The Life and Times of Johnny Chickenshit
Donny Bragg is 12 years old. He does not want anyone in Greenfield Ohio to know that his father is the town drunk, but Percy Bragg makes concealing it impossible. Percy routinely passes out on the courthouse steps across from Donny’s school. He also likes to show Donny the end of a lit Winston cigarette- and Donny’s arms show the marks. Young Bragg’s only respites are his father’s trips to the Highland County jail or the Ohio State Penitentiary in Chillicothe.
Donny’s mother fails to protect him from the abuse, too broken by her own sadness and shame to notice that he is fast turning into an angry and uncontrollable young man. Donny Bragg withdraws from his mother, spending most of his time dodging the truancy officer, picking the guitar, stealing and fighting. By the time he is 15 he is doing 2 years in the Indian River Juvenile Detention Center in Massilon, Ohio for a drunken assault on a stranger who “looked at me funny”.
But Donny Bragg, in addition to being a juvenile delinquent, is also a musician with remarkable talent and the superlative determination born of the choiceless anger and humiliation for being Percy’s son. Donny’s grandfather Vernon gives him a Kay N-15 guitar the year before the drug store assault, saying “figure this a-here thing out, and you might go places.” Donny surprises his mother by quickly mastering Scots Irish standards like “Turkey in the Straw” and “Whiskey for Breakfast”. Most of the money he steals goes to records. He spends countless hours replaying the work of Webb Pierce, Carl Smith and Ferlin Husky on a 45 rpm record player he extorts off another boy by threatening to break his arm.
Despite the heat, cold, rancid food and rampant physical assaults the wards of Massilon endure, there is also ample spare time. The Ohio State Legislature has narrowly passed a bill in 1945 banning the practice of forced labor for inmates under 18, meaning that Donny can spend hours on music. He is a picking prodigy with a passion to play.
Although Donny’s music is mentioned as a mitigating factor to his delinquency by the judge in the assault case, he has no guitar for the first six months at Massilon. He does sing, and these lonely months are probably where Donny learns to sing. Massilon’s Warden, P. Lambert Brine, overhears Donny bleating Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” one night after curfew, and Brine immediately arranges for Donny’s guitar to be sent from Greenfield. One of Donny’s fellow inmates remembers the day the guard walked into the day room with the guitar:
“We was a settin’ there playin’ cards when in walks a guard, carryin’ a burlap bag. Guard says ‘Bragg”! Warden’s got a delivery for ye!’ He takes the guitar out of the sack and hands it to Donny, who commences to snatch it out of the guard’s hands and scream, “About time motherfucker!””
Donny always plays angry. The Hank Williams songs he practices are delivered through what, in rare early recordings, sound like a clenched jaw, the guitar accompaniment spare and imprecise but already showing the sensitivity that will become his hallmark on the pedal steel, where his genius as a picker will be later put to good use.
Despite his early skill as a picker, Donny is foremost a singer. When his voice changes, he begins to develop the distinctive and later much copied bleating nasal style, combined with the later characteristic vowell-heavy phrasing. He transforms the word “turn” into a keening and attenuated “tiiirn”, “today” becomes “to-daiiy”, “drunk” is pronounced “dronk”. This style derives from Shaped Note gospel choirs of Donny’s ancestors. The irony of Donny, a hard-living nihilist, appropriating his devout ancestors’ church music to fill smoky beer halls and sleep past noon is lost on him. Donny has no use or capacity for that kind of analysis. He lives in the moment. He is a cipher.
Years later during his final personal and musical resurrection at Chillicothe Prison, Johnny Chickenshit recalls “Music was all I really had to hang onto, especially in the can. In fact, without that time in Massilon, I might never have had the discipline to cross over, like I did while I was there. Crossing over– that was goddamned intense. No amount of hard living could ever take away what I learned in those early years.”
Locked up in Massilon, Donny thinks often about what his grandfather Vernon has said about making something of himself. Back in Greenfield, he has spent long hours with his grandfather, who impresses Donny with his (no doubt exaggerated) stories of easy money and high living. Donny is drawn to Vernon’s appreciation of the “finer” things. Unlike his besotted father, Donny’s grandfather wears silk suits and spats. He keeps the company of showgirls and bookies. He is a big tipper, despite the fact he is constantly asking others to front him ten dollars. Donny thinks about this waiting out his sentence with nothing but his guitar.
