(part 252) FOR A KID NAMED BOBBY JAMESON

Click picture to enlarge to the actual size.

And there was another one. And another, and another. They just kept coming, and just as before, there was no face, no record, or record label mentioned. The many questions raised by the preceding ads were left unanswered. The 2 page spread above was literally a billboard within Billboard Magazine. It said nothing at all while at the same time claimed an imaginary pay off within the near future.

When your goal in life is to become a recognized performer, as mine surely was in 1964, the mere fact that your name appears in print is a dangerous and addictive lure, and something I developed an immediate craving for at 19 years old. With no understanding of how things really worked, I was incapable of viewing this oddity outside of my own self-glorification and instant notoriety, which later proved a costly mistake.

The reaction by the industry to the 2 page ad was mixed. It was ridiculed by some and heralded by others, but in my mind it was all about me. I had by this time begun to morph into someone else. I was quickly abandoning the quiet unsure of myself kid I'd started out as, for a more self-assured and conceited version of the new Bobby Jameson. My singular goal of "stardom" was seemingly coming true, and I was completely unequipped to handle what was happening.

As if "The Star Of The Century" and "The World's Next Phenomenon" weren't outlandish enough, the 7th week topped them, by claiming I would soon be "The New King." Try to imagine what the mind of a 19 year old blossoming ego-maniac did with that picture. As you might have guessed, I bought into it hook, line, and sinker, as if it were my birthright, and to make matters worse Tony was constantly telling me it was true, which it was not. The reality back then was I wanted it to be true. I wanted it so badly that I deluded myself into believing it was.

Click picture to enlarge to the actual size.

The industry people in L.A. were by now beginning to find out that this so-called phenomenon was a local nobody, and that the Billboard ads were the brainchild of one Tony Alamo. Without much information about how Alamo was looked upon back then by those in the industry, it appears that he was disliked intensely before I ever met him. He was a hustler and had made unwelcomed waves by selling bootlegged oldies through the mail with a company he owned called Mr. Maestro Records, something I learned of after two armed Federal Postal agents showed up at his apartment to question him about mail fraud.

Be that as it may, Tony had my confidence back then, and probably no one could have persuaded me to question him while the ads kept running. In my view he was single handedly changing my life for what I thought was the better. He had pulled me out of the darkness of obscurity and pushed me onto the world stage, where I would be dissected under the bright lights of scrutiny. In short, he took me from nobody to somebody in a matter of weeks. He so altered my psyche, and I let him, that it became impossible to ever go back to who or where I once was.

End of part 2...to be continued. (part 1 below)

(part 251) THE BEGINNING AND END OF BOBBY JAMESON

In case you are wondering why I am even bringing up the subject of these Billboard ads, I will explain. Just recently I became reacquainted with my old friend Ralph Molina from Crazy Horse, and one of the first questions he asked me was "Do you still have those Billboard ads that were run on you in the 60's?" I said I didn't, but it prompted me to go to Billboard's archives and dig them up. I thought it was interesting that after four decades Ralph still remembered and asked about them. Of course why wouldn't he, he was there, along with Danny Whitten, and Billy Talbot the day we saw the first one.

So what I am trying to write here is difficult, but I will try to examine the subject of the Billboard Magazine ad campaign run on me in 1964. Those 9 weeks of promotion changed my life forever, and in hindsight, were the catalyst for not only my beginning, but as well, my simultaneous downfall as a recording artist. The truth is, there was no way to live up to the hype.

One has to keep in mind that I am referencing a subject from over four decades ago, when the world as you know it now did not exist. This happened before The Byrds, before Dylan went electric, before all of what eventually occurred on the west-coast with folk-rock, pop-psyche, and the hippie movement's mark on music in the U.S. took place. It was a time of no cell phones, no computers, video tape, or any kind of instant access to anything. There were only a few channels on black and white television, and newspapers, magazines, radio, record players, and reel to reel tape recorders.

Two of the prominent forces in the music industry in 1964, along with AM radio, were Billboard and Cashbox magazines, who reported weekly, on all things related to the music industry. Those two publications were on the top rung of reporting, world wide. They were the last word on what was happening, and was going to happen, in the business of management, A and R, music publishing, distribution, and the manufacturing and sale of records commercially. They were read by everyone involved in or interested in the music business, and were considered the bibles of the industry, with Billboard being the most prominent.

Because what I am saying here is factually accurate, it makes no difference what my opinion is, because facts are not controlled by opinion, they just are what they are, facts. In 1964, The Beatles dominated the world of music, and everyone else was playing catch-up. It was an atmosphere of mind-numbing searches for something or someone to compete with The Beatle's undisputed position.

With this as a rough framework, I will try to explain the abnormality of those 9 weeks of advertising run in both Billboard and Cashbox initially, but which concluded in Billboard only. For the sake of discussion, I was admittedly a nobody at the time, other than a 19 year old kid on the streets of Hollywood with a dream like many others. By chance, I met a person in a coffee shop, and for whatever reason, was picked by him to be the center piece of those ads.

