(part 139) "OK I'M CRAZY"

click

As a kid, fame to me was the obvious answer to everything. I had no money, I didn't know how to do anything except sing, and I wasn't planning on an extended education.

If I could make a record, I believed it would be a hit, so for me that was my path, to get someone to record me. This may sound foolish to some, but no more that a poor black kid believing that an NBA or NFL career would solve his problems. In the mind of any young dreamer this was powerful stuff--"to believe."

With this in mind, you can possibly understand, not only the importance of this belief, but the framework this belief was cast in. I had a talent and that talent was my life's answer.

This wasn't a vague belief or secret little dream with me, this was an up front, end of story, concrete decision-making arrangement. I quit high school to pursue it, and didn't consider anything else, ever.

At 17, I was already worried that my time might come and go if I didn't put everything I had into it. By 18, I made my first record, "Let's Surf," and by 19, I made my second record with Tony Alamo, which was a hit, "I'm So Lonely."

My dream worked, except for the part about getting paid. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't get paid, back when I was dreaming about all of this. Looking back on it now, I wish I had thought about not getting paid, then I could have incorporated it into my entire dream at the time.

Being young is a powerful thing, and I accomplished a lot early on. But because I didn't know how ruthless life could be, I left out key parts to my request of the "Dream Machine." This is the folly of the young and impatient, which the older and more devious among us prey on.

In my case the older and more devious came in the form of one Tony Alamo. Tony made me famous alright, and he also kept me broke. My once perfect Hollywood dream was to become my long-term and deadly Hollywood nightmare.

These thoughts, and others like them, were what I ended up dwelling on to the point of madness. The young kid with a dream, and the ensuing repetitive rape of that kid by fast talking con men. It haunted me day in and day out for years.

Those whose only talent was to package and sell the dreams and hard work of others, and then pocket any and all of the gains, would become my sole obsession of scorn in the end.

This illness of greed, which I encountered almost without exception from the beginning in the music business, was the single most damaging aspect of my life next to addiction.

What I was left with in the end, was a version of semi-fame, co-created as a result of those one sided arrangements with no money. The continuing rationale for this, by the so called producers and packagers was, "If it wasn't for me no one would know who you are," as if being merely "known" would pay your rent and feed you. I was known alright, but I couldn't even afford to be alive so I could be "known."

Had I never made a record and just worked a regular job, I would have made more money than I did making records, even if it had been a shit job at a car wash or as a busboy. To realize this was true, over and over in my mind, gave rise to the most intense form of anger I could possibly imagine.

Over the eleven years, from 1963 to 1974, I literally drowned in the facts of what my personal reality in the record and publishing business had been.

To view these people in public, and to repeatedly come in contact with them, knowing how they truly operated, drove me into a place of darkness where I could not live without losing my mind.

I drank and used drugs to obliterate myself, and in the end I turned on myself, as well as them, in an explosion of threats and exhibitions of unbridled rage.

After years of trying to force-fit this sick logic into my head, and failing, I went crazy. Piece by piece, this dehumanizing form of slave labor imposed upon me by the likes of Tony Alamo, Andrew Oldham, Randy Wood and Abe Sommers, Ken Handler, Steve Clark, the Cohen Brothers, and others, along with the companies they represented in one form or another, finally pushed me into despair and gave birth to a madman seeking to even the score.

So I was famous, or more accurately, infamous. It was the one thing I knew I owned for sure. Bad, good, or indifferent, I possessed it, as it surely possessed me.

The more I had raged in public, the more cover I created for those bastards to hide behind. They sat back and watched me self-destruct, and then pointed to it saying, "He's nuts, he's only got himself to blame," as if they had nothing to do with it.

I could not stand it. "OK", I thought, "I'm fucking crazy, so what can I do to really piss these assholes off that is really fucking crazy?"

(part 138) FAME AT ANY PRICE

Because the damage to my ankle was so massive, walking without pain was impossible. My desire to be off the crutches, drove me to endure a level of misery, similar I would suppose, to standing on an ice pick with each step.

There was no way to do this without the aid of a mixture of alcohol and pills. My personal demand on myself to walk, only made worse the mental and emotional problems I suffered from, because of the extreme amount of substances I required to tolerate the pain.

I'd managed to get off the heroin, but clung to the pills and booze like my life depended on it. Any thought of quitting that practice seemed absurd to me at the time and was never considered.

