I Lived to Tell It All Page 8

  Riddle hung around for a while, and I mentioned that I needed to hire a harmony singer. I had to have someone who knew my songs, who was willing to travel, and who could leave the next day.

  “I can sing harmony, and I can go tomorrow,” Riddle said.

  I tested him on the spot by breaking into “White Lightning.” He nailed his part, and the next day he rode with Jimmy Dickens, promoter Rex Reinhardt, and me from Nashville to Hobbs, New Mexico. I broke him in right—four men, instruments, clothes, and perhaps fifteen hundred miles—in one sitting!

  Riddle and I played every dive that would have me for a year, working with house bands where they had them and working as a duo where they didn’t. He paid me a high compliment recently when he credited me with getting him a recording contract with Mercury Records and said that I saw to it that he had billing on every show he ever worked with me. It’s nice to be able to help somebody, and it’s nice they remember in a business where too many people too often forget. I’ll tell you later about my open-heart surgery in 1994. But I’ll tell you now that George Riddle came to see me the day after the procedure, even though I hadn’t seen him in years.

  I suppose the biggest compliment that Riddle paid me was that he remembered in all the time he and I worked together that I only missed two shows due to drunkenness.

  “There were plenty of times he went on when he was loaded, but I only saw him miss two shows, and one was on ‘George Jones Day’ in Beaumont,” Riddle remembered. “We told the crowd he was sick, and Johnny Cash filled in for him.”

  Riddle also bragged that he remembered once when I not only showed up but arrived a week early. We were booked at the Flame Club in Minneapolis. We drove all night and most of the next day from Nashville and were exhausted when we pulled into the parking lot.

  There, rising above the lot, was a glowing sign that said, WILMA LEE AND STONEY COOPER HERE TONIGHT. I quickly fumbled through my briefcase to discover that I had the right club on the wrong date. I left Riddle with friends, and he waited for me to return in seven days.

  I stayed at the Capitol Park Inn during most of my time in Nashville in those days. I came in after a Christmas trip home to Texas and told Riddle that I’d found a hit.

  The song had been written by nineteen-year-old Dickey Lee. Twenty-two years later, Lee said he was still trying to write a song that would become that popular. It was pitched to me by Jack Clement, who had a little studio in Texas at the time and later moved to Nashville, where he wrote songs and produced records for some of the biggest names in country music, including Waylon Jennings during the 1970s and 1980s, Waylon’s heyday.

  On April 14, 1962, I saw the release of “She Thinks I Still Care.” The song was on the Billboard survey for twenty-three weeks, six of them at number one. It has been recorded by scores of artists and in 1974 spent two weeks at number one after it was rerecorded by Anne Murray, who changed the hook-line to “He Thinks I Still Care.”

  For years after I recorded it, the song was my most requested, and it became what people in my business call a “career record,” the song that firmly establishes your identity with the public.

  In the fall of 1963, I went to New York City and sang on Jimmy Dean’s ABC network television show. I was nervous and had a hard time singing without a live audience. We wrestled through an afternoon of rehearsals, but even in Manhattan, where there wasn’t one country radio station, the only thing Dean and his crew wanted to hear was “She Thinks I Still Care.”

  Just before the song’s release, I told Riddle to hire a band that would be called the Jones Boys, the name of my band to this day. I suppose you could technically say that up until then it had been George Jones and the Jones Boy. But Riddle expanded the band by four, hiring Billy Wayne on steel guitar, Jerry Star (formerly with Wanda Jackson) as our lead guitarist, Gary Prawl (whose name I couldn’t remember, so we changed it to Gary Parker), and Glen Davis, who is now a staff drummer at the Grand Ole Opry.

  Billy was the first to leave the group. That meant I had no steel player and one spare uniform. The uniform was tailor-made of polyester and rhinestones. It was bright red with white trim. It wasn’t the kind of suit you’d find at Robert Hall Clothes, and it would have been very hard to buy in a different size for a new player.

