The Grand Tour (17 page)

Beck saw the other side of George—his disappearing skills—in action that year when New York–based
Country Music
magazine wanted a major profile on him. Tammy helped Beck plan an interview and photo shoot at Columbia following a scheduled meeting she and George had with Sherrill. After the meeting she'd bring him to Beck and both would escort George to meet writer-photographer J.R. Young. They'd shoot the photos in Columbia Studio B, and directed George to a stool in the studio. “Oh, great! That's great,” George replied, adding, “I just need to go to the men's room.” “George goes out the studio door into the men's room,” Beck remembered. “I literally see him go in the men's room. Tammy and J.R. and I talk for a few minutes and George isn't around. I go in the men's room and there's nobody there. I come back and I said George wasn't there. So Tammy said, ‘He might have gone up to see a couple of people in the building.' We start looking around for him and we couldn't find him. I didn't see him for another six months.”

As Beck's assistant, McCready got a course in George's music from Sherrill himself. “Billy spent time talking to me about George Jones and his feelings about George as a singer and an interpreter. When George was in his office, Billy would often call me up and we'd sit and talk.” She became entranced by his music. “I really fell hard for George Jones. I was not raised on country music. I was raised on Motown music. George hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't get over how magnificent he was.”

Epic was about to unleash George's most powerful solo performance to date in the summer of 1974. “The Grand Tour,” another masterpiece by Richey, Carmol Taylor, and Norro Wilson, was a wall-to-wall showcase of heartache, the milieu where George did his best work. He began alone, singing, “Step right up—come on in,” before the band chimed in behind him. With an unabashedly
traditional melody, he sang of a desperately lonely, grieving man, abandoned by a wife who took their child, walking through the home, noting every good time, pining for what he'd lost. It was a study in abject anguish.

Norro Wilson had attended the session and was pleased with the results. But he had no idea if the song had any traction—until he visited the Opry on a night George was to sing it on the show. Having performed on the Opry in the past, it was old home week for Wilson, who arrived early to visit with friends, including the show's musicians. “No sooner I walked in the door everybody come runnin' up to me and said, ‘Jesus
Christ
! Have you got a
monster
on your hands!' So this is the first I've heard about it. I knew it was done. I was there when he recorded it and all that, but no knowledge in front of anything. And man, I went ballistic! Everybody that I ran across that night said, ‘That's just gonna be a monster.' It was a really, really, really good record.” “The Grand Tour” became George's first solo No. 1 single since “Walk Through This World with Me” in 1967.

Artistically, the
Grand Tour
album, which included “Once You've Had the Best,” was among his strongest at the label so far, though it charted no higher than No. 11. There were songs by Bobby Braddock (“She Told Me So”), by Peanutt and Jimmy Richards (“Mary Don't Go 'Round”), and “Our Private Life,” a George-Tammy original that openly lampooned the media buzz about their every move, shrugging off coverage about his drinking, carefully avoiding the fact that those real-life events were shaping the material.

For all their offstage differences, the couple presented a solid front when Olivia Newton-John, a rising British-born pop singer raised in Australia, was named Female Vocalist of the Year at the 1974 CMA Awards based on her lightweight, country-flavored
pop hits “Let Me Be There” and “If You Love Me, Let Me Know.” The CMA's ongoing inferiority complex made it anxious to rid itself of the “hillbilly” stigma, even if it meant embracing acts who had little connection to the music most of its practitioners performed and recorded. No doubt the CMA electors making these choices sensed them as an attempt to widen the music's reach. Many veteran artists, white-hot with outrage, didn't see it that way, and moved swiftly to publicly voice their disapproval. George and Tammy hosted a meeting of their fellow stars at their home. Among those attending: Jean Shepard, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Billy Walker, fellow Epic artist Barbara Mandrell (produced by Billy), Bill Anderson, Conway Twitty, and Hank Snow. Anderson was elected chairman of a new organization. ACE, the Association of Country Entertainers, was conceived to protect country music's unique identity. It remained intact for a time before slowly fading away.