I received no treatment of any kind for the myriad of challenges I was faced with. I was still getting a small check each month from ATD, (aid to the totally disabled) from the State Of California, but would soon face the world flat broke again, when cut off.

After some time in Arizona, I suddenly, and without warning, just up and left, as was my practice. Another snap decision that would again prove to be life altering.

In my mind, Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, was home, whether they wanted me or not. Hollywood and Bobby Jameson were like two lovers that didn't get along, but had great sex. We always took each other back, no matter how bad the last fight may have been.

Once there, I spent some time at Carol's, and in the house of Donald Lively, a multi-millionaire drunken coke-head from Dallas, who didn't think I was that bad because he was worse off than I was. Don once rented a Learjet for an afternoon, and convinced me to come along.

Somewhere during the flight he offered the pilot $500. to pull the "stick" back, causing the plane to go virtually straight up for a number of seconds. That was his idea of a good time. He later drowned in his own bathtub in Dallas under suspicious circumstances.

Prior to Don Lively's demise, I spent a lot of time in his house getting loaded on cocaine, pills, and booze, while writing songs and trying to reinvent myself for the hundredth time.

Around town I'd earned a reputation as the jumper, and this monicker, hung on me by various well wishers, was something I accepted, because it was not only true in a macabre way, but came with an odd type of recognition.

For an egocentric nut case like me, that kind of notoriety fit right in to my now twisted sense of pride and humor. Something like, "I may be crazy, but you know who I am."

Truth being told, I'd become more famous for climbing up on buildings and jumping off the tower, than I was for being a recording artist or song writer, at least in L.A.

Unfortunately, I was not capable of distinguishing one kind of fame from another, and did not understand the ever more grim state of being I lived in. To me it was all fame. I didn't seem to care for what, as long as I was famous, which proved to be the most insidious of all my weaknesses.

What I needed was some serious psychiatric help and physical therapy, coupled with a stable environment, but what I received was next to nothing.

What I did have, was my own set of rules, or lack thereof, designed for the purpose of catapulting me into the public eye and keeping me there at any cost. I was a lost madman on a continual ride down, with a one way ticket to calamity.

Looking back, there was absolutely no attempt to retrieve the human being known as Bobby Jameson. To the contrary, there existed kind of a cheerleading atmosphere, by some, to glorify my antics as something other than what they were, tragic.

I was guilty more than anyone of promoting such an idea, mostly out of an inability to be honest with myself about the true nature of my insanity, and the reluctance of others to intervene.

Once again, I was loose on the streets of Hollywood spinning wildly out of control. My single quest in life was to beat into the minds of those around me, and those who watched from a distance, the belief I possessed, regarding what I was owed and the wrongs done to me by the music industry.

Driven by my emotions, and aided by drugs and alcohol, I was winding myself up for another insane assault on the world at large. When the damage done is left untreated, then the original damage will be compounded by each successive damaging event.

This was me. A damaged person, untreated, who was incapable of not damaging myself further. In my world, it was like re-breaking a broken window. All that could be achieved was to break the glass into ever smaller bits and pieces, and then go to work destroying the framework the window once occupied.

(part 137) PUZZLE MAN

click

I was a puzzle. A bunch of different experiential pieces that were totally dissimilar to the experiences of those in the world around me. Pieces by themselves, unassembled, which did not portray in any cohesive way a picture of my collective self.

These pieces were in a box in my head, and they just sat there. Occasionally a new piece was added to the box, confusing further any clear notion of what the pieces would represent, should they ever be joined together forming a single character.

A human set of fragments, strewn across the filthy floor of my own house of demons. Cascading emotions and super charged flashbacks flowing in an endless array of deadly memories through my mind and body.

To see me sitting almost perfectly still you would not have guessed that I was engulfed in the kind of turmoil I was in. I would have appeared at ease to any onlooker, even comfortable, while in truth I was not even present.

The shades and textures of a human being are created and changed over time by all that they have been and now are. The social continuity of a culture is born out of the collective similarities of everyday experience.

But when you have a human being, whose experience is totally dissimilar to the experiences of those around him, then the one will be different than the many, and will find it difficult to assimilate or integrate into the world around him.

I could not integrate myself into the world around me. I stood outside like a beggar at the window, hiding the pieces of myself from your view, afraid of what you'd think. In Tucson, I was a nobody on crutches. In Hollywood I was thought of as crazy, but I was still Bobby Jameson.