  I wanted to replace Billy with a good player, but, more important, I didn’t want to have to buy a new uniform. So I sent Riddle from somewhere on the road to Nashville to pick up a steel player who was like Billy in talent and size.

  Shot Jackson was a master Dobro player who worked at a music store. He knew every good musician in town. Riddle went directly to him, and Shot raved about a new guy who had just come to town. George interviewed Weldon Myrick, who went on to become one of the most sought-after steel guitar recording session players in Nashville history. Riddle was overwhelmed with his playing in 1961. But unless Weldon reads this book, he’ll never know that the reason he wasn’t hired was because Riddle figured he wouldn’t fit into Billy’s used uniform. So we hired Hal Rugg.

  For a while, all six of us, plus our instruments, traveled in one car. Shortly afterward we pulled a trailer, but that still left six grown men inside a sedan. And we were working one-night shows with five hundred miles between each show. A lot of folks came to our shows and thought I had it easy. I often did—after I got to the show. In those days, the hardest part of a show was not performing it but getting to it.

  In the early 1960s, before the popularity of interstate highways and radial tires, one of six men in a car almost always had to go to the rest room. Somebody was always hungry, tired, grouchy, lonely, or otherwise irritated. But truck stops and restaurants weren’t as plentiful then as they are now.

  Maybe you’ve driven across the country with your family. Have you ever done it with no room to stretch your legs, when you had to be at a certain place at a certain time, and try to sleep in the car so you could repeat the same routine the next day?

  The driver gets so bored that he contracts highway hypnosis. I was actually riding once with a guy who came to a curve in the road and jumped out. The car went down an embankment with me bouncing around inside. (Seat belts weren’t mandatory back then either.) You guessed it—I broke my arm and had to have it placed inside a cast!

  Another time I was drunk in the backseat when Riddle pulled into a restaurant. He left me sleeping, and when I awoke I could see a giant mound of dirt through the back window. I had been dreaming, and the miles had taken their toll. I didn’t know where I was, but that didn’t make any difference.

  I bolted from the car and charged into the restaurant.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again,” I yelled at Riddle.

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “Don’t you ever let me ride, then wake up when I can’t see nothing but dirt,” I said. “I thought I had died and was in my grave!”

  People all over the room were staring.

  Chapter 6

  A young country singer today knows he’s on track when his record label hires an image consultant, gets a national advertiser to sponsor a tour, and places him with a financial consulting firm.

  But when I was coming up, you weren’t a bona fide country star until you had a bus with your name written in big letters on the side. Getting that first bus was a rite of passage, and that’s no exaggeration.

  Customized buses are still as much a part of country music as ballads. Artists have traveled for years from show to show in buses like the one I currently own, which has a satellite television, a range, microwave oven, double bed, wall-to-wall carpeting, wood paneling, mirrored ceiling, central heat and air-conditioning, and more. Country music coaches are swanky houses on wheels.

  In December 1994 Nashville’s WSM radio reported that Dolly Parton had spent $750,000 on just the interior of her new bus.

  My first bus, acquired in 1962, didn’t cost that much, and it wasn’t as elegant. It was a used, dented, and rusty contraption that I bought from a Western swing band. It wasn’t
customized, but was instead hollow on the inside, where there was little more than bare sheet-metal walls. Except for a few seats up front, all the “furnishings” were portable and weren’t fastened down.

  Some friends wanted me to get a bus because they thought that would prevent me from trading cars so often. I can’t count the hundreds of cars I’ve owned. Even to this day, I sometimes buy a car and trade it before the new smell fades. But I used to be worse.

  Before I formed my band I played Minneapolis with George Riddle and we drove to the show in my car. He sang a few songs before I went onstage. While he was performing, I traded cars with a guy I had met at the show. Riddle came offstage, I gave him my car keys, and he went to the car he thought was mine. He was fumbling with the lock when the new owner asked him what he was trying to do. A mild argument resulted before Riddle got his wheels straightened out.