Despite their ongoing issues, George and Tammy purchased a new home on Franklin Pike in Nashville's Oak Hill section, their most lavish yet. The one-story home, built only four years earlier, sat on eight wooded acres and had every palatial appointment anyone would want, including a yard large enough that George could indulge one of his favorite pastimes: cutting the grass with his riding mower. In the studio, “The Door,” another ballad from Billy and Norro Wilson, came complete with pained allusions to war, of “a thousand bombs exploding” in a relationship facing a death spiral. It became George's second No. 1 in a row at Epic. Tammy's continued admiration for her husband's artistry despite their problems was one constant. As Wilson explained, “Aside from the fact that they got married, was they had an admiration society goin' on between them that was remarkable. And when he'd sing, she'd just about go crazy. And when she'd sing, he was
affected deeply. They were big fans of each other's professional ability.” Dan Beck saw this side of the couple's relationship as he sat in the control room with Billy and Tammy as George worked on overdubs for “The Door.”

“Tammy and Billy invited me back one night to the studio. George was gonna be doing some overdubbing at probably eight o'clock at night. And it was just George in a darkened Studio B, and in the control room was Lou Bradley, the engineer, and Billy and Tammy and me. I was sitting behind all them on a couch, and they were all at the board. And I'm just kind of a fly on the wall. They were doing the overdubs, George starts singing, and everybody's looking at each other like this guy—he's amazing. He's just tearin' this song up. It's just so great. And Tammy turned to Billy and said, ‘That Jones—he's the only man who could make
war
a four-syllable word!' To me, that was George Jones. She nailed it on the spot. It was just a magic moment.”

Beck sensed no turmoil when he visited Franklin Pike to drop off press clippings. “They never gave an indication of [problems] to anybody, you know. It was Shangri-la, as I saw it. I would go out to the house and the two of them would be in the kitchen area in the back and George would say hello—always quiet. It was great. Tammy and I would sit down and George, he'd go get on the lawn mower and mow the lawn, in three variations of plaid. He'd have on plaid shorts, a plaid shirt, and a plaid hat. He'd be out mowing that eight- or nine-acre place.”

They were in the studio in December recording a surprising selection. “Near You” was a song born of the other side of Nashville music: the city's strong (if not nationally recognized) pop music scene. In the 1930s and 1940s, WSM, home of the Opry
,
had a first-rate group of staff musicians. Orchestras led by Beasley Smith, Owen Bradley, and Francis Craig played the
town's fancy nightspots and country clubs. Craig composed the melody; New York songwriter Kermit Goell supplied lyrics. Early in 1947, Craig's orchestra recorded the semi-swinging number, with a vocal by Bob Lamm, for the Nashville-based Bullet label. “Near You” spent several months as America's top pop song. The muted performance became the final song George and Tammy would record as a married couple, though it wasn't released for some time.

A day after the session, George went to help Shorty Lavender, his and Tammy's booking agent, remodel his agency's new offices and stuck around downtown. In his usual fashion, he hit the bars and clubs and wound up shit-faced. Knowing drunkenness was a red flag for Tammy, he didn't want to return home that way and got a hotel room to sleep it off. When he finally called home, Tammy exploded, telling him not to come back. He did not. Tammy Wynette filed for divorce from her husband of nearly six years on January 8, 1975. George, for his part, knew the marriage was through, but he was crushed nonetheless. They divided the property. She kept the Franklin Pike house and had custody of Georgette. George got the Tyne Boulevard home, the couple's houseboat, and debts owed Columbia for advances against royalties. He was ordered to pay $1,000 monthly child support for Georgette. Tammy kept the tour bus, and a number of the Jones Boys became the nucleus of her new band, the Country Gentlemen. The divorce was finalized March 12.

In interviews, Tammy claimed, overlooking her own issues, that her ex-husband was “one of those people who couldn't tolerate happiness.” George, back in Nashville and drinking his way around town, had his own comments, feeling bitterness about her hostility to some of his longtime friends, including the Montgomerys. Tammy would visit many dark places in the next phase of
her life. Nor were her interactions with George at an end. He was about to enter a phase of his own that would see artistic triumphs he could never have imagined, with honors that would satisfy many for life. Mixed with that were horrors, most of them self-inflicted, that more than once nearly sent him to the grave.