This was my catch-22 reality. Mentally, I was neither in Tucson nor Hollywood. I was hopelessly split somewhere between them. Always wanting to leave where I was to get to where I thought I should be, and once there, would question my own presence.

As I sat in my wheelchair in the living room of my mother's house, I looked down at my left arm and stared at the needle marks. I looked at my mother, seemingly unaware, of the tragedy all around her. My brother Quentin, nodding out from drugs on the couch and all the while the TV chattering in the background.

In this surreal setting, I knew something had to change. I was broken and loaded on smack and booze in a goddamn wheelchair in Arizona going nowhere. As my eyes traveled over this scene, I knew then the heroin had to go, and I had to get out of there. I vowed to myself that I would pull it together and fight my way back.

After some months, my casts were cut off while having two metal pins removed from my ankle that had worked themselves loose. My left leg, from the thigh down to the calf, was emaciated from no movement for over half a year. It looked like the leg of someone who'd spent time in a prison camp.

The first time I put weight on it without a cast, the pain was unbearable. But with the aid of alcohol and pills I finally got to where I could tolerate it. I was slowly but surely piecing myself back together like frankenstein.

I was a wreckage, posing as a human being. Where once I'd had a clear picture of myself and my purpose, I was now fragmented into so many pieces, it was hard to know what I'd become or where I was headed. Again, I was like a fully assembled puzzle that someone had picked up and dropped on the floor.

I had only a vague sense of what I was doing. In reality I was wandering around as a damaged group rather than a whole human being. Unaware of the truly splintered nature of my psyche, I continued to grope, unsuccessfully, for anything resembling a normal life.

(part 136) DOPE AND GUNS

click

My mother had opened an American Indian store in Tucson on Grant Road, called the "Three Brothers Trading Post," a store front visible to passing cars, with a small house attached in back.

It didn't make a lot of money, but stayed open and paid the rent. She had a real love for American Indian culture and artifacts, along with the jewelry, pottery, blankets etc. These were the things she traded and sold in the store.

When I arrived, my younger brother, Quentin, was already working and living there. We all knew something about Indian Jewelry, because my mother's third husband, Francis Farr, whom she had since divorced, had dealt in it for years.

Still hobbling around on crutches, I learned to maneuver my way though the house and store where I occasionally helped out.
Basically lost, and deeply troubled by my own circumstances, I felt immediately out of place in that surrounding.

For me, it was like moving backwards in my life instead of forward. I was grateful for a place to come to, on the one hand, while being deeply troubled that I'd found it necessary to end up in Tucson at my mother's place.

Being as damaged a person as I was at the time, I felt no one really understood me. It wasn't discussed much, but rather treated as if it weren't really happening.

Part of the reason for this was that the other people in my family all had their own personal demons to contend with, so in essence, it was a house filled with damaged human beings. Unlike me, they didn't want to talk about it, whereas, I didn't want to stop talking about it.

I'm still like that today. If you've got a problem, then let's put it on the table and beat on it untill we find an answer. Most other people would rather keep it hidden and pretend everything is fine, which drives me crazy.

During that time in Tucson, I learned about heroin. Heroin is a dark drug. Not in color, but in the using of it. There was something different about it, I learned, and that difference sets it completely apart from other substances. It stands quite alone in the world of drugs as a mysterious and destructive entity.

I didn't much like it, in comparison to other drugs, but began the process of acquainting myself with it while in Arizona in 1973. There had been a time, in the not too distant past, where the idea of me using heroin was laughable. But as things changed and life became harder and more unpredictable, heroin ceased to be something I wouldn't try.

With the help of my younger brother, I soon learned the fine art of cooking up "smack" in a teaspoon, or tablespoon, to burn off the impurities. Once that was done a small piece of cotton was placed in the spoon soaking up the liquid, trapping further impurities in the cotton.

That accomplished, the drug itself could be drawn into a syringe or outfit, a homemade syringe, and injected. You could, skin pop it, inject it into the flesh, or mainline it, inject it into a vein. Mainlining was what we did. This practice is more hardcore in its effect.

I didn't like needles when I first started, but soon got addicted to shoving them into my body along with the drug itself. In fact, we would shoot up water if we ran out of the drug, just to be able to experience the ritual of doing it. I found this phenomenon rather bizarre, but still participated in it willingly.

