Jerry Douglas Speaks

Editor’s Note:  This article is a continuation of the excerpt from the Jerry Douglas chapter of Bill Amatneek’s new book Discovering Tony Rice.  The first half ran in the December 2023 issue. 

Regarding his interview with Jerry, Bill said, “Jerry Douglas was one of the most insightful people whom I interviewed for Discovering Tony Rice, Tony’s oral biography. He was perceptive about Tony because he is insightful about himself. We see that what Jerry has to say about his old friend also says much about himself.

“I spoke with Jerry on July 12, 2022 via phone.” In this, the second half of Jerry Douglas’s interview, Jerry speaks of Tony’s last gig at IBMA in 2017, a meaningful phone call and a treasured gift he received from him, a session with Earl Scruggs and a tour with Alison Krauss, the last time they spoke, and the first time they picked.

The book will be published in February and can be ordered at Vineyardspress.com.

Bleeding on the Strings with the Usual Suspects

But I knew that Tony would come back next night, because there was this big check involved, and he was supposed to play in this big thing with Sam and I and the usual suspects. Tony got up to play all these songs, and he played well.

By the end of the next night, Tony’s hands were bleeding. Because he hadn’t played, he didn’t have any callouses. But he was being Tony Rice without rehearsal, without playing. It was all muscle memory, and some of it failed, but it was Tony.

It was painful to watch because we all know what it feels like to play guitar on those little wires when you have no callouses. If you don’t play guitar all the time, like I don’t …. If I play guitar for a set, I’m in pain for two days.

I imagine that was happening with Tony because his left-hand fingers were bleeding from pulling-off, hammering, all the things that Tony Rice does. It was strange, strange to say the least. And as soon as he was done, he was out of there. That was the last time I saw Tony.

A Phone Call Out of the Blue

But I know if I had gone to his house, he wouldn’t have let me in. He didn’t let his brothers in; he didn’t let his uncle Frank Poindexter in. He would come out and sit in their car for a short time and then he would go back into the house. His anxiety had reached such a level that he couldn’t even deal with his family. He couldn’t talk; he couldn’t speak to them.

He’d gone on to some other plane at that point. I know about mental illness but not to the point where Tony was. He had to be a lonely, lonely guy at that point. He had Pam and India, [India is Pam’s daughter from her marriage to Bobby Scott] but no one else. He didn’t let anybody else in the house. Pam had some heart problems and she moved into an apartment complex. 

But Tony did call me; he called me out of the blue one afternoon. He said, “Ya know, Pam takes this heart medicine and sometimes she talks crazy, like out of her head. But she said something to me the other day that made sense. She said, ‘Your friends probably all hate you, because you never talk to them, you don’t converse, you don’t tell them anything. It’s like you just left them.’”

And he said, “That hurt my feelings, and I understood that and so I’m calling you guys to let you know.”

He was talking other-wordly, like, “I love you guys. I never wanted it to get this way. I never wanted to leave you guys wondering about me.”

He said, “She’s right. I should stay in contact. You guys are my friends. I love you and I’m not trying to avoid you. My depression and my anxiety … I can barely leave the house.”

But that one last call that I got from him was his way of trying to patch it up a little bit, just let me know that he loved me and all the cool things we’d done together.

We talked and laughed for a solid hour. And then, that was it. That was it. 

IT. 

I never talked to him again.

When he went away, when he snailed back into that shell, for all intents and purposes he died to us then. It was like Tony died but he was still walking around. It was very odd for us. Wanting to play with him but knowing he wasn’t going to do it. 

Tex’ing with Tony about Earl

Bryan Sutton said, “The only way I’ve been able to get an answer from Tony is to text him.” So I texted him. I was in Montreal, at the Montreal Jazz festival, and I texted Tony and he texted back immediately.

He said, all in caps, all the time … it’s like his phone was stuck on caps. He said to me:

I DON’T DO VOICE MAIL. I DON’T DO EMAIL. I DO THIS NEW KIND OF MAIL CALLED TEX.

[“Tex” … we laugh.]

So, we kept going: What I was texting him about was coming down to play on a thing I wanted to do with me, Earl Scruggs, and Tony. Just to play “Home Sweet Home” with just those two guys. 

So, we did it a few times. Earl was in great shape. Earl played faster than I actually wanted him to. And Tony took a couple of solos and one of the solos I had to take out. I just couldn’t use it. It was hard. The second solo I kept. 

He drove up from North Carolina to do the set. He was there for two days. I got him a nice hotel here. And at the end of two days, he was just gone. No nothing, just, “Bye.”

I sure would have liked to have my pal around for a minute, just to talk to, but that wasn’t going to happen. He just entered this alternate life that didn’t have anything to do with us unless we needed him for something, and then he would come. 