  The Jones Boys nicknamed my first bus “The Brown Bomber.” Later they changed that to “Gas Chamber.”

  Diesel fumes seeped through the floor into the cabin if the bus was stationary. Not many cars had air-conditioning in those days, and there certainly wasn’t any on that bus. Have you ever traveled in solid steel across a steaming highway above a hot engine in the summertime? Heat beats down from the sun at the same time it rises from the floor. When the two meet where passengers sit, the effect is unbearable. The guys and I sweated away many pounds inside that old thing.

  Gary Prawl decided that whoever manufactured the bus should have put vents in the floor that would force air into the interior at highway speed. There was no ventilation until I got drunk outside Joe’s Lounge in Chicago Heights, Illinois, and emptied a pistol into the floor. Our air-conditioning was bullet holes. When we moved, the air leaked in slowly. When we sat, the fumes still came in quickly.

  I couldn’t afford to customize the jalopy, so I put used bunks inside and didn’t anchor them. They shifted if the driver took a curve too quickly. We sat on folding chairs, and occasionally a chair and the guy sitting on it fell over as the bus rounded a corner.

  People have always been fascinated with modern minstrels who travel from town to town on a bus to earn a living. To this day, someone at almost every place I play wants to get on my bus. They want to ask how many people it sleeps and if I take a shower on there and things like that.

  We played New Braunfels, Texas, shortly after we got the Brown Bomber, and a young woman got on the bus. She had had a few drinks. The guys went to the back and were changing clothes when the bus began to move. That wasn’t unusual.

  In about ten minutes we were in open country, sailing down a Texas two-lane with the windows open, bound for San Antonio. The bus kept going faster and faster. Pretty soon the guys in the back began to yell at me to slow down.

  “I’ve never seen him drive this fast,” one said. “How much did he have to drink?”

  They kept worrying, and the speed kept accelerating. Glen Davis and George Riddle braced themselves by pressing their hands against the ceiling and wobbled up the moving aisle to ask me to take it easy. By then the fence posts looked like a picket fence rolling by the window.

  Glen or Riddle grabbed the driver’s shoulder and discovered it belonged to the visiting girl.

  You never saw so many grown men stumbling over each other as they rushed to get her to stop. The boys had thought I was driving, and I had thought one of them was.

  We finally wrecked that bus.

  Instead of hiring an experienced driver from Nashville, as I would today, I hired someone I knew in Vidor. The band and I simply called him Tubbs. As I look back, I wonder if he had ever been out of Vidor. He said he had, but he was always getting lost. A band member or I would drive to the highway that we were going to take to our next destination, then we’d put a map in front of him.

  “Now, Tubbs,” one of us would patiently say, “just stay on this road and you’ll be fine. Don’t get off this road.”

  “Okay,” he always insisted. “I’ve got it this time.”

  We’d go to the back of the bus for some serious drinking or to go to sleep. Within thirty minutes Tubbs would be stopped at the side of the road.

  “I’m lost,” he always said. And he always was.

  We had finished a show in Anderson, California, and were on the way to Salem, Oregon, when we took an unwanted detour off the side of a steep mountain in Grants Pass.

  Riddle said he remembers a crash, bolting upright on his bunk, and seeing things flying around him. His mattress flew off his bunk, and Glen estimated that Riddle passed him on that bedding at fifty miles per hour.

  The bus turned over, and everything inside went in every direction. The bus’s interior was totally black on that dark slope as we skidded on the side windows toward the bottom of the mountain. All you could hear was the sound of rocks scraping against glass and metal and grown men screaming. I don’t remember what finally stopped us.

  The same thing happened to the band and me in 1964 in another bus on a two-lane highway in the Smoky Mountains. No one was injured that time.

  After the first accident, I was taken to a hospital in Grants Pass, where I was treated for broken ribs. My stomach and chest were wrapped in bandages, and it hurt just to breathe, let alone walk. The boys were bruised and broken from head to foot. One wore an arm cast, and all wore heavy bandages when they worked the next show without me. I had taken an airplane back to Vidor.

