The Grand Tour (19 page)

Street was out of his misery, but George received another legal wallop early in November when the Third National Bank of Nashville sued him for $56,966.70 in unpaid loans. Regarding his finances, he had but one remaining option. On December 15, 1978, he filed for bankruptcy in Nashville, quoted by the
Nashville Banner
as saying he felt “rescued from death.” At the time it was reported he had missed fifty-four concert dates in the past year.

It was a laundry list of financial irresponsibility involving the Third National Bank debt, $12,000 in credit cards, an unpaid $40,000 loan for a new tour bus, nearly $78,000 owed Columbia Records in advances against future royalties, $200,000 in attorney bills, and $300,000 in miscellaneous other judgments. There were, the filing stated, a total of forty-six creditors. George's assets were listed as $64,500, his liabilities at $1,400,000. George's explanation for the missed show dates was a memorable one. His attorney, S. Ralph Gordon, explained to the court that his client “didn't feel he was performing in such a way the fans were getting what they paid for.” George didn't help his case (or his attorney's arguments) by blowing off court appearances where his presence was required—or he if did arrive, appeared obviously coked up. Holed up in Alabama, he continued to miss show dates. In November, Linda alleged he roughed her up. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings gave him a total of $64,000 in cash that he turned over to the court as a token payment. While the court denied his bankruptcy petition, he no longer faced arrest if he came back to Nashville.

George's deteriorating mind was a mass of contradictions. When the press asked him about the canceled shows that had earned him the both affectionate and derisive nickname of “No Show Jones,” he continued claiming he wasn't up to performing and didn't want to give the fans less than his best, a line of bullshit given the less than pristine condition he was often in when he did appear. Early 1979 brought the release of the duets album
My Very Special Guests
. Solid as Billy's idea was, even with the success of “Bartender's Blues,” George's vocals were subpar. Despite the mystique building around George, the album's sales were modest.

Shug had his own problems. The Tennessee Department of Revenue auctioned the contents of Possum Holler to satisfy back taxes on January 24, 1979. Baggott also filed for bankruptcy. Two days later, Shorty Lavender, one of the few during this time who actually seemed to give a damn about George himself, sued Baggott, claiming the manager had been in business for himself, booking George into venues in different places the same night. The financial issues took a turn for the better when new attorney Thomas Binkley took another run at a bankruptcy filing in a Tennessee District Court. This time, a new judge approved the petition, which had a flexible payment plan giving creditors twenty cents on the dollar. George would be repaying the debts into the 1980s, when he began to recover. To aid the repayment, songwriting and record royalties not tied with his previous divorces were applied to the debt, now at $1.5 million. A legal conservator would oversee his finances.

Even relieved of that pressure, George continued imploding. When visiting Nashville, he stayed at two hotels: either the Hall of Fame Motor Inn or Spence Manor Inn. He often hung around in the lobby, sometimes singing with his guitar like a common street busker. Unpaid room bills got him banned from both places. He
moved to an apartment. His support system in town was shaky by then. In August it became even shakier when Shug was busted for selling two pounds of coke to an undercover federal agent, bringing his time with George to an abrupt end.

Simon & Schuster released Tammy's autobiography,
Stand
By Your Man,
cowritten with Joan Dew, who was introduced to her by Dan Beck at Epic in 1979. Channeling Tammy's memories and viewpoints into a narrative, Dew later told Tammy biographer Jimmy McDonough, “I don't know if Tammy even read the book.” It was optioned for a TV movie. Don Chapel was especially unhappy. In late October he filed a lawsuit under his legal name of Lloyd F. Amburgey, demanding $12 million in compensatory damages and another $12 million in punitive damages, citing harassment and humiliation from “fans, co-workers, peers, employers, agents and managers.” At issue was Tammy's contention he didn't contribute financially or emotionally to their marriage, and her account of the infamous photos, which he insisted were taken with her permission. The suit was eventually dismissed.

