(part 233) WALK THROUGH THE FIRE

I was living at Carol's for one reason: I could work there, even with the drawbacks, better than any place else I could find.

The tape deck and amplifier I was using were hers, so because of that, working there made sense.

The electric guitar I played was borrowed, as was the Rockman Effects box. I owned the small Yamaha keyboard I used for the drums, bass, and organ, and the acoustic guitar and speakers were mine.

I scammed a $75 equalizer and a $14.95 Shure microphone as a gift from a lady named Lee, and the cassette deck was again Carol's, I believe.

Working on these songs, in 1985, kept me busy as well as crazy. I wouldn't eat enough, sleep enough, or treat myself like a human being, because being human was the last thing I felt like.

I resembled a machine more than a person. A machine dedicated to my precise programmed assignment, which was to write and record these songs.

Somewhere in my tortured psyche there was still the hope that, once accomplished, someone would say, "Hey these are really good."

I would lie to myself about this, saying, "I don't care," but in all honesty, that old need was still churning way down deep inside me, but enough of the "I don't give a fuck who likes these" was there to allow me to write and record what I wanted.

Once again, I penned a blues song that was descriptive of how I was at the time. It involved very real pieces of my failing life experience and the emotional turmoil I was in.

The two failed relationships, sober, that ended dismally, and two business arrangements, sober, that had also failed in the long run to change my life into something more reliable and predictable.

The anger, defeat, abandonment, and sheer lack of hope, became lyrically, the bedrock of the song "Movin To Hell." It was, and is, a dark, yet concrete, evaluation of my life then as well as now.

The blues for me was a workshop of the heart and soul. A single place where the bleak realities of struggle and defeat could be set to music and tempo, and allowed to fill the air with a message and plea for something better, a society, claimed out of love by many, but only truly understood by one's own walk through the fire.


WOKE UP THIS MORNIN
WITH AILIN HEALTH
CALL ME A DOCTOR
GONNA KILL MYSELF
IT DON'T MATTER
AND I DON'T CARE
I'LL BE MOVIN TO HELL
IF THE BLUES AIN'T THERE

WORK SO HARD
CAN'T SAVE A DIME
SOME DAYS YOU DON'T
WANT TO GO ON TRYIN
IT DON'T MATTER
WHAT YOU DO
YOU CAN'T GET RID
OF THE GODDAMN BLUES

HAD YOU A WOMAN
NOW SHE'S GONE
SHE FINALLY LEFT YOU
WITH A HEART OF STONE
IT DON'T MATTER
WHAT YOU SAY
THOSE GODDAMN BLUES
THEY JUST WON'T GO AWAY

Bobby Jameson 1985

There are 2 versions of Movin To Hell. The first is an acoustic version. The second is an electric version which was cut at the same time in 1985. The edition of the distorted electric guitars adds to the force of the message of the lyrics for some, and will be a distraction for others. I like them both, and recorded them both for my own reasons.

(part 232) PART OF MY HISTORY IN 1985

It took me about five months to write and record seven songs and call them finished. During that period the collapse of my life continued on.

Each obstacle encountered, and there were many, were pushed aside. I had guaranteed to myself that the project would indeed be completed.

My hours were that of a musician, you know, work all night and sleep most of the day. In the pre-dawn silence I could concentrate better, and didn't have to worry about ringing telephones getting recorded accidently.

I kept going to AA and NA meetings, and at times would appear to be alright, but on other occasions it was obvious I was not doing so good.

I gave up believing that anybody in the program would understand what I was doing, or why, or approve of it, so I just kept at the business of writing and recording the songs for my own personal reasons.

It had become increasingly difficult to connect with people on anything other than a superficial level, so trying to do so was all but disregarded.

As usual, I drove my car a lot. It provided me with the time to be alone and think. Not necessarily a good thing, but it was what I did.

I'd see countless young, good looking young ladies walking the streets, offering themselves up for cash, and because I was lonely and isolated, I would too many times waste what little money I had on their company...

But for me, in the shape I was in emotionally, it was like an oasis in the desert. See it, pay for it, and then gulp it down, no questions asked. I didn't have to get their approval or make promises.

It was just a cut and dry momentary cure for the loneliness, and was always out there, like me, just out on the streets alone, night and day, wandering...looking.

