(part 204) THE CHASING WIND

I WALK IN THE ZONE
BETWEEN HEAVEN
AND HELL
LIFE AND DEATH

I WANDER BENEATH
THE GREAT TIMBERS
OF CONSCIOUSNESS
LIKE AN ANT

SO VAST IS THE
UNIVERSE OF THOUGHT
SO ALIVE THE COLLECTIVE
HEAP OF EMOTIONS

THE PHYSICAL LIFE PAINFUL
THE THOUGHT OF NOT
ENDURING IT ANY LONGER
A DREAM OF FREEDOM

HANGING ON TO THREADS
OF PROMISES FROM
HUMAN LIPS
THAT SINK LIKE STONES

IN THE STILL WATERS
OF THE HEART
NEVER TO APPEAR AGAIN
AS IF NEVER UTTERED

ALL THAT IS LEFT
ARE THE RIPPLES
ON THE POND
AND THE CHASING WIND

AS IT WHISPERS
TO THE STARS
I AM HERE
I AM HERE

Bobby Jameson Sep 2009

(part 203) DENNIS AND GEORGE.....DUCEY AND LUCEY

Once again, I set my thoughts into believing that a deal with Dennis and his partner George could, or more precisely, would come to pass, just as I had prior to the RCA deal.

I continued to paint the house I'd been working on by day, and focused on expecting something better, and going to AA meetings at night. Whenever the doubt would creep in, I would expel it immediately and replace it with a more positive thought.

I remember what it felt like when I got word that the new deal was a go. In the twinkling of an eye my life changed again. I finished up with the house painting, and silently vowed I'd never have to do it again because of being broke.

As I walked down the driveway toward the street, and away from that job, I felt a deep sense of freedom and joy for the first time in nearly two years.

It was near the end of 1979, and I was to be paid $500 a week to write songs and make demos of them, for a minimum of one year. I was ecstatic.

"I was going to get my own place again and be able to pay the rent. I was going to have a job doing what I loved, and I was going to feel good about myself, really good," I thought.

* * *

Back in the early 60's I'd been a smiley faced ball of fire before encountering the likes of Tony Alamo, Andrew Oldham, and Randy Wood.

After finishing my work on the Chris Lucey album, Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest, for a mere $200, I understood that people in the record and music business were completely untrustworthy, and would lie about anything and everything to get what they were after.

It appeared to me, at twenty years old, that I had stepped into a world of con-men who used flattery and dishonesty as tactics to accomplish stealing from the young and naive, of which I was certainly one.

My understanding, in 1965, led me to refuse to sign an agreement with Mira/Surrey, put forth after I'd done the work on the album.

Once I'd completed my assigned task on Songs Of Protest, the so called contractual agreement was presented to me in Randy Wood's office.

In that closed door session with me, Wood, and Somer, Wood's attorney, those two men set about to persuade me to sign the Somer-penned document. It was without any other person present to protect my interests.

It was me against the two of them, and I was twenty years old. In a spur of the moment maneuver, the half inch thick contract, which I'd never seen or even heard about until that moment, was produced out of the blue and I was told to sign it.

Feeling completely out gunned, I asked what I would get if I signed it? To that, Randy Wood exploded and told me, "I just let you make an entire album at my expense, using your own songs, you little son of a bitch, and now you want more?"

I remember thinking at that moment that he had taken the situation from, Bobby Jameson had helped him out of the jam he was in with the Ducey record, and turned it around to be, he'd now done me a favor.

I was confused and uncomfortable in the confines of Wood's office, and said I'd think about it, but doubted if I would sign it. As I tried to leave, Randy grabbed me and threw up against the wall.

He began screaming in my face that I was an ungrateful little prick and that he was trying to help me, but I was too stupid to know it and was trying to fuck him.

With his hands tightly grasping the front of my shirt, and his body pinning me against the wall, I stared into his contorted face while he yelled at me. I looked over at Abe Somer, for help, but he just stood there with a smirk on his face, holding the contract in his hand.

At that moment Randy seemed to realize what he was doing and released his grip on me saying, "Go ahead, get outta here. Get outta my sight."

Shaken, but relieved, I vacated Wood's office, and remember the scene as I opened the door and looked at the larger Mira/Surrey office space.

Everybody was stone cold silent and stared at their desks, the wall, or the floor. No one said shit to me. I was just there by myself looking for a face, a gesture, something.

I looked down the length of the room to Betty Chiapetta's office door, which was open. I waited for a moment, but nothing, absolutely nothing. I left alone, and everyone knew I had refused to sign a contract for Chris Lucey. They had heard everything.