T
he home on Franklin Road had a circular driveway, and he would occasionally enter, drive around a few times, and then leave. After his two prior divorces, this one left George dealing with pain and remorse, harboring hopes of reconciliation. Clearly both parties were at fault in the marriage. George's drunken, irresponsible, and impulsive behavior cast a pall, as did Tammy's own issues—her legitimate health problems, need for pharmaceuticals, and obsessive focus on surgery, sometimes of questionable medical value. She tried to maintain a civil relationship with her ex for Georgette's sake and soon she was dating, first Tommy Neville of the New England Patriots, then Rudy Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers.

George unloaded the Nashville home on Tyne Boulevard he'd received in the settlement and began to spend increasing time with
the Montgomerys in northern Alabama, specifically the area around Muscle Shoals and Florence. For George it became a haven from Nashville. He, too, found a new companion: Charlene Montgomery's sister, Linda Welborn. The two met in 1974. Welborn's earthy country-girl simplicity, free of Tammy's ego, appealed to George the same way Melba's had. George and Linda began living together.

Billy Wilhite was handling George's Nashville business at this point. He was present when George met another pivotal figure in his career, one who generated greater and darker controversies than Pappy ever did: Alcy Benjamin Baggott, nicknamed Shug.

A longtime Nashville nightclub owner, Baggott ran a rock club in town, steering clear of anything country because he simply never cared for the music. His change of heart, he claimed, came after he saw George and Tammy's 1974 performance at the Opry House at a benefit for Ivory Joe Hunter, a veteran R&B singer (“Since I Met You Baby”) pursuing a country music career in Nashville before he was stricken with cancer. Shug first encountered George and Wilhite at the Hall of Fame Motor Lounge at a time George was too blitzed to talk. When they finally connected, Baggott proposed reviving the Possum Holler club in a building he owned in Printer's Alley downtown. When the two visited the location, George's decorator mind-set kicked in and he began to visualize colors and layout. With little money, he'd have no ownership stake, but he was to receive a royalty from Baggott for the use of his name. The new George Jones Possum Holler opened on March 22, 1975, ten days after his divorce was final. George and the Jones Boys were present to entertain. At some point later on, during a night when George was too besotted to perform at the club, Shug introduced him to the substance that became his new best friend and worst enemy (aside from himself) over the next eight years: cocaine.

In April, Peanutt, after years of keeping pace with George in the boozing/partying department, became a born-again Christian, giving up his bad habits. He and Charlene remained close to George, though Peanutt's new sobriety and George's growing dissolution would alter the dynamics of their friendship, with George initially skeptical of his friend's conversion. That fall, George found a home in the nearby Sherwood Forest development in Florence. He also bought some lakeside property in the area.

CBS Nashville was anxious to keep the career momentum going for George and Tammy. The label worked a PR blitz as Tammy resumed her career with some high-visibility performances and magazine pieces reflecting more resiliency than she actually had. The label had more singles ready. Before the split with Tammy, George recorded another ballad the couple cowrote: “These Days (I Barely Get By),” his only Top 10 single that year. A chronicle of unfettered woe introduced by a heavily bowed fiddle, George inhabits the lyric about memories of walking home from work in the rain and returning to an empty house to find the bills “on the desk in the hall” with a layoff in the future.

In October, he joined Sherrill in the studio to record “The Battle” as his next single. Complete with martial drum rolls, lines about firing “the guns of anger once again,” he sings of being defeated by a woman's tears. Norro Wilson cowrote it with Richey, based on an idea they got from Linda Kimball, a secretary for Al Gallico. Despite being less monumental than “The Grand Tour,” “The Door,” or “These Days,” the record was nominated for a Grammy.

After their divorce, George and Tammy didn't record duets together for a while. That hiatus ended with a performance that became one of their finest. Written by Bobby Braddock and Rafe Van Hoy, “Golden Ring” cleverly recounted the life cycle of a
modestly appointed wedding ring, purchased by a hopeful groom in a pawnshop, placed on the bride's finger that day, and later thrown away when the couple splits, winding up back in the pawnshop. Crisp and simple, its catchy arrangement framed by acoustic guitars, it was the strongest George-Tammy duet since “We're Gonna Hold On” reached No. 1 in mid-1976, and remains one of their finest recorded moments.