Donny Bragg makes it out of juvenile prison on the condition he join the Navy in 1953. In 13 months he receives a dishonorable discharge for assaulting an officer. He comes back to southern Ohio and soon picks up enough money for whiskey and dice games by playing small roadhouse honky-tonks. Vernon gives him a dilapidated 1940 Mercury as transportation. Donny’s covers of Hank Williams and others like Porter Wagoner and Carl Smith are well received by the rowdy patrons of these smoky taverns. A favorite in his lineup is Faron Young’s “Live Fast Love Hard Die Young”, a prophetic title.
With the rocket like ascendance of Elvis Presley, Rockabilly is all the rage. But rural listeners’ ears do not appreciate Rock and Roll’s appropriation of black gospel and rhythm and blues. Donny Bragg concurs and swears to never “go Elvis”. Later in life, Johnny Chickenshit will say “The people who liked my music had no use for bongo drums and pelvic thrusts. I do not respect Elvis, and I do not like him. He was just a drag queen in my book.”
Besides country music, the other main attraction of the roadhouses Donny plays is beer drinking contests, a southern Ohio tradition. Men who excel can pour entire pitchers of beer down their throat as fast as pouring it on the floor. Donny is a natural but avoids the sport after his beer guzzling abilities start to eclipse the small fame he is garnering as a singer. But just because Donny is staying away from beer guzzling, doesn’t mean he is abstemious, and he drinks whisky with a thirst that will not be slaked. As soon as he leaves the Navy, Donny Bragg, and later Johnny Chickenshit, stays intoxicated for most of the remainder of his life.
Donny is not a nice drunk. The booze makes him testy on the good nights, and violent on the bad nights. He routinely yells obscenities, upturns furniture, pounds his fist on the bar, and threatens people who annoy him with violence. Occasionally he drinks and just becomes very quiet and morose, weeping and stomping his feet, muttering about his hatred for Percy and his desire to kill him.
But for now, like many problems of the very young, the consequences of Donny’s frightening behavior can be put off for “later”. His success shields him from the dark reality of his gradual but unrelenting alcoholic unravelling.
6 months after Donny is discharged from the Navy, he is drawing crowds at 15 road houses in 3 states. On Saturday nights, bar owners hire off duty Sheriff deputies to direct traffic. To hear this skinny kid sing better than Lefty Frizzel is a mind altering experience for those who understand what they are witnessing. At the tender age of 19, Donny has agents and handlers and bodyguards. It is a heady summer for a kid who spent the previous winter in a Navy brigg.
Years later, when queried about his early days as a teenage country music phenom, Johnny Chickenshit says quietly “quite a ride”.
Being the hero of the roadhouse circuit is an easy entree into the world of live Radio. A Cincinnati radio host named Stetson McLure from WCKY approaches Donny outside a brothel in Locust Grove, KY in September 1956 and offers him $500 to sing on the radio in Nashville. Donny, drunk at the time, accepts belligerently and demands the money in cash without delay. McLure obliges on the spot. It is a $500 investment that will make McLure a rich man. To Donny, it is merely a down payment on another raucous and dissipated Saturday night.
The following Monday morning Donny steps off the train in Nashville. Upon arriving at the RCA Studios off 17th Ave South, McLure meets him at the door. He hands Donny a glass of bourbon and says, “Look Bragg err Donny, your name is not suited for show business. If you wanna work for me, we’re changing it to Donny Chrome.”
“Ok boss”, Donny replies, knocking back the drink.
That Donny would so carelessly give up his name is not just a reflection of his love affair with whisky, it also belies the disgust for the dissipation of his father, his shame for the failures of his grandfather, and the stain of self loathing he carries within himself every day of his life. Donny Chrome it is. He writes his mother to inform her of the change. She abides it and begins addressing his mail with his new name. When Vernon learns that his favorite grandson has discarded the family name, he says “well fuck-a-dooidle do and fuck you too.”
Stetson Mclure knows to keep Donny Chrome drunk, and drunk he is when he signs a stack of papers in McLure’s Nashville office one night. It is the first of a series of ill considered business deals Donny will enter into.