* * *

In the deal with Dennis, I set it up so I received an ongoing salary for a year. It was a way of guaranteeing that I would not only get paid for my efforts, but that it would continue for a set amount of time.

I knew, through bitter experience that what I would be paid would have to be gotten up front, or as a salary arrangement, because trying to get anything after the fact was an empty promise that I'd heard too many times before.

(part 202) CURIOUS DAYS

DREAM MACHINE
IN FLASHING SKY
TWIRLS INSIDE
MY EMERALD EYE
LIKE SPINNING GOLD
AGAINST THE SUN
THERE'S NOWHERE LEFT
FOR ME TO RUN

CONTINUITY
OF TIME
SPLIT LIKE ATOMS
WITH EACH RHYME
IN SENTENCES
OF BLURRING MIND
RELEASE ME LOVE
FOR LOVE IS BLIND

TANGENT'S SCRIBBLED
ON A WALL
NO ONE COMES
HERE AFTER ALL
I ALONE
HAVE READ EACH WORD
UNSPOKEN STILL
AND STILL UNHEARD

MAGNIFIED AGAINST
THE BLAZE
OF HOVERED HONED
AND GHOSTLY DAYS
WHERE LIGHT IS BORN
AGAINST THE BLACK
OF YESTERYEARS
AND LOOKING BACK

BACK INTO
THE REALM OF FATE
WHERE ANGELS SCREAM
AND BUZZARDS WAIT
TO EAT THE FLESH
OF CURIOUS DAYS
NOW LOST INSIDE
THE ENDLESS MAZE

Bobby Jameson Sep 11, 2009

(part 201) DENNIS AND GEORGE

The lawyer's name was Dennis Poulsen, and he was an insurance attorney from Whittier, California. Carol Paulus had befriended him in Beverly Hills where he'd opened a perfume shop.

It seems that Dennis had read an article in Time Magazine about people getting into the music business and making a fortune without any prior experience. This was where he'd gotten the idea, and had decided to take a shot at it himself.

As you can imagine, Dennis looked like what you might think an attorney from Whittier would look like. He was well dressed in a suit and tie with short hair, was a conservative Republican, had little or no style, was young, late 30's, maybe 40, and had a business partner named George who liked to drink.

They were both married, and I guess they thought they were pretty hip, which they weren't. Maybe in Whittier, but not in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

The first time I met him was when he came to Carol's apartment. She was not there, so it was just me and Dennis. He was positive, intelligent, and friendly, and he reminded me of guys I'd met in bars on the west side on weekends.

They always seemed a bit too positive, and overly expectant that something was about to happen. They didn't know what exactly, but they were always ready for it, or so they thought.

When you've been on the street as long as I had, you kind of learn to read people fast, and that's how I read Dennis.

I took a good look at him when he came in, and decided almost immediately who I was dealing with. Because of this, I didn't want to spend a lot of time talking.

I didn't feel like this meeting was going to amount to much, so I took him into another room where my guitar was and said, "I'm gonna play you some songs, if you don't mind." Too much chit-chat and letting someone like this get comfortable was what I didn't want to do.

"Are these original songs, Bobby, that you wrote?" he asked.

"Yeah!" I answered, "Everything I'm gonna play for you is something I wrote, and they're all unpublished."

"OK," he said smiling, "lay it on me."

Lay it on him is exactly what I did. After my initial discomfort at playing live for an audience of one, who was a total stranger, I threw caution to the winds and settled into playing the songs.

As I hammered out one after another, I could see his interest growing. With each new tune he became more convinced that he'd stumbled across a good thing.

He had to be thinking that here is a guy who can play, sing, and write his own songs, and is good at it. And, he's got a lot of songs.

They just came pouring out of me like a human jukebox. I knew what was going on. I'd planned it that way. "Just beat the crap out of him with original songs,"I thought, "so many that his mind turns to mush. Make him know that he really saw and heard something special. Don't let him leave wondering. Make sure he is convinced of one thing: that Bobby Jameson can write, play, and sing."

After about 25 songs, I stopped, wiped off the sweat, and put my guitar down. I lit a cigarette and said, "Well there ya go, man. That's what I do and I did it for you," as I blew out a large cloud of smoke into the air.

I looked over at Dennis, who appeared a little unsure of what to say or do next, and said, "Well whatta ya think, man?"

Dennis finally gathered himself and confessed that I'd blown his mind, which seemed odd coming from him, because he looked so straight. I chuckled, and took another drag on my cigarette and waited for him to say something.

"How is it that you have so many good, better than good, songs, and can play them all as easily as you just did for me, and you are not signed to a record deal?" he asked.

"Don't know, Dennis," I said, "I guess I'm not that good or there are a lot of dumb shits in the music business, you tell me?"