Along with injecting drugs, Quentin and I had a fascination with guns, which we immersed ourselves in as well. There weren't too many things deadlier than me and my brother, high on heroin and booze, screwing around with loaded guns.

I remember clearly, a day when he and I went to a bar, called the "Grant Road Tavern." I ended up betting a guy I could beat him at pool, even on my crutches. I lost the game and once back home, Quentin and I got into an argument about it. He'd bet money on me and I'd lost.

After yelling at each other, he shoved me in the chest, and I crashed to the floor. Because of my casts I couldn't get up. Frustrated and angry, I grabbed a loaded AK-47 that was leaning against the wall, and fired off two rounds in his direction, leaving a couple of gaping holes in the wall.

He immediately vacated the room and I crawled up on my bed. Moments later he reappeared with a loaded 357 magnum revolver, which he shoved in my face.

I stared into the barrel of the gun and could see the tips of the bullets in the cylinder. I reached out with my head and grabbed the barrel between my teeth. This startled my brother and he pulled away from me saying, "You're fuckin nuts, Bob."

He then left the room again only to return with a 22 rifle, which he again pointed at me. I sat on the bed with my head against the wall and stared at him, as his first shot penetrated the wall a couples of inches above my head.

A second, third, fourth, and fifth shot rang out and I still did not move. Frustrated, he yelled at me, saying, "Don't you ever get scared, asshole?" "Not of dying," I answered, "I don't care if I die."

(part 135) CRUMBLING REALITY

click

Once again I was just out there, loaded and angry. I did not have the capacity to deal rationally with the world around me. My emotions, out of nowhere, would explode in a frenzy of rage, leading me to do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. I did not do this occasionally, but repeatedly for the next few years.

I truly was my own worst enemy, and unfortunately lived inside my own head, which was similar to driving a car with a broken windshield. I could see out, but everything coming in was distorted by the multiple cracks in the glass.

Seeking real help was never a priority in my twisted thinking. I would rationalize everything down to my troubles with the music business. My singular focus, right or wrong, was them, and not me, and the "me" was going to make vividly clear to "them", how deep my resentment ran.

Without a normal set of daily rules or routine, I was like a pinball bouncing off each moment without any particular direction. Day to day events set the tone in my life, not rational thought.

In many ways I was just completely lost, and lived like an animal fighting for small scraps, which I managed to wrestle away from the world. I clung to my own self-image like a selfish child protects his favorite toy.

To know me then, depended on which one of my various personalities you were encountering. On a good day, I was friendly and quick witted; on a bad day, I was even quicker, and could turn on you in an instant.

Some of these same traits still haunt me today, but in a more muted way. When you have been where I ended up, it is easy to see both the similarities as well as the differences, a reality not very well understood by people who think they know me.

Back in the 70's, the extreme nature of my deficits as a human being were so blatant, that only by personal experience with the, then "me," and the now "me," would you be able to accurately measure any hard-won progress.

I stood on crutches like a wobbly stack of blocks, now forced to relearn the art of balance. Alone and ashamed, and with no prospects of any kind, I fought to take a single step without crashing to the ground.

As I plodded forward, unnoticed by the world, I vowed to master my own limbs and take another step. One by one I accumulated each of those steps on my long path back.

Both my legs had withered over the five months in casts with no use at all. My muscles were like rubber, and collapsed repeatedly under my weight. My once proud gait had been lost to a now bumbling stumbling rhythmless stomp forward, aided by aluminum sticks.

My view of the world was a view of the ground ahead. While life moved on, I was now relegated, through my own actions, to learn to walk. As a mere shadow of my former self I fought to make sense of my continually crumbling reality.

With no money and no place to go, I once again turned to Carol Paulus for a hand out. Good bad or indifferent, she possessed the capacity, more than anyone else, to deal with me in my destructive madness, a reality I abused more than once.

Because of her own desire to be close to me, she tolerated, to her detriment, my endless insanity and poor behavior. As time passed, and with her help, I learned to walk on the crutches with more grace, but found myself still confined to a world of limitation.

During this period of deep frustration, and in the midst of an angry dispute with Carol, in Westwood, I demanded she take me to UCLA hospital where I stole a wheel chair. In another of a myriad of emotional outbursts, I set out through the streets of Westwood Village in the rolling death trap.

