(part 271) FLICKER AND BUZZ

It wasn't like I thought anyone missed me or my music. I had assured myself that I was long forgotten by everyone, or not remembered at all. In the eighteen years since I'd left L.A., there had been no clamoring that I was aware of to locate the likes of one Bobby Jameson. In my world it was just hard physical work, raging daily headaches, and nickels and dimes squeezed out of an unforgiving world.

I was competing, it seemed, with my early teens, when I'd loaded hay-trucks around Phoenix for my step-father in Arizona. The work was hard and the pay was shit, and I now plodded forward daily in a life I'd learned to tolerate in place of the one I'd wanted. On the bright side, I stayed sober and clean, which was some sort of miracle I thought, because there hadn't been much good derived from my staying sober, other than the world did not have to cope with one more loaded crazy man.

No one in San Luis Obispo, CA had ever seen me loaded, and because of that, they were unaware of how much I had improved since my old street days elsewhere. They never understood, and still don't, how far I'd come, because they had no measuring stick to gauge it by. In L.A. there were people who were grateful, based simply on the fact that I didn't get loaded anymore, because they had seen me at my worst. But in San Luis, they just found things to complain about, like my anger, and how I was capable of flying off the handle in a moment's notice. Not once did they understand how, in the old days, that anger had been lethal, but now was restricted to mere words.

In the world of sobriety, one is expected to learn how to be happy, joyous, and free, but in the world of Bobby Jameson there was little to be happy, joyous, and free about. In each instance, that which had worked, stopped working, that which solved a problem ended abruptly causing new ones. This circular pattern of frustration had beaten me into a form of reluctant submission at best, while at the same time continued to present me with one form of disability after another.

As I looked on at those who'd come after me in sobriety, in many cases, I saw improvement in the quality of life they were able to achieve. In my case I saw only the repetition of old problems appear and reappear in a never-ending cascade of "what's next" certainties. Over the the years I settled into the pattern of waiting for the next rock to fall, and sure enough it would. Many would chirp and moan, saying, "that if this is what I expected, it would surely be what I got." My answer to them then, and it still is today, was, "It must be real easy for you assholes to look on in judgement while never having to walk in my shoes!" Of course this was dismissed as an excuse by them as you might well imagine. The convenience of blaming someone else's hardship on the one suffering from it is reminiscent of the rich blaming the poor for being hungry.

So to some extent, I hope I have set the stage for this post, and those to come, by clarifying, what it was like back then trying to deal with the two-headed dragon of chasing success for twenty years and then withdrawing from any attempt to pursue it at all for the same amount of time.

As I said, I was working in a mobile home park, and had no real concept of me and the music business at that point. I played my keyboard for fun at times, but overall the subject of what I once did was non-existent, and rarely, if at all, discussed with anyone. It was no more than ancient history, and had been relegated to the outskirts of my thinking.

There is a reason why I keep driving this home by repeating it. It is a point that will stand in direct contrast to the things that began happening out of nowhere in 2003. Any ability to cope with, or understand what was about to transpire was limited. Being faced with information from a complete stranger about my past one afternoon on the telephone, was the last thing on earth I was expecting.

* * *

As I sat with my brother Bill in the house (we were alone because my mother had left town to visit her niece in Southern CA.) the phone rang. Thinking it was probably someone in the park needing me to do a job, I answered it with that in mind.

"Hello," I said, waiting for a response.

A somewhat startled voice answered me. "Is this Bobby Jameson?" they asked.

"Yeah!" I said, "Who's this?" not recognizing the voice of the caller.

"Uh, my name is Steve Stanley," the voice said, "and I work for a record company in the UK called Rev-Ola, and they have reissued your old 60's album Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest by Chris Lucey as a CD."

I stood there for a few seconds trying to compute what had just been said to me and replied, "What? Who is this, what are you talking about?"

"You are that Bobby Jameson aren't you?" asked the voice.

"Yeah I am," I said, "Who are you?"

I was caught completely off guard by the question, and actually thought it was someone playing a joke on me, but quickly concluded that no one I knew had this information to do that, so I asked again who it was.

