One of country music`s funnier novelty songs in recent memory, ”Ya Ba Da Ba Do (And So Are You),” has just been released as a single by the vocalist most often cited as the field`s greatest, George Jones.
But this seemingly lighthearted event occurred only after a long bout with the sort of self-doubt and soul-searching usually reserved for more serious endeavors.
”This thing,” the plainspoken Texan confesses, ”has scared the hell out of me.”
Trepidation over the release of a record would have been thought out of character for Jones a few years ago. For at least a decade, he was so preoccupied with drugs, alcohol and other personal troubles that he had no time for such considerations as responsibility to his career and concern over the feelings of the American listening public.
In the last eight years, things have changed, gradually but dramatically. Having kicked drugs in the early `80s, he then began battling, and eventually beating, his gargantuan alcohol addiction as well. Now, at the improbable age of 57, a whole new Jones appears to be emerging.
Not only has he not had a drink of hard liquor in two years, he says, he also has:
– seen a crushing Internal Revenue Service debt of nearly $1 million, which has dogged him for more than two years, suddenly and miraculously lifted off his shoulders;
– been performing lucratively to huge concert crowds with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard on the ”Living Legend” and ”Country Explosion” tours;
– begun planning to buy a Nashville home, in addition to his present one in eastern Texas, to get closer to country music`s business center, which he used to avoid like sobriety;
– recorded, after two years of comparative drought, one of CBS Records`
hottest-selling albums, the new ”One Woman Man,” whose title song and first single recently peaked high in the country hit charts.
Which gets back to the subject of ”Ya Ba Da Ba Do” and Jones` fears.
They were rooted in the song`s lyric, which portrays a tragicomic hero abandoned by his mate and left with only a small table, a Flintstones jelly-bean jar and a decanter of liquor shaped in the likeness of Elvis Presley.
The fellow`s troubles drive him to begin imbibing the decanter`s contents, using the jelly-bean jar as a glass. After a while, he starts blearily seeing the two distinctive vessels as Fred Flintstone and Presley themselves, and begins discussing his situation with them.
The song`s most memorable lines show him pulling ”the head off Elvis”;
filling ”Fred up to his pelvis”; getting interesting lovelorn counsel from Flintstone and Presley, and finally and sloppily breaking ”Elvis`s nose pouring the last drop from his toes.”
At regular intervals during all these activities, the chorus rises like a hilarious dirge: ”Ya ba da ba do/The King is gone/And so are you.”
Jones says he thought the song was funny until a few days after he recorded it.
”Then I started playing my copy of the tape to a few people, and one person, a hard-core Elvis fan, spoke up and said, `You can just cut that off, I don`t care to hear it,` ” Jones recalls. ”He thought I was putting Elvis down.”
Jones and his wife, Nancy, started to worry. At the time, ”One Woman Man” had barely been recorded, let alone released, and they had gone a couple of years without an all-out hit. The last thing they needed, they thought, was a record that antagonized a large group of people.
The singer flew to Nashville to ask CBS Records boss Roy Wunsch to bury
”Ya Ba Da Ba Do” in the new album, not putting it out on any single as even a B side. Wunsch agreed, but by the time Jones got home again, he was even more nervous. He recalls that he called Wunsch and requested it be left off the album entirely.
But then other viewpoints started coming in. A Nashville radio programmer called Jones to tell him he had played it for six friends who were Presley admirers, and they all liked the song. Another broadcaster, who had spent 35 years at various stations all over America, told Jones he thought the song would appeal not only to country listeners but also, because of its novelty nature, to both pop fans and children.
When Wunsch called back to try to talk Jones into letting CBS at least leave the song on the album, Jones reversed his earlier position and said OK. ”I said, `Go ahead: They got me feeling better about it now,` ” he recalls. ”I think it`ll either be a real good record or will just totally flop.”
Jones` concern about ”Ya Ba Da Ba Do” stemmed from a wish not to ”hurt anybody`s feelings.” He admits it proceeded not from any overpowering reverence for the memory of Presley himself.