"Well it's obvious you're good enough," he said, "so it must be the people in the business."

I looked at him and laughed, blowing smoke in the air again. "Yeah," I said smiling, "It must be the people in the business."

We sat there for a long time, and I listened to him tell me about who he was and what he wanted to do. At that point I was giving him my full attention, just as he'd done for me while I played him my songs.

We were worlds apart, but I could see that he was making a real effort to communicate his dream to me. I respected him for that, and his willingness to try and bridge the obvious gap between us. I began to believe he was actually serious about getting something going.

After quite a bit of talking, he asked me what I wanted in the way of money to get under way with some sort of an arrangement.

I had nothing to lose at that point so I threw out a number off the top of my head. "$500 a week," I said, "for a minimum of one year, and then we'll see how it goes from there."

I watched him closely for a response and saw no signs of balking. "Well that sounds reasonable," he said, "let me get together with with my partner, George, and go over some numbers.

(part 200) SONGS....LOTS AND LOTS OF SONGS

West Hollywood and the Sunset Strip

It might appear to some who have read what I have been writing here that I have a problem with AA, which I do not. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous, as laid out in the simple text of its book, is straight ahead, and works.

My problems were with me, and various members of the program who attempted to shove their version of AA down my throat, and then say they were only trying to help.

If you've read my story, you are aware that I probably came to the program a total and complete mess. Possibly more of a mess than some others.

As I began my life in AA, I'd found different books about spirituality that I used to deal with my life and it's numerous problems.

But rather than dealing with many of my own character defects and flaws at a rock bottom level, I covered many of them over with techniques I found in some of these books.

Science Of Mind gave me a way to focus my attention, and worked in the sense that I, either by coincidence or design, was able to appear to have something tangible occur in the way of results. But when the house of cards I built collapsed, I was again faced with the bulk of the problems I came to the program with.

In the early days of my sobriety I lived in West Hollywood and the surrounding area, which was full of well off, sometimes quite successful, people. A lot of show business people, doctors, lawyers, etc.

I had fallen into the trap of equating success in sobriety with success with money, property, and prestige. Back then I didn't know any better, and it just seemed to be the way it was.

Because of my initial financial success in the program, I knew about both sides of the proverbial coin so to speak. I had played the role of the successful person for awhile, and then the role of the loser. This is not an overstatement. It was literally that stark.

The west side of L.A. is either hot or cold, like it or not. The competitive reality exists there, and you either get it or you don't. I'd never gotten it from the standpoint of being an ongoing success, but I knew the area like a coyote knows his hunting ground. I'd spent too much time there not to know how it worked.

One of the strangest things about 12 step programs, particularly in places like West L.A., is that people come to them because they have problems beyond just drugs and alcohol.

After they've been clean and sober for awhile, they start acting like they don't have those problems anymore, or that they've fixed them all.

This was and is a dangerous mindset, and in my world, an absolute nonstarter. If nothing else, I knew I was screwed up, an opinion shared by most who knew me. I guess it is always easier to focus on someone like me than to have to look at oneself.

I was never quiet about my problems. I just couldn't hide them. I tried, but never had success in sustaining the persona of "every thing's fine." My resentment toward living sober like I'd lived when I was loaded, bothered me to no end and I said so.

I would appear at times not to be sober at all, because I was so vocal about these debilitating conditions. But beneath that outward appearance, I was on a 24-hour a day search for real answers to my problems, and for peace, although nobody much thought so then, or thinks so now.

Difficulties again rose along the way when I got involved in a second relationship with a well known actress on the program. This ended after we had a fight over me collecting junk stereo equipment to sell.

I had piled this stuff around her apartment, where I was living, and she had finally gotten tired of it and said something harsh to me about it.

My reaction to her scolding me led to the fight, and I raised my fist as if I were going to hit her. I didn't, but knew I had come too close to the real thing. I decided it was unacceptable on my part, and my punishment for this act was to remove myself from her home immediately.

A few weeks later, I was in an AA meeting in the area, and she and her new boyfriend walked in together. When I saw them I felt like a trapped rat. I would have left, but I was leading the meeting, so I stayed.

In somewhat of a panic, I searched my mind for a way out of the situation. Coming up empty I simply walked toward them and watched their eyes as they saw me approaching.

When I reached them I smiled and stuck out my hand saying, "I'm glad to see you both here, thanks for coming." I'm sure they were as surprised as I was to hear those words come out of my mouth.

After that incident, I could not shake the fact that that simple gesture had calmed the waters and eased the tension of the moment. I studied the phenomenon over and over, and began thinking of how it could be used in my life overall.

