I Lived to Tell It All
Jones, George & Carter, Tom
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "I Lived to Tell It All" Stand by This Man (though not within shooting distance) ken bones and sewed tip wounds with. a needle and thread. His roughneck father, George Washington Jones, eked out a Iiving as a backwoods...
...There has never been a time when country music was so disrespectful of its elders...
...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...With his manic-depressive voice soaring and swooping above hard-driving fiddles and a moaning pedal-steel guitar...
...His unruly ghost has haunted country performers ever since who have tried to emulate both his heart-wrenching, gut-bucket music and his rough and rowdy ways...
...Unfortunately, the liquid silicone injected directly into a woman's breasts was often contaminated with bacteria, leading to all manner of hideous complications...
...When the song ended, she looked up and her eyes were welling with tears...
...No matter how much he destroyed his body, though, his haunting baritone has somehow remained undefeated-the sound, as one critic put it, of"spirit trapped in flesh...
...the freshly scrubbed young acts that monopolize the airwaves today are as bland as a beer commercial, their test-marketed careers a far cry from the world of Jones's nitty-gritty: I don't care much for many of today's young country singers...
...His roughneck father, George Washington Jones, eked out a Iiving as a backwoods moonshiner until a shipyard job brought the family to the World War II boom town of Beauneont...
...A Baltimore club owner once took great offense when Jones-dur irig a rare stretch of sobricty refused the man's offer of a drink...
...Though he again became a chart-topping solo artist after Wynette's departure, it was his drinking career that really took off...
...W.W...
...Country Music," the couple dominated the charts for years, not least because their duets were domestic soap operas that detailed their own stormy marriage and mirrored the messy lives of their workingclass fans...
...cally sophisticated, Information Age America...
...Unfortunately, she has little to say about a fourth group-liberal Democrats-who in many respects are the most culpable of all...
...His sole display of anger is reserved for today's booming country music industry...
...fire club owner caine out of his chair...
...Some time in the early 19go's, tens of thousands of women became convinced that their silicone breast implants, with which they had been perfectly satisfied for years, and in some cases for decades, were a mortal threat to their health...
...and nearly all consulted their lawyers...
...Jones virtually invented the sound of modern country...
...more than once he apologizes for deeds he can barely remember...
...Jones is repentant throughout, and writes like a man finally facing up to a wayward life...
...I threw an ashtrav ata mirror behind the bar, and glass flew in all directions...
...All things considered, it was a common enough occurrence...
...On one tour he was inebriated so often that his handlers wrapped him like a mummy with gauze tape to keep him standing upright behind the mike...
...he shouted...
...0 r the guns...
...We killed a fifth of whiskey amid got into another...
...Jones credits his survival to his fourth and present wife...
...He pleaded some more, than ran front the room, scared to death by the man . goingcrayv in his nightclub...
...Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal o f Medicine, addresses in Science on Trial...
...Turning his life into one of Nashville's greatest legends, he earned the horrific wrinkles that, by coiriparison, make the portrait of Dorian Gray seem as innocent as a photo in a high-school yearbook...
...Billed as "Mr...
...By his early teens lie was playing in the juke joints where he perfected his crafts-singing, boozing, and brawling...
...She sat ever so still, her hands clasped and her head bowed as if in prayer, as Jones wailed about the glorious pain of heartbreak...
...In Nashville recently I...
...Norton / 256 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan...
...And, in a refreshing twist on the recovering-celebrity-confession genre, he denies finding salvation in AA or the Lord...
...Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case MarciaAngell, M.D...
...Basically, Angell blames three groups-lawyers, doctors and journalists-for the breast implant fiasco...
...From Japan the technique spread to Nevada and California, where showgirls and aspiring actresses underwent breast augmentation for professional reasons...
...That is the question Dr...
...I le admits having shot up more than his share of tour buses through the years, and as [ills exploits grew to match his fame, everybody wanted to experi ence fl ic madman in person...
...Now sober at 64, Jones recalls leis journey down the lost highway in I Lived to 'fell It All, and admits to reinenibering very little of it...
...Then, in 1961, one of the unsung benefactors of the human race, a Houston plastic surgeon named Frank Gerow, designed a new implantable device-a rubbery silicone envelope containing silicone gel...
...What lifts his account of the down-and-out above a simple grocery list of bad behavior is his sense of shame...
...Though he has enjoyed hits well into the nineties, his music hasn't been played on the radio for years...
...Remarkably, too, he bears no grudges and settles few scores in these pages...
...He hit his commercial peak in the late sixties after marrying his third wife, singer 'lhnemy Vv'y'nette...
