The Grand Tour (20 page)

George's Nashville friends did what they could to get behind him. Late in the year they staged a special tribute at the Exit Inn titled “Nashville Loves George Jones.” Some in town feared it might be the last time he'd be seen alive. He and the Jones Boys did occasional concerts with Tammy and her band, but his reliability continued to be a crapshoot. He missed a show in Columbus in February, the same month “He Stopped Loving Her Today” earned a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.
The year 1981 began with Epic releasing another tune seemingly ripped from George's real life: “If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” “her” yet another allusion to you-know-who.

George remained philosophical about throwing in with Richey, telling
Chicago Tribune
writer Jack Hurst in a March 22, 1981, profile that “sometimes, in this business, you have to bend over backwards. And sometimes when you do, you find it wasn't that hard to do. Bein' friends is better 'n stayin' enemies.” He also admitted, “All my life, I've been runnin' from somethin'. If I knew what it was, I could run the right direction. I know where I want to go, but I always seem to end up goin' the other way. I know there's nothin' down that way. I been down there too many times.”

In March, the TV-movie adaptation of
Stand By Your Man
appeared with Annette O'Toole, at the time a young actress just starting her career, in the starring role. Character actor Tim McIntire, who portrayed pioneering rock disc jockey Alan Freed in the 1978 film
American Hot Wax,
was cast as George. O'Toole, who immersed herself in Tammy's records, did a respectable job approximating the star's vocals. But overall accuracy was not a top priority. The characters were dumbed down to simpleminded, one-dimensional caricatures. McIntire was miscast as George. Billy Sherrill, played by James Hampton, is shown not as a CBS Records executive but as an independent Nashville producer-manager, his screen personality worlds away from Sherrill's often acerbic cockiness. It was one more fictionalized, simplistic music biopic like the bizarre
Your Cheatin' Heart,
starring George Hamilton as Hank Williams, and barely rose above the crappy B or C country-music films shot around Nashville in the sixties, released to small-town southern theaters and rural drive-ins.

The buzz continued on April 30, 1981, when “He Stopped Lov
ing Her Today” won three awards from the West Coast–based Academy of Country Music: the same three that came from the CMA, Male Vocalist and Single of the Year for George and Song of the Year for Braddock and Putman. The honors meant little to George at this point as the dissolution continued both off and on the road. With no concern over the consequences, oblivious to the havoc he wreaked on his own life and those of everyone in his hemisphere, he drank and rammed powder up his nose, or local coke dealers did the honors. He'd later claim situations where others filled him up, sometimes involuntarily, particularly among the Alabama drug dealers he seemed at odds with. His shaky stature didn't prevent the occasional cameo on others' recordings. His friend Barbara Mandrell recruited him to add a vocal on her single “I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool,” released that spring.

On the road, high and indifferent, he blew off a concert in Manassas, Virginia. Paul Richey wanted to charter a jet to take George and road manager Wayne Oliver to the next stop at Possum Holler Music Park in Logan, Ohio, southwest of Columbus, named in George's honor by owners Jim and Stellie Ryan. George said he preferred sleeping on the bus until he arrived. With the jet already chartered, Oliver flew ahead. George remained in his room on the bus boozing and coking. When the bus pulled into Possum Holler on May 24, as the Jones Boys began setting up, George, under no one's watchful gaze and thoroughly wasted, pulled yet another vanishing act, slipping off the bus. As Oliver began hunting for him, George walked into the small town of Logan, met two elderly women, and was soon sitting on a porch, talking. When a guitar was produced, he sang to them. George asked the women to call a cab. The driver agreed to chauffeur George back to Nashville, George offering a private concert the
whole way down. He took the guitar, promising the women the cabbie would return it. Back at the park, all hell broke loose when the announcement was made that George wasn't performing. Some audience members rushed the stage, venting their anger on anyone seemingly tied to the show. The bus's tires were slashed; one of its windows was broken. As police moved in, a sheriff's deputy was seriously injured and seven people arrested. While in the past the mystique of No Show Jones was funny, even folksy to many, no one felt that way this time. George was so out of control he clearly didn't give a damn about any repercussions.