I got out my Science Of Mind book, after a long absence, and recall reading this sentence by Ernest Holmes. "If you're not loving everybody unconditionally, start now."

Hell I knew I wasn't loving everybody, so I just started trying to at least find something good in those whom I'd had trouble with, which was almost everybody.

It was hard to do, but I kept at it. When my mind started ripping into them I'd quiet it, and insert something less negative. Like I said, it was hard to do and extremely tedious, but I kept up the practice.

In 1979 I was painting the interior of some guy's house, and had about three and a half years of sobriety. As I worked I wondered if I was ever going to get out of the seeming rut I was in.

Carol Paulus, whom I still knew, and talked with periodically, told me about a lawyer she met who was interested in getting involved in the music business.

She said she'd told him about me, and said he wanted to meet me. At first I brushed it off, but it kept coming back up in conversations over time.

Finally after realizing she wasn't going to give up, I agreed to meet with him at Carol's apartment, and play him some new and unpublished songs I'd been writing. If nothing else, I always had songs. Lots and lots of songs.

(part 199) STILL CLEAN AND SOBER

As you read this, I would remind you that I'm not telling you I'm right or wrong. I am telling you what happened to me and how I handled or, if you like, mishandled it.

In the aftermath of the humiliation of failure and blame, I fought to stay clean and sober through it all. Whatever success I had appeared to have had earlier on, was now gone. I was wiped out completely.

The expectations and moral demands laid on me by others, and how I should handle my emotions and thinking, was something I failed miserably in accepting or doing. It was not them who had lost it all, nor did they carry the dark history that I came to the program with.

My biggest problem was me, and my old ideas of complete capitulation in the wake of an all too familiar sense of disgrace. The old demons rose up inside me, and I found myself engaged, night and day, in a personal war with the old Bobby Jameson.

The world around me faded into the background as I wandered aimlessly from AA meeting to AA meeting in search of help. Too many times I ended up at the same one as my ex-girlfriend, and the whole painful mess would replay in my mind all over again.

Feelings of loneliness and worthlessness ran my life 24-hours a day. While I sank into a mire of self pity and self recriminations, I did not drink or use. To me the only real mistake I could have made at that point would have been to get loaded and/or kill myself.

Many were the times that I sat alone in fear of God and other human beings. I isolated myself behind a wall of AA sayings and phony emotional disguises to ward off the preaching of others.

Rather than deal with the real issues of a total sense of lack of self worth, abandonment, and failure, many had the tendency to mouth one liners like "Let go and let God" as their only notion of support.

God at that point was the last thing I dared or wanted to rely on. In my mind it had been my reliance on God in the first place that had led me down the path to the slaughter house. I didn't expect any agreement on the issue, but for me, letting go and letting God scared the shit out of me.

I existed for as long as I could in this make believe world of denial. Bur eventually, it was my anger at people and their various versions of the facts that caused me to snap.

The phony role playing in someone else's scripted version of the events is what I finally rebelled against. For anyone to say that what had happened was nothing more than "God's will" to my face, was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The condescending attitudes of the "Holier than thou" was eventually met by me fighting back and yelling, "Well fuck off! Who the hell needs a God whose will is always that I lose everything?"

To say the least, this was not welcomed by more than a very few, and my reputation for being quick to anger and slow to forgive, added to my difficulties.

I struggled on through months of depression and anger, trying to sort out my place in the realm of the 12 step programs that had saved my life. I searched for my own footprints in the sands of confusion.

I laid out the real facts as they'd truly happened and accepted them. Not in a peaceful or humble way, but at a rock bottom level of, "Here's how is."

I quit debating with the self appointed "Spiritual" people. I admitted to being incredibly pissed off at God, and said on more than one occasion, "If God's God, than he can handle my anger."

I based my position on the fact that I was still sober, and dismissed the words of those who said things like, "But you're so angry and unhappy."

There were actually those who seemed to know what I was doing, but mostly I was looked down on as someone who hadn't surrendered my will to God, and was constantly told as much by far too many.

To them I said, "I did surrender to God in the beginning, and I trusted him completely until I found that trusting him got the same results as not trusting him." They shook their heads, and gave me the "Oh Bob" look and walked away.

There were even those who said I should go get drunk and then try and make it back to the program with a better attitude. To these idiot assholes I said, "Go fuck yourself."

In the long run I was just the pissed off guy who stayed clean and sober during those times, and learned a lot about sobriety from the raw side.

I had lost everything alright, but I hadn't gotten loaded over it, and in the end that was all that really mattered. I'd weathered the storm, and turned my back on God, but I never threw in the towel.

I banged my way through it, and looked and sounded like shit doing it, but I was still in the game. I was still clean and sober.