(part 6) TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

My record "I'm So Lonely" was a full blown hit in Cleveland and Detroit. So naturally Tony started booking me as the guest star at some big shows. I opened for The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Chubby Checker, who at the time were all successful acts. I was never paid one penny for any of the live shows I did. Tony always told me that they were just promotion, and I was doing them for the exposure and to push record sales. Hell the record was in the top 5 all over the mid-west, why did I have to do free promotional gigs?

Of course looking back on it now, I realize Tony was getting paid, he just wasn't paying me. Once again, I believed what Tony told me. I was 19 years old and this man had changed my life. It is far easier now to see the truth than it was for me at that time. It was during this period of working hard that Tony first introduced me to the dexedrine, which I have already mentioned. The point was to keep me going no matter what. Keep the train moving. Don't let a little thing like being exhausted get in the way.

I was flying around on airplanes and riding in limos. I barely knew what city I was in most of the time. The haze began to be my everyday life, and the use of pills to get up and pot and booze to come down had become routine. Not only was I doing these live shows and not getting paid, but Tony was booking me all over the country, and in parts of Europe, with no intention of ever having me show up. He'd book me, get the front money and that was that. I did not find out about this until some time later.

One of the giveaways to this was when I was doing a live interview, by telephone, with a Cincinnati, Ohio radio station, where people called in to talk to me. The trouble was that everybody was pissed off at me and finally I asked why? "Are you kidding me?" the DJ asked, "No!" I said, "Why are you people so mad at me?" The DJ answered, "Because a couple of weeks ago the mayor of Cincinnati and 1100 kids waited at the airport for you in the rain. They were there with the key to the city and you never showed up."

It was like being slapped with a rope across the face. "I gotta tell you man," I said, "this is the first time I've even heard about it." There was silence for a moment at the other end of the line. "Are you telling us, because there's a lot of people listening to this show Bobby," he said, "Are you saying that right now is the first you've heard about this airport thing?" "Yes! That's what I'm saying. I didn't know anything about it or I would have been there, period. I feel awful, I don't know what else to tell you. I just wouldn't do that If I knew, I just wouldn't do that." The interview ended and I could not believe that what had just happened actually happened.

What the hell was Tony doing? It was my name getting trashed, but it was Tony Alamo's plan. I began wondering how much of this was going on? If I didn't know about Cincinnati, what else didn't I know? I begged Tony to tell me what was going on. I also insisted that he get me a band to work with on the road. I told him how hard it was to go on stage by myself and perform over and over again without backup. "They love you!" he said, "You don't need a band. You're better when you're alone. A band would just take the focus off of you and you're the star. You don't need a band."

On and on it went. I could never get what I needed. I'd just show up and play, until I started screwing up. That was a big deal! That was different! Tony had never seen me foul up while playing. It just hadn't happened, ever, until it happened. He changed his tune a bit. "Well maybe a band is not such a bad idea, let me work on it." I never got a band. What Tony did was to start asking guys from other bands, who were playing at the same shows to play with me. A lot of them were glad to do it and that's how it went. Tony always avoiding laying out cash for anything. Always getting someone else to do the work while he collected the money.

In case the point hasn't been made enough, let me be absolutely clear here. I was not paid one red cent for doing any of the things I have discussed here. "I'm So Lonely" sold a lot of records. I was told by the distributor in Detroit that the only record that he'd seen do better was Del Shannon's "Run Away". I am not saying "I'm So Lonely" was a mega-hit I'm just saying it sold a lot of records. There were other people who did more shows than I did, but I imagine they were paid something, at least I hope so. But I am still of the belief that Tony Alamo owes me money for what I did. Do I believe I will ever get it? No! I know Tony too well.

go to part 7

(part 5) ME, TONY, PETER and GORDON

Terry Knight CKLW DJ

Peter Caine was a good guy. He was also a photographer who got hustled by Tony Alamo into taking most of the photos for the Billboard ad campaign. Peter ended up being my only friend and helped me to finally break away from Tony and go to England, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

To this day there is still an unpaid bill at Billboard for most of the ads that were run. Somewhere between $13.000 and $14,000 I believe. You see Tony either couldn't or wouldn't pay for the ads. But what he did do, was find someone else to guarantee to Billboard that the account would be paid. In this case that someone was Gordon Gessler, the son of wealthy diamond dealers in Beverly Hills. Gordon was kind of a goofy guy with a pretty good heart and Tony used him to accomplish Tony's goal, which was to get the ads in Billboard.