...A record producer urged him to find an individual singing style to snatch his uniquely magnihcent voice-and the real George Jones s~:is horn...
...How could such a tidal wave of hysteria and panic sweep through technologi...
...Finally, Jones relented: h.iiroi I)t• s\ r, it iior icriter for 11'asliinglrnl Cih l iher...
...I Lived to Tell It A] I George foiiws with Tom Carter ViIlard / 333 pages / $22,5o REVIEW EI' is l' Eddie Dean When Hank YViilialris died in the back seat of his Cadillac on the way to a New Year's Day show in 1953= he becalm Country music's alltime marl r. Forever defining the white man's blues, the so-called "hillbilly Shake speare" was also country's greatest hellraiser, living out every word of his honkytonk epics until succumbing to booze and pills at 29...
...I look at the shape of contemporary coun try music, and I'm saddened...
...t broke glasses, smashed rnir- s rors, heft metal chairs, 72 August 1996 - The American Spectator broke the legs off tables, tore down curtains, shattered whiskey bottles behind the bar, and more...
...And them I got out of my mind...
...A child of the Depression, lee grew up poor in a hardscrabble area of east ' l exas kiionS i i as Big 'I'll icket, where Iocals.set Ilicim ou 11 bro The records he made in the next decade-"White Lightning,' "The Window Up Above...
...Many went to their plastic surgeons to have the implants removed...
...And when, finally, evidence began to accumulate that breast implants were perfectly safe, this, too, seemed to have no impact on the public...
...artists making records about life who haven't yet lived much life...
...saw an elderly woman listening to an old George Jones song on WSM-AM, one of just a handful of stations in the country still broadcasting the classics...
...What are you going to do, tear tiie place to pieces...
...Angell points out that the first women to use silicone to enlarge their breasts were Japanese prostitutes eager to satisfy the expectations of their American patrons in the aftermath of World War II...
...Be that as it may, he soon convinced sili The Great Big American Breast Implant Scare 73 The American Spectator . August r996...
...By the late '70's he was living in an old yellow Cadillac in downtown Nashville, down to just loo pounds from a diet of blended whiskey and cocaine and clinging to an old publicity photo of Hank Williams...
...Widely acknowledged as the greatest country singer of all time, Jones likewise earned the rep utation as the biggest drunk ever to take a stage...
...she Thinks I Still Care," "The Race Is 0n," among dozens of others-arc milestones of American music...
...Nobody sings a weeper like George Jones...
...I was out of my drunken mind...
...In most lives such a point would mark rock-bottom...
...Married and divorced by ao, he signed tip for the Marines after a jail stint for failing to pay child support- 1-1 is first break came in 1954, back when country music was still called "hillbilly" and every singer tried to sound exactly like 1-lank Williams...
...Respect for one's elders -it's the kind of old-fashioned idea you'd expect from a man whose music harks back to an America that worked hard and played hard, a people who craved song not as mere entertainment but as some reward that made life worth living...
...ones denies Wyiutte's long-repeated accusation that lie once shot at her-the kind of denial that says plenty about the life he's led...
...I said...
...And 11 eant it...
...Since the Garth Brooks revolution, a cleanedup version of country has become the most popular music in America...
...and Mrs...
...Instead of bragging, he presents his exploits with a humble reserve, as if still nursing a lifethreatening hangover...
...The result was the largest class-action suit in American history, and the bankruptcy of Dow Coming, the leading silicone implant manufacturer...
...Jones also confirms the oft repeated story that he once rode a lawn mower eight miles to a liquor store after his wife had hidden the car keys...
...There the youngster began singing harefoot on the streets for pennies...
...But though Wynette's biggest hit was the decidedly unfeminist "Stand By Your Man" ((later infiniously disparaged by I Iillary Clinton), she abandoned Jones when lie refused to give up the bottle...
...They're not countrythey're clones...
...Curiously, all this went on despite the fact that scientific studies had never shown breast implants to be hazardous...
...some, more impatient, took a razor blade to their breasts and tried to do the job themselves...
...for Jones it was just another episode amidst the booze-addled decades...
...Even so, her book is an eye-opening account of how our civil justice system works-or rather, how it fails to work...
...His band mates warned the man that hooch often made their boss get rowdy, but the club owner wouldn't take no for an answer...
...It is said," notes Angell, "that Gerow was impressed by the similarity between the consistency of a plastic transfusion bag containing blood and the feel of a breast...
...Only before I whip your ass...
...Of all the wannahes, only George Jones has managed to surpass Williams in both song and sin...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
