(part 274) EVERYTHING...

Well the answer to "What could go wrong?" was simple, it was "Everything!" But at the time I didn't know that. I was too engrossed, admittedly, in my own belief that things were turning around before my very eyes. The feelings I was experiencing that day were too good to worry about rational thoughts. I was like a starving man who'd been given a meal and was too busy consuming it to be wary of the fact that it might be tainted in some way.

So full-steam ahead was where I chose to place myself in the telephone conversation with Steve Stanley. Almost without reservation, I proceeded to answer any and all questions he asked me, never thinking that there might be a reason not to do so. It is not as though I told him things I didn't want him to know, but more over the fact that I was so willing to do so with a perfect stranger. I chalk it up to my own need to discuss it with someone, anyone, so as to be rid of the burden of being the only one who knew all the facts and history in context. The weight of carrying it around alone for decades was literally a boulder on my back, which I was eager to drop.

One of the most interesting things about the conversation was becoming aware that Steve was confused about many of the facts, such as the Billboard Magazine Ads from the 60's. He, and others I learned, were under the false belief that those ads were somehow linked to the original release of Songs Of Protest in 1965 on Surrey Records, which was completely wrong. I explained to him that the ads came out nearly a year and a half before the Chris Lucey album and were not connected to it in any way. Of course this presented all kinds of problems to those who had taken the position that the ads were specific to Songs Of Protest. I informed him that the ads were for I'm So Lonely, released as a single on Talamo Records in 1964, in conjunction with Tony Alamo, and had occurred before I went to England. Songs Of Protest wasn't even recorded until I returned to the U.S. in 1965.

Unknown to me at the time of this conversation, was the fact that Rev-Ola had printed and included a booklet with the wrong information inside the CD itself as part of the history of Chris Lucey/Bobby Jameson. They'd also run promo ads, I later learned, using the incorrect information, which still exist today on the internet. It wasn't until I saw what was written, and read it for myself, that I learned just how screwed up it was. The entire content of what was included in the CD itself was written by Steve Stanley and was the accepted version at large by nearly everyone who had an opinion on the subject.

Other major problems with information included in the CD, were references made to Diane Linkletter's suicide and my supposed connection to it, which were false. I knew nothing of these things as I talked with Steve Stanley during that first encounter with him. None of this was actually known to me until I received, some two weeks later, my first and only copy of the CD, which Steve Stanley mailed to me. Had I known at the time of my first conversation with Steve what I later became aware of, that conversation would have been markedly different.

There was nothing written for, or contained in, the CD that was done out of malice, but there was, in my opinion, a tendency to glorify facts which proved to be false, for the purpose of publicity. On the other hand, it had been assumed by most that I was dead at the time the CD was being constructed, so those who OK'd what became the final package had that leeway as a buffer in their mind.

Prior to receiving my first copy of the CD, I spoke with Steve on several more occasions. Those conversations as well were without my knowledge of what I was yet to find written in the booklet contained within the Songs Of Protest CD. I do not know, in hind sight, what the difference in our conversations would have been, other than knowing now how our conversations changed once I got the CD. I recall quite clearly that on the day I read, for the first time, what was written in the booklet I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach when I got to the part about Diane Linkletter. The reference to Kim Fowley being the source of this information had the singular effect of thoroughly pissing me off.

(273) HELL...WHAT COULD GO WRONG

It may seem odd to some to read what I write here about my reaction to this telephone call in 2003, but you have to try to understand it from my point of view, if possible. First of all the Chris Lucey album, in my mind, had always been regarded by me as a complete dud. It was something I had done in the 60's with little or no fanfare. It had someone else's picture, Brian Jones, on the cover, it wasn't my name, and all the songs were written to someone else's (Chris Ducey's) song titles. It was a discount album created for cheap record bins in Europe, and nothing more. I had no knowledge whatsoever that anyone even knew that it existed or that I had written and recorded it. So my initial reaction to being told it had been released again was, "Why?"

Trying to fit my reaction and feelings into Steve Stanley's exuberance over finding me and talking to me about this album, was just plain difficult. He'd found me alright, but at the same time I didn't know I was being looked for. It was similar to somebody taking a walk and running into a person who said, "Oh my god, I found you," to which the response of the person found was, "I didn't know I was lost." The beliefs and opinions of others about this subject have little or no bearing at all on what my beliefs were at the time. So much of what I say here is in conflict with what others thought or think about it from their standpoint.

As I said, my initial reaction to the call was somewhat negative, but changed as I continued to talk to Steve.

....Steve Stanley

"Well," said Steve, "I can see how strange this must be for you Bobby, because you obviously didn't know anything about it, and then some complete stranger calls up out of the blue and tells you."

"Yeah." I chuckled, "It was not in my plans for the day."

"Well, sorry," said Steve, "but there wasn't really any other way to do it. I guess I could have written you a letter, but once I got the telephone number from the private detective, I couldn't wait. I had to call and see if it really was you. If you want to stop I understand, but it is exciting to know you're alive and to get to talk to you."

"No, it's OK," I replied, "I'm kinda over the initial shock of it all, so I'll keep talking with you for awhile."

My willingness to continue the phone call with Steve Stanley is something I look back on now with mixed emotions. Had I just said goodbye after a minute or so, I could have possibly chalked it up to a telephone call I got one day and had forgotten about. But it was my choice to continue talking to him, so all that has transpired as the result of my own decision, is on me. It was my curiosity about the album and what he was saying that sparked my imagination. The old me had been aroused by the possibility that something I'd once done was actually being noticed by a new generation of listeners.

