Photo by Tim Barber.
Sid Vicious was a woman’s blouse. You know him as a punk legend who couldn’t play bass and used to cut himself on stage and got hooked on junk and stabbed his girlfriend and then OD’d a few months later on some dope his mom bought him. But let’s face it: The guy was a submoronic fashion plate who died of pussy-whippedness. Country kills punk. Check it out…
Born: April 6, 1937
Died: Still alive
Wives: 5
Biggest Hit: “Okie From Muskogee”
Best Song Title: “I Made the Prison Band”
Prison’s always been a big part of the country mystique, but Merle Haggard’s one of the few crazy sumbitches to have actually done some serious time. He was nine years old the first time he broke out of a detention center, and at thirteen he was on the lam, playing music at a bar called the Fun Center, where he was paid in beer. Before he made it big in 1963, Merle and a couple of shitfaced buddies decided to burglarize a popular Bakersfield, California, restaurant. They were positive it was three in the morning, but when they broke down the back door they were greeted by a full kitchen staff. It was 10:30 p.m. Merle was arrested the next day, but escaped prison for long enough to run home and apologize to his wife. Then he got caught again. Being in jail just made him that much hungrier to do crime, so he started brewing beer and getting all his convict pals pie-eyed in the yard. (That’s a lot harder than passing off a joint to someone near the weight room.) One day he got too high on his own supply and they threw his drunk ass into solitary confinement, where a man who was sentenced to die convinced him of the obvious: Jail sucks, get out. Merle cleaned up his act and was released two and a half years later. The world rewarded him for his good behavior with fame, fortune, and tons and tons of blow.
Born: Nov. 5, 1946
Died: Sept. 19, 1973
Wives: None (died at 26)
Biggest Hit: None, but he’s been canonized by both country-music fans and people who don’t actually listen to him.
Best Song Title: “$1,000 Wedding”
Gram Parsons was one of those talented, lovable fuck-up types whose premature death from a heroin overdose was not a shock to anyone. After all, he spent his vacations with the Stones trying to match Keith Richards drink for drink, line for line, etc. He also reinvented the look of the Nudie suit (a must-have outfit for country stars since 1947) by having his custom-made with pot leaves, pills, and naked babes embroidered all over it. His last day started with a liquid lunch at the airport near Joshua Tree, California, then back to the hotel with two gal pals for more Jack Daniels and some heroin and morphine. At some point that night it became pretty clear that he had overdosed, so one of the girls began sticking ice cubes up his ass (a trick that’s supposed to bring junkies out of an OD). At first, it worked. Parsons came to and muttered something like, “Hey, what’re you gurls doin’ with mah pants down?” before getting up and walking himself around the room. After about an hour of that, he died. Parsons’ stepfather had made plans to fly the corpse home to Louisiana, but Gram’s good friend Phil Kaufman knew the singer wished to have his body burned up in the Joshua Tree desert. Kaufman and a buddy managed to grow a big enough pair of booze ballz to steal Parsons’ body from LAX, drive it into the desert in a beer-filled, unlicensed shitbox with no windows, and torch it. The whole story of the Gram Parsons corpse-snatching is now being made into a bad movie starring Johnny Knoxville.
Born: Jan. 17, 1955
Died: Still alive
Wives: 6
Biggest Hit: “Copperhead Road”
Best Song Title: “The Week of Living Dangerously”
When Steve Earle’s 1986 debut album, Guitar Town, morphed from country smash into pop-crossover hit, Earle celebrated by smoking a lot of crack and shooting speedballs with Dilaudid. Run-ins with the Nashville authorities were everyday occurrences for him, and a 1987 altercation with a security guard in which he was choked with a nightstick permanently damaged his singing voice. Around that time, his answering-machine message went like this: “Hi, I’m Steve Earle. I am not at home. I’m out beating up cops, shooting heroin, and chasing 15-year-old girls.” He took a four-year vacation from fame and fortune in the early 90s to live in seedy South Nashville motels, where he was content to spend his days listening to hip hop, glass pipe in hand. Sometimes he would pick up a few bucks as a security guard himself, only at a crackhouse. He skipped a meeting in 1992 with some L.A. record executives who wanted to offer him a multimillion-dollar deal. Apparently, he had sold his plane ticket for $100 and was holed up somewhere with a huge bag of rock. In 1994, he failed to show up for sentencing on a heroin charge and was thrown in jail, where he freaked out and sobered up when his folks visited him. He’s still a totally interesting and talented guy, going on Larry King Live to talk about abolishing the death penalty and writing songs in the voice of American Taliban John Walker Lindh. But pre-comeback Earle is some harrowing, hardcore shit.
Born: Sept. 12, 1931
Died: Still alive (he’s playing Kelowna, BC, on March 21)
Wives: 4
Biggest Hit: “He Stopped Loving Her Today”
Best Song Title: “I Ain’t Got No Business Doin’ Business Today”
Waylon Jennings said of George Jones, “If we could all sound like we wanted to, we’d all sound like him.” He’s considered country music’s greatest singer, and it’s sort of weird that he’s still alive considering the legendary status he’s achieved and all the fucked-up things he’s done over the years. Because he’s been high on booze pretty much from childhood on, there’s no shortage of famous George-Jones-loves-to-party tales. His famed marriage to country star Tammy Wynette produced two especially mind-blowing gems. One day, she foolishly tried to put a stop to Jones’ drinking by hiding his car keys from him. Jones climbed behind the wheel of his lawnmower and used that to get to the bars. Another time, George stocked up the orange grove behind his house with hidden bottles of vodka so that he could hide in the branches and suck down screwdrivers without having to be judged by that unreasonable hard-ass. Things got especially weird for “No Show” Jones (a nickname he earned from blowing off concerts in order to rage) after booze introduced him to its closest pal, cocaine. After that, he would get lost in loud and stuporous arguments with Deedoodle Duck and the “Old Man,” two buddies who lived in his brain and loved mischief. He wrote a book in 1996 celebrating the joys of sobriety, and then almost killed himself two years later when he got wasted and slammed his car into a bridge abutment. I guess he’s straightened up now, but who knows…
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