The Grand Tour (11 page)

Hanging out in Nashville, he partied with anyone and everyone. With onetime idol Lefty Frizzell now a close pal and drinking buddy, the two went on binges that lasted for days, at times hanging out in Frizzell's basement. Back in Vidor, George Washington Jones continued his endless consumption of booze until, for the first time ever, the bill unexpectedly came due. After undergoing surgery, the old man suffered a stroke, the mark of a circulatory system faltering under the weight of both advancing age and decades of alcohol. For George Glenn, who was at home when it happened, the event was cathartic, unleashing a maelstrom of love, guilt, and rage all rooted in his longtime love-hate relationship with his daddy. Sitting with Helen's husband, Dub Scroggins, clearly hurting, he raged about the old man's failings, a trail of anger that extended back to Saratoga.

His impulsive instincts front and center, George jumped into his Cadillac that night and mowed down a good bit of fencing around his house. The hired hands who tended to his horses called Dub, who found the Caddy totaled. Dub walked in to find George lying on a couch and angrily assumed the rampage was a by-product of another binge. He was amazed to find his brother-in-law totally sober. What that escapade cost George financially didn't assuage the pain. As Dub drove his brother-in-law to the hospital to see his daddy, George cried, declaring he felt inferior to both of his parents. To everyone's surprise, old George not only recovered: he set aside the bottle for good. Clara was obviously relieved, delighted to see a happy, sober husband at work, enthusiastically selling sewing machines door-to-door.

ALONG WITH RAISING JEFFREY AND BRYAN, SHIRLEY WAS INVOLVED WITH
George's business interests besides the Chuckwagon. Occasionally, she saw to the Jones Boys' musical needs. Luther Nallie, working at a Beaumont music store, often dealt with her. “Shirley took care of everything, and she would call me and say George needs this or that, and I'd bring it out to him, out in Vidor. I think Johnny Paycheck was playin' bass with him at the time. [George'd] say, ‘I need a bass amp,' and I'd put one together and bring it out to him and Shirley would pay me. Shirley took care of the payin'. She was a lot more responsible about payin' stuff than George was. She did a good job of it. He'd just call when he needed something or have Shirley call.”

Contractually bound to United Artists for a given number of songs, George had fulfilled his agreement. Pappy already had a new place for him to land: Musicor Records, founded by Brooklyn-born songwriter Aaron Schroeder in 1960. Schroeder hit the mother lode writing the Elvis Presley hits “A Big Hunk o' Love,” “I Got Stung,” and “It's Now or Never.” Musicor was affiliated with United Artists, and Schroeder's ear for talented songwriters led him to the label's first star. Singer Gene Pitney wrote two rock standards: Rick Nelson's hit “Hello Mary Lou” and the Crystals' “He's a Rebel.” Vocally, Pitney's flair for intense drama came through on his first hit singles: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “Only Love Can Break a Heart.” When the British Invasion and changes in pop music left UA executives uncertain about Musicor's future, Art Talmadge jumped at the opportunity to run his own label. Talmadge Productions—Art and Pappy—purchased Musicor from Schroeder in 1964.

With Pitney still on the label and George and Melba added to the roster, Musicor's appeal could now expand into the country
field. Pappy would take Jones to another level there, not always in a good way. George soon found himself over-recorded, with sessions mixing masterpieces and respectable material with mediocre and abysmal songs that had no purpose except to fill a steady stream of George Jones LPs. The figures speak for themselves. From 1965 through 1967, Musicor released five Jones LPs a year, some solo efforts, others duet albums pairing him with Pitney or Melba. They cut back to three a year in 1968 and 1969. Pappy grabbed songs from across the country spectrum but paid special attention to material published by his companies: Pappy Daily Music and Glad Music. Among their composers were three gifted ones: Leon Payne (who wrote “Lost Highway”), Dallas Frazier, and George's buddy and Melba's brother Peanutt Montgomery, who also toured with George and became one of his closest drinking and hell-raising buddies. He often played guitar behind George and his sister when they toured together.

George had no illusions about Pappy's intent. In 1996, he noted, “When I was at Musicor, I recorded an entire album in three hours, a practice that violated the Musicians Union's rules. I'd go through one take, Pappy Daily'd play back what I had done, and then he'd usually holler, ‘Ship it!' It'd be at the pressing plant next day.” It wasn't far from the truth. He'd recorded entire albums in a day at United Artists as well. Pappy, of course, had ample motivation to cut corners at both UA and Musicor. At UA, lower production expenses saved him money. At Musicor, where Pappy was part owner of the company itself, he had even greater incentive to put quantity ahead of quality.

