk with me for so long. We lived in a dry county, and I can remember when Peanut would stagger with as many as ten empty whiskey bottles in his hands to return to the bootlegger who met him at the door. I always laughed, knowing he couldn’t have done that while sober.

  I heard his car pull up beside mine that night at the river. I told him something about someone dear to him, and he called me a liar. I knew better.

  The drinking, cocaine, financial uncertainty, loneliness, and all-around personal misery were too much to bear. The final straw was Peanut hollering in the dark that I was going to hell because of my sinful ways.

  I needed a friend, not judgment.

  “You don’t know what I go through!” I began to yell, with my car window down.

  “You need Jesus,” Peanut thundered. “Repent! Repent!”

  “Well, let’s see if your God can save you now!” I said.

  I stared directly through the darkness into his eyes as I picked a pistol from off of the car seat. I intentionally fired over his car roof. I’ll believe that until my dying day.

  There is no way I could have shot, or shot at, Peanut Montgomery. We were too good of friends who went back too far, no matter how furious he made me with his Bible-thumping.

  Peanut’s car burned rubber, and gravel flew as it charged off of the riverbank, leaving me in the darkness, alone and ashamed again. But not for long. Peanut went to the police. I was arrested for attempted murder.

  In an effort to scare me into straightening up, Peanut decided to file charges against me with the intention of dropping them before I went to trial. That’s what he did, and I was told to leave the county, which I didn’t. The district attorney said he would keep my file open and refile the charges if he ever caught me inside the county again.

  Peanut said I had fired at him and the bullet had struck his car door about an inch below his open driver’s window. I never saw a bullet hole. I only saw a photograph of a supposed hole. I believe with all of my heart that someone, possibly someone in law enforcement, doctored that picture to try to help me get my thinking right.

  I paced the floor over that one, knowing that the punishment for attempted murder could be several years in prison. My concert dates fell out like never before. No promoter anywhere wanted to take a chance on me not showing up or showing up drunk with a gun.

  I have to say that my brush with imprisonment did set me to thinking more than ever about my need to change. But I didn’t know how to do it.

  I just didn’t know how.

  Chapter 17

  Rick Blackburn and Billy Sherrill were forever supportive of my career when it was under their guidance. I never got any flak from the record label about my legal and criminal woes. Rick maintained his stance about the more trouble I was in, the more records I sold. That actually became the indisputable case beginning in the late 1970s.

  I became overly dependent on Rick. I carried his name and telephone number at all times and called him with whatever problem I had. He was the vice president of my record label, not my baby-sitter. But I treated him as such.

  I was arrested once and gave the sheriff my name. He thought it was so common that I had made it up.

  “Then you call Rick Blackburn at CBS in Nashville, and he’ll verify me,” I said.

  The sheriff did, and asked Rick if CBS had an employee named George Jones.

  “No,” Rick said. “We have an artist on our label by that name.”

  “Well, we got a guy in jail that claims to be him,” the sheriff said. “And all he’s done since he’s been in here is sing to the other prisoners. They’re having a big time, and he don’t act like he cares if he ever gets out. Would you listen to be sure it’s him?”

  The sheriff held the tele
phone to the bars, and Rick could hear me singing over the long-distance line.

  “That’s George!” Rick said. “Where do I send his bail?”

  And he sprung me.

  Then Rick got the idea for me to record an album of duets. Old and new songs were selected for me to sing with Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and some other folks, including James Taylor. I can’t remember who else was on the record, which has been out of print for years. I lost my last copy about ten moves ago.

  I’d never heard of James Taylor, who I learned is a big soft rock and folk singer.

  “Don’t you know ‘Fire and Rain’ or ‘Sweet Baby James’ or ‘You’ve Got a Friend’?” Rick asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I never heard of them.”

  I’ve never listened to anything but country music. I had heard of the giant rock acts such as the Beatles, but I didn’t listen to them. Why should I? I’m sure they did well what they did, but I didn’t care for any kind of music that wasn’t country. (I listened to the Rolling Stones occasionally just to hear Keith Richards play guitar.)

