Paycheck enjoyed reputation as 'honky-tonker'

This article has been lifted from The Tennessean newspaper -
http://tennessean.com/entertainment/news/archives/03/02/29062764.shtml

Willie Nelson, left, and Johnny Paycheck perform in this photo. Paycheck worked with several musicians during his career, including George Jones, Porter Wagoner and Faron Young.
By TOM ROLAND
For The Tennessean

''All my friends are dressed in black and they're standing reverently/Let's have a few moments silence for the late and great me.''

Johnny Paycheck examined the possibility of his own death — a death caused by heartache — in a 1960s recording called The Late and Great Me. The reality came to pass early yesterday morning, when Mr. Paycheck, 64, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after a lengthy illness.

In court, Johnny Paycheck holds the gun used when he shot and wounded a man in a bar in Ohio in 1985.
He was best known for his 1977 recording of Take This Job and Shove It, a blue-collar anthem about a factory worker who fantasizes about revenge on his boss. When Mr. Paycheck's music had all but disappeared from the radio, Take This Job remained a calling card, played during the Friday drive home by stations ranging from country to Top 40 as a signal that the weekend had begun.

But his music went far deeper than one hit, comprising a catalog of classic honky-tonk that stretched from the 1960s to the '90s.

''He was really a superb talent in many regards, as a singer, as a songwriter and as a performer,'' said Country Music Hall of Fame historian Dan Cooper, who wrote liner notes for an important Paycheck reissue.

''If you listen to his recordings through the entirety of his career, you'll have an appreciation for what a fine singer he was. His delivery had great emotion and power.''

Cooper noted that Mr. Paycheck's music was often characterized by dark themes, leavened by ''an active tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. And I think that mixture is what made his material interesting.''

Numerous country stars held Mr. Paycheck's artistry in high regard. One was George Jones, for whom Mr. Paycheck sang harmony in the 1950s and '60s.

''I thought he had a lot of heart and soul,'' Jones said yesterday. ''He was a fine little old singer.''

For many years, however, Mr. Paycheck's personal struggles overshadowed his musical accomplishments. In 1987, before he began serving time in prison for shooting another man in the head during a barroom argument, he vowed to turn his life around. And indeed, during the final 11 years of his life, he claimed sobriety, achieving enough respectability that the Grand Ole Opry added him to its membership.

But Mr. Paycheck had accrued a nasty reputation that created anger among some Opry fans on his induction. His history included:

• A court-martial and imprisonment for two years in the 1950s for slugging a Navy officer.

• Playing for beer in Los Angeles dives in the 1960s, even with three top 20 records under his belt.

• A $175,000 judgment against him in a slander suit filed in March 1982 by a Frontier Airlines flight attendant.

• A suit by the Internal Revenue Service in April 1982 to collect $103,000 in back taxes.

• Bankruptcy in September 1982.

• A plea of no contest in 1983 to a sexual assault charge involving a 12-year-old girl in Wyoming. His lawyer said ''critical witnesses'' were unwilling to testify. In later years, Paycheck insisted that he was innocent and that his incriminating plea was entered on the advice of his attorney.

• Admission in The Tennessean in 1984 that he used narcotics, calling cocaine and alcohol ''upfront drugs.''

• Two years in prison for the non-fatal shooting in the Ohio bar.

Even after he embarked on a personal revolution, those stories overshadowed his reformation. Even to the end, the fans usually viewed him as a wild man.

''People still come to see me, because they still remember me as that crazy, good-time Charlie honky-tonker,'' he told The Tennessean in 1997, ''and I don't tell 'em any different.''

Singing since childhood

Mr. Paycheck was born May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, with the given name of Donald Eugene Lytle. He received his first guitar at age 6, entered talent contests before turning 10, and in his early teens became a regular performer at Club 28, a Greenfield honky-tonk owned by family friend Paul Angel.

At 15, he became, he once said, a ''gypsy,'' jumping trains or hitchhiking, traveling around the Eastern United States. He scored another regular club gig in Columbus, Ohio, at 16, then headed to Toledo, where he joined the Navy. There, while still a teenager, he was court-martialed for fracturing the skull of a superior officer. He escaped twice from a military prison during his subsequent incarceration.

Returning to his wanderlust after his release in 1958, Mr. Paycheck ended up in Nashville, where bass player Buddy Killen helped him get a recording contract with Decca Records. Under the name Donny Young, Mr. Paycheck recorded four songs for Decca, then another two for Mercury.

Killen, who later ran Sony/Tree publishing and would produce Exile and soul man Joe Tex, played bass on George Jones' 1959 hit White Lightning, on which Mr. Paycheck provided backing vocals. It was an early moment in Mr. Paycheck's career as a sideman. He toured — still under the name of Donny Young — with Jones, Porter Wagoner, Faron Young and Ray Price, his raucous carousing contributing to his revolving employment.