As a reader, I would ask that you try to understand how out of the realm of expectations this actually was for me on that day. A completely cold call from a total stranger, out of the blue, talking about something so far from my then reality that it literally made no sense to me.

"Who did you say you were?" I asked.

"Steve Stanley!" said the voice.

"Well Steve," I said, "What did you say about Chris Lucey?"

"It was released in 2002 by Rev-Ola Records as a CD!" said the voice.

I stood there with the phone in my hand, staring at Bill, who looked as confused by the conversation as I was. I said to him in a frustrated voice, "What the fuck is this guy talking about?"

"Is this some kind of fucking joke man?" I said into the phone.

"No!" said said the voice, "Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest was released by an English company last year, and it's doing pretty well, kind of an underground cult hit."

My brain began to race and old lights began to come on as if someone had plugged in an old dormant pinball machine in an arcade, and now watched it hum back to life. Old dreams I'd long since rejected as failures began to flicker and buzz in a dark corner of my mind. There was no way to stop my reaction to the information I was receiving. No way to close out the message or to have prepared myself for it at all. I was caught completely off guard by the call and the reaction was automatic, as if programmed long ago to react in the only way it could, once triggered. It was the "dream machine" from my youth. The pulsating mechanism that believed in magic, and it had been turned on by a stranger on the telephone on a sunny afternoon in San Luis Obispo in an old mobile home park on the planet earth.

Come Sit With Me

Come sit with me...Tell me which of your parents committed suicide...
Which brother, sister, or other, killed themselves
out of sadness, disappointment, or rage...

Show me your scars and I will show you mine...
Tell me your dream and I will tell you mine.....

Which of your family went insane...
lived in that dark place where there are no doors unlocked,
no windows without wire grates.....

Come sit with me...and we will bleed together, cry together, laugh together...
The two of us, shedding blood in the moonlight, kissing each other's tears...
wiping away the stain of life...so ruthless, so cunning, so sour...

Let us greet a new day, and stand together against the scoffers...
Those who would love us today, but will betray us tomorrow...

Come sit with me...show me your wounds suffered along the way...
Show me the graves of your dead lovers and broken promises...
Walk with me in the moonlight.....

I come to you not as King, but as a leper...
not as a prophet, but a liar...
I have triumphed over peace through chaos...
and bludgeoned my way here...

Come sit with me...let us talk honestly and openly to one another...

Bobby Jameson Feb 14, 2012

(part 270) THE GUITAR...

Trying to explain, for the purpose of clearly conveying an accurate picture, is tedious, but at the same time important. The psychology of it has never been understood, possibly because I have not made it understandable. I spent twenty-two years actively pursuing music from the standpoint of becoming successful in the music industry as a writer/performer. I then spent twenty-two years actively trying not to do that.

This is important in regard to what my life had been, and what it became. I am aware that some people have the capacity to keep active musically while they pursue other things, I am not one of them. I had invested my entire self in music, and the pursuit of becoming a successful artist, writer, and recording artist within the context of doing it for a living.

When I finally called it quits in 1985, I did not simply move on and continue doing music as a hobby. For me, it was impossible to do that. Playing and writing was not a hobby. It was an all out pursuit of something far more specific, which was becoming a success. When I concluded in 1985 that it was over, I meant it, in the deepest sense of the true meaning of those words. I had faced the fact that I had failed, and that I'd given it all I had to offer. So when I left L.A. I left with that mindset.

I eventually sold the guitar, pictured above, to a local music store. It was one of the last remnants of my previous life, other than a few tapes I'd managed to carry with me when I left L.A. I sold it in 1992, I believe, as a final gesture of my complete withdrawal from my previously chosen endeavor. Right or wrong it was what happened. It was in some ways similar to a carpenter selling his tools after deciding to retire. Some would retire and keep their tools, some would not. I fell into the latter group. I did not want to have them there to remind me of the past.

