Facing Cold Hard Facts

George Jones heads into Wednesday’s Grammy Awards ceremony with the prospect of tripling his lifetime Grammy take in one swoop.

That’s not as imposing an achievement as it might sound. Country music’s greatest living singer has to his name a total of one award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences: a 1980 male country vocal award for his signature ballad “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

At least Jones is in good company. Elvis Presley, the most important performer in rock history, got only three Grammys during his lifetime--all for gospel recordings. Bob Dylan didn’t get one until 1979, and the Beatles landed only four before their 1970 breakup.

Jones hopes he might come away with one of the two he’s nominated for--male vocal (for “Choices”) and country album (for “Cold Hard Truth”)--or that “Choices” songwriters Billy Yates and Mike Curtis might win for country song of the year.

“Whatever I would win would mean a whole lot to me at 68,” he said. “I told somebody they oughta just give me one for being the oldest codger in the charts.”

But he’s not banking on taking home any Grammys.

“I don’t expect to get it because new, hot artists are the thing that are going right now,” he said last week from San Francisco, on a tour that also includes a stop tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. “I just feel lucky I’ve got a good album that’s selling.”

“Cold Hard Truth” has been almost universally acclaimed as a watershed album for the man whose career began almost 50 years ago. USA Today called it the best country album of 1999 and the Washington Post raved that it “achieves levels of quality and intensity that few [albums] in his voluminous catalog ever have. . . . Most of the songs find him confronting a lifetime’s worth of mistakes.”

‘So Dern Lucky to Be Alive’

Jones, too, thinks it’s a cut above.

“I think it’s the best album I’ve had out in probably 15 years,” he said.

It also came close to being his final album when, last March, he crashed his Lexus sport-utility vehicle after drinking alcohol for the first time in about a dozen years.

He added that the accident, which happened when he took his eye off the road for “a coupla three seconds” while trying to play one of the album’s just-recorded tracks for his daughter over his car phone, put the fear of God into him and he hasn’t touched a drop since. He said he’s also quit smoking.

“I’m so dern lucky to be alive,” he said, “I decided to quit all that mess.”

Yet his brush with death--he came down with double pneumonia while recuperating from a lacerated liver and a collapsed lung--focused more attention on “Cold Hard Truth,” especially from youth-obsessed country radio, than it might have were it just another new George Jones album. Even one for a new record company--the newly reactivated Asylum label--whose executives were making him a top priority for a change.

“When we first took over the label,” Asylum executive vice president Susan Nadler said in a separate interview, “George had not been given the attention by other people that we felt he deserved.”

Case in point: At last fall’s Country Music Assn. awards ceremony in Nashville, Jones originally had not been invited to perform. Then, he said, CMA officials “finally gave me a call and told me I could do 35 seconds of ‘Choices.’ Then they said I could have one minute. I said, ‘No, if I can’t do the whole song, I’d just as soon stay home and watch it on television.’ ”

That’s exactly what he did, only to “come up out of my chair” when Alan Jackson unexpectedly inserted a few bars of “Choices” in the middle of his performance as a nod to a singer he idolizes.

So when Nadler set about finding material for Jones, it was all about locating songs worthy of his abilities.

“I put out a notice saying that we were looking for killer George Jones songs, and everyone came out of the woodwork and started pitching us stuff,” Nadler said. “I must have listened to 2,500 songs. . . . I didn’t want to do any novelty songs. I just wanted him to do the kind of album he might have done 20 years ago if people had listened to him, with just seriously brilliant songs.”

Addressing Themes of Pain and Regret

Nadler, producer Keith Steagall, Asylum president Evelyn Shriver and Jones narrowed down the contenders during a series of meetings--”George always brings a big notebook with him,” she said. “He knows music better than anyone I know”--to the 10 that wound up on the album.

Some were written by well-known and respected Nashville songwriting pros--such as Max D. Barnes’ “Day After Forever” and Jamie O’Hara’s title tune--others came out of the blue. “Sinners & Saints,” Nadler said, was on a tape handed to Jones in his driveway by aspiring songwriters Vip Vipperman, J.B. Rudd and Darryl Worley.

The common thread is the way the songs address themes of pain and regret unflinchingly, without a hint of the playful wink that typically accompany such emotions in so many country songs that become hits.

“That’s not what radio wants to hear,” Nadler said. “But I believe the people still want to hear heartfelt emotions sung by the greatest living country singer.”

Because of those emotions, “Cold Hard Truth” has an autobiographical tone that turned almost valedictory in the wake of his accident.

“It was all coincidental, of course,” Jones said. “But it seemed like everything fell together, having the songs ‘Choices,’ ‘Cold Hard Truth, ‘When the Last Curtain Falls,’ ‘Bed of Roses,’ and then I almost got killed in the wreck--it all kind of went together. A little bit more so than I’d like!”

He also downplays how such songs apply to his circumstances.

“When we picked ‘Choices’ to be the first single, a lot of people thought we planned that [to capitalize on the accident]. But if you stop and think about it, that song fits everybody. I don’t know of anybody right off who hasn’t wished they couldn’t change a few things, go back and make the right choice.”

Jones’ choice now is to remain true to the traditional approach. To that end, he plans to follow “Cold Hard Truth” with an album of country standards--something he’s never done.

“I’m still what you’d call strictly traditional. . . . It’s like a religion to me. I just can’t see chasing the almighty dollar and turning against what made you, having to change with the times. Why should you change if it’s something that you love?”

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George Jones plays tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. With comedian Cledus T. Judd. 8 p.m. $47. (800) 300-4345.

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