Music

'Cocaine & Rhinestones' Is the Only Great Music Podcast

Tyler Mahan Coe sets the record straight on country music history and its greatest singer ever, George Jones, in his show's second season.
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Chicago, US
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'Cocaine & Rhinestones' Host Tyler Mahan Coe (Photo by Jace Kartye)

In 2017, Tyler Mahan Coe couldn’t find a podcast on the history of country music, so he decided to make one on his own. For the first season of Cocaine & Rhinestones, Coe, the son of country icon David Allan Coe, spent months exhaustively researching the stories behind Spade Cooley, Bobbie Gentry, the Louvin Brothers, and other 20th century country icons, writing, recording, editing, and releasing everything himself. Though it was a totally DIY production, the podcast gradually exploded in popularity, topping the iTunes Music Podcast charts. In 2018, The New Yorker called it “addictive.” 

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“From the beginning, you're listening to me figure out in real time what I'm doing, because I had no idea when I started,” said the 36-year-old Coe. “People were able to listen past how I’m a beginner in the medium for the content, which is these detailed, rich, and deep stories that connect to so many narrative points in history and connect to mainstream culture.” 

The podcast’s 14-episode first season stood out for Coe’s deft storytelling knack and his ability to connect little-known pockets of country music history to larger themes in pop culture and modern life. His three-part deep dive into the subversive Jeannie C. Riley hit “Harper Valley PTA,” which targeted conservative hypocrisy, and his episode on Loretta Lynn’s controversial number-one “The Pill,” which was about birth control and banned from country radio, took on country music and America’s structural misogyny. His explainer on Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” subverted the popular understanding of the song as a conservative anthem.

But while Season 1 was an anthology, weaving together disparate vignettes from different chapters in country music history, Season 2 focuses entirely on Texas-born crooner George Jones, who Frank Sinatra jokingly called “the second best singer in America” and Dolly Parton claimed, “anyone who knows or cares anything about real country music will agree that George Jones is the voice of it,” passed away in 2013. Considered by more than just Sinatra and Parton greatest country singer of all time, Jones earned the distinction of being the only artist to release Top 40-charting country records across seven different decades like 1959’s “White Lightning,” 1962’s “She Thinks I Still Care,” 1974’s “The Grand Tour,” and 1980’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”  

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To Coe, you can’t understand the last century of country music without knowing the story of Jones, whose career spanned most every evolution of popular country music in the 20th century. “Everything I would talk about in season one was in order to tell the George Jones story, which then being told in order to tell what's coming in season three, et cetera, et cetera,” said Coe.

Over 18 episodes, which will come out in two-week intervals over the summer, the podcast dives into Jones’ entire life, including his abuse-filled childhood, his alcoholism and cocaine addiction, his stage fright, his disastrous marriage to Tammy Wynette, and some of the most stunning country songs ever recorded. But as far as Coe sees it, in order to understand Jones, you also need to know the history of seemingly unrelated phenomena, like pinball, moonshine, bullfighting, and ice cream—all of which Coe explores in depth across the second season's 18 installments, often through episodic intros.

Before the second season even zeroes in on Jones, Coe sets the stage with episodes defining the Nashville Sound and the A-Team, the group of session musicians who played on the most influential records on Music Row. “Okay with that base, now let's talk about why everyone always calls George Jones the greatest country singer ever,” said Coe of the way he structured the season. “Half of that is his talent, his voice, the material, and the way he was able to deliver it, but it’s also, objectively speaking, [Jones’ life] story that has largely overshadowed that catalog of music.” 

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Compared to the six months it took to make Season 1, Coe says spent three years researching and writing about George Jones. He even got access to the Country Music Hall of Fame’s archives, a resource so vast it explains how long it took him to make the season. “It was probably about a year of straight writing,” said Coe. “I didn't realize I was writing a book until halfway through it.” 

He hasn't actually written a book—yet—but the scripts for each podcast episode average around 12-13,000 words, which over the course of an 18 episode season makes for a meaty novel-length opus. “With how much I've learned about every step of this process from researching, writing, recording, editing, post-production all of it objectively, I have become so much better at making a podcast since I made season one,” he said. Coe is right, and Cocaine & Rhinestones is required listening for anyone remotely interested in country music.

VICE spoke to Coe about the show’s second season, some popular misconceptions about country music, and why music history is more important than ever at a time when music consumption is digital and ephemeral.   