Tony succeeded, as Tony was prone to do, and then had a falling out with Gordon once the goal was accomplished. I am by no means blameless in all of this, because I ended up moving in with Gordon's ex-wife Lois Johnston who was 29 years old while I was 19. At the time I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. Part of the star game is beautiful women, so I was sure I'd made it when I actually moved into Lois's house in Benedict Canyon.

As the ad campaign moved forward into it's climax my record "I'm So Lonely" began getting heavy airplay throughout the mid-west and Canada and started climbing the charts in places like Detroit and Cleveland, Ohio. There was a huge 50,000 watt station in Windsor, Canada called CKLW just across the river from Detroit. A young DJ named Terry Knight took it upon himself to single handedly break my record and make it a hit which he succeeded in doing. CKLW was heard in a wide spread area of the mid-west and the record climbed into the top 5 and I believe made it to # 1 in a number of places.

The point of this is, that now I was in demand. Tony could go to work on more people using the record's success as leverage to bend them to his will. First was Dick Clark at American Bandstand who Tony convinced to put me on the show. Following that a number of other more regional music shows became willing to put me on too, because Bandstand had. Tony was no fool. He knew how to use one success to accomplish another.

He did a lot of things right. It was just that he always managed to do something that was so outlandish that it made the earlier successes nearly null and void. An example would be that as I was out touring around the country Tony sent me and some other people to Denver, Colorado saying we were booked into the Denver Hilton and were expected. He told us that all we had to do was go there and we'd be welcomed with open arms. All of this was true.

We were greeted at the front door by the hotel manager and staff, and then escorted to a suite of rooms. We joked with each other for hours saying we were really in the big time now. Later, at about five o-clock in the morning, we were awakened by loud pounding on the door of the suite. We opened it to find a number of hotel security who were there to remove us from the hotel for fraud.

Here's what happened. Tony had telegraphed the Denver Hilton and told them we were coming and to treat us with care, because we were important friends of, Tony signed the telegram Conrad Hilton. Well when the manager of the hotel in Denver, who I believe was a Hilton himself, found out he had been bull-crapped by some Hollywood conman he was a little bit pissed off. So when I say that Tony did a lot of things right, but always managed to screw it up, this is what I was talking about.

These kinds of off the wall scenarios continued throughout my time with Tony and I will discuss some of them throughout these writings. As you may well imagine I had a tough time trying to understand this man, who on the one hand was making my dreams come true while on the other was scaring the crap out of me by doing things like The Denver Hilton fiasco. For a long time he was able to convince me that this stuff was just a mix up and not to let it bother me. My job, he said, was to "concentrate on the music" and he would take care of the business.

All the while Tony was continuing to smoke pot and began having episodes where he said "God was talking to him and telling him to except Jesus as his Lord or die." This too was bewildering to me, because it came out of nowhere and then would vanish as if it hadn't even occurred. Tony used to say, "it was just the pot talking and that he'd just gotten too high." The real trouble for me was, that whether or not it was the pot talking I began to feel more uneasy with Tony's explanations for why these things kept occurring. Looking back on it now I can see that these outbursts were the beginnings of Tony's eventual conversion into some dangerous cult like form of christianity.

go to part 6

PART (4) WITH TONY ALAMO IN 1964

click on pictures to enlarge

For the next 6 weeks the ads kept coming out. I think it was the 3rd or 4th week when Tony dropped Cashbox and just kept the ads coming in Billboard. The 3rd week was a three quarter page ad. The 4th week a full page and so on. They went from black and white to three color and then to a full color. A four page pullout in the 8th week. No one had ever done this before, so the whole world wide music industry was noticing it.

People were watching to see how far it was going to go. Each week they'd check out Billboard to see if a new and bigger ad was in it and there was. It became kind of a game that everybody was playing. I was blown away by the whole process. You've got to understand that I was just some punk kid from nowhere that nobody had ever heard of, and all of a sudden I was the subject of a lot of the industry. No one knew where the ads were coming from or who was doing this.

