GRAMMY TIME : His Rose Garden Was Full of Thorns : Many artists have peaked with Grammy glory, but none may have had the talent of Joe South--or as tragic a fall

When Joe South’s “Games People Play” won a Grammy in 1970 as the song of the year, it was more than a moment of glory for the songwriter. It was the first time a hard-edged--for its time--rock entry had won in that category.

Lennon and McCartney’s ballad “Michelle” had been named best song three years earlier, but it fit into the conservative Grammy tradition.

“Games People Play” was a biting commentary about misplaced values that combined the influences of two of South’s musical heroes: the gospel-edged country-rock of Elvis Presley and the lyric bite of Bob Dylan.

But South wasn’t thinking about rock history when he stepped to the podium to accept his award, one of two he won that night. He was just trying to avoid falling on his face.

“It was real sad,” South, 53, says now, sitting in his music publisher’s office with his wife of seven years, Jan. “I staggered up and sort of leaned against the mike and said something, but I don’t even remember. . . . The drugs had taken over.”

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Many promising young artists have failed to live up to their nights of Grammy glory, but none had the talent of Joe South--or, possibly, as tragic a fall.

Besides his own hits, he wrote “Down in the Boondocks” for Billy Joe Royal and “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden” for Lynn Anderson. He also played guitar on such hits as Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album.

Among the dozens of artists who have recorded his songs: Elvis Presley, Deep Purple, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Bryan Ferry, Linda Ronstadt and k.d. lang.

Within three years of his Grammy victory, however, South had withdrawn from the record business because of drugs and other personal problems and had moved to Maui, where he spent a couple of years “just walking up and down the beach and hiding in the jungle.”

Returning to Atlanta, he released his fourth album in 1975, but it was poorly focused and didn’t sell. A dazed and confused South then dropped out of sight, where he has largely remained all these years, quietly hoping to feel strong enough to return to the music world.

The singer-songwriter’s problem during his hit years wasn’t cocaine or heroin, drugs often associated with the rock scene. He was addicted to prescription drugs, including the amphetamines and tranquilizers that, he says, had helped him block out deep-rooted insecurities for years.

His condition was so bad around the time of “Games People Play” that South wasn’t able to follow through on the career steps, including high-profile touring and TV exposure, that should have made him a celebrated figure in the pop-rock world.

While his Grammy hit was blaring from radios around the country in the spring of 1969, South was playing dives in the Carolinas. There were some impostors booking themselves as Joe South and playing bigger rooms than he was, he now says ruefully.

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South was born in 1940 in Atlanta, where his father was a paint and body shop worker who loved country music and his mother was a housewife who enjoyed writing poetry and short stories.

Fond of such country stars as Hank Snow and Hank Williams, South (whose real name is Joe Souter) started singing and playing guitar when he was around 11 and landed a weekly guest spot in 1951 on a local country music radio show.

The show’s host, Bill Lowery, who eventually built a recording-publishing empire in Atlanta, encouraged South to write songs. By his mid-teens, his allegiance switched from country to rock, thanks in large part to the arrival of Elvis Presley.

“Everybody wanted to be Elvis,” the singer-songwriter says. “Everything about him seemed magical. When I first heard ‘Baby, Let’s Play House,’ I dropped all the hillbilly music.”

In the summer of 1958, South had his own hit record, a novelty titled “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor” that was written by J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper.

The song went to No. 47 on the national charts and earned South a spot on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” show.

He returned to Atlanta, played clubs and continued to write, but he didn’t get another record on the charts until 1962 when the Tams, a local R&B; group, recorded his “Untie Me.” It was No. 1 throughout the South for weeks.

Moving shortly afterward to Nashville, where there was a larger music scene, South was in much demand as a recording session guitarist. He played on records by artists as varied as Simon & Garfunkel and Conway Twitty.