I was initially presented to the world as "The Star Of The Century," by Tony Alamo. I had not been told, nor did I expect to see my name in the pages of anything, let alone in those two magazines on an afternoon in a coffee shop in Hollywood. It was then and there that I saw the ads for the first time, along with four friends, Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina, and Bruce Hinds.

You may think that I must have known about this, but you'd be wrong. Neither I, nor any of the friends I just mentioned, knew about it until we saw it together in the Carolina Pines coffee shop for the first time. I had no arrangement with Tony. If anything, we all considered him a big bullshitter until we saw the ads. The picture used for the first ad was probably snapped in the parking lot of that coffee shop weeks or months earlier without my knowledge of what it's ultimate use would be.

Within a short time, the 2nd ad ran, and then the 3rd. Within weeks people were talking about them saying, "Who the hell is Bobby Jameson, I've never heard of him?" They wanted to know why they couldn't see my face, and why anybody would run ads on someone no one had ever heard of, with no record or label. During the first 8 weeks of ads no record label or actual record was mentioned. It was not until the 9th week that my face, name of the record, and label were shown.

click on picture to enlarge

People were not only aware of what was happening in Billboard, but many were immediately put off by it because they saw it as too grandiose, too expensive and arrogant, which it surely was. But what they didn't know, was that there was no record label or record referred to because it hadn't been made yet. To this day I still don't know if Talamo, as a record label, even existed at the time the first ads were run. There was nothing more than a faceless name and no knowledge of who was behind it. The intrigue came from the fact that it kept happening week after week, so people waited, some reluctantly, to see if there would be another one.

End of part 1...to be continued

PICTURES OF DREAMS...BOBBY JAMESON Billboard Magazine 1964...

These are most of the pictures from the 1964 Billboard Magazine ad campaign which ran for 9 weeks.

Click on pictures to enlarge

                                               3/4 page ad

                                            Full page ad

                             Third page of 3 page ad...other 2 below

      2 pages of 3 page ad...3rd page above

3 page ad...4th page below

Page 4 of 4 page ad

9th and final week of ads...Full page with face and record made known

(part 250) MY OPINION

photo by Schatzberg

I have not written the way I want to for a long time now, so that will change with this post. This will be unedited and unrestrained, so if my commas and thoughts fall short, so be it. I have spent too much time worrying about your approval. No one but a handful of people approve of my position and rhetoric, so knowing that as I do, there is no reason for me to be concerned about what I say here. This is the Bobby Jameson blog. It belongs to me and was started as a place to post facts, as I see them, know them, and have lived them. Your opinion is yours, mine is written here in these pages.

After four years of doing this, the one overriding fact is that nothing in my life has improved as a result of what I have done. This is a reality I have to contend with daily, you don't. When I came to the internet I had nothing. No friends, no lovers, no job, no health, and no money. With the exception of a very few individuals, I still have no friends, no lovers, no job, no health, and no money.

One would think that after all this time something would have improved, if not only slightly, but that is not the case. My main gripe is that way too many bullshit historians of music and record collectors, turned record sellers, thrive on inaccuracy and a deeply embedded sense of self-justification for what they do. Much of what is written is flat out wrong, and people who collect and/or sell records fail completely to understand that they are trading in the dreams and misery of those who created, what are now no more than collectable artifacts, used for amusement and/or profit.

There is no real understanding, by so-called music historians and collectors, that there are and were, real people involved in the creation of what is now merely written about, traded, and sold. The emotional detachment of many of these self-serving assholes is staggering, to say the least. They remind me of people who collect and discuss body-parts of dead soldiers, while their insipid eye for detail and fact is breathtaking.

The glorification of works, coupled with the shallow views and opinions by some, about those who created the works, has and does piss me off in a way that mere words fail to make clear. To elaborate on the failings of the human beings who gave their hearts and souls to create these works, so assholes can write about it and or collect and sell it, is pretty much repulsive to me. I for one, am a living breathing example of this shoddy practice, and stand alone as a vocal critic of this crap, which is justified only by those who practice it.

I have found, and reject entirely, the lame indulgence of those who talk about someone as a friend, but do nothing that a friend would do to be a friend; I find that this practice runs rampant throughout my entire experience on every part of what exists on the internet. The two bit soothsayers and slap you on the back phonies, personify the personality of music and friendship on the web, while in reality what goes on here is nothing more than a business and social whorehouse where some benefit on the backs of those who are harmed, cheated, and demoralized. As well, the zit-faced, low-ball punks, who pound out their criticisms on a keyboard in the safety of their bedrooms, is proof enough, that the truly useless have found a paradise to inhabit.

There is nothing good about the music business, and there is nothing good about the ever expanding profiteering of people's work who are not allowed to share in those profits and benefits. The smaller reissue labels, for the most part, are no more than the beginnings of another round of "fucking over" the artists, writers, and musicians who created the products being sold.