Alison Krauss & Union Station

We had him come play the Grand Ole Opry with us, with Alison Krauss & Union Station. There was a huge response.

And we said, “Why don’t we play a tour and we’ll do some of our songs? We’ll do a whole set of your songs. And you just play guitar. Dan Tyminski will sing or Alison will sing. We’ll do the songs in as close as we can do to the keys of the originals. So, you can play exactly what you played.”

He did that, but he drove his Mustang instead of riding the bus. And some of these things were over 500 miles a night. It worked out pretty good for the first four or five, and then Tony started missing sound checks because he had to drive all night long.

He had another guy with him to help him drive, but he would not let the other guy take the wheel. So, Tony’s driving this Mustang with this guitar in the back and he’s driving like 90 miles an hour to make the gig. He showed up at every gig.

A Gift at Dinner

When I first came into the band, one of the first things I noticed was Tony was wearing this watch that I’ve never seen anything like that. And he said, “This s**t went to the moon, dude.” In Tony’s voice, ya know [in graveled voice:] “Ah, this s**t went to the moon.”

It was made for the astronauts, really, and then publicized as such. And Tony went crazy, got a Spaceview, and that’s all he ever wore. He didn’t go in for the other Accutron fancier ones, not really, he maybe did later on, but not while I was working with him. But he always wore an Accutron Spaceview. 

But right before the tour started, I took him out to dinner here, and he gave me one of his watches, gave me one of his Spaceviews. It is one of my more prized possessions of life at this point. And I wear it a lot. And people come up to me and they’ll go, “Hey look, I’ve got one too.” It’s like a Tony Rice thing. If you’ve got a Spaceview watch, it’s because of Tony Rice; it’s not because of Accutron. 

And for him to give me that watch before we went on the tour was like handing me the keys to the kingdom. I felt very close and very fortunate at that point.

It was all sad, and happy, and thank God, and we’re going on this tour, and I said “Hey Tony, there’s a window up there on the van, you can push this little button, and you can blow smoke all night long, I’ll get you a fake steering wheel, you can drive all you want to …” But he would not ride the bus.

I Fergit Where I Am

You know how Tony would get a phrase and wear it out? Like … “I fergit where I am.” There was always something that he would repeat to you at least twenty times a day.

You just laugh. It was just funny. It was Tony’s way of being funny. That’s what he came up with. He’d say that, and he’d get a great response and then he could go back to being himself again.

Knowing more about mental illness now, I know that a lot of these things are camouflage for how someone is feeling. I’m gonna say something funny to set this thing back on its ear again, and off we go. This gets the attention off of me and moves it on to something else.

It was a reflex. It wasn’t him trying to be funny. It was a reflex. And that’s why he’d repeat them. Because he just knew they would get a reaction from us. We laughed every time. And that was what he needed. That fed him and he could go on.

We all kind of wondered, Why are we here? He wants you here because you do what you do and he needs that, and he’s your friend. And that’s my angle on all of it. I wish that he had taken all the advice he’d got from us and boiled it down to “Tony, we love you; please get some help.” But I don’t know that he ever did.

How can he not have, at some point, as intelligent as he was, go to somebody and go, “Look, what’s wrong with me? This is something I can’t figure out. Can you help me?” It just seems it would be unlike Tony not to do that, but I don’t know that he did. 

That’s the Tony Rice I know. He was just a tormented soul, as long as I’d known him. He could laugh like anyone else. But underneath there he was tore up.

There was something there that kept coming back. Maybe it’s something that happened in his childhood. At age 19, he really thought he had granuloma [a small area of benign inflammation, in Tony’s case, on his skin], and that this was what was going to kill him. At that early point in his life, he thought something was going to kill him.

He told me, “Till I was about 11 years old, I thought Larry [Tony’s brother] was a Mexican.” I don’t know where we were or why he said that. It was just Tony inserting his weird sense of humor into whatever it was we were doing. When he said it, it was f’ing hilarious. It was just like pandemonium. We just all just laughed our asses off for a while, then we got back to normal.

But it stuck with me. It was funny. It was sad.

I’ll say it again: We just all were waiting for the day when we’d hear that Tony got help and Tony was on the road to recovery. I had that thought and I wanted that to happen. Every time we thought we were getting close, he would fly back. But there was nothing we as friends could do. Out of our own “fight or flight,” we decided to let Tony go. That’s what I did. I let Tony go to the point that I would only get my news about Tony from Frank Poindexter or Wyatt. I’ve sent countless messages to Tony that just went unanswered. Forever.

How Tony Died 

My understanding is that Tony didn’t die on Christmas, that he died a couple days before Christmas, but he was found Christmas.