In Alabama, George continued to dodge drug dealers and, he later claimed, cops friendly with said dealers. He rarely ate actual meals but indulged in sardines, beef jerky, and other junk food. The psychodramas with the Duck and the Old Man continued. Despite the shooting incident, Peanutt and Charlene Montgomery kept tabs on their friend and grew more alarmed seeing him heading for the abyss far faster than anyone could have expected. On December 10, 1979, Peanutt filed legal papers in Lauderdale County, seeking permission to commit George involuntarily to the Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Muscle Shoals, to be treated for substance abuse. Probate Judge Ralph Duncan agreed. George was admitted on December 11. Four days later, he was transferred to Hillcrest Hospital in Birmingham, better equipped
to deal with his drug issues and alcoholism. The hospital staff had a challenge. Peanutt later said George talked the ambulance driver into stopping en route to Birmingham to get him a pint of booze. After treatment he was discharged, and like George Washington Jones, he quickly fell back into old habits.

Things appeared to turn a corner in 1980. Relations with Tammy began to mend after she attended one of his recording sessions. He signed a deal with her agent, the most highly regarded country music booker of his time: Tulsa's Jim Halsey. Halsey was still attending college when he got his start booking and managing Oklahoma-based honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson in the fifties. Roy Clark later became another of his clients. Halsey expanded his agency, booking the Oak Ridge Boys, Mel Tillis, Don Williams, Tammy, and many other top-echelon acts. George's business affairs would be handled by Tammy's brother-in-law Paul Richey, George Richey's brother and part of Tammy's organization. Plans were made for George and Tammy to begin performing together and resuming their duets.

The media buzz was substantial. The couple was featured, George looking particularly bad, on the June 1980 cover of
Country Music
magazine, with the cover line “Tammy Interviews George Jones.” Inside was a nine-page Q&A interview. The dialogue, while colorful in spots, sanitized George's issues as he talked of possibly returning to Nashville to live. Asked by Tammy about her book, he said he hadn't “been able to get a hold of a copy. I wasn't offered one.” Tiptoeing around the truth, he insisted, “I believe you'd be fair,” adding, “I don't shy away from the truth, as long as it's the truth.” He called past problems “water under the bridge.”

When she brought up the reason their marriage ended, he said, “We were smothering each other.” Discussing the
Special Guests
album, he was more candid, admitting, “I did a bad performance of
a lot of the things on there, but some of them came out good, and some of them came out bad. I wasn't in very good voice at all.” Discussing his hospitalization, he spoke kindly of his treatment, saying the staff “really know how to work with you and take care of you, and get your thinking cap on right.” As for missing concerts dates, he admitted it, adding, “The people I was involved with were booking me, a lot of times, for two or three shows on the same date.” But he also added a telling bit of contrition when it came to the fans he'd let down, saying, “These fans, who might be walking a country mile with their children just to get to the show and they get there and . . . no George,” adding, “It breaks my heart now that I realize this and think about it.” For the most part the interview soft-pedaled the problems, trying to create a buzz about the couple's professional reconciliation, and both mentioned their next duet (“Two Story House”) and George's single: “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

At Columbia, Rick Blackburn's stellar track record handling CBS Nashville's music finally elevated him to the top job: vice president and general manager of the whole Columbia-Epic Nashville operation. For some time, George and Sherrill had been sparring over “He Stopped Loving Her.” Written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, Johnny Russell had recorded it on an album, but Sherrill knew how he wanted it tailored for George and had the composers rewrite to get it as he wanted it: as an epic ballad, a sorrowful tale of unrequited love centered on a man who never stopped loving a woman who'd spurned him. His yearning for her ended only with his death.

Recording George during that time was complicated, Pig Robbins remembered. “When he started doin' that cocaine, he went down the drain. George'd be there a lot of times, but if we saw he wasn't gonna be able to get anything that day, we'd just lay the
track down and move on to another song. We'd just make tracks and they'd put [his vocal] on later. They'd catch him halfway fit [to record]. The background singers were there with the rhythm section. [Billy] used the [vocal group] Nashville Edition on a lot of them.”