People speculated that it was a major label doing it from America as a response to Beatlemania, which had taken over the US along with the rest of the world. The Beatles were the phenomenon, so Tony called me "The World's Next Phenomenon." I had nothing to do with it. I just stood around trying to comprehend what was happening to my life. In fact, for quite awhile nobody knew that I was Bobby Jameson, and when they found out they basically said, "well who the hell are you?"

I didn't know how to respond so Tony responded for me. At first this was great, because he wouldn't let anyone screw with me, but later I found my own voice and trouble between Tony and me soon followed. We had no contract. To this day there is no contract. We had no record. I had to go in the studio (Nashville West) on Melrose Ave., in LA and cut one. We didn't even have muscians on most of the recordings. I wrote, arranged, played, and sang everything.



I basically produced 4 songs that are now the only 2 Talamo Records that exist. "I'm So Lonely/I wanna Love You" and "Okey Fanokey Baby/ Meadow Green". There aren't any others because I didn't have any other songs at the time. People think there are more secret Tony Alamo tapes of Bobby Jameson, but there aren't.

The 9th week Billboard ad was a black and white full page with my face shown for the first time. It also had the record listed "I'm So Lonely/I Wanna Love You" for the first time. There was no planning. Everything was done in a rush. The whole damn thing from the beginning to finally having a record took 9 weeks. My whole life changed forever in 9 weeks. I went from dreaming it to being it. I had no way of knowing what I was supposed to do next, so I kept waiting for Tony to tell me, and he told me.

Do this, go here, go there, dress like this, act like that. Everything he told me to do I did, because I didn't know what else to do. He once looked at me and said, "You are a star. You need to be convinced that you are a star. Right now," he said, "you just want to be a star, but I'm telling you, Bobby, that you are already a star. Now believe it and don't ever doubt it again." The amount of time it took him to say those words to me is the amount of time it took me to accept them as the absolute truth. Bullshit or not, I was utterly changed forever by those words, "You are a star!" "Right!" I thought, "My name is Bobby Jameson and I am a star."

I was forever doomed by that belief. Forever separated from others because of it. I have lived to regret it to this very day. Even now there is a part of me that still believes, "My name is Bobby Jameson and I am a star." I am also alone.....

go to part 5

(part 3) TONY ALAMO'S PLAN

Danny Whitten (left) Ralph Molina (top) Billy Talbot (bottom)



Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Bruce (Baby John) Hines and I were seated at a table in the "Carolina Pines" coffee shop one afternoon, in 1964. Tony Alamo approached us with copies of Billboard and Cashbox in hand. He dropped the papers in front of us saying, "take a look." Not knowing what he was referring to we began looking through both publications when we stumbled on black and white quarter page ads in both mags which stated, " The World's Next Phenomenon Bobby Jameson".

These words were above a black silhouette of me. The ads were identical in both publications and purposely did not show my face. All of us got pretty excited seeing this and were at a loss for words. Since we had pretty much decided Tony was just a lot of hot air we were forced at that moment to admit we had been wrong about him. We asked him how he had done it and frankly why, since none of us had a clue that this was coming.

Tony glared at us and then looked directly at me and said, "I told you I was going to make you a star." He owned me right then and there. I was his to to with as he saw fit, and he knew it. Tony was a master at getting to your weakest point and using it to endear himself to you. Once accomplished, he could pretty much get you to do anything he wanted, and this is how Tony set me up to follow his every command.

At that point he became the most important human being on earth to me, because he was actively making my dreams come true right in front of my very eyes. I wanted to be a star and he was making it happen. He was God, or at least he had me believing it. The following week, 2 more ads ran in Billboard and Cashbox, except this time they were half page black and white ads. The words on them stated, "Bobby Jameson The Star Of The Century" and again they topped a black silhouette of me not showing my face.

The noose around my neck tightened, as once again, I was mesmerized by my own addiction to seeing my name in print. Tony, ever the one to take full advantage of his own work, reminded me constantly that he and he alone would get me where I wanted to go and I didn't question that for an instant. It was the most powerful addiction that I have ever encountered, from then until now. No drug, and I have used smack, pills, cocaine and booze, has ever had any more control over me than that did, at that point in my life.