As I have been writing here of late, sometimes with redundancy, and purposeful repetitiveness, I am attempting to draw a clear distinction between the two very different life styles I lived over a forty-four year span of time. It is easy for some to say, or think about, what they would have done in my position, but it is irrelevant to the facts of what my own experience was and is.

I set about to unwind myself from my own self-ordained goal in life, because I had failed at it. Whether you agree, or disagree with my conclusion, is again irrelevant to the facts of history. It is of more importance, in my opinion, to understand what and why I did what I did, rather than to debate whether my doing it was the correct thing to do or not. It may well have not been the right thing, but nonetheless it is what I did.

The store happened by chance, because my mother was getting rid of it, so I stepped in. The gun business, again, was by chance. A momentary decision that turned into a business that ended in disaster. My study of the law was a desperation move that was induced by the disaster of the gun business. All of these things just happened because I was there and I needed to do something, and these are the things I did.

When I started doing yard work in the mobile-home park in San Luis, it was again done out of desperation, and not from a quest to do physical labor because it was good for my health. Only occasionally did I think about music and the music business. But my experience in the past made me wary of even picking up an instrument, for fear I would end up pursuing my old dream, and be once again immersed in the mind altering obsession of chasing success at all costs.

For some it will be impossible to get this fact straight. They will say what normal drinkers say to alcoholics, "Well don't drink so much, take it easy and just have a few drinks!" The trouble with this is obvious, because an alcoholic cannot stop with a few drinks, they have to keep going, even though it is obviously destructive for them. My obsession with music, and the business of music, was like that and I knew it. I knew that if I screwed with it, I would eventually create something that would lead me back to my old obsession, which had nearly killed me, and had certainly disrupted my life in general, if not altogether destroying it.

(part 269) I JUST DID WHAT I HAD TO DO

From 1985 until 2007 I tried to find a new direction for my life. I forced myself away from the driving mechanism of the dream machine of music, because it had been the catalyst for so much of my misery and disappointment. I could not play music and simultaneously do something else, I didn't know how. For me it had always been the music that had been my engine. Writing it, recording it, and presenting it so people could hear it was intricately and deeply wound into the entire process for me. I was either all in or all out, and there was no middle ground. Whether or not this was a failure on my part is a good question, but none the less it was a fact in my reality.

I did find something else to put my mind to work on, but regrettably, I also encountered the systematic demise and destruction of that which I was doing. I found it mattered not what I was doing, but that it was me doing it that seemed to be the problem. I now know that some of my choices back then as to what I devoted my time to, were questionable, such as the gun business. The fact that it led to trouble is not much of a mystery, but the fact that I could not, did not, or would not perceive this back then is, or maybe not.

Probably I just didn't care, because at the time I actually felt, if not completely believed, that my life was basically over, and had been since the day I left L.A. in 1985. Somewhere, deep down inside, I had given up my dream and knew it. So the reality then, for me, crazy or not, was basically "fuck it!" And that view rings more than just true, looking back at it now. It was a wholesale attitude of, "I don't really give a shit about anything anymore."

The fact that I got into the gun business was on a whim in the beginning, and never something I thought about succeeding at. It developed on its own and drove itself on the simple fact of supply and demand. I had found, by chance, stupidity, or bad luck, something people wanted, and I became a supplier. But it was a business scrutinized by numerous entities, something I had never understood until I found myself knee deep in shit. By the time I understood it clearly, I was already in hot water and was being pushed into a corner by forces I was unqualified to thwart.

Out of desperation I turned to studying the law simply because I didn't have the money to pay for a lawyer. I chose the law-library as a last ditch effort to rectify my own self-made dilemma. In the beginning, my mind rejected the difficulty of the law-books with a resounding, "You gotta be kidding!" But on the day I nearly gave up in frustration, one simple thought persuaded me to keep going, and that was, "If it's hard for you to understand Bob, it's probably hard for them to understand as well."

I remember this thought quite clearly, and it became the basis on which I strove to master the drab and mundane collection of words and meanings called the law. I learned to read foot-notes, the most tedious of all that is written on those endless pages of muck. Those little, ill-defined notes led me to a wealth of understanding that served as the bedrock for my self-education on the subject. I learned how to find things in the law that are so hidden that any reasonable person would simply shun them to preserve their own sanity.