The glaring arrogance and compartmentalizing it takes, to do what is done, under the guise of legitimate business, by those who do it, is akin to human trafficking for profit. To heap, yet more misery on the backs of those already harmed, simply in the name of making available "good music" to those who want what is sold by these pricks, is now as common a practice as slavery was, prior to the American Civil War.

Whether you like me or agree with me at this point, is no longer of any importance whatsoever. I am taking back my right to have an opinion, which I somehow managed to lose track of in the last year or so...or as in the words of Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone "When you got nothin, you got nothin to lose."

AS LONG AS MY GOODBYE...

BY MYSELF
I CAME TO YOU
TO YOU
I CAME ALONE
FROM DISTANT
TIMES AND
DISTANT LANDS
I CAME HERE
ON MY OWN....

NOHING CARRIED
ON MY BACK
POSSESSIONS
HAVE I NONE
ALONE I CAME
ALONE I'LL LEAVE
WHEN MY
LONG WALK
IS DONE

I THE WOLF
A FOREIGNER
ALWAYS ON
MY OWN
WANDER IN
A LITTLE WHILE
BUT ALWAYS
LEAVE ALONE

CRIMSON MOONS
AND CRYSTAL STARS
AGAINST BLACK
VELVET SKY
MY HELLO
WILL NEVER LAST
AS LONG
AS MY GOODBYE...

Bobby Jameson July 7, 2011

The Luxury Of Not Knowing...originally posted in 2011

Richie Unterberger

In 1985, I'd become deeply aware that I was the only person who knew where I'd started in 1963 with Let's Surf, and as well, who I'd morphed into by the middle 80's.

I realized that all the records I'd made were viewed as creations of various individual artists other than me. For instance, Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest by Chris Lucey was never attributed to, Bobby Jameson, until decades after it was made. It had barely been remembered as a one-shot deal from an unknown artist named Chris Lucey. Similarly, All I Want Is My Baby, recorded in London in 1964, was assigned to an English artist with the same name as me, but not to me personally. And again, I'm So Lonely, also from 1964, was credited to an early 60's artist.

Each of my attempts in the music business had been seen as a separate career by various different persons. None of my previous work was ever understood to have been the work of the latest and continuous Bobby Jameson. The different labels, countries, and styles, helped create the confusion, so it was not seen as the sustained career of a single artist.

Rum Pum, Vietnam, Mondo Hollywood, Reconsider Baby, Gotta Find My Roogalator, and All Alone, were again, not attributed to me, and my ever growing library of songs and recordings, but regarded as mediocre works by separate artists with a similar name. Nobody ever said, "Hey, look at all the work this guy has done," because nobody knew that I had.

By the time I wrote and recorded Color Him In, in 1966, I was again referred to as a new artist, known simply as Jameson. None of my previous work was known to be mine, so I was treated as if I had no track record at all, even though I had started years earlier, in 1963, and had worked on two continents with a lot of different people.

With the album, Working, recorded in 1968, I used the name Bobby Jameson, instead of Jameson, but again found myself with little connection to my past work. There was a slight awareness that I was the Jameson who had made Color Him In, but for the most part I was just starting from the beginning again.

I was so splintered by this reality that I found it difficult, if not impossible, to convey to anyone who I was, or what I had actually done. In my mind, I had the complete picture of all of my work, but in the eyes of others, I was just some new flash in the pan that they should dismiss.

Rather than view myself in terms of my latest failed recording, at any given time, I saw myself as someone who had continued to write and record music any way, and every way, I could since 1963. I was burdened with knowing the context and continuity of my own work and career, while others knew nothing about it at all.

In 1969, with the dismal reception of my album Working, I too began to regard myself as a failure. This god-awful vision of myself was to eventually epitomize my own thinking, as well as that of others, for decades.

So in 1985, I left Hollywood, and L.A., in a broken heap, surmising as I went, that it was not only the last straw that broke me, but all the last straws, over time, that caused me to retreat into obscurity.

For me, there was always a sense, vague as it might have been, that the only way to convey what had really happened, would be for someone to write a book with all of the facts firmly in hand. It had appeared far too easy, from where I stood, to relegate a person, any person, to the ash heap of history using either flawed facts, or no facts at all.

If nothing else has been accomplished by me writing my own story, at least I got my name, age, and place of birth correct, something the so-called music historians have mostly failed in doing to this day. Even though the facts, and most of the basic points are here on this blog, a lot of what has been written by those, such as, Richie Unterburger, remain inaccurate. Some might say it reflects upon my own unimportance, but I say, "If it was important enough to write about in the first place, and get it wrong, then it is important enough to be corrected by those who wrote it, and to set the record straight." The failure to do so reflects a lack of seriousness, and editorial integrity, by the authors themselves, and those whom they write for...