Because of this experience I wrote a song called Buckets On The Blvd. Not a very good song, but a song none the less about the fact that it was there, good or bad.

It was a time in my life when I lacked any coherent explanation at all for my existence, so I narrowed everything down to making these recordings, not killing myself, and staying clean and sober.

I kept it very simple. I had to, because the damaging effects of all I had done to my body and mind, during the 60's and 70's, had finally blossomed forth into a full scale jungle of confusion and remorse which was running my life.

My focus was on what I knew how to do, because I didn't know what else to do. Write songs because I could, and create a framework to keep busy with the work of recording them, not much else.

Locked in the damage of twenty years of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, it was a mesmerizing maze of confusion, demoralization, and isolation, so I just hung on to what I knew.

There was no help from any quarter really, other than surface applications, to what appeared to be a bottomless pit of destruction, called my life, so I read the AA book a lot looking for answers.

I watched others recover and progress, while I stayed put, in the endless ruts of my own zig zagging path. I knew something was wrong with me that wasn't wrong with others, but had no idea of how to do anything about it.

I prayed, ranted, cried, screamed, begged God, and then cursed him for abandoning me. I pounded on the walls of hell and heaven alike, but found nothing in the way of help for what ailed me.

This, more than anything, kept me locked into doing what I was doing. It became the imperative. Just keep busy, Bobby, just work on the songs. Don't die, don't get loaded, just keep going...keep working...no matter what.

This song is a tidbit of garbage, captured on tape, and part of my history in 1985. For decades I was embarrassed to play this song for anyone, let alone make a video of it for public consumption.

The telling of this story, though, requires that the pieces be assembled in the right order, no matter how some of them may appear, or how they might make me appear.

(part 231) MAKING SILVER NAIL

Ping ponging, or collectively reducing the number of tracks into a single track, allowed me to build recordings that far outnumbered the 4 original tracks available to me on the TEAC recorder I was using.

Because of this, I was able to create such things as Silver Nail, or the da da da da song, as I called it, back when I was making the recording.

It has layers of multiple tracks, that were added over time, to create depth and dimension to the production.

The song was written about my thoughts and feelings toward life at the time, as well as the past, and how the hopelessness of repetitive problems plagued me.

The lyric content is dark and forceful, while the da da da da vocal parts attempt to lend an opposite pollyannaish accent. This was purposeful and hopefully lends itself to the sense of dichotomy.

Because my life was not improving at all when I did these songs, there are direct links to my thoughts and feelings written into them, in 1985.

As mentioned, Carol was not a fan, musically, of what I was doing there. She had heard much of my work over the years, and far preferred my more melodic and sensuous songs.

Because of this, I was not given the support from her I might have enjoyed had she been in love with the songs I was writing and recording in her apartment. As you might well imagine, this tended to create tension.

Just outside my door was a hall where a telephone was placed. It had a fifty foot cord on it, so it didn't need to sit just outside the door where I was working. Nonetheless Carol kept putting it there no matter how many times I asked her not to.

I explained that the phone ringing, when I was working on something, ruined whatever it was I was doing, because the ringing got recorded too.

Things like this caused no end to my difficulty in the creation of this material, and caused me to get angry at her on many occasions, again making things more difficult.

Perhaps if she'd read these lyrics, and understood how much this meant to me, she could have lent herself a little more to the recording of these songs, but that never happened.


...SILVER NAIL...

CITY LIGHTS
THE RAINY STREET
LONELY NIGHT
NO ONE TO MEET
TAKE A RIDE
TO NOWHERE'S DOOR
SHOOT SOME PAIN
YOU FINALLY SCORE

DA DA DA DA DA DA

WHITE LINE MIRROR
BROKEN GLASS
GOT TO GET
SOME SPEED UP FAST
NEON BLINKING
ON YOUR FACE
SCREW THESE RULES
IT'S DEATH'S OWN PACE

DA DA DA DA DA DA

BLACK AND BURNED
BENT TO ROLL
LIKE DICE YOU THROW
YOUR GODDAMNED SOUL
AGAINST THE ODDS
OF DESTINY
YA LAUGH AT WHERE
YOU'LL NEVER BE

DA DA DA DA DA DA

NOW YOU SEE
THE SHINING LIGHT
RAINY STREETS
THE BLACKENED NIGHT
SCARLET TEAR
A SILVER NAIL
RUSHING PEACE
A LIFE SO FRAIL

DA DA DA DA DA DA

Bobby Jameson 1985

(part 230) ANALOG RECORDING AND HISS

Me at Carol Paulus's apartment 1985

In L.A., in 1985, I was engulfed in the writing, playing, singing, and recording of half a dozen, or more, new songs.