You write this show in such an accessible way that your audience doesn’t have to know anything about country music to dive in. 
I don't just like country music; I'm a fan of all music. If I wasn't making a show about the history of 20th-century country music, the show I would be making would be about 20th-century soul, R&B, and their crossover into funk, because I'm equally fascinated by that stuff. My idea for this was, What's the coolest approach someone could take on any genre of music? Let's treat country music that way. I wanted to treat history like art, treat history like fiction, write it the way you would write a novel, and get it right. 

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Before you released this podcast, you said you listened to every number-one single on the Billboard country charts. How did that inform the way you think about the genre? 
It does come into play a little bit in season two, in those early episodes, when we're talking about the birth of the Country and Western charts on Billboard specifically. When you go back to the very first number-one country song, [1943’s] “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by Al Dexter, it's just such a hard song. Even now, the guy seems like the coolest motherfucker on the planet when you listen to him sing the song. I'd be hard pressed to go [up] to a fan of country music now and, without any further context, be like, “Oh yeah, this is a country song.” They would think you were crazy. There are a lot of different variations on what has been called “country music” in the past that would receive the same reaction. 

I don't want to only glamorize a certain window of the genre's history. When you run into people who say, “I don't like the way country music is now, I like the way it used to be,” and you ask them what they're actually talking about, almost always what you're going to find out is they only care about a 15-year window of genre's existence, which could be the 1950s, 1960s, early Nashville sound, the Bakersfield sound, or outlaw country. The way that these little windows of time become crystallized in certain people's minds as “the way it used to be” is never the whole picture since there are always new movements in the genre. It is wildly misinformed, and I would feel like a clown if I approached Cocaine & Rhinestones from that direction.

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I want to make people who think that way feel embarrassed when they hear my show. I want them to feel challenged because I do love country music and everything that means. What country music historically has meant is something existing on the fringe. What was happening in the middle of the road at any given time is almost by definition, less interesting. It's the thing that most people liked; it’s McDonald’s. 

Your show is important because it sets out to construct a record of a period in music history that risks being lost in the streaming era. There are so many George Jones albums that aren't even on Spotify.
That's really the whole reason I started this show. What I saw happening with the history around the music is what I had already watched happen to the music itself, with the transition from vinyl or 8-tracks or cassette tapes over to CD. Half the music I own on vinyl didn't make that jump. It’s certainly not on streaming now. It’s a very real problem. 

I do hope that by telling these stories, I can have some sort of effect on it. But if you buy a vinyl record because of this show, that doesn't show up on a sales report wherever these catalog’s rights holders are. The people who could reissue this stuff, if they knew what was selling on the after-sale used disc market, don't get a piece of paper saying people are buying old Conway Twitty albums. It would only show up if it were on streaming, and the only way it would get on streaming is that they knew that people care enough to try to put it on streaming. I have people ask me why I don't make Spotify playlists for each episode, but less than 50 percent of the songs I mention in any given episode are actually on any streaming service.

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I was shocked to see that a song like “Mr. Fool” wasn't even on Spotify.
And to me, that's easily [one of] the top three greatest vocal performances of George Jones' entire career. I think about anyone who's been told that “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is the greatest country record of all time, which you almost can't even try to refute in public without getting shouted down; [they often] don’t go any deeper, because that song doesn't knock them over in a way that they would expect the greatest country singer of all time [would]. It's not like George Jones on cocaine becomes an unlistenable singer or anything, but compared to the rest of his career, especially a song like “Mr. Fool”—come on.

Country music history and country music, in general, have always seemed like blind spots for the mainstream music press. There seems like a barrier to entry for people who didn’t grow up with the genre
These are stories that people just haven’t heard before. The reaction I get in a big way from people is, “How have I never heard this? How did I not know this?” It's because the people where they go to get stories told to them don't know it. Or when these outlets do get a chance to tell these stories, they fuck it up by going after the most exploited and sensationalized version of whatever it is, like, “Look at what happens when you give all these rednecks a bunch of money." 

But I think that is changing. Ken Burns’ last documentary was on country music, and that dude reaches an audience that's pretty much exclusively his in a lot of ways. I'm sure that him making that documentary has resulted in people who never would've pressed play on my podcast, pressing play on it. Whatever gets them in the door—that’s great. I know once I get them in, they're getting zero percent bullshit from that point forward.