Jones knew the rock `n` roll king during the early days, since Jones joined the cast of the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport shortly before Presley became a regular there in the mid-1950s.
”After he came there, he was taking all the encores and bows, and we weren`t doing anything,” Jones says.
”He turned the Hayride audience into all kids; he changed the entire thing. The rest of us felt like nincompoops goin` out there and havin` it be deader than hell. Finally, I started doing `Long Tall Sally` and Little Richard stuff-I had to do something-to tear `em up.
”He used to make me so mad. People would say, `Ain`t Elvis great for country music?` I`d say, `Bull! He`s ruined the Hayride.` I`ll have to be honest: I was glad to see him leave.”
Like Presley, Jones came from a severely deprived Southern background, and Jones` was undoubtedly the more squalid of the two. Growing up in a rural area of eastern Texas called The Big Thicket, he was the son of a hard-drinking logger who sometimes whipped his son to make him sing for him when he wanted to hear music.
The son grew up to be perhaps country music`s most enigmatic figure, a grade-school dropout who drank to legendary proportions, had periodic run-ins with the law, skipped so many performances he got tagged ”No-Show” and, with Tammy Wynette, made the field`s best known, and most unhappily ended, love match.
Throughout this long string of personal defeats, his unschooled and unforgettable voice produced classic hits magnificently chronicling the rage, pain and sorrow he was otherwise unable to articulate. Literally singing through gritted teeth, he became the foremost idol of countless peers and legions of fans.
He still sings the same way, but his mood is altogether different. He`s talking about writing songs again; he even claims-emphatically-to be enjoying interviews, an activity he used to detest and rarely engaged in.
The difference is popularly attributed to Nancy, the wife he married in the early `80s when he tried to regain control of his habits and stay alive. Does all the credit belong to her?
”She deserves a hell of a lot of it,” he says. ”She seemed to be the backbone, to give me that extra boost I needed. But I saw I was at the point I needed to quit all that mess; I had did about enough of it. I had drank about all the booze in the world.
”I quit drinking on my own after all them years, and it was hard, but it`s a lot easier when you know you`ve got to quit.”
”The last couple of times I was in the hospital was for pneumonia and bronchitis. The next thing I`ve got to quit is the cigarets.”
Jones says that since he has ”been doing the right thing,” the pieces of his long-disordered life have begun to ”fall into place,” and it appears to be true.
Newsweek, for instance, recently gave him a prominent place in an article about a handful of performers from all fields who still make memorable music after extended careers; the others were Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt and Jones` famous ex-wife, Wynette.
He notes that the hot album and the hit single of ”One Woman Man”
couldn`t have come at a better time, just as Jones was getting ready to negotiate a new recording contract with CBS.
Especially vital was the settlement of his I.R.S. bill. It constitutes what may be the most eloquent statement ever of the power of Jones` music.
”It was just slightly under a million dollars, and a fan just wrote out the checks to `em,” Jones says, shaking his head. ”He didn`t ask for nothin`. I didn`t have to put up any collateral; I just signed a note where if anything happened to me, he could at least write it off his taxes. He`s . . . just a fine person.”
Most people never get a new start in life, especially at age 57 and after the kind of life Jones has lived. Most people who live the kind of life Jones has don`t live to be 57.
”I had a long stretch there where I didn`t enjoy performing, so I did some terrible jobs of it,” he says. ”But now I`m feeling so much better that I love singing again the way I did when I was a kid. Now I`d just like to see how long I can stay with these young boys like Randy Travis and Ricky Van
(Shelton). There`s some awful good young ones out there now.”
What about awards? Are there any he`d still like to have?
”Well,” he replies, after a pause and a sudden laugh, ”they could give me Entertainer of the Year one of these days. `Course, I`m not what they call an `entertainer`; I don`t jump up and down onstage and pick all kinds of different instruments. I just stand up there and do my thing. But I think you can entertain in different ways. I think you can do it through your voice.”
Can you ever.