  My reputation for missing personal appearances due to drunkenness had begun to spread as early as the early 1960s. Some of the boys thought the crowd would think we had pitched a bender and gotten into a brawl and that I was too hungover to make the show. But newspaper reporters, who eventually wrote many mean things about me, did me a favor after that bus wreck.

  By the time the boys got to the show, the news wires had carried the story about George Jones and the Jones Boys barely escaping death on a steep mountain pass. The band members said lots of fans were concerned and thanked the band for coming despite the accident.

  Eventually, my reputation became so bad that people said I was drunk no matter why I missed a date. Of course, the truth of the matter is that I was drunk when I missed most of my dates. There came a time a few years later when some underhanded promoters took advantage of my reputation by advertising that I was going to appear without ever booking me. I honestly had no idea I was expected. On the night of the show, the promoters would sell lots of booze to the crowd and tell them that George Jones would be there shortly. A few hours later they would announce that I wasn’t coming after all, implying that I was drunk and somewhere else. They usually told the crowd they could have their money back, but by then most of the people were too loaded to care if I showed up or not. The promoters therefore sold tickets and whiskey around my appearance without my ever appearing.

  But whatever has or has not happened in my life since I bought my first coach, it has always been back to the bus and back to the road.

  During the early 1960s I was a binge drinker. I’d go as long as three weeks without a drink, then stay drunk for three or four days. That’s when my hostility surfaced.

  I’ve been drunk and picked fights with men twice my size just because liquor made me feel aggressive. I’ve been a gentleman with nightclub owners who insisted I have a drink with them, then another, then another, and so on. That was often a disaster.

  I played a club in Baltimore in 1962 for a week and never took a drink the entire time. The nightclub owner kept hounding me to get drunk with him.

  “I want to be able to say I got drunk with George Jones,” he told me every night.

  I never knew why people wanted to say they drank with me. Was it because I had a few songs on the radio or because I was getting the reputation of being a two-fisted drinker? But I met that kind of temptation every place I went, and years later when I tried hard to get sober, the constant pressure from fans and promoters to drink was a terrible handicap. Some people like to give drinks to a drunk, and I don’t think much of those folks.<
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  Riddle met secretly with that particular Baltimore nightclub owner and told him I was on a sober roll.

  “Leave George alone,” Riddle told him. “Don’t try to get him to drink. You don’t want what you think you do. Seeing George drunk is not always a pretty sight.”

  But nothing else would do for this guy.

  “I’m paying the bills around here, and I’ve given George Jones a week’s worth of work,” he said. “Does he think he’s too good to drink with me?”

  I’ve never felt too good for anybody. To this day I don’t like snobs. But today I wouldn’t let that man’s remarks get to me. I’d consider the source and go on my sober way.

  “Okay, my friend,” I told him on the last night after my last show. “Break out the bottle.”

  We killed a fifth of whiskey and got into another. And then I got out of my mind.

  I threw an ashtray at a mirror behind the bar, and glass flew in all directions. The club owner came out of his chair.

  “What are you going to do, tear the place to pieces?” he shouted.

  “Only before I whip your ass!” I said. And I meant it.

  He pleaded some more, then ran from the room, scared to death by the man going crazy in his nightclub. I broke glasses, smashed mirrors, bent metal chairs, broke the legs off tables, tore down curtains, shattered whiskey bottles behind the bar, and more. I was out of my drunken mind.

  The club owner, hysterical, ran back into the room and jumped on me. I knocked the shit out of him several times. I’m glad I had already gotten paid for my week’s work. He ran out of the room once more, and I never saw him again. I was never invited back to play his club.

  The next day I felt terrible about what I’d done, and I was mercilessly hungover. (The combination of a hangover and motion sickness from riding a bus is terrible.) There were plenty of times I did awful things and paid money for my misbehavior the next day. Riddle said he doesn’t think I paid that guy. He said he had warned the guy about my drinking and that he thought the man had it coming. So we just got on the bus and left town.