* * *

A couple of years earlier in 1962 I was enrolled as a junior at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale California. The only persons I knew in Glendale, other than my family, was a girl I'd met and her brother who lived across the street from us. I was a fish out of water and knew it. The lingering southwestern cowboy environment I'd come from hung on like an ill fitting jacket. It was obvious to people as soon as I started talking. This became my training ground for reinventing myself lock, stock, and barrel. I learned to talk different, walk different, and look different than I had when I'd first arrived. I wanted to fit in and I was ashamed that I didn't. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to associate me with any redneck background so I dressed like a surfer.

You may be interested to know that the first record I ever made was called "Let's Surf" on Jolum Records in 1963. In my days at Hoover High the biggest thing going was surf music. like Dick Dale And The Deltones. Shortly thereafter it was The Beach Boys, Jan And Dean, and some Chubby Checker. Two years later I would be the opening act for all three of these artists. But in the meantime I had a lot of crap to go through.

Like every other teenager I thought I knew everything right then and there. I was just 17 years old and barely starting my life, but in my mind I had already been through the ringer. Family mental illness, failed marriages, and harsh surroundings had done their damage. Coupled with forced down your throat religion, multiple schools, towns, and fathers and I was kind of confused to say the least. Once again in my own mind music was the only thing that offered any hope to me of ever making my life any better than it had been in the past. It had been and still was the only thing I believed that I could do well.

I started drifting over to Hollywood in 1962. Whenever I got the chance I would go. I'd ride the bus over there from Glendale or if I got lucky hitch a ride with someone. It didn't matter how I got there just as long as I got there. The place in my mind, was the ultimate turn on. It was where all the magic happened. People who actually got paid to do stuff I'd do for free. I couldn't imagine how people like that lived so I wanted to find out. I just wanted to get the chance to meet someone like that and talk to them about how they got there and what it was like to live there. Everything I did and thought was geared to ending up in that town. I belonged there I thought, and nothing was going to keep me from being there.

Looking back on it now, I can see how the power of ones thinking can actually make things happen whether in the long run they're any good for you or not. To this day, I'm not sure I had any other choices, but the ones I made in the matter. It was more than a desire with me it was my obsession. Maybe if my life had of been better and our family wasn't so screwed up things could have gone in a different direction for me. But the way it was was the way it was, and I was just using the only thing I had at the time to solve my problem. I believed that I had the power and ability to end up where I saw myself in my own mind. I had a picture so clear in my head that nothing else could penetrate. No threat of any kind could or did sway me from my path once it got started.

I had seen where I was going back in Arizona and knew then what my path was to be. Time passed and here I was, standing on Hollywood Blvd. in total awe of my surroundings. I can also see looking back now how naive I was about the town, which I now know through my own experience, can be a snake pit. I guess when you're trying to blot out bad memories from earlier times anything looks better to you than the past, so it can fool you into thinking it's OK and safe. There was nothing safe about what I was doing at the time and I always had the feeling that if my mother knew where I was she'd be angry and try to stop me. I was 17 and roaming around the streets alone. I was a sucker for a complement and my judgement about people was piss poor. You could have sold me a bill of goods about anything.

Back in Glendale I'd go to school and pretend I was like everybody else, but inside I knew I was different. I think most of the kids knew I was different too. Even though I'd become pretty popular it was all a show to hide where I'd come from. I still had that feeling of being damaged goods from the past and it drove me to over compensate in everything I did. It was like if I could just keep moving no one would ever see who I really was. The guy with the mentally ill brother and the mother who couldn't stay married which in my mind meant I was screwed up too. I was always on. Like a performance every single minute of my life. Dancing and weaving trying to keep you off guard so you wouldn't get a good look at me. It was exhausting and sooner or later I'd crash and become deeply depressed and combative.

It was those episodes that separated me from others more than anything else. Whereas something that might have been a joke when I was in a good mood was now seen by me as a reason to go to war with someone. In that mood I was not afraid of anything and because of it I nurtured that part of myself for that very reason. I didn't like being afraid and when I was I was humiliated inside and wanted to escape. So that feeling of not being afraid, that came from depression and anger, was in my mind, a friend I could depend on.

go to part 4

(part 2) TONY ALAMO

Tiny Naylors Drive-In at La Brea and Sunset Blvd. across the street from the Carolina Pines in 1964

I met Tony in Hollywood in 1964, probably at the "Carolina Pines," a local coffee shop hangout for struggling musicians, writers, and actors. He was just another of the long list of "I'm gonna be somebody someday people" like myself, who scouted the streets, rumor mills, and hangouts for any info on the bizz. He owned a record mail order company called Mr. Maestro Records that sold boot legged oldies through the mail, and I always figured that's how he got by.