But it is still early for Donny, and the consequences of his recklessness are yet to manifest. Soon Donny Chrome is a 6-state radio sensation, and he is enjoying it. He nets $500 per week, ably covering his Nashville drinking and gambling expenses. Rent and food are compliments of Stetson McLure, but plenty of additional hospitality in the form of comped food and drinks flows Donny’s way, and he accepts it without hesitation. This is the life Vernon has told him to covet– fancy clothes, fancy women, free drinks.
All this is possible because Donny’s voice rings like a bell over the airwaves, a high lonesome yodel soaring above a chiming acoustic guitar. It is as if Donny’s grandparents’ church choir was amplified and weaponized as a pure expression of longing and belligerence. When Hank Williams hears a tape of one of Donny’s live radio shows, he becomes very upset and goes on a 2 day drunk.
Another country music heavyweight who hears Donny Chrome’s radio concerts is a child prodigy from Beaumont, TX named George Jones. Jones starts as a busker on the streets of Beaumont at the age of 11. At 27, he is the Frank Sinatra of Nashville.
Lying drunk in a hotel room in New Orleans during a rare vacation away from the Nashville radio grind, Donny is awakened by a call from one of his idols. Jones is also drunk but manages to hire Donny as a bassist and backup tenor in his traveling band.
It is Donny’s big break. Jones has just released “Just One More”, which rises to #3 on the Billboard country charts. It is the latest in a 2-year string of hits for Jones, including his breakout, “Why Baby Why”.
Jones pays Donny $1,000 per week plus expenses. It is more money than Donny can imagine. With it, he has his run of dice houses and taverns in any town George’s band stops through. He acquires a lifelong habit of buying drinks for the bar. He brags openly about his flush status and disgorges it publicly in card and dice games. An upshot of this Vernon-like ostentation is Donny’s often being robbed on his way home from the bars. Thieves know to bring at least three men to deal with Donny, who even when staggering drunk, puts up a vicious fight. In the end, being repeatedly robbed never bothers Donny much. There is always more money, and he can seldom remember the night before. He is living the “night life” as the underworld of rural southern nightclubs is dubbed by Willie Nelson in his song by the same name. Donny’s scrapes and bruises go hardly noticed in a milieu where almost everyone bares some scar or another, some secret, some unresolved craving.
Besides an employer, George Jones is two things to Donny: a musical mentor; and a fellow traveler on the near nightly quest to get drunk and raise holy hell. Jones has a distinctly childlike approach to life. He cares not for the future or the past, often loses track of time, and is incompetent in most conventional pursuits. He is also a musical savant who can succeed at nothing in life besides being a country singer. He and Donny hit it off immediately and become a kind of Mutt and Jeff duo on the road. Donny’s irascible bragging and relentless extroversion are balanced by Jones’ simple and obliging willingness to agree with whatever Donny says, which is plenty. Onstage, George calls the shots by virtue of his talent, but Donny is the front man off stage. This relationship is probably not good for either of them. George’s passivity enables Donny’s worst behaviors; Donny’s loud manic kinesis degrades George’s reputation and saps his energy. Together they are consummate “drinking buddies”.
Donny’s talents as a backup singer and steel guitar player take him and George far, leading up to “The Race is On”. Donny and George co-write the hit “Once You’ve Had the Best”–Ray Price hires Donny during one of Jones’ prolonged benders and uses him also as a backup, as does Faron Young, Skeets McDonald and Roger Miller. Willie Nelson also plays in Price’s band and Willie introduces Donny to hard drugs, mainly speed. George is incarcerated for the drunken discharge of a firearm, which turns out to be a dark foreshadowing of Donny’s own future problems.
