I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  Riddle and I left our bus at the Mexican border once to do some drinking in the cantinas between show dates. We caught a taxi and were having a good time until I got drunk, and then my mean side surfaced. It almost cost us our lives.

  I began to feel my alcoholic oats when I noticed five mean-looking Mexicans looking at us in a bar. I don’t think they liked gringos, and I didn’t like the way they were staring. They had scarred and greasy faces, like the bad guys you might see in a Clint Eastwood movie.

  I decided I’d make conversation. I asked if their mothers had any children who had lived.

  They didn’t understand a word I said, and one or two might have thought I was trying to be friendly. Then I called them five smelly sons of bitches. They still didn’t get it. I said the same thing again, and that time they got my tone.

  “I don’t think they ever did know what George was saying,” Riddle said recently. “But when he began to scream and cuss so loudly, and when they could see the look on his face, they got the idea.”

  That’s when they pulled out the knives.

  Riddle and I fled without paying our bill. I weighed so little that I could run like a deer. Riddle kept looking over his shoulder, and each time he did, he saw the summer sunlight glistening off the flashing blades they were waving at us. By then the Mexicans were shouting, and I couldn’t understand what they had to say. But I also got the tone.

  Riddle saw a taxi, and we ran into its side. We hit with the thud of stray deer running into a car on a dark highway. Dust boiled from the tires as the driver locked all four wheels.

  We dove into the backseat, and Riddle began to roll up the windows. The Mexicans and their knives were only a few feet away. Riddle by then was hanging over the front seat, cranking the passenger’s window up while hollering “Drive, drive, damnit, drive!”

  The taxi driver didn’t understand English.

  Riddle had just cranked the fourth window to the top when he had an idea about how to communicate. The Mexicans, meanwhile, were pounding on the taxi and kicking its side. One had jumped onto the trunk. Maybe he thought he’d come through the rear window and slice us to pieces in the backseat.

  “Border, border, border!” Riddle began to yell.

  The driver got it.

  He was still looking at us in the backseat when he put the accelerator to the floor. The guy on the trunk rolled off, and the jolt forward broke the other men’s holds on the door handles.

  “I worked for George Jones for four years and had some pretty hair-raising experiences,” Riddle said later. “I have to say that was the most scary, and probably the most scared, I’ve ever been in my entire life. I can’t remember the name of the town, but I thought that was going to be the place where I would die.”

  We were taken to the border and the bus.

  Today the public realizes how important a bus is to a country singer’s livelihood. Swiping his bus can be like swiping a carpenter’s hammer and saw. I guess that’s why people have attacked my bus when they’ve been angry at me.

  I was booked to play Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1975 when the band made the show but I didn’t. I had found out that one of my previous managers was going to seize the gate receipts, so I knew I’d wind up playing the show for no compensation. But the promoter had spent money advertising the concert as one where no alcohol was served. He therefore didn’t have the luxury of lubricating the crowd with liquor. With nothing to settle their nerves, their anger mounted. A lot of irate fans demanded their money back, and apparently the promoter quickly saw that he was going to take a loss.

  His first thought was to call the sheriff, who happened to be his uncle. The uncle’s first thought was to seize my bus and let the promoter sell it.

  Justice moves quickly in small towns, where everybody knows everybody, but nobody knew my whereabouts.

  With no bus, my band had no way back to Nashville. The only transportation for a six-member band and my friend Billy Wilhite, who used to accompany me in those days, was a six-passenger car. The promoter seized that too and wouldn’t even let anybody in my organization sit in it. He didn’t know the car was rented until he received a call from Hertz, whose lawyers must have sounded more ferocious than his sheriff uncle. The car was returned to Billy, who returned it to the rental agency.

  Meanwhile, my bus and the band it was supposed to haul were still stranded.