I don't recall exactly when it started, but when I would see him he'd say things like, "I'm gonna make you a star." I just figured he was mouthing off, but part of me wanted to believe this guy. I mean I was so hungry for fame I think I would have believed damn near anyone, if they said anything good about me. That's part of the trouble with show business. People are so in need of being noticed that they trust those I wouldn't let take out my trash.

Anyway, Tony pretty much had the magic touch when it came to bullshit, so I began inching my way closer to him the more candy he dropped in my ears. Looking back on it now I guess he was practicing for the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation, which came about a couple of years later. When I knew Tony he was a pot smoking hustler from Hollywood via Montana.

I was at an apartment of his in Hollywood one time when 2 Federal Postal Inspectors showed up at the door with guns drawn. They were looking for him for an alleged mail fraud scheme concerning his mail order record business, which he ran out of that address. He must of worked it out later, because it never came to anything while I knew him. It was just an example of how knowing him was like "what's next?"

He used to keep plenty of pot around so me and a few friends, Danny Whitten, Bruce Hines, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina could stay high and work on songs. In those days everybody smoked grass so we were just glad to have it. Hell it was free. Danny, Ralph, Billy and Bruce were guys I also met in Hollywood when I first got there. We started living together so everybody would have a place to stay.

We lived in an apartment on Franklin Ave near Highland and used to talk about when we would "make it," a term relating to "making it in show business." Strangely enough Billy, Ralph, and Danny went on to become the band "Crazy Horse" and Bruce was their roadie. The three of them had come from Ohio and were a doo-wop vocal group called Danny And The Memories, they were damn good, I mean really good. And me, the scared kid from Arizona with a dream, I too went on to one of the strangest voyages anyone could ever imagine.

From the streets of Hollywood to London and back. From the nobody bottom to the nobody top and back again. I was still the human yo-yo on a string. Never sure of who I was, who I had been, or who I was becoming. From country to country and style to style I was Bobby Jameson the goddamned quick change artist. Always ready with another song, another look, and even another name.

* * *



St. Johns, Arizona High School

Back in the late 50's I watched my brother get beaten in a fight in front of the entire student body of St. Johns High School. We'd played at a school assembly a couple of months earlier, for the first time, and the attitude toward us from then on was completely different. A lot of people liked it, but a lot of them hated our guts for becoming the center of attention. Some of the top guys in school now had to worry whether their girl friends had a new interest in us. Hell, we were like mini stars of a piss ant town and some of them were down right threatened by it, hence the fight.

It was just a matter of time before it happened and it happened at the school dance. My brother, who was a good fighter, got sucker punched by a football player and never had a chance. The Mormon principle of the school stood by and watched the whole thing happen and did nothing. I was beside myself screaming at him to stop it, but to no avail. The Indian kids knew what was going on, they'd seen that kind of shit all their lives. In the end it was them who picked my brother up off the ground and tried to clean him up. It was a beating, not a fight. It was a goddamned beating!

After that my brother just deteriorated mentally. Something inside him gave up and not too much later he ended up in the state mental hospital and was never the same. I vowed that from that day on no one would ever do that to me. It created a will in me that to this day I still possess. It has caused me great difficulty.

My mother moved to Mesa, the third biggest Mormon city in Arizona, to be closer to the state hospital in Phoenix where my brother Bill was. That is when she actually married Francis Farr, the Mormon in a wheel chair. That is where I learned to work like a Mexican field hand loading hay trucks in and around Phoenix in the summer when it was 120 degrees. He rarely paid me, but worked me like a dog. 18 tons of alfalfa a day. I worked with Indians, Mexicans, and poor whites. I gained their respect even though they knew I was the boss's son, because I worked harder than any of them, I had to. We unloaded box cars at night, because it was too hot to work inside them in the daytime.

I tried to prove myself to this asshole, but I never could. He made promises to me to get me to work, but he never kept one. Finally one afternoon I flipped out and blasted him with the rankest kind of language I could think up. I was 15 years old, going on 16, and had had enough. I told him I would never work for him again and from that day forward I never did.