Donny Chrome goes solo and records the hit, “The Miracle of Love”. After two years of delay (and desperation on Donny’s part) for checks from his debut solo work, Donny discovers that Stetson McLure owns 99 percent of the royalties from his recordings. Donny drives over to McLure’s office with a lawn mower blade and threatens to castrate him. McLure writes Donny a check for $1,500 as a “down payment” on their “revised” contract. Donny takes the money and buys an epic night on the town with George and Willie . McLure belatedly sends a new and even more convoluted and unfair contract to Donny, who by now has befriended a 50 year old wealthy alcoholic widow from Baton Rouge named Edna Ginne. Ginne turns Donny into a kept man and he (for now) forgets that the “Miracle of Love” checks are still not arriving. Donny has his first seizure. Edna buys him a Coupe de Ville and a pair of custom Lucchese boots. Donny is arrested for public urination and spends a month in the county poke, during which his brief brush with sobriety produces an impressive list of original country songs, such as “One More Cigarette” and “Tell Me Bartender”. Mclure has neglected to steal the proceeds from Donny’s original songbook, which is quickly purchased and recorded by the likes of Tammy Wynette, who goes platinum with Donny’s song “Apartment #9”, about a lonely woman in a cheap room who begs a drunk country picker to come calling.
After jail, Edna introduces Donny to Sam Nebow, who persuades Donny that if he changes his name (again), Sam can restart Donny’s recording career apart from Stetson McLure. The name “Chickenshit” is Donny’s impulsive response to Nebow’s suggestion, and the name sticks. Donny becomes Johnny, just to make sure he is insured a “clean break” from the legal handcuffs of Stetson McClure. In a town full of stage names and changing personae, most in the know still call him Donny, but the name Johnny Chickenshit will stick with Donny for the rest of his life, its caustic profanity impelling and encouraging him to embrace a “wild man” mystique. Johnny’s drinking has escalated and he is broke and addled. There still remains strong interest in Johnny’s music, but who Johnny is becoming is getting in the way. He misses studio time, he drinks in the studio and on stage. He is mercurial- barking at strangers one moment, then weeping, then laughing loudly at a joke he has told thirty minutes ago.
Johnny Chickenshit is at Yancey’s Saloon on a morning in 1965 when he receives the invitation to play and sing backups for Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys. As is Ray’s style, the bartender hands Johnny an envelope with “Donny” written in florid scrip. The enclosed card praises Johnny and instructs him to get in contact with Buddy Emmons and provide a phone number. Johnny has large tabs running at a dozen bars in Nashville and he needs money. Johnny calls Emmons from the bar.
The next day, Johnny swaggers into 319 West End Avenue, home of The Ray Price Studios. The old three story brick building is in the heart of Music Row. Ray owns it. Studio A is where The Cowboys practice when not on tour. Waiting for him is Emmons. “The Big E” is a tall, lanky man. He wears a taylored buckskin jacket over an ironed western shirt and a western tie. He runs down the rules: no drinking on the job; show up on time; dress appropriately. He adds that one should be bathed and groomed. Donny feels a need to lay down his own rules. “I’m a man who believes that right is right and wrong is wrong,” Emmons recalls him saying. “Treat me right and I will give you my all. Treat me wrong and I give you nothing.” Emmons later recalls, “I said ‘OK Chickenshit’. That shut him up.”
Before he leaves, Ray’s secretary gives Johnny an envelope containing $250. Instead of fueling an orgy of drinking and forgetting, Johnny uses the cash to buy a metronome and pay up for his room at the Union Station Hotel. (Edna has thrown Johnny out for the usual offenses: drunkenness and abuse). For the next three weeks, he sequesters himself there and plays to the tick tock of the metronome. This is not easy work, as his hands shake from alcohol withdrawal. His lone visitor is his new bandmate, Willie Nelson, sent by The Big E to keep an eye on him. Willie is a prodigious song writer. Before he even joins Price’s band, he pens classic country singles like “Hello Walls”, recorded by Faron Young, and “Crazy”, Patfsy Cline’s epic signature song.
Nelson taken with Johnny. He is amazed not just by Johnny’s playing or even his newfound commitment to his craft. What astounds him is Johnny’s ability to willfully beat back his severe alcoholic craving to salvage his music. Nashville in those years seems to be a city perched on the shore of an ocean of whisky, the streets flushed by the tides which, in an ancient rhythm, pull souls out and into the deep. But Johnny seems to be his own force of nature. “A lot of people go to rehabs and a lot of people need that,” Johnny says years later from Chillichothe Prison. “I’ve always been the kind that says, ‘Look, I got myself into that, I’m gonna get myself out of it.’ That’s the only true way for me. I either beat it or I lose.” If he is lonely in his endeavors, he does not show it. By the time the money runs out, Johnny has regained his chops. As his only contact during his drying out, Willie sees a positive side of Johnny that even Johnny has difficulty perceiving. Most people in Nashville are afraid of Johnny, and work with him hesitantly. Willie views Johnny as man wrestling with the demons of his drunken anger and self-pity who, despite all the pain, chaos and bluster, is at heart a talented and driven artist.