I'd taken over Carol's den and made it into a mini recording studio, as well as my bedroom. It was more like a prison cell with instruments and speakers than anything else.

I would lay down a guitar track first, in most cases, with each new song, and then begin the tedious job of adding other instrumentation and my vocals. The bass and drums were played, by me, on a keyboard with various voices, as they're called, or instruments built into the keyboard.

Learning to keep track of everything at once, drove me crazy at first, but improved as I kept at it. When I'd overdub something, because I was working with analog equipment, I'd pick up a lot of tape hiss from the recording heads.

I had to EQ it out of every track I added to keep the recordings as clean as possible, and not let that build up. It wasn't like I had real good equipment, so hard work and patience proved invaluable over time.

On Voodoo Blues, which was a basic Bo Diddley beat, I used a tremolo effect on the electric rhythm guitar parts. The maracas, or shakers, were actually a bottle of vitamin pills I used for that effect.

On the lead guitar parts, I used a Rockman effects box, which could also be used for various reverb, distortion, and echo effects.

For those who haven't worked with analog, or don't know what I'm talking about, I'll try to explain.

In analog tape recording you literally have a piece of magnetic recording tape running across, what are called recording heads on the tape recorder, which cause noise or hiss on the recording.

Initially that's not too much to worry about, but as you add more tracks, overdubs, you begin to re-record the initial noise, or hiss, picked up from the previous tracks recorded.

You can use Dolby to knock the hiss down, but it squashes a lot of the good sound you may want to keep, so I don't use it. That is why I had to EQ, or equalize, each separate track with a piece of equipment called an equalizer.

It was imperative to do this on some songs more than others, to ensure in the final outcome that I didn't end up with recordings that had enormous amounts of hiss on them.

Once I added a new track to the recording, I had to make sure it was OK, because I could not go back later and fix it. It became part of the overall recording as I went along. I only had four tracks, so I had to keep combining tracks to create room for another overdub track.

As you might imagine, this kept me on my toes, and tense as hell, while engaged in the effort of recording. Any outside distraction would cause me to lose sight of what I was doing, or worse yet, get recorded onto tape as I tried to overdub.

These kinds of distractions were: telephones ringing in the middle of recording, airplanes, dogs barking, someone bursting through the door, or knocking on it, etc.

Voodoo Blues was fortunately a purposely noisy recording with high-end noise, like the maracas, which could join in with unwanted sounds, such as hiss.

Again it was a blues song, and once more, deterred Carol from any real support for what I was doing.

(part 229) BECAUSE I WANTED TO DREAM

Dreaming was the motivator as well as the killer. Dreaming dreams was what I did. Seeing myself where I believed I was supposed to be, no matter where I was at the time. I have talked about this before, and the redundancy of the subject is purposeful.

I envisioned the things necessary to achieve the goal, which in this case was to write and record new songs. Not songs aimed at commercialism, but songs I wanted to work on for personal reasons, outside of other's opinions or likes and dislikes.

I had to have a tape deck, an amp, a keyboard with multiple voices, an electric and an acoustic guitar, an equalizer, speakers, an effects box, microphone, recording tape, and last, but not least, a place to work when I wanted, which turned out to be at Carol Paulus's apartment.

I set out to get these things by loan or by gift, it didn't matter to me which it was. I didn't have to own the stuff, I just needed to be able to use it for as long as it took to accomplish the end result.

Piece by piece, I accumulated each of the items needed for my project. I was obsessed with the goal, and pursued it as a last ditch effort to fulfill a need inside me.

My quick smile, my staged look, each little detail, was geared to facilitate the progress of the plan. I would get what I wanted, and pursue my own self-interests with abandon. Everything and everybody was fair game at that point I believed.

In my mind I had to do it...I had to have a goal...a place to head for... I needed the discipline of concentrating on the work.

I would write it, engineer it, play it, and sing it. The entirety of it rested on me alone. I did not want anyone to work on it or help me. It was deeply personal in a way that I had not known before.