There was lots of Xanax around. [Xanax is a sedative to treat anxiety and panic disorder.] I think maybe Tony got down to like 90 pounds. And I think his body just quit. I think maybe he had a heart attack. He smoked a lot; he still smoked a lot.

And when I heard Ricky say he was making coffee for breakfast, I thought, Darn it, Ricky, Tony didn’t eat breakfast. He went to bed at nine or 10 o’clock in the morning, or a little bit earlier. He was up all night. Tony made coffee at night. He didn’t make coffee in the morning.

I think he was making coffee at night, whatever night it was, and he had a heart attack. Or some seizure of some kind, and that killed Tony. He was all alone, and he had nobody to come check on him, so he was just there. 

He was resigned to dying just the way he died, I’m pretty sure. He didn’t want to have anything to do with playing the guitar or singing. He was done.

This is what I think was going through his mind: How could he be as good – even if he got repaired everywhere – how could he do what he did before, without letting people down, without being an imitation of himself?

I look at it as this: He’s submitted to life on his terms. He wasn’t going to be that guy anymore, so he wasn’t going to pretend. He wasn’t going to have operations done so he could attempt to be that. He had been that and he was done.

I don’t know if there is a will. I don’t think so. And he always told Wyatt he was going to give him that guitar. I don’t know how he was actually going to do that.

The guitar is in a safe place right now. I wish Wyatt could play that guitar and it should rightfully be his guitar to play, but it’s at least a half million-dollar guitar.

Last Phone Call 

Last time I talked to Tony, I decided as soon as I heard his voice on the phone, that I was not going to tell him anything, tell him what to do. I was going to listen to him, tell him I loved him. If I didn’t agree with him, I wouldn’t say anything, but if I agreed with him, I wouldn’t tell him I agreed with him either.

But it wasn’t going to be a downer conversation from me, it was going to be as up as I could get it. I decided, all these times we talked to him about doing this, this could make it better, this could make things better or, … it might make it better for us, but we weren’t him. Everybody’s got a different way of taking advice, even from their friends. 

It’s like, … “Nah. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and if you’ve got a great idea, I’ll take it, I’ll think about it,” but, I don’t think his mind was made up at that point. He wasn’t going to do anything about it. I don’t think so. I think he just lived those last few years like he wanted to. He worked on watches. He didn’t have to deal with the music. He kept as many people out as he could. He was totally in charge of what was going on with him. I think that Accutrons kept him going as long as he did. 

I think he had guns. He didn’t shoot himself, or anything like that. I don’t think he had the infatuation for guns that he had for watches and cameras. Remember when he used to take so many pictures of everything? That was Leela who got him interested in photography. And she was such good photographer. 

Bill: Tony knew that I was a minister. He asked me to officiate his marriage to Leela, so I did. It was my shortest-lived marriage.

[Jerry laughs long … ]

Well, it wasn’t because of you, Bill. We sure know that. When she was done, she was done. She was outta there. The End.

He had demons all the time. She was the one who chased them away until she wasn’t there anymore. She just got tired of living that way. She was young, beautiful, her whole life ahead of her. She had to make a decision and probably made the right one.

And, oh man, we loved her, we loved her. You must have too.

When somebody’s that distant all the time, and I know this from personal behavior of mine. I can get very distant when that stuff starts coming on. I’m actually doing something about it. I’m deep into some regression therapy at this point and trying to find out, what the hell, why does this stuff happen? [Regression therapy is an approach to treatment focusing on resolving significant past events that may interfere with a person’s mental and emotional wellness.] Turning over every rock, trying to figure it out, because I don’t like it and I don’t want to end up like Tony. So, I’m doing something about it, but I don’t think Tony ever did.

Jerry’s First Time Ever

Bill: Do you remember the first time you played with Tony how it sounded, and how that affected your playing?

Yes! And it was like being surrounded by guitars, only it’s one guy. I was listening to him more than I was to me.

But he …

He was …

He was like …

I’ll just say, when Sam Bush was playing rhythm, and Crowe was playing banjo, Tony was like a tornado. And you’re in the eye of the tornado but there’s this guitar, it’s just surrounding you and it’s everywhere, but it’s not playing what you’re playing. It’s supporting you in every possible way.

His guitar wasn’t just an up-and-down, fill-in-the-holes kind of rhythm. He was playing all around you. He heard every note you played and would play something to compliment you; he never destroyed your solo. He didn’t overdrive your solo, or overdrive his influence in your solo. 

I’ve never played with another guitar player that did that to me, that could be so many things at once, could lead me into something that I wanted to play, or influence me to play something that I hadn’t thought of playing.