Years later, shortly before his death, Johnny Chickenshit says “I hated everyone and I thought everyone hated me. I knew I had given people plenty of reasons to hate me, and that a lot of my problems were of my own doing. Ray and Willie… they picked me up and helped me clean things up– for a while.” Prior to Ray and Willie, most of the men Johnny looked up to were drunks and thieves. Johnny enters a brief period of relative calm and stability.
That summer, Ray and The Cowboys tour throughout the United States, from Seattle to Portland, Maine and points in between. These are, however happy, short-lived times for Johnny. He stays off the booze for a while and gets along with the rest of the band. He matures as a musician and writes some of his best songs, such as “Don’t Explain to Me.”
But as usual, things will not hold together for Johnny, and one night in Amarillo, he succumbs. He is playing along on his A-11 Country Gentleman to a song he helped Ray write called “Little Bit Stardust” when he sees Emmonds point at him. The $5 fines irritate the other members of the band, but they are especially grating for Johnny. Getting fined while playing his own song is just too much. After the show, as the band is packing and getting ready to board the bus, he approaches The Big E. Donny puts the barrel of his .45 ACP to Emmonds’s forehead. “If you ever do that again, I’m going to fuckin’kill you,” he hisses. Buddy’s eyes go wide. Willie approaches. “Come on now, Chickenshit, it’s alright. Buddy’s a good ol’ boy. He ain’t bein personal.” Willie speaks softly. He gets Johnny to put his gun down. The band quickly packs and heads for the bus. At the door, while everyone else on board, Ray meets Johnny. “We can’t do this.” He hands Johnny a thick wad of bills to distract him and leaves. The bus pulls off into the night as Johnny counts the cash. In the cargo bay is the A-11. For years afterwards, Donny fixates on the guitar and tells anyone who would listen that Ray stole from him. He breaks into Ray’s studio eventually and steals it back.
Without Ray, Johnny is still in demand in Nashville, but lacking the distraction and structure of the Cherokee Cowboys. Now a semi-legendary honky-tonk polymath willing to work for studio wages, Chickenshit spends the mid-1960s playing for a who’s who of Nashville recording artists, but avoiding Ray Price. Chickenshit also continues to write and record his own singles. “You Can’t See the Pain” goes to #2 on the Billboard Country charts in 1966. In 1968 he scores a #4 single with “Killer on the Highway”. Johnny seems to live in two worlds during these Nashville “heyday years”: one inhabited by the people he needs to impress with his art, and another by the people with whom he drinks. In the studio, Johnny is at the height of his craft, but at quitting time Johnny’s company often consists of a parade of hangers-on, suck-ups and users. Johnny’s broken past, his memories of Percy’s piss-pants noonday dissipation on the courthouse steps, his anger for what Percy has done to his mother, and the desperate sinking feeling Donny has whenever he is alone means he is destined to be victimized by the very same people he calls “friends.”
The turmoil in Johnny’s personal life now continues to escalate. After shows on the road, Johnny invariably retires to the nearest roadhouse. In Shreveport one night he notices a woman at the bar. Already in his cups, Johnny approaches her and tells the two men she is with to leave. The bartender yells for them to take it outside. Johnny is accompanied by his “security detail” in the form of Wes Tucker and Clem Hoster, (who later both work for Howard Hughes in Las Vegas at the Sands). In the parking lot Johnny and company quickly overpower the two strangers who are now prone in the gravel. Johnny delivers a quick single blow to each man’s face, using the handle of his Colt ACP. As the two men writhe in the mud, spitting teeth and slobbery blood into glinting halide pools of oil and Louisiana rain, Johnny whoops and gives each a shot in the ribs with his now blown out Luccheses, appearing as a psychotic leprechaun, a dancing sadist. “Ah kick ‘im honey”, Clem yells, pulling on a flask. Johnny’s love interest stands sobbing from a distance and declines his cocky invitation to get on the bus when they pull out.