His most memorable session was Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.” That’s South playing lead on such tracks as “Just Like a Woman” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”

“I was in awe of Dylan because he introduced a whole new language to songwriting,” South recalls. “Before him, there was this idea that you could only use certain words or images in pop songs, but he started putting in words that you’d expect to just find in books and in poetry. He opened everything up.”

South’s songwriting became his strength and he scored Top 10 hits in the late ‘60s thanks to Royal’s version of “Down in the Boondocks” and Deep Purple’s rendition of “Hush.”

With that confidence, he turned to making his first album, which was released in 1968. Titled “Introspect,” it was an ambitious work that included “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden.”

But it was South’s own version of “Games People Play” that earned him international respect.

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Whoa, the games people play now

Every night and every day now

Never meaning what they say

Never saying what they mean

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Where the hit and the Grammy recognition brought South the validation he had long sought, he found it difficult to deal with all the attention--and it apparently drove him deeper into drugs.

“Nobody could get in touch with me,” he says of that time. “I had a problem with talking on the phone. . . . Shyness. I dreaded to talk to anybody about anything. . . . Don’t know why. I guess it was just part of my sickness with the drugs and shyness.”

The most crippling moment for him was the suicide in 1971 of his younger brother Tommy, who had played drums on the “Introspect” album

“I blamed myself for (the death),” he says. “I felt like fate had for some reason smiled on me, lavished this fortune on me . . . and Tommy never did find himself as far as making his fortune in the world . . . and that was partially the reason for his suicide.”

After the time in Maui and a failed comeback album in 1975, South couldn’t shake the depression. His first marriage ended in divorce. (He has a son, Craig, 19, who is studying singing and acting in Los Angeles.)

By the late ‘70s, South was written off in the industry. He was widely dismissed as a drug casualty and someone who was difficult to work with. He shakes his head now in disbelief when he thinks about how many potential projects he sabotaged over the years of his erratic behavior.

“My goose was cooked in the record business and the song business,” he says now. “Nobody even knew me anymore. I was gone from the scene. I felt like a nobody.”

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For all the vigor of his vocals and the slashing power of his guitar work during his prime, there’s something shy and delicate in South’s eyes as he sits in his publisher’s office, 30 to 40 pounds heavier than in the hit days and no longer wearing his hair in a modified Beatles cut.

It’s as if South has been through so much that he’s hesitant to speak about new dreams and goals.

Yet he and Jan, a social worker whom he married in 1987, were cautiously optimistic on this afternoon. He had just checked out of another recovery program and felt he was better equipped than ever to make another run at the music business.

Asked to name a favorite line from his songs, South turns to “Down in the Boondocks,” the 1966 hit about a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks in love with an out-of-reach rich girl.

The line he chooses once expressed South’s own underdog story of growing up on what he felt was the wrong side of the tracks. The words can now been seen as an expression of his hopes of making vital new music:

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One fine day, I’ll find a way

To move from this old shack.

I’ll hold my head up like a king

...and I never, never will look back

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South was drug-free when the couple met in 1986, but the problems eventually resurfaced and he went into a hospital recovery program in the late ‘80s. Things then went smoothly until the relapse last fall.

“The real sad thing about it is that just around the time of the relapse, Joe had gotten active in music again . . . doing some shows around town . . . and it bothers me to think of the correlation between his career and his problem,” Jan says. “I think there’s been a tendency on his part to think when he’s writing that he needs the drugs to do it.”

She looks over at South and he nods.

“I think I’ve reached a turning point at last,” he says. “By allowing chemicals to be a god in my life for so many years, I’ve cut myself off from the things I love about music. It’s not the pills that wrote those songs.”

South, who says he’ll watch the Grammy telecast on Tuesday, pauses and looks at his wife.

“I’ve got faith that I’ll be able to keep at it . . . to express myself again in my music. I’d like to get a DAT studio together and record some of my new songs. But if I find myself falling back again, I’ll just give up the writing. I’m not going to let this kill me.”*