After making it up an incline, I suddenly began rolling, out of control, down a hill on the other side, crashing into the door of a yellow cab. The driver, scared half to death by the impact, stared out at me in a futile attempt to understand how I got there. He rolled down the window asking, "Are you OK man?" I smiled at him and said, "Can you take me to the airport?"

Without rhyme or reason and with no plan I headed for LAX and boarded, with great difficulty, a plane bound for Tucson, where my mother had moved during my time in the hospitals.

There, with the aid of my younger brother, Quentin, and a small monthly ATD (aid to the totally disabled) check, I would master the art of shooting heroin in a wheelchair and plan my next move.

(part 134) THE WHEELCHAIR

click

After about three months in USC's orthopedic ward, I was getting stir crazy, to say the least. I convinced someone to sneak me in a pint of booze during a visit, which was a common practice among some of the patients.

While drinking, I got rowdy from my bed with one of the hospital janitor's. We were jabbing at each other verbally, and it led to an argument. This particular event ended, when I told the guy, "If I could walk, I'd kick your ass."

Following, what was deemed my threat against a member of the hospital staff, two uniformed security guards showed up and told me I was being thrown out of the hospital.

I looked at them like they were crazy and asked, "Well where is it you'd like me to go?" They told me that they didn't care, and began digging my clothes out of a small locker next to my bed. I was basically in shock when I realized they were deadly serious about removing me.

They helped get me dressed, which consisted of cutting off the left leg of my pants, because it wouldn't fit over one of my casts. I was then taken out of bed and put in a wheel chair by the guards, and wheeled into the corridor for the long ride down to County General's massive lobby.

Once there, they continued on to the giant entry doors, and then pushed me out into the open air onto a concrete terrace at the top of the stairs that led down to the parking lot. Without so much as a word, they fixed the wheel chair brake, turned and walked back into the hospital.

I sat there alone looking out at hundreds of parked cars wondering what the hell I was gonna do now? It all happened so fast I hadn't had any time to think about where I could go.

One minute I was in bed, and now I was out here. If I could have gotten up and walked away, I would have, but I couldn't. I was stuck in that Goddamn wheel chair and could only maneuver around in that limited space.

I do not recall with much clarity, how long I sat there, but knowing me, I probably got pretty angry as the time passed. I soon began raising hell on the front steps of the hospital.

I knew I'd done something wrong to get where I was, hell I always knew that, but what I didn't know was why there was such overkill when others dealt with my mistakes. I wasn't warned or counseled in any way, just dumped out into the world at the first opportunity to be rid of me.

* * *

As a kid growing up, it was always like that. I'd screw up at something, but the punishment would always be overly severe. In 1959 or 60, in Mesa, AZ, my mother had gotten married to my second step father, Francis Farr, a paraplegic Mormon, who I was forced to work for, loading hay trucks around Phoenix.

I was about to turn 16, and he said he'd buy me a car if I worked all summer for him, with no pay. I agreed. At the end of all that hard work, I prepared myself for the well earned payoff.

During a weekend with a couple of redneck friends of mine, I drank some beer, which my stepfather found out about. His version of fair was that he was no longer obligated to keep up his end of the bargain, because, as he said, I'd violated his moral code by drinking.

Without payment of any kind, I angrily told him it was unfair, saying, "You don't have to get me the car, but you do have to pay me something, because I already did the work and you benefitted from it." His response was, "You're not getting anything, as punishment for drinking the beer."

I guess you can figure out this didn't go over too well with me, in fact it led to a complete split from Francis Farr. Soon after, I ran away from home.

This episode was a key component in teaching me that my work, once done, did not deserve or require payment from those I worked for. This insidious lesson was repeated over and over in my experience with the music business, and remains true to this day.

* * *

I angrily wheeled back and forth on the concrete landing at the entrance of County General Hospital, until I got the attention of what appeared to be a doctor on his way inside. He listened, as I explained my circumstances to him, promising he would investigate the matter immediately, which he did.

His opinion was, that if what I'd told him was true, the hospital had over reacted by throwing me out without following up on an alternative location to place me in, because of my condition.

As a result of this, I was transported to Long Beach General's orthopedic unit and given a bed in a small individual glass enclosed cubical, where I stayed for over 2 months, until I was thrown out for throwing a fire extinguisher through a glass partition.