  Clarence Reynolds at the Commerce Union Bank in Nashville held the papers on the bus, and he called the sheriff. The bus had seen a lot of miles and madness, and when Clarence told the sheriff how little the bus was worth and how much money I owed on it, the sheriff asked how he could find me to give it back. Finally, the band, bus and all, got home.

  There’s a secure feeling in being inside thousands of pounds of steel moving at sixty-five miles an hour with the curtains drawn. You can shut out the world. But you always have to stop, and the world is always waiting when you do.

  Living the majority of your waking life on a bus also breeds claustrophobia. The sheer confinement of a few square feet holding eight to ten adults can make everyone on the bus extremely restless. The obvious outlet is humor.

  Darrell McCall used to play bass and sing high harmony for Faron Young, Ray Price, and occasionally for me and a few others. Faron frequently did long tours with Hank Snow in the early 1960s, and Darrell used to get off Faron’s bus eager to play pranks on Hank, who was generally a serious type. (Darrell once said that after you ride a bus for so many miles your mouth feels like the bottom of a birdcage.)

  Hank used to love to shoot home movies. He shot film of almost every place he played all over North America. That was back when Hank and Faron would go out on forty-day tours, be home for one night, then go back out again for forty more.

  During Hank’s one night at home, he often wanted to show his home movies to the band that had just accompanied him on the tour. In other words, he wanted to show them on film what they had just seen in real life. They were sick of the view.

  But Hank was their boss, so they felt they had to watch his movies. Darrell thought he’d break Hank of the habit.

  He secretly got hold of Hank’s movie camera and filmed things he shouldn’t have. He photographed hubcaps, piles of dog shit, and other things that weren’t a part of the lovely landscape. Faron said recently that Darrell used to turn on the camera and toss it in the air, filming the world in a spin. Hank would send his exposed film to his wife and ask her to have it processed so that it would be waiting for viewing when he and the band returned to Nashville. He’d have his unwilling guests in place, turn off the lights, hit the projector switch, and see Darrell’s handiwork.

  Then he’d call Faron.

  “That goddamn Darrell has ruined my film,” Hank would fuss. “I shot beautiful film, and he has replaced it with film of dog shit! Now, what are you going to do?”

  Faron never did anything except to laugh.

  A lot of people feel they should be able to do anything they want when they’re at home, and that bus is home to a touring singer. I’ve carried barbecue grills on my bus and stopped by the side of the road, away from people, to eat and relax before climbing back on and going to the next town. To this day I sometimes arrive in a town where I’ve already paid for a nice hotel room. But there are plenty of times I never see the hotel’s interior. I’d rather dress on my bus.

  I think the willingness to do what we want to do at home is why some country singers have behaved so recklessly inside their mobile houses.

  Billy Wilhite was one of the best friends I’ve ever had. I met him in Texas in 1957, and he started coming around my shows and traveling with me now and again before I got my first bus. After I did, he did various jobs for me, and eventually he and I lived together in an apartment in Nashville.

  But first we lived on a bus, where I lived any way I wanted.

  It was 1975, and I hadn’t been divorced from Tammy Wynette for very long. I was booked on a package show with the Statler Brothers and Tammy
in Tampa, Florida, and was supposed to go deep-sea fishing with Billy the next day. But Tammy and I got into an argument that reminded me of the way we fought when we were married. I got drunk and decided I wanted to go to Nashville.

  The band wanted to stay in Tampa, so I took off on the bus without them—just Billy, Gordon Wooden (my driver), and me. We went by way of Florence, Alabama, where I was living at the time, and were headed down Georgia 278 near Atlanta. I was loaded on vodka.

  Billy remembers my coming up the aisle to where he was sitting near the front, talking to Gordon. I was carrying an open bottle of Smirnoff’s.

  “How about a drink?” I asked him.

  “No thanks, George,” he said. “You know I had heart trouble here a while back and I don’t want to drink.”

  I asked him another question, and he said that his heart problem was the result of angina he had suffered six months ago.

  That seemed like enough recovery time to me.

