George Jones Confesses To Some Bitter Truths In Autobiography
Readers accustomed to show-business autobiographies and their convenient sanitizing or excising of facts will be wide-eyed at the just-published memoir of the great George Jones, whose capacity to tell the truth about unflattering aspects of his legendary life seems staggering.
In “I Lived to Tell It All” (Villard, $23), Jones not only provides an inside view of such things as the drinking (almost a fifth of whisky in an hour) that caused him to embarrass himself on a nationally televised Country Music Association awards show in the early 1980s, he also tells about myriad incidents that few people knew about.
“I never wanted to be a star and only occasionally wanted to be a performer,” he says in the book’s preface, off-handedly explaining a long life of titanic mistakes. But: “I always wanted to be a singer.”
One can justly fault him for a lot of things, but nobody can accuse him of not achieving what he wanted to be.
Merle Haggard comes much closer to being country music’s most complete artist - because he is a great singer, a great songwriter and a great guitarist - but it is doubtful that anybody in history has matched the keening desperation, the stomping capacity for joyous rhythm and the playful, richly awesome bass tones that make up Jones’ monstrous voice. Maybe the reason is that no singer in history has pent up inside one human body so much shame and remorse.
In the book, co-written with Tom Carter, Jones says he never liked lying. He says he refused, despite the begging of underlings, to tell angry promoters that he hadn’t shown up for some of his hundreds of missed performances because a relative had died or his transportation arrangements had been aborted or some other lie. No, he said, tell them he was drunk.
“I don’t think there are any inaccuracies,” he writes of the book. “I know there is no insincerity. So much misinformation has been printed about me, and I never understood why. The truth was always outrageous enough. Why did writers feel they had to add anything to it?”
This is just a guess, and certainly not intended as any justification for shoddy journalism, but at least some of the media distortion of his story was probably to be expected. Much of the time the press had little chance to know the truth, because Jones, so full of self-loathing, wasn’t seeking opportunities to do interviews. For many years when he did occasionally do them, he wasn’t terribly forthcoming or coherent because of heavy drinking and/or cocaine abuse.
Now, thanks partly to Tom Carter but mostly to Jones’ own decision to let his fourth wife straighten out a life on which most people had long since given up, he is not only coherent but unbelievably frank.
His story is amazing. The fact that he is man enough to so unflinchingly tell it is even more so.
Tritt tour invades Europe
Travis Tritt led a diverse troupe of Nashville stars across the Atlantic recently on a so-called “Rockin’ Country Tour” that appears to have made major inroads into the market for a couple of the acts.
Tritt and the likably rebellious band Confederate Railroad, New York-rooted singer-songwriter Victoria Shaw, the veteran Charlie Daniels Band and the recently reunited Highway 101 played five shows in various combinations with none of the shows featuring all five of the acts.
They sold out the 2,000-seat Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, drew 5,000 to an 8,000-seat venue in Stuttgart, attracted another 2,000 in Rotterdam, 700 (for Tritt) in a Dublin nightclub and 1,500 in a 2,000-seater in Interlaken, Switzerland.
“I’d say it was a tremendous success,” says the tour’s booker, Trisha Walker-Cunningham, a native Briton who has been arranging transoceanic tours by Nashville acts for nearly two decades.
Walker-Cunningham says Tritt made a promising beachhead for his international reputation but adds that Confederate Railroad and Shaw had the most pronounced effect on the tour’s audiences, each because they displayed “tremendous rapport” with fans. Shaw is to return to Europe in September to open shows for a tour by an American favorite of Europeans, Don Williams.
Despite this tour’s impressiveness, Walker-Cunningham says she is “very disheartened” by Nashville record executives’ lack of international interest and by the disinterest of European record executives, who are so involved in rock and pop musics that they don’t accord country music much of their time.
She makes a point of saying that none of the acts on the tour lost money, despite the fact that they were new to the market, but she also says that American country acts wishing to expand their careers to the international scene would be well advised to scale down their entourages and expectations because of the high cost of overseas airfares and hotel rooms.
She says Victoria Shaw’s work this fall with Don Williams will be acoustic, just Shaw and her guitar.
Brooks-Dunn video showcase
Brooks & Dunn, an act that has tended to avoid TV and music videos far more than usual these days, will see its forthcoming video single, “A Man This Lonely,” showcased exclusively on CMT during July because of the duo’s selection as the cable channel’s July Showcase Artist.
A ballad co-written by Dunn, “A Man This Lonely” is a lonely male’s declaration of love for the woman who transformed his life. The video was shot at a southwest Texas mission built for the recent ABC-TV miniseries “Dead Man’s Walk.”