There are those who believe that Jones' inimitable, lonesome vocal style was derived from his on-again, off-again work with Mr. Paycheck during that period.

In 1965 he took the name of Johnny Paycheck from a Midwestern boxer, legally adopting the name the next year.

Also in '65, Mr. Paycheck made his first appearance on the country chart with A-11, a Hank Cochran song inspired by the jukebox at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, the renowned songwriter hangout across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium.

In 1966 Mr. Paycheck scored his first top 10 hit, The Lovin' Machine, a celebration of the automobile. It marked the beginning of a period at Little Darlin' Records that many critics have viewed as the most remarkable of his career. Mr. Paycheck em-braced a series of strange characters and soap-opera story lines through such oddly titled songs as (Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill, He's in a Hurry (To Get Home to My Wife), Don't Monkey with Another Monkey's Monkey and If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom).

Interestingly, he briefly titled his first Little Darlin' album Johnny Paycheck at Carnegie Hall, though the album wasn't recorded at that venue and wasn't even a live recording.

Mr. Paycheck's Little Darlin' work earned poor sales, however, and by the end of the decade, he was working small California clubs, feeding a drug and alcohol habit.

After music executive Nick Hunter found Mr. Paycheck, producer Billy Sherrill signed the singer to Epic Records in 1971, where he would enjoy his strongest commercial success, beginning with She's All I Got, which earned a Grammy nomination in 1972. That song, and its follow-up, Someone to Give My Love To, were re-recorded by Tracy Byrd in the '90s.

With the emergence of the Outlaw movement in country music, Mr. Paycheck was easily cast among its membership. I'm the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised) joined his stable of top 10 singles in 1977 and became the proposed title for his autobiography, which Mr. Paycheck had been working on with writer Richard Courtney just before his death. I'm the Only Hell preceded Take This Job and Shove It, which vaulted Mr. Paycheck from cult status to major country star.

He was unable to sustain success, however. He last hit the top 10 in 1979, when former boss George Jones joined him on Mabellene, a remake of the Chuck Berry classic. Over his career, Mr. Paycheck notched 11 Billboard Top 10 hits.

The early 1980s produced the roughest period of Mr. Paycheck's personal life, including the slander suit, IRS entanglement, bankruptcy and sexual assault charges.

The turmoil peaked when he shot Larry Wise in an Ohio tavern in December 1985. Mr. Paycheck later downplayed the severity of the incident — claiming that the wound to Wise's forehead was treated with a Band-Aid and that Wise was back in the bar later that same evening — but it landed the singer in jail in 1989, where he remained for two years.

It was during that era that Mr. Paycheck said he finally pledged to revamp his rowdy ways.

''The hardships that (I) put on my family — all of this was due to one thing only: my stupidity, OK?'' he said in 1997. ''I decided in the latter part of '87: 'This is it — I'm gonna turn this thing around, 'cause I want no more of this, for myself, but mainly for my family and my fans — people who've been good to me all my life.'

''With that in mind, I proceeded to embark upon that venture, which was a great adventure. And I beat it. And I did it on my own. A lot of people go to rehabs, and a lot of people need that. 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.''

It appeared as if Mr. Paycheck had beaten his demons during the final years of his life. He never shrank from the bad-boy reputation that he had created, but he professed to more than a decade of sobriety.

He became a regular guest on the Grand Ole Opry and was surprised when he was offered membership. He officially joined Nov. 8, 1997. He made several well-received nightclub appearances in Nashville that year and closed the year as the opening act on Tim McGraw's New Year's Eve concert at the arena.

But even as Mr. Paycheck's credibility rose, his health was deteriorating. Breathing problems repeatedly sent him to the hospital during the past few years, and he was unable to rally from emphysema.

Mr. Paycheck's final contribution as a performer was on Daryle Singletary's new That's Why I Sing This Way album. Singletary re-recorded Mr. Paycheck's Old Violin and invited the old outlaw to supply the song's recitation. Mr. Paycheck recorded that part from his bed.

Paycheck's hits that made Top 10

The Lovin' Machine, 1966

She's All I Got, 1971

Someone to Give My Love To, 1972

Something About You I Love, 1973

Mr. Lovemaker, 1973

Song and Dance Man, 1973

Slide Off Of Your Satin Sheets, 1977

I'm the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised), 1977

Take This Job and Shove It, 1977

Friend, Lover, Wife, 1978

Mabellene, with George Jones, 1978

Related story: Singer Johnny Paycheck dies at 64

Tennessean music writer Craig Havighurst contributed to this report.

This article has been lifted from The Tennessean newspaper -
http://tennessean.com/entertainment/news/archives/03/02/29062764.shtml