‘George and Tammy’ and the Rainbow After the Storm
Some years ago, after radio host Don Imus had interviewed George Jones, Imus said it was maybe the most surreal interview he ever conducted.
Jones’s autobiography had just been published, and it was laced with stories about his behavior under the influence of alcohol, where he had spent a great deal of his adult life.
Imus, who loved Jones’s music and had had his own issues with adult beverages, asked questions like did Jones really drive his riding lawn mower to the liquor store after his wife had taken away his car keys.
Jones, in a courteous and sober tone, would reply, “Well, if it says in the book that I did it, I guess I did.”
He wasn’t being obnoxious. He was saying that significant chunks of his story had been pieced together from the recollections of other people, because to Jones himself it was a blank.
In a separate interview on that same publicity tour, Jones admitted he also remembered little about recording “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which many consider his greatest song and one of the greatest country songs ever recorded by anyone. He could vividly recall how much he hated being forced to cut rockabilly songs in the 1950s, when he wanted to record Hank Williams-style country, but he couldn’t rightly say how he got such visceral emotion into “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
The point here is that George Jones, adored and envied by millions, was for stretches of his life a blackout drunk, which he acknowledged as openly in real life as he did tacitly in songs like “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will).”
Both the parts Jones remembered and the parts he didn’t are packed into George and Tammy, a six-episode bio-series now playing on Showtime. Nor, as the title suggests, does it only dissect George. It also dissects Tammy Wynette, an equally towering country artist who was married to Jones for seven years and sang with him on and off for several decades. They didn’t have the same story, but their stories are permanently intertwined.
Wynette (Jessica Chastain) comes off as more sober than Jones (Michael Shannon), which isn’t saying much, but she’s not without issues of her own. While we get more of her sympathetic backstory — a hairdresser trying to claw her way into a male-dominated music world — she initially comes off as something of an impulsive stalker not smart enough to see that when you marry an alcoholic, even one with the voice of George Jones, your problems don’t diminish. They multiply.
And so we have another successful and beloved artist with a tormented life.
It’s a story not unique to George and Tammy, and as fodder for dramatization, it’s a surefire bet. Every time we hear dark off-stage tales about artists we know and admire, we slow down to survey the wreckage.
On the one hand, we feel bad about the pain. On the other, we’re fascinated by the disconnect. From the outside, it’s hard to imagine how creating great art and being adored by millions could be anything except exhilarating.
The problem with productions that dramatize these stories, whether they’re documentaries, biopics, miniseries or whatever, is the bad parts are so alluring that the good things — the reason we cared about these artists in the first place — can get diminished or swallowed altogether.
George and Tammy doesn’t go that far. It packs in a load of music, sometimes entire songs, performed by Shannon and Chastain in the style of Jones and Wynette.
That’s the right idea. Unfortunately, Shannon and Chastain face the impossible challenge of capturing what made Jones and Wynette extraordinary. The way he wrung raw pain out of single words. The cry in her voice.
Shannon and Chastain do their best. They just aren’t exceptional singers. Jones and Wynette were.
When the songs don’t pop off the screen and grab us, that dims the musical part of the story and elevates the drinking, fighting and hurting part.
The best dramas about tormented stars explore how they either used that torment or somehow walled it off.
In the case of Jones and Wynette, the multiple parallels between their lives and their music were right out front in flashing neon. They sang “We’re Gonna Hold On” three years before their divorce. They had a №1 hit with the breakup song “Golden Ring” the year they divorced. Jones’s own career, before and after Wynette, was stuffed full of love-tortured songs like “She Thinks I Still Care,” “The Door,” “The Grand Tour” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Write a country song about shredded relationships and George Jones would not only sing it, but kill it.
Wynette broke through with “Apartment Number Nine,” about a lonely single woman. She secured her place in the country world with a defiant anthem defending a flawed partner, “Stand By Your Man,” and she sang about a matter with which she was too familiar, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”
That’s the part missing from George and Tammy: the intensity of their music. At his lowest point, when he was strung out on booze and cocaine and living in his car and blowing off so many concerts that he became known as “No-Show,” George Jones never discarded his intense bond with country music or his passion for singing it. Musicians from Roy Acuff and Emmylou Harris to Bob Dylan and Keith Richards called him a master, the standard toward which others would strive. “If we could choose,” Merle Haggard said, “we’d all sound like George Jones.”
We come away from George and Tammy with a sense of sorrow and frustration, and it’s likely the real-life Wynette and Jones — who died in 1998 and 2013, respectively — shared much of that feeling.
At the same time, they made extraordinary music, separately and together. They had to know that, too, even the songs Jones didn’t remember.
In an earlier documentary, producers recalled that they couldn’t record their duets at the same time because Jones’s unique and elusive phrasing made it impossible for Wynette to follow in a live session. It drove her nuts, so he would record his vocals and she would add hers from the tapes. The smooth and lovely result, up to and including their final 1995 album One, gave no hint of whatever ragged ends had to be tied up to get it there.
Jones and Wynette created plenty of ragged ends outside the studio as well, and neither made any secret about it. They left plenty of wreckage. That said, they’d tell you they had some good times, too. They also might say George and Tammy spends a little too much time on the ragged ends without quite enough balance from the songs into which all of it was spun.
