Blues So Bad 1980-81 demo
So once again I was faced with dealing with the negative outcome of what had started out as a positive venture. Namely, I had to again make a decision that would negatively affect my life for positive reasons.
Principle! I was hung up on principle. It had happened with the RCA deal, and it was happening again in 1981 with Dennis.
He'd spent far too much time talking to other lawyers, who'd convinced him that controlling my copyrights was the name of the game.
He had missed out on the part about find a label and make a record deal, or production deal, so you have an outlet for those copyrighted songs.
Without someplace to put the songs, they didn't amount to much of anything except in theory. Theory was just that. A bad case of the what ifs.
Music had to be worked. It had to be played, recorded by someone, and made public to one degree or another. Otherwise it was a secret, the last thing you wanted to have happen.
Well that is where we were. The secret songs of Bobby Jameson, of which there were already too many. I'd been writing songs for decades, but no one had heard most of them, so the songs were unknown and not in play.
It was the same problem over and over again. I hadn't gotten the songs out there. Other artists hadn't recorded them. We needed a record deal. We needed to release something. The songs needed play, needed to get known.
There was always that battle going on over owning and controlling the copyrights, instead of getting the songs worked. If I had had any brains, I would have spent more of my time playing them in public so the songs could get heard.
I too had made mistakes. I should have canned the idea of only writing songs instead of playing them in public. Because of that, I take some of the responsibility for what didn't get accomplished.
None the less, I was facing the loss of everything once again. My house would go, and everything I owned would end up being sold for survival money. Tape recorders, guitars, furniture, etc.
I knew too well what this would be like. I resented my life for never getting past go. It was always, "Things look good! Oh shit, it just turned to crap again." I was addicted to the process of endless loss and recovery, just to find myself lost in loss again.
I had tried diligently to break the trend, but found myself exasperated over the same carbon-copy outcome. My positive thoughts of the future had degenerated into to fear of the the future. Fear of being homeless for the umpteenth time.
I had a yard sale in my front yard, on Westmount Drive in West Hollywood. The little old frame house had been my home for nearly a year, and I had flourished there. Now it was to be the scene of my latest catastrophe.
People began arriving almost immediately. I was surprised at how quickly they came, and how many there were. They seemed willing to buy everything in the place.
My equipment disappeared instantly. Some lucky guy bought my 60's Telecaster for $250, and I still think about it to this day. My bed, towels, clothes, appliances, and furniture, gone within hours. By the end of the day I had $1800 and a used car.
I had five years of sobriety, and felt like a complete loser as I sat alone eyeballing the money I'd made from the sale. This is what it had come to. Less than two thousand dollars for a year's work.
One more time in my life, I was faced with the loss of everything I'd worked for. There was no one from AA or any place else, for that matter, who had offered to help.
No support, no nothing, just me. Just me, staring at the floor and wondering, "Now what do I do?" A question I'd asked myself far too many times before. "Put one foot in front of the other, Bobby... one day at a time... survive... no matter what... don't get loaded... don't kill yourself!"