  “You’re going to take a drink,” I said.

  “No I’m not,” Billy insisted.

  Right there on my bus, I pulled out a .38 caliber pistol. Once again I’m recalling the behavior of a man who used to live inside my body. I’m not proud of it today. But I made a deal with myself when I started writing this book. If I honestly did something, even if I’m honestly ashamed, I’m honestly going to tell it.

  I sat down at a small table across from Billy. By then my bus (not the Brown Bomber) was as nice as that of most country entertainers. This one had a place to eat and play cards.

  I was perhaps four feet from Billy when I waved that pistol in his face.

  “Take a drink,” I said.

  “I ain’t gonna do it, George,” he affirmed.

  So I fired a round.

  I intentionally missed him. Billy remembers that the bullet sailed about a foot from his head and went out the roof above the front windshield. Gordon jerked, and the bus swerved. You can imagine how loud a gunshot sounded inside the close surroundings of a bus.

  “Take a drink!” I demanded, pushing that bottle closer to his face.

  “I said no. I’m not taking a drink!” Billy shouted.

  I fired again, with no intention of hitting him, and that bullet went on the other side of Gordon. A scrap of metal hit him as the bullet penetrated the bus wall. Gordon stiffened, frozen with fear. He still hadn’t turned around to see what was prompting the gunplay. He just stared into space and drove.

  I picked up my argument with Billy and fired a third and then a fourth shot at the window across the room from him. Glass shattered, and at our speed some of the fragments sprayed into the air and around the room. I had never intended to hit Billy, only to scare him, and it had worked.

  I finally fired my last bullet, and Billy knew it.

  I held a five-shot gun, and he knew that I never kept a round under the hammer. So he decided to take the situation in hand by taking the gun away from me.

  “Stop the bus, Gordon!” he said, and Gordon locked the brakes. We lunged forward.

  As soon as the bus was stopped, Gordon leaped out of the driver’s seat. He and Billy pounced on me and wrestled me to the floor, where they took away my gun.

  They put me in a lower bunk, and one of them sat on me while the other searched for all my bullets. Convinced that they had found them, they kept my gun and dared me to get out of the bunk.

  They had the gun and the bullets, and I had my orders.

  Folks have told me that I have telepathy, and lots of things have happened in my life that would support that. On that day, even though I had passed out, I woke up about the time we were approaching Florence. I just somehow knew I was getting close to my destination. Billy had already decided to take me home and not let me ride on to Nashville.

  Folks have also said I was a different man when I wasn’t drinking, and there are plenty of examples of that too. I can’t count the times I’ve given money to the less fortunate, although I’m not bragging. I just want to make the point that even during my drinking days I did things I thank God I could afford to do—when I was sober.

  Billy remembers that on the day of the bus shooting I poked my head out from the bunk’s curtains as the bus was coming to a stop. He could tell I had sobered up some.

  We pulled to a halt, and I was the first one off the bus. I walked past Billy, who was still sitting down. I had four one-hundred-dollar bills on me, and I stuffed them into his shirt pocket.

  “Buy you some nerve pills,” I said.

  And, for a few days, I was off that bus.

  Chapter 7

  A touring entertainer meets more people in a month than most folks do in a lifetime. I never ceased to be amazed at the unusual circumstances surrounding some of the meetings, especially among people who later became some of my best friends.

  I bought a house in Lakeland, Florida, in the late 1960s, and the seller told me that my next-door neighbor was a real son of a bitch.

  “Stay away from him,” he said. “He’s a raving idiot!”

  The neighbor, Cliff Hyder, became one of my best friends. He remains so to this day.

  I opened a gift shop on Nashville’s Music Row in the late 1980s and decided to give a free show for the first customers. I sang one of my hit records, “Bartender’s Blues,” a James Taylor tune. A girl who I’d never met was invited to sing harmony. I thought she was magnificent, and that was my introduction to Trisha Yearwood. In February 1994 I recorded “Bartender’s Blues” again and selected her as my duet partner. By that time she had recorded many of her own hits and held platinum albums.