  Ernie Rowell got mad at me once when he brought Neil Young backstage in California.

  “Neil Young is here to see you, George,” he said.

  “Neil who?” I said.

  “Neil Young,” he said, “of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.” He went on to say how much that act was played on the radio.

  “But I don’t listen to that kind of radio,” I told him, “and I ain’t never heard of Neil Young.”

  Neil apparently became angry and left. Ernie later said I was out of touch. I knew that.

  I didn’t always listen to country radio either. When country stations played songs that were too pop-sounding to me, I changed the dial. I know I wasn’t in the fad, but I’ve never cared about fad.

  But I’ve always cared about country music. Genuine country. That’s the simple reason I never listened to anything else. Radio stations that claim to be country today play modern junk with words that don’t mean anything. So I don’t even listen to what’s called country radio anymore, except for WSM-AM in Nashville, where the format is mostly real country music from the 1950s through the 1980s.

  Rick played a song for me in 1977 that Taylor had written, “Bartender’s Blues.” James had made his own demonstration tape, using his own voice.

  “That guy is trying to sound like me,” I told Rick after hearing the tape.

  “He wrote the song with you in mind,” Rick said.

  “It’s a good song,” I said. “I’ll record it. Now why do I have to sing it with this Jimmy Taylor guy?”

  “Because it’s going to be on an album of duets,” Rick said, “and James wants to do a duet with you.”

  As I recall, I recorded my part and it was sent to James, who overdubbed harmony. He did an awful good job. I thought then he’d go a long way in the music business.

  “Bartender’s Blues” was released during the first week of 1978, a terrible time to ask fans who are trying to pay Christmas bills to buy a record. The song was on the Billboard country survey for fourteen weeks and peaked at number six. It was my first Top 10 song in two years, following “Her Name Is,” which went to number three in 1976. That song was about a guy who was in love with another man’s wife. It was a tongue-in-cheek treatment that went, “Her name is …” and never told the name of the woman the singer wanted.

  The public believed I was singing about Tammy. Several reporters asked if that was true. I purposely hedged on the question. I was ready to let people think whatever they wanted to think if it might sell a few records. I needed the money to pay child support to Tammy.

  Once again I wasn’t paying a lot of my bills because once again I rarely worked and because when I did, I once again didn’t earn enough to satisfy all of the claims against me. I worked many shows and never saw any money from my management. Once again I was usually paid only in cocaine. And once again I was so strung out that I accepted the drug, however reluctantly, as payment in full.

  Concert promoters had judgments, some guy in Nashville sued me for breach of contract (claiming that I had agreed to buy his house), and there were various other lawsuits and judgments.

  I gave two prices to show promoters. One was the official price listed in a contract. If they paid that, and paid with a check, I couldn’t escape tax liability. The other price was less but required the promoter to pay cash. There was no record of that transaction, and I didn’t pay income tax on it. I always took cash when I played for the door.

  I think every touring country act of the 1960s and 1970s worked that way. I’m owning up to it now because the statute of limitations on my tax liability twenty years ago has expired. And I no longer do business that way.

  Today all of my transactions are recorded. If I owe taxes, I pay them. Thank God I have the money to do that at last. And thank Him for a lot of additional organization that Nancy has brought to my life.

  Jimmie Hills remembers that I was running late for a show date that I had picked up quickly in 1977 or 1978. I sped to the airport at Huntsville, Alabama, and called Jimmie, who hadn’t heard from me in days. He had gone back to full-time work as a barber after deciding he couldn’t keep tabs on me for a living.

  I don’t remember how I got the word about the pickup date. I only remember that I barely had time to drive from Florence and that I feared I was going to miss my plane. The Jones Boys had left Nashville on a borrowed bus and were supposed to meet me at the show.