I dedicated myself with a vengeance to reading, remembering, and understanding what was written in those books. I spent more time than any of my foes defining the laws and regulations used by them, in an attempt to entrap me, and or imprison me. In the long run I succeeded, because their use, or misuse, of the law, failed. It was a lesson and a new dimension of thinking for me. A lesson in hard work, dedication, and discipline, something I'd rejected as a child, long ago, in school.

But even though I was successful on the one hand, I was wiped out on the other by the circumstances and losses that came about from being run out of business. All that I had built was destroyed in the defense of the builder. Each and every plus had deteriorated into a heap of minuses, piled on the endless rock-pile of my life, and it is with this in mind that I remind the reader, that what I did then in San Luis Obispo to restart my life was less by choice than by an instinct for survival.

Keep in mind that there was no way in hell I wanted to become a handy-man in a mobile home park on the Central Coast of CA., or that I wanted to subject myself to working so hard that it made me ill. But back then these choices did not exist for me at all. I just did what I had to do, because there wasn't anything else to do...

(part 268) ANOTHER LIFE FROM ANOTHER TIME

I had become a complete loner, staying to myself as much as possible. I knew that making myself useful, by working, had secured for me, to some extent, a place amongst people who otherwise didn't want me around. They disapproved of my looks, the long hair, and thought of me as an outsider in their midst. So it was the work I did for them that made it somewhat easier for me to co-exist in this environment.

For the most part I did not see myself as an artist anymore, although I would still write an occasional song or poem. But somewhere down deep inside me the real desire of creativity continued to pump away as usual. At times, I would allow myself to think that someday I would wake from this bad dream, and by some unforeseen miracle, rise again out of the ashes of my life.

I always dismissed this notion though, fearing it would cause me to reject even further, the reality of the life I was living, and make it harder to cope with than it already was. I had learned, by sheer force of will, to accept my lot, for the most part, and just do what was in front of me, no matter how objectionable it was.

Working in a mobile home park, amongst mostly older homes, was a learning process that taught me much about how to deal with things I would otherwise have no interest in. Solving problems and keeping the cost down, became a talent I honed for years. Where otherwise people would have to lay out a lot of money, I was able, in many cases, to do it for far less, by learning to understand how old mobile homes deteriorated over time, and how to deal with them. It was this, more than anything, that kept me working year after year.

With the same mind that had once learned to write, perform, record and engineer a session by myself in a bedroom on micky mouse equipment, I now figured out how to repair old dilapidated mobile homes for nickels and dimes. With the same intensity as before, I crashed head long into each new endeavor I encountered, no matter how mundane it was. I took pride in what I did and would always explain the problem, and its solution, to everyone I worked for. If it was something I couldn't do, I told them they had better get it done by someone, or the problem would get worse and cost more later.

As long as I kept busy, I had little time to spend on the past. I would turn away from it over and over again, avoiding it like a pit of quick-sand. I could not afford the luxury of thinking about Bobby Jameson the singer/songwriter anymore. I trained myself to see me as a guy who worked hard for a living, doing jobs of all kinds for people. I had become a regular person for the most part.

The years kept stacking up, one on top of the other. They turned into a decade, and then nearly another. It was a long way and a long time since I'd left Los Angeles in 1985, and the past had been pushed into the background. It sat there, like an old trunk, locked away in the attic of my mind. In a way I was grateful that I had learned to leave it alone, because it was full of too many bad memories and disappointments. I always knew it was there, but I let it be for the most part, regarding it as another life from another time.

From 1997 until 2002, I pushed on and on in a pointless line to nowhere. There was nothing new, other than some problem with work, and nothing exciting about my life whatsoever. I didn't go anywhere or meet people. I had no girlfriend or hobbies, I just worked, ate, and slept. I bought a small keyboard that I played, but other than that I just existed from day to day in some sort of hardcore exercise in futility.

