I Lived to Tell It All Page 26

  I was very hostile, so although Peanut came to see me often, he didn’t stay very long. I was too unbearable.

  I watched a lot of television and read a lot of cards and letters from fans who weren’t supposed to know I was in there. Somehow the reporters got hold of the story. Don’t they always? The press had discovered so many of my misfortunes that it didn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t like the reports were going to damage my reputation.

  I had a lot of time to think about God and to read the Bible. I had a lot of time to lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, whose cracks and holes I memorized. I took a lot of mental inventory. I did a lot of soul-searching. I fell asleep a lot of nights on a tear-drenched pillow.

  I was financially, psychologically, and emotionally bankrupt. I had no upcoming show dates, no idea if my band had disbanded, and didn’t want to see the few people who wanted to see me. And for months I had no longer been able to lie to myself about Tammy and me someday, somehow, getting back together.

  “This is it,” I remember thinking near the end of my hospitalization. “I have finally reached the bottom.” In a way, I was actually glad to have gone through so much. The only direction from here had to be up, I was sure.

  And on the radio, disc jockeys were playing “These Days I Barely Get By,” my 1975 song about a man who was hitting bottom so hard he was sure he couldn’t go on. In part, it went as follows:

  I woke up this morning aching with pain

  Don’t think I can work, but I’ll try

  The car’s in the shop, so I thumbed all the way

  Oh these days I barely get by.

  I walked home from work and it rained all the way

  My wife left and didn’t say why

  She laid all our bills on the desk in the hall

  Oh these days I barely get by.

  These days I barely get by

  I want to give up, lay down, and die

  Worst of all was when she told me good-bye

  Oh these days I barely get by

  These days one barely gets by.

  The song was cowritten by someone who seemed to know my desperation as well as I did. Her name was Tammy Wynette.

  Chapter 19

  Nothing would make me prouder than to tell you that my thirty days in drug and alcohol treatment healed me. Nothing makes me more ashamed than telling you they didn’t.

  I felt so good the day I got out of the hospital that I stopped and got a six-pack. I went to my house, where I had hidden a small amount of cocaine, and used it.

  I celebrated my temporary freedom from alcohol and cocaine with alcohol and cocaine.

  My treatment had amounted to no more than a monthlong recess from self-destruction. I had rested, but when I went back to the real world, I found my problems hadn’t rested at all. They had mounted.

  The boys in my band were so unaccustomed to being paid that they still refused to go on shows unless they got their money in advance. I couldn’t provide that, as I had no money myself. I had just come out of the hospital. I had no insurance, and I hadn’t been working.

  I’d finally persuade the Jones Boys to go on the road, promising them their pay after the show, and do my best to deliver. If my managers got the money first, and didn’t pay the band, my players understandably got furious.

  Drummer Ralph Land was the most vocal of all, and what he said about band members needing their salaries to pay their own bills made sense. My management team thought he was a troublemaker simply because he wanted money that was due him.

  Someone anonymously threatened to kill him, and he decided, rightly or wrongly, that the threat had come from Shug or Sandy Baggott. He left my office one evening and called the Tennessee attorney general.

  “I’m Ralph Land, and I play drums for George Jones,” he said. “I’m leaving Jones’s office now and heading for my house.” He gave his address, then stated, “If I don’t make it there I want you to know who murdered me.” He gave the names of the Baggott brothers.

  It’s hard to maintain morale within an organization whose members aren’t getting their paychecks and who suspect each other of trying to kill each other.

  And after every show my band and members of management were still physically running to the box office, competing to collect my performance fee to apply to money they said I owed them.

  Inside that hospital I had made minimal changes in my mind. Outside my sick world was the same.

  So, in the words of Merle Haggard, it was “back to the bar rooms, right back to drinking again.” And for me, cocaine went with whiskey as well as water.

  Shortly after my hospitalization, I think my alcohol consumption became worse, if that’s possible, than at any other time during my approximately thirty years of drinking. In the back of my mind I thought that, with what I had been taught at the rehabilitation center, I could “control” my drinking. All I had to do, I thought, was to enroll in detoxification for thirty days anytime I got exhausted from the booze. I’d dry out, rest, get fed, and even get my thinking right.

  I could go into rehabilitation for two thousand dollars in those days. I could afford that merely by getting my share of a weekend’s worth of work.

  My thinking was really out of whack. I had missed the entire point of detoxification and rehabilitation. Looking back, I think I was discharged too soon.

  My mind went right back to playing tricks on me. I went to Florence one day to get Jimmie Hills to cut my hair. I was half drunk and carried perhaps an ounce of cocaine in my front pants pocket. It looked like I had a lump on my leg.

  I knew that Jimmie knew I used, and I knew he wouldn’t say anything about it. Another customer entered while I was in the chair. He was an IRS agent.

  Jimmy introduced the man to me and said he had long wanted to shake the hand of George Jones. This here is so and so, Jimmie said. He’s one of your biggest fans, and he works for the IRS.