Pig Robbins, who played piano on virtually all the Musicor dates, agreed. “Pappy always thought he ought to get five or six songs on a session, but Pappy didn't have the arrangements. He just wanted quantity instead of quality, I thought.” George's effec
tiveness in the studio still depended on his alcohol intake, and too much inevitably led to problems for everyone present. “George, when he crossed that line, he would get belligerent,” Robbins recalled. “He wouldn't listen to anybody, and by God, he was gonna do it his way or nothin'. That's just the way he was. Sometimes it went smooth and other times, he would get that way.”

IT'S NOT CLEAR WHAT MOTIVATED ART TALMADGE TO TEAM PITNEY WITH
George on records, but the younger singer agreed to give it a shot. Country and pop singers recorded together in the forties and fifties, when Ernest Tubb recorded best-selling duets with the Andrews Sisters, Red Foley did likewise with singer Evelyn Knight, and Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded successfully with Kay Starr, but it didn't happen that often in the sixties. No one in their right mind thought a Jones-Pitney pairing would entice Beatle-loving teens to buy Jones records, yet the chance Pitney might reach country fans was at least worth exploring.

Prior to the sessions, set for January 5 and 6, 1965, Pitney and George met at a Nashville motel to run down material, heavy on country standards like Moon Mullican's “Sweeter Than the Flowers,” the Rusty and Doug Kershaw Cajun hit “Louisiana Man,” Faron Young's “I've Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night,” and Acuff's “Wreck on the Highway.” Known for his own unique phrasing, Pitney saw he'd need to alter his own approach when he heard George. “I realized right then and there,” he told interviewer Jim Liddane before his death, “that there was no way that he was gonna change one iota of his phrasing to suit mine—I was gonna have to change to suit his. And the beauty of it was that when we got in the studios and we started the very first song, everybody just stopped playing, just listening to the
blend—a combination of the high sound that I have, and that beautiful low bass sound that he has—it just seemed to be like magic, and I had no problems with him whatsoever—it was just automatic.”

The Jones-Pitney duets felt natural even if they didn't succeed on a scale with their respective solo singles. “I've Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night” broke the Top 20, and their spritely version of “Louisiana Man” made it to the Top 30. They appeared together on ABC television's prime-time
Jimmy Dean Show
prior to the release of “Five Dollars.” Pappy wound up with two George and Gene albums: the 1965 album, inelegantly titled
For the First Time! Two Great Stars,
and the 1966 release
It's Country Time Again!
He'd also complete a solo set,
The Country Side of Gene Pitney,
and record an LP of his own duets with Melba
.
After those four albums, Pitney ended his country experiment. Aware of how the business worked, he had no issues with George or the music. But hearing industry gossip that he was planning a permanent move to country, Pitney chose to veer away from future Nashville collaborations and refocus on his pop career. Years later, he explained—correctly—that the Jones sessions happened “before you could cross over from pop to country and back again, as you can do nowadays.”

GEORGE'S SOLO RECORDINGS INCLUDED ONE ACKNOWLEDGED MASTERPIECE:
Leon Payne's brilliant lament “Things Have Gone to Pieces,” a virtual punch list of misery including everyday mishaps and misfortunes. George's peerless approach elevated this simple ballad to a masterpiece that became his first solo hit on Musicor in the spring of 1965. Today it remains a high point of his six years with the label. One of his UA hits got new life in the pop market
when crooner Jack Jones, known for his successful easy-listening fare like “Wives and Lovers,” took “The Race Is On” to the pop Top 20 with an arrangement loosely based on what the Nashville musicians had created for George's single. It enhanced his stature enough that on May 13, Beaumont honored him with “George Jones Day.”

At home, things with Shirley could go either way. She was raising the boys when he was touring, partying around Nashville, whoring, and boozing with his buddies. One stop at home led to one of the most notorious of all George Jones incidents. Seeing he was too drunk to drive, Shirley confiscated his car keys. Wanting to fill himself up, he looked out the window and saw his riding lawn mower. Cutting his lawn on a riding mower was one of his favorite avocations through most of his life. With no other transportation available, he hopped on the mower, drove eight miles to the nearest liquor store, and returned with the needed libations, a true story that only added to the Jones legend.