I stayed clean and sober, and I fought through the headaches which plagued me day and night. My sleep patterns were erratic, because of the pain, and my disposition would always be subject to the effects of that reality. At times I'd lose hope altogether, but would ultimately force myself to go on, in hopes that I would someday get better.

It was a dismal reality, and felt more like a punishment than a life. It seemed to become a contest to see how much I could endure. I'd question deeply whether there really was a god, and say to myself, "If there is, he must hate my guts!" Day after day I would look for something to keep me going, and year after year I would say, "What's the point?"

(part 267) FROM GUNS TO WEED WHACKERS

From 1987 to 1991 I devoted my attention to the store and the firearms business. I did well at it, and thought my life had finally begun to make some sense. I worked and I made headway. I could pay my bills and look ahead with some conviction that I would prosper. I had all but forgotten about music and the music business as I pushed ever deeper into the realm of buy and sell living.

I became well known at gun shows in multiple states, and traveled by motor home throughout the west. I pulled a trailer with a Harley Davidson on it. I had a pocket full of credit cards and cash, and felt free to pick up and go anywhere at anytime, day or night. This period ended abruptly in Reno, Nevada, where I was surrounded at gun point by numerous Federal agents from the ATF and Marshall's Service in a sting operation alleging illegal firearms sales.

For the next few years I studied Federal Criminal Law and Constitutional Law at the courthouse law-library in San Luis Obispo. Day and night, for a few years, I read law books to aid in my quest to be done with the entire mess, which I ultimately succeeded in doing.

Once again I was broke, and without any irons in the fire. I had lost everything and possessed nothing but a used car. I moved into a mobile home park in San Luis Obispo where my mother had purchased an old home that needed a lot of attention. It was depressing as hell, but was at least a roof over my head.

Without a job, or any other prospects, I had to come to grips with the situation as it existed, as opposed to what I thought should exist. I had to make some money to live, but no one was offering the likes of me a single thing. I began doing yard work at my mother's place, and a neighbor asked if I'd do some for her. I agreed, and for $6 an hour I began to do chores for people in the park. This was to become my job for the next twelve years of my life.

In 1997, while digging up a neighbor's old bermuda lawn, I noticed something happening to my body. At first I believed it was nothing more than a reaction to hard work in a 100 degree heat wave, but later found it to be something far more debilitating.

After a year of repeated visits to doctors and emergency rooms, I began to get daily headaches that literally progressed to the point of complete despair. Finding no help, and faced with the prospect of becoming a total invalid, I regrouped internally, and made up my mind that dying while working was better than a slow helpless decay into darkness. With that as a premise, I went back to work and fought my way forward for the next ten years.

I worked, and worked hard, as if to say, "This may kill me, but at least I will die standing up!" As a side issue to this activity, the headaches got worse and worse, and at times caused me to become highly volatile and aggressive in my responses to those around me. There was no way to gauge how the work would effect me on any given day, or how much the effect would alter my coping skills.

Part of the problem was who I had to deal with, or whom I worked for. Many of the people were rude and cheap, always wanting more, and to pay as little as possible for it. I did a good job, and wanted fair pay for it, so at times this became a source of complete frustration. To be talked down to, while working hard, was off limits, a point I made vividly clear to anyone and everyone.

I saw myself differently than the way I was perceived by those I worked for. I knew who I was, but they didn't. To them I was no more than a nobody doing odd jobs for them, and they treated me as no more than that. It was hard to take, at times, to say the least, and I lost more than one job as a result of trying to defend my integrity, which many thought I did not possess.

As the years tumbled by, I only occasionally thought about who I had once been, and what I had spent much of my life doing. I had no instruments to play, or equipment of any kind. I possessed only an old cassette tape of some of my songs and recordings. I only told a couple of people what I used to do, but other than that it was an unknown fact by most who knew me.

As I worked, I would sometimes break into song as a way to entertain myself and pass the time. People would react oddly to my doing this, because it would come out of nowhere, and it struck them as strange. Undaunted, if I just felt like singing, I would carry on as if it were no big deal, and enjoy the confused look on their faces.