When Johnny’s madness finally catches up to him in late 1969, he finds himself homeless and sleeping under the Union Street Bridge. It is no coincidence that once again Johnny’s period of success leads to his own unraveling. The more successful he is the more he falls into intoxication and ruinous violence. People who know him say things like, “Johnny can’t leave it alone” or “once Johnny’s feeling good, he is gonna go all the way.” When the damp cold of winter descends on Nashville in early 1970, Johnny is drinking wine under Union Street, and he never spends a moment reflecting on all that he has lost. It is not in Johnny’s nature to reflect.
That Nashville winter appears to be a “bottoming” experience for Johnny, but only because Waylon Jennings personally drives to Union Street, picks up Johnny and dries him out enough to get him back in the studio. By 1972 Johnny is selling records again. The first real success Johnny has in the post-homeless years of the mid-70s is the #5 hit “Pardon Me I Need to Kill Someone”, which in retrospect appears to be some kind of cry for help. If it is a sign of Johnny’s deep disturbances, nobody cares because once again Johnny can still play and charm his way to more nights yelling at the bar with criminals and suckers. Johnny’s reputation for hell-raising fits nicely with his persona as an artist in the early 1970s. Like Waylon and Willie, Hank Jr, Charlie Daniels, Jerry Jeff Walker, David Allen Coe, and others, Johnny latches onto “Outlaw Country” as a full fledged genre, diverse from traditional “clean cut” Nashville country and western. Outlaw Country is Country Music’s answer to Rock and Roll’s seeming monopoly on anti-establishmentarian rebellion, hedonism and loud electric guitars. The politics of post-Vietnam America delivers both Neil Young and Lynard Skynard to their respective audiences with long hair and loud amps. Willie smokes grass, so does Waylon, so does Neil. Country can be fun, even a bit dangerous. Johnny sports a giant cowboy hat and shoulder-length hair. He moves right past weed to cocaine. He will best them all.
Now the gyre is indeed widening for Johnny. Not only is he ingesting increasing amounts of cocaine, he has reverted to “mailing it in” as an artist. He stops writing music and sticks to recording songs written for him that solidify his persona as a working class badass who might just kick your ass on a Saturday night. Although in some ways the escalating commercialization and dumbing down of country music into cliches and pop jingles degrades the idiom, for Johnny it is just another lucky break. He keeps touring, selling gigs to crowds of fellow drunk rural hell raisers. Johnny’s days as a slick craftsman give way to goading his audience to louder and more unruly shows of “to hell with all you all” defiance. Because of Johnny’s own relative lack of introspection and restraint, he himself buys into this cartoon version of a country singer gone rogue and genuinely believes he is some sort of redneck superhero.
Johnny would never have launched as an Outlaw Country singer were it not for Billy Sherwood, master producer and manager of various Nashville acts. Sherwood encourages Johnny to cover songs with Outlaw juice. Merle Haggard, the Prince of Bakersfield, learns that Johnny wants to cover his song “I’m the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised” and demures. He and others increasingly view Johnny as a carnival act rather than a serious musician. Sherwood builds an album for Johnny in 1977 around David Allen Coe’s song “Take this Job and Shove It”, essentially about impulsively walking off from work and threatening people on the way to your car. Arguably the most disturbing example of this phase of Johnny’s career is the song “Colorado Kool-aid”, penned by Phil Thomas especially for Johnny. The song is delivered not as music per se but as the rambling recollections of a day drinker at a Houston bar who watches a man’s ear get removed as repayment for an act of drunken disrespect. The slurry voiced delight that Johnny professes to watch the “big man” have his severed ear literally handed to him is both disturbing and seductive for its glib and sadistic familiarity with (and enjoyment of) violence.
