George Jones will be doing a makeup performance of sorts at the Chicago Country Music Festival on Saturday.
“Last time, they had this tornado,” Jones said in an interview a few days ago at his mansion near Nashville. “We got in there about the time it came in, and they canceled the show. So we’re going to try it again.”
After seeing his records ignored by youth-crazy country radio programmers in the ’90s, the improbably resilient Jones is a hot property yet again, with a booking on CBS’ “Letterman” and an eerily appropriate hit titled “Choices” now rising in the country charts. He also has a much-anticipated new album, “Cold Hard Truth.”
But the Greatest Country Singer Alive nearly vacated his title in March by totaling his Lexus SUV on the wall of a concrete bridge near Nashville.
Still nearly 20 pounds underweight and struggling to strengthen his vocal cords after a lengthy convalescence, the seemingly chastened star said he has even quit smoking and limited his caffeine intake.
He said he “never thought I’d see the day we’d have radio back playing one of my records.” He went on to give programmers the benefit of the doubt, saying they apparently “were just looking for the right song.” At a suggestion that his continual presence in the recent news may have helped, he frowned.
“Yeah, but it ain’t the best kind of news in the world,” the 67-year-old singer said. Then he turned philosophical. “You know, we all just kind of live our lives, and the way it turns out is the way it turns out.”
Few have lived lives as storied as his. Nearly as fabled for the amounts of alcohol he used to consume as for his impassioned clenched-teeth singing style, the Possum, as he is known to a legion of country music true believers, has inspired the half-joking belief among peers that his liver is destined for the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The CD itself is amazing, and for several reasons. Produced for the first time by Alan Jackson studio supervisor Keith Stegall, Jones sings more hauntingly than ever, sounding as if he’s captured amid the guilt and self-accusation that followed the wreck.
Actually, it all was recorded before the accident and, although the listener cannot discern it, most of the tracks had not been finished by Jones when they were rushed into final mixes to capitalize on the public attention. Finished or not, it is a package of exceptionally well-chosen songs treated to some of the most passionate vocals of Jones’ career.
Evelyn Shriver, boss of Asylum Records’ Nashville office, noted that the often reclusive singer is “agreeing to a lot of things he wouldn’t normally” countenance, such as autograph-signings in major stores that sell records.
“Timing is everything,” she went on, noting that the wreck occurred the weekend before Nashville’s annual Country Radio Seminar, which draws hundreds of America’s most influential country radio people. “That was a blessing. When he came close to death, it made people re-examine their positions across the board, realizing that the Greatest Living Country Singer could’ve been the Late Great.”
Along with condition reports (he suffered a punctured lung and lacerated liver), there were concurrent speculations as to the cause of the crash, which initially was thought to have occurred solely because Jones was driving while talking on his mobile telephone and trying to listen to a just-completed track of “Choices.”
But the news blitz didn’t stop. Soon there was speculation that Jones had fallen off the wagon he had claimed to have been riding since the ’80s. A small, half-empty vodka bottle was reported to have been discovered under the passenger seat. Eventually came grand jury deliberations, a Jones indictment, and finally his confession to a judge that he indeed had “slipped” and been drinking the day of the crash.
“You know, I didn’t get a broken bone or anything,” he said. “I didn’t even notice any bruises. If I’d been in a lower vehicle, like a regular car, I’d be dead. But (the Lexus SUV) was up high. What caused the wreck mainly was me leaning over (toward the center of the vehicle) trying to rewind the tape to hear the new song, `Choices,’ and talking to my daughter on the speaker phone at the same time.
“When I hit the bridge I was over toward the middle of the (SUV) about halfway. Well, my legs slid on down in the floorboard just like that” — he snapped his fingers — “so I missed the airbag, which might have killed me, because I’m a short person. So I missed the airbag and went right down in that floorboard, and I believe that’s what saved me.”
He said he doesn’t recall much of his lengthy hospitalization, although people told him he “talked and sung and all that.” He said his first memory, while “still doped up,” was asking to sing a song with Southern gospel singer Vestal Goodman, whose voice he said he has admired for decades.
A couple of weeks ago, Jones started mounting stages again, first in Andalusia, Ala., then outside Minneapolis. A Lear jet brought him home from the one in Minnesota at 1 a.m. the night before the interview, he said, adding that in Minnesota he finally “kind of got the scaredness out of me” and the singing went better, “even though my voice was still quivering a little.
“I’ve got a swollen vocal cord on one side, and I’m taking medicine for it, and it still hasn’t got right. (A physician) told me it’s going to take singing because I didn’t talk for two months and didn’t sing at all for over three months. The vocal cords got too relaxed, and the best thing for it now is just get out there and sing.”
He said his layoff lasted so long that he has even had to be reminded of the correct keys for certain songs, etc., and that some of his high notes sounded hoarse and some of his low ones — such as on his sexy “Corvette Song” — he couldn’t hit “at all.
“So ’til that comes back, I’m worried,” he said. “They say it will with this treatment. I keep going around saying, `Yeeeahhhhh’ ” in real deep tones, he added with a laugh. “It sounds better this morning, really, after working last night.”
Asked if he ever considered refusing to admit that he was drinking that day, he said no.
“There was never no doubt in my mind that I was going to admit it,” he said. “I’ve always tried to be truthful with my fans, because you tell one lie and you’ve got to tell about 20 more, and you really don’t get out of it then.” (He pleaded guilty to drunken driving and violating the open-container law and received a $550 fine.)
Jones has publicly made a lot of repentant-sounding promises over the years, but the latest ones, and the stable-sounding way in which he made them, seemed easily his most heartfelt. He plainly was moved by the hospital visits of such stars as George Strait and Alan Jackson and by the nearly 40,000 fan letters he found when he arrived home.
Reflecting on why he has “done so many things” of an unfortunate nature, he said that he had “walked in fire without even looking, you know.
“I think I just do it on instinct or something. I don’t know.” He suddenly laughed heartily. “I think some people have better luck than I do.”
