There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
All the work you’ve done has finally led to real results. You’ve paid your dues, followed the rules, did what you were told to do, and it’s been upward ever since. The light at the end of the tunnel is you, a shining star. Or, as in the new book “Cocaine & Rhinestones” by Tyler Mahan Coe, illustrations by Wayne White, it’s a train wreck.
Pinball, says Coe, is almost “directly responsible for some of the greatest country music ever made.” Pinball led to a spattering of small record labels like Starday Records out of Beaumont, Texas which, on a regular day in January 1954, brought George Jones in to record a few tunes. Jones, who’d one day be considered the “Greatest Country Singer Ever,” didn’t become a star after that first session, and so he picked up some studio work for other musicians, and he honed his talent.
By July 1955, after influential star-maker Pappy Daily took a liking to Jones, after the singer started “to sound mostly like himself,” Jones started landing in the Billboard Top 10. He got married, settled down, and started a family with his new wife while he continued to write and sing and make hits.
But there were “red flags,” says Coe. Honky-tonking, recording, and traveling to shows took their toll and Jones started drinking. He claimed that he performed better with a “buzz” and some agreed with him – until he started fighting or had to be carried out or made a fool of himself. Jones was, Coe says, drunk a lot.
But the hits kept coming, though Jones didn’t seem very interested in his own personal image or in taking care of himself. He even kept the “flattop” haircut that he’d gotten in the Marines in
1950, which was quite outdated by the time he started sleeping with a pretty one-time beauty-parlor-worker-sometime-singer, a married mother of two named Tammy Wynette.
Imagine this: it’s Sunday afternoon. You’re sitting in a creaking old rocker on a front porch that needs painting, sweet tea in front of you, slow ceiling fan above you, and the warm voice of a storyteller in your ear. That’s what you get with “Cocaine & Rhinestones.”
Trouble is, the stories go a little out there some. Author Tyler Mahan Coe tells the long, sometimes-truthful, often-scandalous love-hate tale of two of country music’s most iconic singers, but he also writes of pinball, bullfighting, NASCAR, Nudie suits, this and that and a bunch of other singers and musicians. Most of it’s somehow linked to Jones and/or Wynette, but it’s not always clear how. The presence of these topics’ll make you wonder.
And yet, you won’t be able to imagine this book without those chapters, or without Coe’s blunt, sometimes profane writing style or his ability to zero in on the best parts of these performers’ tales. All together, they make “Cocaine & Rhinestones” a country music fan’s delight, and for lovers of a good story, it’s right on track.