  In my mind, I was sure Jimmie had said FBI. I was certain the man was there to bust me for the cocaine in my pants. I immediately thought of how many Mafia figures had been surrounded by authorities in the barber’s chair. I thought of Albert Anastasia, who was murdered by other gangsters while getting a haircut. And so I bolted from the barber’s chair.

  My hair was dripping wet and I still wore the barber’s apron as I sprinted for the back door. There, I was convinced cops were waiting for me outside. Terrified, I yanked a full ounce of cocaine, perhaps fifteen hundred dollars’ worth, from my pocket and ripped the plastic bag. I threw it all over the back-room floor. Then I braced for the cops I feared were on the other side of the door.

  I charged outside, thinking my momentum might knock one or two down and I could leap into my car for a speedy getaway.

  Meanwhile, Jimmie and the IRS agent were scratching their heads inside. The agent wanted a haircut, but Jimmie wouldn’t let him take the chair because my time wasn’t up.

  “George must not be feeling well,” Jimmie said. “He’s probably back there in the rest room.”

  Jimmie asked his wife, Ann, who also worked at the shop, to see about me. She walked in the back and saw the floor. It looked like an indoor snowfall. She knew immediately what it was and figured I wouldn’t be back. She fired up a vacuum sweeper and began cleaning up the evidence. That much cocaine could have gotten me charged with possession with intent to distribute. Conviction carried a sentence of several years.

  Meanwhile, Jimmie and the IRS guy were still waiting for me to return to the barber’s chair. Ann had a customer in her own chair. He couldn’t understand why she had chosen such an unusual time to vacuum the back room.

  If the police had ever learned of that incident and opened that vacuum’s bag, we would have all gotten time behind bars.

  About this same time, I called a couple of the Adams brothers (who had worked as some of the Jones Boys in the 1960s) to do a few shows with me. I don’t remember if they came to Florence or to Lakeland, where I might have called them because a couple of my band m
embers temporarily pulled out again.

  It took all of the money the Adamses had to get to wherever I was. They arrived only to find that I was destitute. Not actually. I had a few cents.

  “We ain’t got any money, George,” one said.

  “Well, all I got is this change,” I said. “That ain’t gonna do nobody no good. Hell, we might as well be completely broke.”

  And so, for the second time in my life and career, I was. I stood at the back door and hurled less than a handful of coins across the lawn. We had a booking, a full tank of diesel fuel in a leased bus, a guarantee of motel rooms to be paid for by the promoter, and nothing else.

  Except for a song. And I do mean a song.

  I played rhythm guitar and sang “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The Adams brothers flipped, and so did most everyone who ever heard that tune before, or after, it was recorded.

  The song had been brought to my attention in 1978 by Billy Sherrill. It had been written by Curly Putnam and Bobby Braddock. Curly had written “Green, Green Grass of Home,” which was a big hit for Tom Jones and for Porter Wagoner. Jerry Lee Lewis had put it on an album. Bobby had written hits for Tammy and me. Billy loved “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He said he was unable to sleep the night after first hearing that song. But he thought it was incomplete.

  The song is about a man who loved a woman so much it killed him when she left. He had said he would love her until he died, and only on his deathbed did he stop. Hence the idea “He stopped loving her today.”

  In 1993 I was a guest on a talk show whose host was Burt Reynolds. Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, and Randy Travis were on with me. Alan said he thought “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was the perfect country song.

  A lot of folks have agreed with him. In 1992 Country Music magazine and USA Today published a list of the world’s most popular country songs, as voted by their readers. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was number one in each publication.

  To this day, when I sing it in my show, people sometimes applaud from the first note until the last. I’ve actually had people tell me they didn’t hear one word because of the deafening applause.

  And I almost missed the song that changed my life and career more than anything, anything, that is, except for my marriage to Nancy.

  Putnam and Braddock killed the song’s main character too soon in their early versions. Billy kept telling them to kill the guy at a different time and then have the woman come to his funeral. The writers thought that might be too sad, and Billy did too. But he knew the song, on a scale of one to ten, was about an eight. He saw it as a potential eleven.

  He gave the song to me, and I carried it for more than a year, also convinced that it needed rewriting. Billy had a notebook about an inch thick that was nothing but rewrites of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

  When we finally got a version that made Billy happy, I went in to record. But I was drunk and couldn’t get the melody. For some reason, the melody to “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” the Kris Kristofferson classic, stuck in my head. So I sang Curly and Bobby’s lyrics with Kristofferson’s copyrighted melody. Billy had a fit, and we had a fight.

  “You’re singing the wrong melody!” he yelled.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Well, the melody I’m singing is prettier than the one you want.”

  “That may be,” he argued. “I’m sure Kristofferson would think so too. But it’s the wrong melody.”

  It took a long time before I sang the correct melody.

  That song contains a narration. I hadn’t utilized a narration in one of my songs in years and can only think of one I’ve done since—Tom T. Hall’s “I’m Not Ready Yet.” Anyhow, the narration pertained to the woman’s visit to the funeral. It goes:

  She came to see him one last time

  And we all wondered if she would

  And it kept running through my mind

  This time he’s over her for good.

  Pretty simple, eh?