In spite of his dissolute state, George's skepticism when it came to songs remained in force and, as before, he wasn't always correct. He'd initially blown off “She Thinks I Still Care” and “When the Grass Grows Over Me.” He complained that the melody for “He Stopped Loving Her” too closely resembled Kris Kristofferson's “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and mockingly sang the song's lyrics to the Kristofferson melody to drive home the point to Billy, who would not relent. The final, Billy-approved rewrite of “He Stopped Loving Her” connected with George's situation at that moment. Braddock and Putman's final rewrite belied George's misgivings. The man being dead, “all dressed up to go away” and “over her for good,” was in many ways a thematic and superior variation on the message of “When the Grass Grows over Me,” one speaking to George's faltering condition at the time.

Sherrill insisted he had to record George's version bit by bit, that the singer's diminished physical state made it impossible to get a complete take out of him. He envisioned the song as a virtual drama in miniature, complete with symphonic strings and the flawless soprano voice of session vocalist Millie Kirkham, infusing the song with gravitas above and beyond his usual work with George. The drama was carefully constructed, complete with a feature rarely heard on the country records of that time: a spoken recitation in the middle as Kirkham's soprano soared above his words.

From the forties to the sixties, some country hits included vocals with recitations, like Red Sovine's “Little Rosa” and Jimmy Dean's “Big Bad John.” Porter Wagoner made recitations an art
form with songs like “The Carroll County Accident.” A few, like T. Texas Tyler's “Deck of Cards” and Johnny Cash's “A Boy Named Sue,” were totally spoken. The idea had largely fallen out of fashion, but George's performance revived it. The spoken interlude, despite Billy's uptown production, left no doubt it was a deep, emotional, and unabashedly
country
record. The final vocal revealed George totally at one with the lyrics, conveying all the pain and tragedy in a way that made his performance transcendent. It seemed as if he'd effectively summed up his entire career in one recording. Billy's arrangement became a foil for George's primal, passionate vocal, the culmination of the sound he'd first pursued on “Tender Years” nearly twenty years earlier. Still not convinced, George, insisting the song was too maudlin, bet Sherrill $100 nobody would buy it.

“Two Story House” entered the
Billboard
charts in March. It would reach No. 2. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” made its first chart appearance a month later, and on July 5 it knocked the Oak Ridge Boys' “Trying to Love Two Women” out of the No. 1 spot, remaining there just a week before it was knocked off the top slot by, ironically, Charley Pride's cover of Hank Williams's “You Win Again.” The buzz around the song, however, did not die down. The many artists who revered George and everything about him were dazzled by it. One night Emmylou Harris and her Hot Band had pulled into a truck stop near Oklahoma City. “Hey,” she told Tony Brown, her keyboard player and a former Elvis Presley sideman, “go to the jukebox and play ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.' It's gonna kill you!” Brown never forgot that moment.

As George's contract with Epic neared its end, CBS took note of the near-universal praise for “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” That acclaim surprised George, who still perceived the song as the maudlin ballad he didn't much care for. During the summer,
Epic released the follow-up: his take on Tom T. Hall's ballad “I'm Not Ready Yet,” about a man wanting to leave his woman but unable to actually do it. Nearly three years after ducking out on CBS's gala, George finally played the Bottom Line in September. During his performance he brought Linda Ronstadt, who was in the audience, onstage to sing “I Can't Help It” solo.

That fall, his personal life wasn't in any better shape than before. The buzz over “He Stopped Loving Her Today” continued, and the Richeys were overseeing his affairs. As for Shug, he was out of the picture. On September 29, the coke arrest landed him a three-year prison sentence. As the CMA Awards ceremonies approached, publicists went to work, spinning the illusion that George was on the mend. In October, prior to the awards telecast, the Associated Press ran a story detailing George's seeming recovery. “Less than a year after his life was devastated by alcoholism, sobered-up singer George Jones could become a major winner in tonight's nationally televised country music association awards show,” it said, adding, “In fact, Jones has never won an award from the CMA.” That night, he won two: Single of the Year for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Male Vocalist of the Year. Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman shared Song of the Year. It would have been a night of triumph for anyone. But given George's condition, he was barely able to savor it.