Outside the studio, George was far from over Tammy. In April, the
Nashville Banner
ran a story in which he claimed he'd finally quit drinking, an assertion he'd make on and off for the better part of the next decade. A month later, he gave her a red Ford Thunderbird and a new ring, allegedly for Mother's Day. In Alabama, he was anxious to become part of a community beyond Nashville, not unlike what he had when he and Tammy put down stakes in Lakeland. He would run the back roads, drink, and hang out. He would buy and lose homes there over the next several years. Meanwhile, he'd ditched the house in Sherwood Forest because he couldn't afford the mortgage, then borrowed money to build an A-frame for himself and Linda on the lakeside lot he owned. The rural areas of northern Alabama became his and Linda's favored hangout as they explored the backcountry and hung out with friends, many of them not involved in music at all, or at least not professionally. During their time together, she tried to keep him connected with his kids. Georgette, now five, visited the couple in Alabama, as did George's sons Bryan and Jeff.

In the meantime, some changes had been taking place in Nashville, instigated by two of George's friends and fellow Texans: Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, supported by Tompall Glaser, Jack Clement, and a handful of others. The producer-driven Nashville formula of producers picking songs, hiring musicians, and overseeing the process that began in the 1950s with Chet
Atkins and Owen Bradley and that had worked so well for George over the years had clearly failed Nelson and Jennings, both of whom recorded for RCA. Their recorded successes had been, for the most part, middling. Feeling they had a better sense of what their fans wanted than RCA did, both demanded creative control of their recordings. Waylon negotiated it at RCA in 1972; Willie did so with Atlantic Records in 1973 and at Columbia in 1975. Many in Nashville's establishment eagerly waited to see these heretics fail. Some older fans were put off by their long hair, blue jeans, and beards. It didn't matter. Both found success with their core following and expanded their fan bases far beyond the country audience.

George loved and admired them both, but he never aspired to produce himself. He might bitch about the occasional song or other aspects of a production record, but he had no interest in the detail work that governed that end of his career. Delighted over Willie's success as a renegade (though Sherrill openly scorned the stripped-down sound of Willie's
Red Headed Stranger
album when he heard it before its release), CBS sought a way to introduce George to the new hybrid youth-cowboy culture rising in Texas. George and the Jones Boys were invited to play at Willie's Fourth of July picnic—his third—to be held near Gonzales, Texas. The lineup mixed Waylon and his wife, Jessi Colter; David Allan Coe; Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge; Roger Miller; Bobby Bare; and Leon Russell with his wife, Mary. The Austin contingent included Doug Sahm, Kinky Friedman, and Rusty Weir.

The notion of performing in front of what he considered an alien audience had George scared, a trait that would frequently arise if he was playing to an audience outside his comfort zone. Mary Ann McCready had traveled with him and his entourage. His stage outfit was a black leisure suit, a seventies fashion state
ment that involved a casual jacket and matching slacks, along with flashy white boots. In a crowd of eighty thousand rowdies, a veritable sea of blue jeans, T-shirts, and tank tops, he was scared shitless, McCready remembered. “Oh my God, was he nervous. He was a wreck. I was flying with him and he was with Walter Cronkite's daughter for some reason. She was with us in the car.” Backstage, she recalled his terror. “He said, ‘These are not my people.' I'm like, ‘They are going to love you; just try it!' He was the weirdest.” When McCready saw Coe, another Columbia artist, she brought him over to run interference as George was about to go on. He rose to the occasion. “George, you know what?” Coe said reassuringly. “Don't worry about it. Here, brother, I'll walk you down there.”

Taking the stage, casting aside his misgivings, George delivered an edgy, burning set of some of his biggest hits to a crowd he found beyond enthusiastic, and encored with a rocker he always loved: Little Richard's “Long Tall Sally.” “He got up in front of that hippie-crazy audience and they went nuts. George got up there and freaking killed it,” McCready said. “That was one of my most profound moments with George. He was really happy. He was happy, and he wanted out of there.” Willie biographer Joe Nick Patoski saw both the triumph and the anxiety, noting “his nervousness showed throughout his performance and a roaring encore.”