  In 1964 I had recorded “The Race Is On,” one of my biggest records and one that is a part of my road show to this day. It’s an up-tempo song that some folks considered rock ’n’ roll when it was recorded. Consequently, I was the only country act booked on an otherwise all-rock show in Austin, Texas, about a year later.

  One of the bands on that program was real scraggly. I didn’t like them because I thought they needed baths and told them so. To make matters worse, the young rockers had no equipment, so they asked to borrow mine. I said yes, and the group played so loudly through my amplifiers that one of them exploded.

  Gary Adams, who was in my group at the time, said something to the band’s lead singer, and the guy said something back. A scuffle was soon under way. Gary put the guy in a hammerlock, then forced him up a stairway where I was sitting with Sonny Curtis, my steel guitar player.

  “This guy and his buddies blew up our amp, and he ought to pay for it!” Gary said. The guy cussed and reluctantly pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. Gary said he handed it to Curtis, who handed it to me.

  That unruly singer was Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

  Today I consider the Stones the world’s best rock ’n’ roll band, and I even recorded a duet with its lead guitarist, Keith Richards, in 1994. We did “Say It’s Not You,” a song I had originally recorded three years after the shoving match with Jagger. Keith remembered my first version and wanted to sing it for an album, The Bradley Barn Session, released during the writing of this book.

  Early on in my career, I recorded “You Gotta Be My Baby” for Starday, which was released on July 14, 1956. One time I performed the song on a show in Odessa, Texas. I met a girl that night and tried to take her out, but she was getting attention from a disc jockey on KOYL. I didn’t want to offend the disc jockey because I wanted him to keep playing my record. But I also wanted the girl. I couldn’t figure out how to get on her good side without getting on his bad. That was my first encounter with Waylon Jennings.

  In the early 1960s, I was sitting in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, an old Nashville tavern across the alley from the Grand Ole Opry that was home to many singers and songwriters. I met Gary Adams that night when he came walking into the joint, his first stop after graduating from high school. He had come to town looking for a job in the music business. I was the first guy he met, and I hired him to be my guitar player.

  �
�Man, this music business is going to be easy,” he remembered thinking when he told the story years later.

  I hired him because he had come to Nashville at the recommendation of Johnny Paycheck, a musician and singer who was then one of the Jones Boys. I knew that Paycheck had sent Gary to Tootsie’s, and I knew that Johnny knew we had a show a couple of days later in Roswell, New Mexico.

  So I left one hundred dollars with Gary for Paycheck and him to meet me in Roswell. They were to take a train.

  “The tickets for the two of us cost eighty-five dollars,” Gary remembered years later. “We had fifteen dollars left to live on for two days. The first night on the train, Johnny got drunk. He was into karate at the time, and the next thing I knew I heard a scream and the crashing of glass. He had put his hand through a window in the men’s room.

  “We had to get off the train and let a doctor sew up his hand, and that took the rest of our money,” Gary went on. “In all, it took three days getting out there, and we nearly starved to death because we had no money. Johnny sobered up and told George that he had fallen down.”

  Johnny played steel guitar for me for a while after that, and we have been friends ever since. It’s been a friendship that has remained through our successes and failures. Johnny was riding high on the popularity surveys with “Take This Job and Shove It” while I was laying low, missing shows due to drunkenness. And our friendship, through the years, has stood even when we couldn’t stand each other.

  We were drunk and got into an argument one night somewhere in Virginia. We were riding in a car while most of the other Jones Boys were on the bus. I ordered Johnny to pull to the side of the road and get out. I told him I was going to whip his ass.

  Johnny jumped out of the car, and I locked its doors. In seconds Johnny saw nothing but taillights. I left him stranded on dark asphalt somewhere in the rural South. Gary hounded me for an hour to go back and pick him up, and I finally tried to do that.