As we continued to talk about the album and Rev-Ola Records, Steve told me, in good faith I believe, that I would be getting royalties for the CD's release.

"No shit," I said, "That'd be a first for me, I've never gotten royalties in my life."

"Well you're gonna get them now, Bobby," said Steve, "you can count on it."

My reaction to his remarks about royalties caused me to open up more about the subject. In the mind of someone who had never gotten a single royalty check in his life for any record he'd ever made, this was of critical importance to me. I could feel the old hole in my gut begin to fill in immediately. I do not believe Steve Stanley had any real idea about what a deep wound I had lived with regarding this particular fact. My opinion was, and still is, that he told me what he actually believed was true, and that was that I would get royalties for the release of the CD.

If you think about it, my decision to embrace the subject at that point was not at all odd, even though I didn't know the person who told me these things. I was willing to believe that what he had said about Songs Of Protest was true and I also became thoroughly hooked when he told me I was gonna get paid for it. My own need to hear those words, for the first time in my life, was all that was necessary to keep me engaged in the conversation.

In my mind it felt like the old nightmare of yesterday had suddenly come to an end. I was standing in a new place with a new piece of the puzzle in my hand. What had started off in a rather defensive stance by me, now gave way to an openness on my part, to talk freely and enthusiastically about my experiences in the music business. Throwing caution to the wind, I embarked on a two hour detailed discussion about the history of Bobby Jameson and Chris Lucey and held back little. It was as if my need to unload the burden of my past superseded any reluctance that might have been wise at the time. I'd been told the album was released, doing pretty well, and that I was gonna get paid, "Hell! What could go wrong?"

(part 272) WHO'S JOE?

click picture to enlarge
............This is an article from Billboard Magazine 2002........

In 2003 I did not own a computer nor had I ever used one. I was only vaguely aware that there was something called the internet, or world wide web. I was completely unaware that anything had been written about me or that anyone was looking for me. I did not know that Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest had been reissued as a CD in 2002 by Rev-Ola. None of what was actually going on in the music business or on the internet was known by me prior to the telephone call I received from Steve Stanley in 2003. I had never heard of Rev-Ola Records.

I was not in contact with anyone from my past, either in the music industry or outside of it. I had spoken only briefly to four different people in eighteen years from Los Angeles, since leaving in 1985. There were no get togethers, mail of any kind, or other forms of communication by me with anybody from my past. I had literally disappeared off the planet for the most part, and had chosen to keep it that way.

I was living completely outside the realm of knowledge and speculation discussed in this telephone call. My complete attention was directed somewhere else entirely, and had been for nearly two decades. My ability to even fathom what was being said to me in this call was difficult at best. To me, it was more of a crackpot discussion than anything real. Only as the conversation continued did I begin to take seriously any of what was being said.

"What's your name again?" I asked.

"It's Steve!" the voice said, "Steve Stanley!"

"Yeah, OK Steve, sorry," I said, "you kinda caught me off guard with this stuff. How the hell did you find me any how? Nobody knows where I am, and they haven't for a long time."

"Yes I know!" said Steve, "Everybody thinks you're dead, but I didn't. I always believed you were alive and now I'm really talking to you. I can't believe I'm actually talking to the real Bobby Jameson."

I didn't know how to respond to his enthusiasm. It felt strange hearing someone talk about me like that. I felt uncomfortable and confused by the conversation and didn't know for sure why I kept talking to him. It just didn't make any sense to me. One minute I was in my life and the next minute I was talking to someone I didn't know about a life I'd long since given up on. Part of me was angry that he'd called at all, because it infringed on my choice to be anonymous, but another part of me was curious about what he would say if I kept talking to him.

"I didn't think anybody knew who Chris Lucey was," I said, "or that I was him, and I sure didn't think anybody was ever gonna release the album again."

"Why?" asked Steve.

"Because no one gave a shit about it when it was released the first time, back in the 60's," I said, "It wasn't like it was a big hit or anything."

"Wasn't there a huge Billboard ad campaign run on you back then?" he asked.

"Yeah!" I said, "but it wasn't for Songs Of Protest. The Billboard Magazine stuff was way before that album came out. The Chris Lucey record happened after I got back to America from England in 1965."

There was a pause, as if what I had just said didn't make sense to him. Later I learned that his facts were muddled in many ways, and not always accurate.

"Well it's a great album Bobby and a lot of people think so," said Steve, "I'm just glad I could find you and tell you that personally."

"Yeah well, how did you find me anyway?" I asked again.

"Through a private detective," he said, "I hired a private detective to find you."

"Damn!" I said, "that's pretty weird man. I'll have to think about that for awhile. Why would you go to so much trouble to find me?"

There was a pause. As if I'd again said something that didn't register right with him.

"Are you kidding?" he said, "Finding you, and you being alive, has been something I hoped would happen ever since I first started working on this project with Joe."

"Who's Joe?" I asked.

"Joe Foster," said Steve, "The director of Rev-Ola, the company in England who reissued your album as a CD"

"Oh, OK," I said, "I got it."

"Wait until I tell him I found you," said Steve, "he isn't going to believe it."

"Yeah, well I don't really believe it myself," I said, "Do you have any idea how weird this all sounds to me?" -

(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.