George's stature meant he worked with Nashville's best musicians, a group of players who went from session to session. Their talents, versatility, and instincts made them indispensable, since they worked together so frequently in the studio they could collectively put together polished and commercial arrangements quickly. Producers could work with them to create arrangements, or simply let them huddle with the singer to come up with ideas. They were known informally as the A-Team. Among the major players: pianists Floyd Cramer and Pig Robbins; tenor saxophonist Boots Randolph; guitarists Grady Martin, Fred Carter Jr., Pete Wade, Ray Edenton, Harold Bradley, Billy Sanford, and Jerry Reed. The fiddlers included Tommy Jackson, Buddy Spicher, and Shorty Lavender. Bob Moore, Lightnin' Chance, and Junior Huskey were the primary bass players, and Buddy Harman, Kenny
Buttrey, and Willie Ackerman the primary drummers. In-demand pedal steel guitarists included Pete Drake, Lloyd Green, Buddy Emmons, and Weldon Myrick. Charlie McCoy played harmonica, bass, and guitar.

Daily frequently called Bob Moore, the Nashville-born bassist who'd worked recording sessions, radio shows, and the Opry since the 1940s and had played bass in Owen Bradley's dance band. More often than not, Bob was George's session leader, the musician who led the band and did the actual production. At other times, fiddler Tommy Jackson handled the leader duties. Moore remembers George showing up drunk, but adds he wasn't the only one at the bottle.

“Pappy used to call me and we'd have a session at nine thirty in the morning and he'd call me at seven thirty drunk and tell me, ‘I'll give you $250 if you go in there and supervise that session.' And I'd do it, but his name would go on the record as producer. I did a bunch of it. I had a deal with Musicor to produce whatever I wanted to. Well, it didn't turn out good, because [the label] didn't do shit after you gave it to them! I was more or less producin' George, and so was Tommy Jackson. Pappy . . . he'd maybe show up and maybe not. And half the time he did show up, he was drunk. I'm not puttin' Pappy down. In fact, I loved him. He was one of my favorite people. But he had all he could handle, you know. And so he was prone to the bottle anyway. And so was George. He'd be the one to get George drunk to start with!”

Moore hired Lloyd Green on quite a few Jones Musicor dates to handle the steel guitar. “Moore booked me on many of those Pappy Daily Musicor sessions, especially George Jones, between 1965 and 1970,” Green recalls. “Bob was essentially the leader/producer always, with Daily being little more than the putative producer, in title only. The way we cut those records was always
the design of Bob, in whom Daily entrusted the artistic, musical, and creative responsibilities.” Jones had similar opinions about the Musicor days. To biographer Dolly Carlisle he praised the musicians, crediting them with the arrangements and adding, “There were good engineers on the sessions, but no one supervised the mixing. This is a big regret of mine . . . Those sessions sounded much better than they do on record.” He firmly believed his voice wasn't prominent enough in the mixes. In many cases, he's correct. As usual, much of the blame for this lay at Pappy's feet. He was usually anxious to get back to Texas and rushed the sessions.

George spent a good bit of June 1965 in the studios, deferring to Pappy's sense of current trends. The hot Nashville act of the moment was George's pal and former writing partner, Roger Miller. After one hit single (“When Two Worlds Collide”), Miller became a hugely successful songwriter, but he still struggled to establish himself as a singer. To fund a move to Hollywood to try acting, Miller recorded a farewell album of his zany, off-the-wall novelty songs. It unexpectedly yielded two hits: the loopy “Dang Me” and then “Chug-A-Lug,” followed by his 1965 “hip hobo” ditty “King of the Road,” a chart-topping country single that reached the pop Top 5.

With Miller's unexpected success creating a niche for goofy songs, Pappy fed George novelties like “Love Bug,” a ditty about domestic bliss, and Dallas Frazier's bizarre “I'm a People.” Stranger than any of Miller's work, it centered on a monkey's loopy insistence he was human. George's exuberant, zany, and hyperactive treatments put both into the Top 10: “Love Bug” in 1965, “People” in 1966. Pappy had more for George to do that summer. He set up recording gear at Dance Town USA, a hall on Airline Drive in Houston, to record an entire show. Kicking off with “White Lightning,” George seemed in good shape, as always, referring to himself in the first-person plural
as he said, laughing, “We're glad to have the chance to be back with you, this time in a little better shape than with the . . .
flu
we had the last time.” They performed a rich sampling of George's hits, yet the crowd shouted so many requests he had to ask them to hold it down. Responding to a request for a “fast” number, after noting he didn't normally perform rock, he flew into a hell-for-leather version of Larry Williams's “Bony Moronie.”