For the next couple of years I got into trouble. I got thrown out of every school I went to and basically became a pain in the ass. It was because of this time that music, the only thing I really loved, began to appear as my only possible chance to escape the depressing conditions of my life. My mother's marriages and my brother's mental illness had taken their toll on me and at times I thought about killing myself to get away from the stark disappointment of my existence. But somehow I always managed to find a reason to keep going. I just kept thinking that music had the power to get me out of this mess. If I could just make a record, people might like it and I'd make some money and change my life.

I didn't have many friends in Mesa, Az. as you might imagine. Let's face it, it was the early 60's like 1960 I'm talking about. John Kennedy was about to be president and the country was going to go through one of the biggest social revolutions in history, but I'm talking about the time that preceded it. The still lingering, black's didn't have the right to vote yet end of the 50's early 60's. A dark social fabric of middle america where husbands could slap their wife around and still beat their kids without being arrested. If I know anything, it was one of the root causes for the 60's social rebellion and I was part of it. The few friends I did have would laugh at me and say I was crazy when I'd try and tell them about my music. They'd look at me like I was from another planet and start to question whether they wanted to know me at all.

Because of this I didn't bring it up much until I had a few beers and got just high enough and brave enough to talk about it. They'd make fun of me and say things like, "Bobby thinks he's a rock n roll star, but he's really just an ass hole". Every now and then I'd have to fight one of these guys to keep from getting pushed around so much. Fighting was something I got better and better at as time went by. Remember, this was Mesa AZ. a town full of Mormon cowboys who went to church a lot and then drank and fought on the weekends. Very similar to the christian right in present time.

The more I had to endure this shit the more I made up my mind to get out. To get as far away from these kind of people as I could. I doubt I could have been more serious than I was and used it for motivation to succeed in doing just that. As luck would have it Francis Farr, the Mormon husband, and my mom weren't doing all that well which in the long run got her to leave Mesa and go to Glendale CA. where her brother Norm and his wife lived. God, I can't tell you what this meant to me. A glimmer of hope for the future. Away from the shit kickers and Mormon pricks who I'd learned to hate with a passion. There was a reason to hope. Something to hang on to. If I could just hold on long enough to get to California everything would get better.

I'd be closer to the magic city of Hollywood. A place where people thought and talked about the things I wanted to talk about. A place where they actually made records and movies and... My head exploded like a pumpkin being hit with a baseball bat. I had transferred myself into a dream world and clung to it like a starving animal. For the first time in a long time I felt as though there was really something to believe in. I understand looking back on it now how incredibly important it was for me to have something to dream of, live for, something to keep myself moving toward. I had to have a goal and I had found one. I knew for sure that if I could just get to California everything would be OK and I would get the chance to make my dreams come true.

I had no idea how long it was gonna take to get out of Mesa AZ. I guess when you're in a hurry things that take a long time take even longer. My brother Bill had gotten out of Arizona state hospital, but was never the same. Once a powerful force in my life he now appeared to have been stripped of all dignity. He was timid and unsure of himself like a dog who'd been abused too much. It was the worst thing I remember about being a kid the day I watched through the wire mesh glass on the iron door at the state hospital. Two orderly's dressed in white hauled him away like a sack of potatoes from my view.

He was altered there, too many shock treatments. It was the old days of mental hospitals much worse then now. They didn't use much care in the application of electric shock therapy back then. They just wired you up and turned on the juice and bingo you were half a vegetable. I hated my mother for doing this to him I hated her for a long time. I just couldn't understand how you allowed that to happen to someone you loved. But over time I have learned that she was a victim as well of those times. She lived in the era when women barely had rights, hell they had to have a husband just to get credit and even then it wasn't their own. So over the years I have understood more clearly how that event troubled her as well.

go to part 3 of blog

(part 1) I Couldn't Have Done Any Better Or Any Worse

Tony Alamo

The first time I ever used pills to perform was in 1964 when Tony Alamo was flying me around the country to do live gigs that he never paid me for. He used to tell me they were for promotion, but he was getting paid for what I was doing. We were promoting my record "I'm So Lonely/I Wanna Love You" on his record label, Talamo Records.

I was exhausted and he had lined up another personal appearance for me to do in Cleveland or Detroit, and I told him I was too damn tired. He pulled a small bottle out of his pocket and tapped a couple of light yellow tablets into my hand and said, "take one of these now and save one for later." This was to be my first experience with dexedrine.