Johnny literally milks (if cocaine were a liquid) the success of the Outlaw years for all he can. When a movie called “Take this Job and Shove it”, inspired by Johnny’s song is released, Johnny’s transformation from country singer to full blown Hollywood celebrity is complete. Johnny musters enough sobriety to do the talk show circuit, where he regales audiences with stories of his eccentricity and excess. The stories are not completely true if only because the graphic violence is edited out. They do offer true impressions of the places Johnny has been and what he represents. They confirm what his fans want to believe, that there exists an example of pure country freedom and irreverence in the person of Johnny Chickenshit. This is a version of violence and menace straight out of a cowboy western, where breaking a glass bottle over someone’s head simply causes them to fall innocently into a horse trough and people laugh. The laughter starts to irk Johnny, though, as the reader will later discover.
Because of the gut-punch opening lines of “Take this Job”, Johnny is given the status of a leader in the movement for workers’ rights. He is summoned to a mine strike in West Virginia where he is greeted as a hero of the cause. He continues getting asked political questions by talk show hosts. He responds in ways that reveal that he confuses labor relations with fighting in a bar. He begins to spend much of his free time with members of the mid-Atlantic Hell’s Angels organization. Johnny is the only man known to be inducted as a Hells Angel without owning a motorcycle because Johnny is 5’3” and is too small for a Harley.
Just like other periods of professional success, this one coincides with a deterioration in Johnny’s mental and physical health. Johnny now masters the toxic balancing act between cocaine and alcohol– one to set you flying, the other to pull you to earth. Coke sobers Johnny up before he goes on stage, booze tamps the insomnia and paranoia afterward in the bus. It is of no help to Johnny that he is a millionaire, that his childhood friends are hired procurers, that he believes he is a genius. Johnny says things like “I am country music” only peripherally aware that the industry is laughing at him and that his fans are growing tired of “Take This Job and Shove It”.
By 1980, Johnny has burned through millions on coke and his income has all but collapsed. Willie and Waylon are keeping it together enough to stay viable as musicians, but Johnny’s antics and lack of artistic depth mean he is not invited to open or collaborate with them. George Jones is stealing lawn tractors to get to the bar, but is somehow making timeless country music that does not rely on old timers like Johnny to sit in the studio. A new generation of studio musicians is showing up. Johnny still gets work playing county fairs, car shows, Star Trek conventions and Las Vegas convention junkets, but not that often. The “Chickenshit Posse”, as Johnny’s entourage is known spends most of its time living a nocturnal existence in Johnny’s filthy Hollywood split-level, venturing out in the bus for the occasional gig.
Cocaine has a double- acting means of provoking the brain’s pleasure response, It not only triggers a massive release of dopamine, it disallows the brain’s dopamine receptors from closing, propping them open like a screen door and allowing them to marinate in the dopamine that is flooding the brain. This overexposure to dopamine is toxic to the receptors, and eventually disables them after repeated cocaine-induced exposure. This damage to the brain sends the heavy user’s moods to paranoia, anxiety and rage. As the user’s capacity to feel pleasure fades, the coke he continues to ingest will provoke greater and greater feelings of agitation and craving– usually for more coke.
Johnny is a classic case. For him, the mature stages of heavy coke use result in the typical “somatic volcano” of pounding heart, runaway blood pressure, sweaty hands, shallow breathing– all of which manifest on the surface as addled and irrational paranoia, outbursts of rage, inability to listen, and a craving for alcohol. Although the cocaine is the dominant poison to Johnny’s mind and body, booze is a strong second place. When Johnny is high he drinks. When Johnny drinks, he wants to get high.
It is 1983. Johnny is steadily approaching some kind of crisis. Those who know him feel a sense of doom hanging around Johnny, as does Johnny himself. But in response, he can only seek to acquire and consume more and more coke. By November 1983, he is psychotic- he speaks semi-intelligibly, his pupils are tiny, he is gaunt and smells like a sour onion.
As much as the coke has wrecked his body and mind, to Johnny coke is not the problem. The problem, to what is left of Johnny’s thinking, is actually finding and buying the coke. Successfully procuring coke not only solves the “getting” problem, it solves every problem, including the root problem– not having it. The doppelgangers of Johnny’s self destruction are working overtime– coke and booze, craving and indulgence, despair and mania, desperation and violence….it has become a very long list as Johnny nears his precipice.