  I couldn’t get it. I had been able to sing while drunk all of my life. I’d fooled millions of people. But I could never speak without slurring when drunk. What we needed to complete that song was the narration. But Billy could never catch me sober enough to record four simple spoken lines.

  It took us about eighteen months to record a song that was approximately three minutes long.

  On the day we finished, I looked Billy square in the eye and said, “Nobody will buy that morbid son of a bitch.” Then I marched out the studio door.

  The song was released on April 12, 1980. It became my first number-one song in six years.

  I’ve had my share of career records, such as “She Thinks I Still Care,” “White Lightning,” “Walk Through This World with Me,” “The Grand Tour,” and maybe a few others.

  “He Stopped Loving Her Today” did more for my career than all of the others combined. I went from a twenty-five-hundred-dollar act who promoters feared wouldn’t show up to an act who earned twenty-five thousand dollars plus a percentage of the gate receipts. That was big money for a country artist sixteen years ago.

  I was wanted by show promoters everywhere. I was wanted by network television producers. The magazine interview requests were limitless.

  To put it simply, I was back on top. Just that quickly. I don’t want to belabor this comparison, but a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song.

  There is a God.

  * * *

  You wouldn’t think I could have found a way to blemish such a wonderful hit record and its resulting success. But I did, although only to a tiny degree. I embarrassed myself on national television, but folks just figured I was drunk. Being suspected of being drunk wasn’t that damaging to my career by 1981. I mean, what else was new?

  The song was nominated for the Country Music Association’s “Song of the Year” and I for “Male Vocalist of the Year.” Rick Blackburn, still vice president of the CBS Nashville division, wanted to personally see that I made it to the awards show sober. The show has been broadcast during prime time in the fall since 1967. It used to be a ninety-minute broadcast but now runs for three hours.

  Rick took me to the Opryland Hotel at 6 P.M. He told me that we had to be in our seats at the Opry House by 7:30 P.M. and that live cameras would roll promptly at 8 P.M.

  “I’ll be back at seven P.M. with your tuxedo,” he said. “You can get dressed, and then the limousine will take us to the Opry House.”

  I told him I was going to take a nap. I can’t remember, maybe I fully intended to do so.

  Remember, a lot of my old drinking buddies came around whenever I returned to Nashville in those days. Somebody, maybe Johnny Paycheck, stopped by my room.

  Rick returned with Tom Binkley, still my attorney, to find that I had almost single-handedly drunk a fifth of whiskey in the space of an hour. It’s a wonder I didn’t suffer alcohol poisoning and die. I know now there have been many times when it was a wonder that I didn’t die.

  Rick expected to find me fresh in my tuxedo when he arrived to pick me up. Instead, I was drunk, unconscious, and naked in the bathtub.

  I was supposed to present an award, sing a song, and possibly receive a major music award on an international live television show scheduled to commence in less than sixty minutes.

  Tom and Rick turned cold water on me in the shower, and Rick ordered pots of coffee. I cussed and kicked over a lot of furniture, I’m told. I probably wanted to fight but was too drunk to even make a fist.

  Rick had spent the last few years trying to convince his superiors in New York City that CBS should keep me in its Epic division. I had disrupted that big deal he had set up at the Bottom Line in New York, but I had redeemed myself with “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He had told the big shots I was a changed man.

  I was. I was a worse drunk than ever.

  Tom and Rick wrestled me down the Opryland Hotel hall and into the waiting car. We were rushed to the Opry House, where Rick walked me down the aisle to my assi
gned seat next to him. We’d be seen when the television cameras panned the audience.

  Then he made one of the toughest judgment calls of his life. He had invested a lot of money over a lot of years to help rebuild my career. Tonight he was scheduled to get some crowning glory. But he went to the executive producer of the CMA Awards, given on Nashville’s biggest night of the year, and told him to scratch me from the show.

  “At what point is George scheduled to go on?” Rick asked.

  “He’s got the third song,” he was told.

  “He can’t go on,” Rick said.

  “What!” said the executive producer. “What do you mean he can’t go on? He’s nominated for one of the biggest awards of the night, he has his own song in the show, and you’re telling me he can’t go on?”

  “That’s right,” said Rick. “He’ll embarrass us all.”

  “This is live television,” the executive producer reminded Rick. “It’s too late to find a fill-in!”

  I guess he wanted me to show my ass live as opposed to having it videotaped.

  “Well,” said the executive producer, “what about Barbara Mandrell?”

  Rick only moaned. He had forgotten that I was also scheduled to do a duet with Barbara, then one of the hottest entertainers in North America due to her prime-time show on NBC. She had recorded a song called “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” that had gone to number one.

  I had sung two lines in that song as a featured artist near the end of the recording. The song was a giant hit, an anthem of the airwaves.

  I couldn’t have sung my two lines any more than I could have sung my middle name. I was that far gone. Rick was even afraid I would pass out in my third-row seat and that much of the free world would see me snoring on Nashville’s biggest night.

  He was panicked and pissed.

  Backstage adjustments were hurriedly made. I didn’t get to sing “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Barbara, I was later told, was told to sing her song without me. She was instructed in no uncertain terms not to even acknowledge me in the audience.