Barely a week later, the Ohio State Fair canceled his scheduled June 2 concert appearance. Fair manager John Evans told reporters, “We try to run a family affair. We can't take the chance of something happening.” Possum Holler's owners filed a $10.1 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against George, Halsey, and Richey, seeking $1.1 million in compensatory damages and $9 million in punitive damages, claiming the plaintiffs suffered “adverse publicity which seriously damaged [their] reputations.” Jim Halsey did not need this. He dropped George as a client. Finally, everyone agreed to a makeup date. George, unhappy to be playing gratis, was flown in by helicopter so he couldn't bolt.

He couldn't even hold it together for the folks back home. A subpar June 2 performance at the Palace near Beaumont disappointed local fans. By then, family members staged their own intervention, forcing him to enter Baptist Hospital. The public claim was he suffered from “exhaustion.” Days later, he left and headed for Alabama. The death watch ramped up as the media began trying to track him down. On July 8, WNGE-TV, Nashville's ABC affiliate, found him at the barbershop run by his pal Jimmie Hills, a gentle man satisfied to be George's friend. George talked to the reporters, telling them he had a total of $237 in his
bank account. Hills was hired, at George's request, as a sort of companion/hair stylist/chaperone, and found himself constantly challenged by George's ability to slip away.

For a time, getting George back to the more familiar atmosphere of Texas, away from Nashville and its pressures, seemed like a sensible idea. Legendary Texas A&M football star and businessman Billy Bob Barnett had opened Billy Bob's Texas in Fort Worth in April 1981. Billed as the “World's Largest Honky Tonk,” it was designed to be a larger, more dazzling version of Gilley's, the massive Houston venue named for singer Mickey Gilley. Barnett and Paul Richey would manage George's affairs. A July 29 show at Pee Wee's, owned by George's pal Pee Wee Johnson, was billed as his official farewell to Nashville. The plan soon collapsed when George unexpectedly pulled out of the Texas deal. By then Paul Richey, too, was out of the picture.

George found a new manager close to his Alabama homestead. Gerald Murray, a Muscle Shoals businessman and owner of Factory Outlet Mobile Homes, was a friend of Hank Williams Jr. and his then-manager James “J.R.” Smith. George's business operations were consolidated in Murray's facilities. George had a three-thousand-square-foot office in the building, with fancy leather furniture. An article about George's organization in the Muscle Shoals
Times-Daily
was titled “New Day for George Jones,” even as his substance abuse rendered him cadaverous and seemingly near the end.

Murray, who'd known him for a while, got a good dose of George's erratic side when setting up George in a colorful office area complete with the titles of some of his hits painted on the wall. Another painting, Murray said, featured “a big possum sittin' back with a hat on and he was playin' the guitar and all this music was comin' out of the center of the guitar. He got
up there one day and said, ‘I don't like that possum up there!' George Richey had given him this beautiful black leather jacket with this possum on the back. George took it out there and put it in the dumpster. He said he didn't want anybody to call him ‘Possum.' He had us paint over the possum right there. It was offensive to him at that particular time. And a week later, he was just the opposite.”

A drunken September 20 show at Meadow Brook Music Festival in Rochester, Michigan, seemed to embody Jones in decline.
Toledo Blade
reviewer Bob Rose detailed a concert that began with the Jones Boys playing eight songs, the musicians looking to the side for signs of George before he finally stumbled onstage, so wasted he was slurring lyrics. Unable to recall words, he had to be constantly prompted by the band. Even a move into the Hank Williams songbook faltered. Rose detailed his taking audience requests and beginning “Your Cheatin' Heart” only to—again—forget the words. “He asked a Jones Boy how that one went,” Rose commented. As the Jones Boys tried to get him to wrap things up, he blithely ignored them, grinning and telling the thinning and disgusted crowd, “We're gonna play till three or four in the morning, right?” By the time management turned up the house lights to get him to leave the stage, most of the audience had left. His pitiful final words from the stage: “Somebody's trying to embarrass us.”