It was to be a private endeavor, one that I would make all the decisions about, right or wrong. A work done on basic equipment with my whole attention given to it, rather than in a studio with others and all the confusion that accompanied that.

I was too volatile, too emotional, to work with anybody. I didn't want input or debate about how to do it, or when. I didn't want to try and figure out which song somebody else thought would be better than another.

I had worked alone before in the past, but not like this, not with this kind of mindset and desperation to feed off of.

I set parameters that were conducive to me rather than to someone else. I would work all night, if I felt like it, or not at all.

I planned to eat and sleep with it, envelope myself in it, give myself to it, and most of all, I told myself, "I don't even care if anyone likes it."

That last point was total freedom for me, because I did not need to get approval for it. I could do it simply because I wanted to. It was one of the only times I can remember not trying to record a hit.

The first thing I decided to work on was a song called Life Of Crime, about an incident where I seriously thought about holding up an armored car because I was sick of being broke all the time.

I wrote it in a notebook on the hood of my car while waiting for my clothes to dry at a laundromat on Sunset Blvd. I'd watched a Brink's truck picking up money at a market across the street.

Carol did not like blues, and would frown every time I'd play them. Because of this I purposely chose a blues songs to start with. It was my way of claiming my own territory within the confines of her apartment.

(part 228) MY TROUBLED MIND

Hollywood California, it even sounds romantic when you say it. My whole life had been about the town, the place, the concept.

The dream machine, a place where childhood obsessions of stardom and fame were acceptable, even preferable. That magical place known all around the world as Hollywood, city of stars.

I had always been one of those wide eyed children with a vision. Had always thought of myself as part of the mystique. It was my home as far back as I could remember.

I'd gone to grade school in Laurel Canyon in the 50's, before we went to Arizona. The Wonderland Ave. School at the corner of Lookout Mountain Dr. and Wonderland Ave.

I had always felt the pull of electricity from the city below at Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights, where Googy's and Schwab's drugstore were.

I loved the town in a way I cannot put into words. It was just as much a part of me as breathing, and when I wasn't there I always knew I would be...eventually.

* * *

I drove south for a long time, down 101 to L.A. I plotted in my head a story to tell to someone, anyone, about why I needed to be there. Carol Paulus? Lois Johnston? Someone I hadn't met yet?

I would find a way, a place, like I always had. One more time, one more try, one more run in that town...my town...my world.

I don't remember with any accuracy where I landed at first, but I know that I did find a way and a place to put myself. I had learned long ago to conform to the needs of others to get what I wanted.

I was a human chameleon, always changing colors to fit into my current surroundings, while privately planning my next move.

Wherever I landed was immaterial, in many ways, to me. The fact that I knew I could sleep there and go there, was the point.

I would cultivate, as I always had, a series of places where I was welcomed, or allowed to enter and leave as I chose.

If a problem arose, and it always did, I would leave and go to one of the other places. It was just something I'd learned to do over the years.

I was a gigolo as much anything else. It had been that ability which had kept me going through thick and thin in this town.

To me it was no more than a tool I used to get by, to keep going. The point was always the music, the rest was just a means to an end.

I was callous as hell in a lot of ways, and this was one of those ways. Like a dope fiend or drunk, the whole point was to get what you needed, so I was like that.

I had a tape deck set up at Lois Johnston's for awhile, and Carol Paulus had a tape recorder at her place, so I used them. I had a lot of tapes at Carol's, a lot of years worth of work.

I'd listen to my own music and try and figure out why I had never been accepted. Try to learn by listening over and over, what the missing component was.

Ultimately I'd just get pissed off and frustrated, saying, "Those stupid assholes in the music business just never got it. It was there," I thought, "they just never heard it."

Every day I'd roam around trying to meet people to use, trying to expand my world into something that finally made sense, that worked. Women who wanted me around, and would buy me a microphone as a gift, or an amplifier, or a box of recording tape.

I was one big manipulating mass of self-need that thrived on the thought of accomplishing that which I had never accomplished, namely, to be recognized and accepted for my work. To finally be treated fairly by an industry and town that I'd poured most of my life into since 1963.

Somewhere in my troubled mind I was conjuring up, for the thousandth time, the outcome of a dream...my dream, one with a happy ending.