After the show, George and his entourage, including McCready, headed for dinner. “He wanted to go get some Mexican food and some hot salsa and we all went out, God only knows where we were, and got salsa. George and I got into some kind of conversation about salsa and he said, ‘Yeah, the hotter the better!' So we ended up telling the waiter, he wants it as hot as it can be. And he took a big slug of this really hot salsa and he's like
WOOOOOOOOOOO!
Right in the middle of the restaurant!”

Shug was managing George, working with a new booking agency and an investor in a lucrative deal guaranteeing him a specific amount of bookings a year. Again George was trusting nearly total strangers. With the naïveté that got him in trouble so often in the past, he relied on Shug and his associates for guidance and for getting him the cocaine he craved. Shug was not a popular figure around CBS Records. While he met with upper-level executives regarding George, McCready remembered, “Billy didn't like him at all. He signaled very clearly on that.”

Epic released two albums in the fall of 1976. The
Golden Ring
album became the only George and Tammy album to reach No. 1 (aside from their hits packages). They began appearing onstage and on television, the relationship at least civil.
Alone Again,
George's solo album, included his most recent hit, Bobby Braddock's “Her Name Is . . . ,” another teasing allusion to a devastating lost love, the Tammy connection obvious. The album included two of his stronger drinking ballads, “A Drunk Can't Be a Man” and “Stand on My Own Two Knees.” The album received a glowing review in the
Village Voice
from Patrick Carr, a longtime Jones observer who called it “his best album in ten years.” The year 1976 also saw the release of “Near You,” recorded two years earlier. It became George and Tammy's final No. 1 duet.

In November, he showed up at a Nashville apartment occupied by Billy Wilhite and his wife, accompanied by two women. The partying got out of hand. The pair claimed a drunken George tried to embrace one of the women and make her drink, then hit her in the face. He was accused of throwing a “briefcase” at the other that hit her in the back of the head. No arrests were made, but on December 17 both sued, demanding $51,000 each. George claimed the women were drunk and belligerent at the time, that he was sober and told both to leave, but admitted throwing a
shaving kit at one of them. The suit was settled out of court.

To friends, the coke factor, on top of George's boozing, was taking him down. Linda filed charges against him in Alabama relating to a domestic incident, but the two eventually reconciled. On the road, his unreliability worsened. In September, after George missed both a concert and a makeup date in Augusta County, Virginia, the promoter sued, and George missed a court hearing. The result: a $29,654 judgment against him, one of many to come his way over the next six years as his dark side gained full control. It prevented CBS Nashville from ongoing efforts to elevate George and his music to a different level—and audience. Mary Ann McCready came up with an idea during a trip to New York to meet with music journalists she knew, among them Texas-born Chet Flippo, an editor at
Rolling Stone
and their primary chronicler of the changing country scene; Flippo's wife, Martha Hume, a former managing editor of
Country Music
magazine; and former
Country Music
editor Patrick Carr.

McCready remembers, “I was in New York making the rounds, [seeing] Patrick, everybody, and having dinner with Chet and Martha in this funky restaurant. It was great. And that's where the idea—first country artist to headline the Bottom Line—that's where that came from. That whole idea happened at that dinner. I was effusive, and I kept saying to Chet and Martha, I felt like if the critics in New York could hear George, that was the door that would open everyone to an interest in country music. That was the idealism, it was, hey, let George kick the door down, let's let the critics fall in love with George and see if we can get somewhere with country music because country music was [seen as] a joke. The major music critics in New York didn't care. So how to make 'em care?”

I went back and asked Billy and he said, ‘If you can get him to show up . . .'”

The Bottom Line, owned by Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, had opened in 1974 and earned a reputation as Manhattan's hippest music club. To Flippo, Hume, and the others McCready consulted in New York, this seemed the perfect venue to showcase George for a new audience. McCready, Flippo, and Hume came up with an invitation list; Sherrill added names, as did Sue Binford, McCready's assistant. Cincinnati-born Rick Blackburn, CBS Nashville's new vice president for marketing, was also involved in the planning. Originally a pop record promoter, he'd been general manager of Nashville-based Monument Records before joining CBS. For the next decade, Blackburn would be a major player in George's career.