  I had been up for a couple of days, drinking, taking cocaine, and driving aimlessly through the Alabama countryside when I found out about this chance to earn some bucks. I tore into the airport and couldn’t find a parking place. I might have had more time than I thought, but when I was taking cocaine, I was usually in a hurry. It has that effect on a lot of people.

  It also makes the user highly irritable and impatient. My tension mounted as I drove wildly around the airport, searching for a parking place. By this time I was sure I was going to miss my plane and the few thousand dollars I so desperately needed. So I said to hell with it and parked on the sidewalk—right at the main entrance. I left the engine running for two days.

  I ran to the ticket counter, then to the gate. I called Jimmie and told him my car was at the Huntsville airport and that I’d like him to pick it up.

  He looked and looked for the car, but he liked to have never found it. That’s because he was looking in the parking lots when he should have been looking on the sidewalk at the main entrance. He finally saw the car and couldn’t believe his eyes. As he approached the vehicle, he heard the motor running. He saw keys in the ignition. In the back he saw an empty can of Vienna sausages. He knew me well enough to know that was the only food I had eaten for days. And he knew that meant my appetite was suppressed by cocaine.

  He contacted the automobile dealership where I had financed the car, and they made keys for him from their service records. They brought the keys to him, and he turned off the ignition forty-eight hours after I had parked.

  He couldn’t understand why the car hadn’t been towed. Then his eyes fell on the dash, where he saw a note. He gave it to me in 1995 when I was writing this book.

  “Please,” the handwritten note began. “To whom it may concern. I was in quite a hurry, this flight was very important. My name is George Jones with the Grand Ole Opry and I’ll be back tomorrow evening.”

  Numerous security guards and police officers no doubt saw my car. But no one towed it or even tried to turn off the ignition. Jimmie said he couldn’t believe the car didn’t overheat in the Alabama sun. But that episode shows how I had “friends” who I’d never met who were nonetheless trying to look after me.

  I was country music’s national drunk and drug addict. There were people whose sympathy for me made them protective and helpful. But again I wish one of them had come forward with legal action to have me admitted to a detoxification ward.

  The greatest example of law enforcement’s willingness
to turn a blind eye in my behalf came on October 23, 1978, two days after the death of Mel Street. Mel was a gifted country singer who had worked shows with me. I loved his style and even wrote the liner notes for one of his albums. He flattered me a whole bunch when he said I had been his greatest influence.

  I was drawn to Mel when I heard about his humble raising near Grundy, West Virginia. He grew up poor, then worked construction and climbed towers to help wire the Niagara Power Project at Niagara Falls, New York. He later owned a body shop in Bluefield, West Virginia.

  He landed a job on a television show in Bluefield, where he was spotted by Jim Prater, who, years later, became Charley Pride’s manager. But in 1963 he knew as little about country music promotion as Mel.

  Mel cut a song called “Borrowed Angel” that he had written, and Jim helped promote it. Jim called the same radio stations and asked them to play the song for more than a year. A programmer finally told him to stop calling because his station would not play a record that fans couldn’t buy.

  Jim was so green in the record business that he didn’t know he was supposed to hire a record distributor in order to sell records. He just kept trying to promote a record that wasn’t for sale. I was touched by Jim’s and Mel’s naive innocence.

  Mel cut “Borrowed Angel” a second time for another label, wrestled for another year to promote it, only to see it flop again. Nine years later he landed a deal with the Royal American label, hardly a major recording corporation. But Mel’s persistence finally paid off, and his little song, first recorded in a little town, entered the national Top 10 in 1972.

  Thereafter, he kept hitting commercial paydirt, scoring with “Lovin’ on Back Streets,” “I Met a Friend of Yours Today,” “Smokey Mountain Memories,” and others.

  The hotter his career got, the more I read that he wanted to sing like me. I felt as though he was a keeper of the country music flame, that he was a country purist during a time when so many other Nashville artists were trying to be “countrypolitan,” a term for the blending of country lyrics with symphonic arrangements. Much of the resulting sound was musical mush. It was good music for elevator rides or visits to a foot doctor’s office.