I went on stage and got a standing ovation. A drug addict was born! From that time on I began depending on drugs, booze, and pot to alter my condition. Pills to get up, and booze and pot to get down. I was like a human yo-yo, with Tony pulling the string. Always providing the demand to work and the means for me to work it.

* * *

click to enlarge
Me, my Mother, and Bill 1948

I Just Liked Music...

I was born in Geneva Illinois in 1945. For the most part I grew up in Arizona and Calif. in the early fifties. I remember listening to the radio at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. I'd try and remember the words to all the songs I liked so I could sing them to myself. I didn't much care about anything else except maybe girls. They were a mystery. They always seem to pretend not to like me even though in the end I'd find out they did. I never did get that. I mean it seemed like a lot of trouble to go through considering it wasn't true anyway. Oh well, girls. Ladies. Women. It still hasn't changed all these years later.

By 1955 I was living in Tucson, Arizona and Rock N Roll was really getting going. My step father hated it, but my mom liked it.
He blamed everything he didn't like about us on "that music" and "those people." Particularly the hair. He really hated the hair styles. You know, "duck tails" and the length. He used to tell us we looked like girls "always lookin at yourselves in the mirror."

My brother and I started watching American Bandstand every day so we could see how everybody looked and danced and then we'd copy them. I remember starting to make up songs instead of learning someone else's, so I guess that was the beginning of my song writing days. My brother and I both got guitars from Sears and started learning how to play them. Nothing real elaborate, just chords, so we could play songs. I'd already worked out some doo wop tunes on my mom's piano, so adding guitars just expanded my horizons.

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Later I wouldn't need anyone but myself to provide whatever I needed to stay high. My demand for the adoration of the crowd, and to feel like I was finally important, was all I needed to supply myself with anything and everything to keep it going. It was a dual sickness that fed on itself and just got progressively worse.

I'm sure Tony Alamo, who is now a born again christian, will never admit to his part in the beginnings of my eventual demise. But I've come to know that the world is full of Tony Alamo's. I once spoke to Tony's brother and asked why Tony didn't pay me for what I had done, because Tony was now a millionaire. His bother said, "All that stuff that happened in the past was before Tony met the Lord."

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By 1957 my brother and I started playing at talent shows and at a place called Kal Rueben's Furniture City on Speedway Blvd., in Tucson. People seemed to like us and said we were like the Everly Brothers. This was a big building full of furniture deals and in the middle of the place was a one story pedestal, from where you could see the whole store. We had a couple of mics set up and would sing songs while people broused for furniture deals. Their kids would stand around and watch us play for an hour or so, and the store just kept having us back.

As I wrote earlier, my brother Bill and I were rock n rollers from an early age and I was convinced in about 1957 that I was destined to be a "teen idol" after watching the likes of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. Of course there were countless others, but I think you get the general idea of what I was inspired by. Some people liked science I liked rock n roll.

My mother and step father separated in 1958, and later divorced. It was the second failed marriage of my mother's and was a loss to me. What little adult supervision I'd had became at that point even more sparse. Like a boat without a rudder, I struggled to find my way, as did my brother Bill who, to make matters worse, suffered from mental and emotional problems. Looking back it's hard to believe that when you're living in that kind of confusion it almost gets to be normal. Of course later you can see clearly how difficult it made everything.

It wasn't all that long after my step father left that my mother moved us all to St. Johns AZ. where I was tossed into a small town environment of Mormons on one side and American Indians on the other. Man, what an unbelievable place to end up. Kinda like the deep south in the 50's. This town was split right down the middle and no one was going to give an inch. Of course my brother and I ended up on the line between the two warring parties and tilted a little bit towards the Indians. This pissed off the lily white Mormons to the bone.

We were immediate outcasts and wondered what kind of hell my mother had brought us to. She ended up marrying a Mormon named Francis Farr, who was also a quadriplegic. This town was in northern AZ west of Flagstaff and got bitter cold in the winter. We lived in an old house with no heat just a wood burning stove. You'd have to put wood in this thing the night before and then when you woke up in the morning you'd go light it and hall ass back into bed until the place warmed up enough to walk around in. No shit! It was so cold you could see your breath in the house in the morning.

go to part 2 of blog