He had three CMA Awards nominations for 1981: an unusual second nomination for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” as Song of the Year, another for Male Vocalist, and, unbelievably, the third for Entertainer of the Year. Given the messes left behind in Logan, Beaumont, and other venues, his chances of winning in that last category were remote at best. This time, the entire country saw the mess on the televised 1981 awards. Neither the prelude nor the
aftermath, Murray said, were pleasant. When George arrived at the Opry House, Murray recalled, “Ralph Emery said, ‘George, I've got something for you that the Opry gave us.' He handed him a watch, and George took it out and it had diamonds around the thing and it had some engraving inside it about the Opry. Inside the top it was really neat. And George just took it and we walked maybe ten steps and there was one of those flip-top garbage cans right there and he just reached over and hit it with the back of his hand, and throwed the watch in the garbage.” After the show ended he returned to his suite, broke some lamps in his hotel room, and apparently got rough with Linda. No one was surprised when he failed to appear at CBS Records' CMA Week Artist Showcase.

With the contrived stories about George on the mend rendered moot, much of Nashville began accepting the notion that the World's Greatest County Singer, driving around with Hank Williams cassettes in his car and a life-size cardboard figure of his early hero, was heading for a similar if not identical end. He stiffed everyone on a November 22 show in Roanoke, Virginia. The promoter sued for $25,000. It had long been a crapshoot with his fans, yet enough still loved him that they continued showing up despite his disrespecting them. “He just had one thing on his mind, and that was the drugs,” said Gerald Murray.

With “Still Doin' Time,” another bleak ballad about lost love and symbolic incarceration in a “honky-tonk prison,” at No. 1, any doubts over George's status with CBS Records were put to an end when the label re-signed him in November. He flew to Los Angeles with Rick Blackburn and his own attorney, Tom Binkley, to sign the new deal with a half-million-dollar advance to be applied to his debts. George, however, was still George, and threw a wrench into the deal at the last minute by demanding $100,000 for himself. He
got the money and bought a new car. Most of the remaining cash likely went up his nose.

George was in Shreveport, Louisiana, with Wayne Oliver, who had a girlfriend there. Since he and George were flying to New York, Wayne arranged for his girlfriend to accompany them and bring a friend for George: Nancy Sepulvado, a Shreveport divorcee, the mother of two daughters, who'd spent twenty years working in a factory assembling telephones. From the start, George and Nancy found a bond. They were captivated with each other, to the point that George flipped off some shows to visit her in Shreveport. She ended up leaving Shreveport with daughter Adina to join George on tour. His relationship with Linda, who had stuck by him despite abuse and the stress of watching him implode, began to unravel. The bad blood between Nancy and Linda, with Jones caught in the middle, upset everyone, and Linda finally had enough. Before 1981 ended, she and George parted for good.

The year 1982 began with a disappearing act before a January 6 concert with Johnny Paycheck, now one of the hottest singers in the business, and Donna Fargo. As George and Nancy set up housekeeping in Alabama, George's situation grew more dire. The coke dealers were abundant. Nancy knew he drank, but cocaine added a chilling dimension that could turn him physically abusive, even to her. Unlike other women in his past, she reacted to his behavior with a steely determination to do everything she could to pull him out of what were clearly the last gasps of both his career and existence. She didn't care if he never sang again. Her love was for the man, not the icon.

ONE DAY GERALD MURRAY'S PHONE RANG IN MUSCLE SHOALS. IT WAS WAYLON
Jennings asking, “Can you come and get the Possum?”

George had visited Waylon and Jessi's home in Brentwood, south of Nashville. George ended up out of control. Waylon's ill-advised decision to give him a generous dose of whiskey, hoping to calm him down, backfired badly. He trashed furniture, then threw a photo in a metal frame at his host. When Jerry Gropp, Waylon's guitarist, tried to restrain George, he ended up with a busted thumb. Waylon held George down. When he thought George was finally tired, he let go. George, who'd been faking, sucker-punched the man who had given him tens of thousands of dollars to help him out of his financial morass. Waylon finally subdued and restrained his friend, then made the call to Murray.

Murray arrived to find a mess. “He broke all his lamps and everything.” George sat on a piano bench. Waylon “had him tied, his pants pulled down around his knees and his belt around his ankles pulled up there. Jones jumps up and squirms around a little bit like nothing ever happened [and said], ‘You gotta hear this!' He asked Jessi to sing something. Waylon looked at me and said, ‘
Boy!
'” Despite it all, Waylon hadn't lost any of his affection for the man he'd met in Lubbock more than twenty years earlier. He refused to take any money for the damages.