Rare News Desk
We miss George Jones.
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We miss his music, his voice and his way of making songs relate to us. But most of all, we miss the way he would talk about the good old days and the crazy situations he somehow always found a way to find himself in.
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On this day, the third anniversary of his death, we decided to take a look back at the five George Jones stories that have become legendary through the years.
- He totally flushed $1,200 down the toilet.
Pappy Daily bailed him out of jail once and landed him a $2,500 gig in Houston. Jones played the gig, threw a party, and got drunk; word filtered back to Daily that Jones had flushed the remainder of the money down the toilet. Daily confronted the singer about the incident, saying, “Golly, George, I get you out of jail, get you a date, give you front money and buy you new stage wear, and you go and flush $2,500 down the toilet!”
“That’s a goddamn lie,” replied Jones. “It wasn’t but $1,200.”
- He rode a lawnmower to the liquor store after his wife hid the car keys.
“Once, when I had been drunk for several days, [then-wife] Shirley decided she would make it physically impossible for me to buy liquor. I lived about 8 miles from Beaumont and the nearest liquor store. She knew I wouldn’t walk that far to get booze, so she hid the keys to every car we owned and left. But she forgot about the lawn mower.
“I can vaguely remember my anger at not being able to find keys to anything that moved and looking longingly out a window at a light that shone over our property. There, gleaming in the glow, was that 10-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition.
“I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did.”
- He regularly turned down meetings with famous rockers, claiming he didn’t know who they were.
He was so caught up in country, old country, that when a record company executive suggested he record with James Taylor, Jones insisted he had never heard of the million-selling singer-songwriter. He was equally unimpressed when told that Neil Young had come to visit backstage and declined to see him, saying he didn’t know who he was. He did listen to the Rolling Stones, only because of the guitar playing of Keith Richards, a country fan who would eventually record with Jones.
- He made his first money singing on the street. He took his earnings to the arcade and bought candy.
“A lot of them started throwing change down in front of me, down on the concrete,” he said. “When I was done, I counted it and it was $24 and something, and that was more money than I’d ever seen in my life.”
With his initial earnings, Mr. Jones went to a penny arcade, bought candy and played pinball.
- His wife Nancy made him do about 50 free shows for all the promoters he burned when he didn’t show up.
Gradually, Nancy offered each of the promoters who had been burned by No Show an unpaid appearance. “We probably did 50 shows that way,” Nancy says. “And got their trust back into George.”