Johnny wraps up a “tour” of sorts and finds himself hanging out in a Cinncinati Hells Angel’s clubhouse where there happens to be a kilo of coke and two bags of cash. Partying with the Angels has become a regular thing for Johnny, and in the midst of this session, there is a sudden scare that the police are descending. In the confusion, Johnny grabs the cocaine and heads for his car. He drives toward Greenfield, looking for a childhood friend that in his paranoia he believes has somehow cheated him.
On December 14, Johnny finds himself stopping to drink at the North High Tavern in Hillsboro, Ohio, just a few miles from Greenfield. Johnny is highly coked up and takes a seat at the bar and starts drinking Old Grandad with a Michelob chase. He is wearing a Chickenshit Tour cap, filthy jeans, boots, and flannel shirt. Drinking at the bar several stools from Johnny are Chuck Stats and Jerry Feathers, local men who have visited several other taverns in the area that night. Each later admits to having had “7 or 8” beers. Chuck is particularly loose, and he recognizes Johnny, calling him by his given name, “Hey, Donny Bragg!”. Johnny turns and waves and they all shake hands. Chuck is happy to introduce Jerry to Johnny. Johnny buys the two men drinks and all seems merry.
But something goes wrong. Jerry’s fun in life is to get drunk and swap hats with someone. He offers to swap his green camo deer hunting hat for Johnny’s tour hat. Johnny agrees, but when they swap hats, Johnny later testifies that he “felt threatened” and felt they were “laughing at me”. Johnny brushes it off, but soon Jerry is regaling Johnny about how good Chuck’s turtle soup is, and that Chuck has some in his truck if Johnny is hungry. Johnny suddenly snaps and says “You think I’m some kind of a country hick or something?”, draws a pearl handled .22 revolver from his waist, raises it and shoots Jerry in the head. Fortunately it is a glancing blow to his forehead, putting a hole through Johnny’s own tour hat. Jerry bolts, bleeding, Chuck Follows and Johnny is left in the bar holding the gun. Johnny eventually does also run, gets in his car and guns it to his uncle’s house, where he has planned to stay. He passes out and is awakened in about 5 hours by the Highland County Sheriff and taken to jail wearing Jerry’s deer hunting hat.
Johnny spends 5 days incarcerated but is bailed out for $50,000 by Merle Haggard, himself a former inmate. Highland County claims throughout the trial that Johnny had “gone berserk” over the the collapse of his musical popularity, and had for weeks been looking for someone to shoot, to kill, to punish, roaming the interstates in a coked-up quest of hate and revenge, pointing to the first hand testimony of the people who spoke to and observed Johnny the weeks leading up to the shooting. Johnny takes the stand high and rambles about how it was self defense and how his finger slipped. He astonishes and terrifies the court when during a break in the proceedings, he picks up the gun in question from the evidence table and starts doing a quickdraw and side-twirling tricks routine with it in front of the jurors. The prosecution’s closing arguments do not neglect to point out that the title of Johnny’s last album is “Armed and Dangerous”.
Johnny is convicted of felony assault and sent to the Ohio State Prison in Chillicothe. Merle and Johnny play a benefit inside Chillicothe during Johnny’s sentence. They play “Take this Job and Shove It”, the prisoner audience goes wild and Johnny picks the guitar.
Johnny gets a pardon from the governor two years into his time and walks out a hero to the other prisoners and to himself. He quickly goes Platinum with the mournful song of repentance, “Old Violin”, recorded in the last days of Johnny’s post-prison sobriety:
Tonight I feel like an old violin
Soon to be put away and never played again
Don’t ask me why I feel like this, hell, I can’t say
I only wish this feelin’ would just go away
I guess it’s ’cause the truth
Is the hardest thing I ever faced
‘Cause you can’t change the truth
In the slightest way, I tried
So I asked myself
I said, “John, where’d you go from here?”
And then like a damned fool
I turned around and looked in the mirror
And there I saw, an old violin
Soon to be put away and never played again
Johnny is dead in 18 months, killed in a one-car accident coming home late from the North High Tavern.
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Very well written. Accurately describes, mania, cocaine addiction, crime, alcholism and fame. Especially, the lengths and depths of despair associated with dual diagnoses. Also, the truely sad and disparaging life of Donny Bragg.
I didn’t know much about him so this was interesting to read!