Tuesday, February 5, 2008

(part 24) THE GLOVE "AMERICAN POP WHORE" IN LONDON




I worked on various songs to record for Brit. They were more along the lines of "All Alone", "Vietnam", and "Gotta Find My Roogalator", which I recorded when I went back to America in 1965. They are also on my myspace site currently, which you can go to by clicking on a myspace link at the top of the page.

I had zero luck at trying to convince the powers at Brit to go along with me, which was another disappointment in my English adventure. I had also written a song called "Rum Pum Mum Num Dip Ta Dip, which was shortened to "Rum Pum" for the record. It was an overly cute song using old nursery rhymes strung together, and Brit loved it. They also loved another better song called "I Wanna Know" for the B side.

It was recorded with about a third of the players from the London Symphony Orchestra. It was a long way from Bobby Jameson and his guitar in his bedroom singing Buddy Holly songs a few years earlier to recording in London England with an orchestra of that calibre. It was a hell of an experience, but once again it was not me. It was an overly exaggerated super teeny bopper pop thing and I had a hard time coping with it.

As usual I gave it my full attention and the recording was good, it just wasn't me. The goddamn "Glove" thing was being hyped up to the eyeballs with the new record's release, and I kind of groaned about that, but had only myself to blame for starting it in the first place. I felt like a little dancing puppet all the time running this way and that for whoever was paying the bills, and it became annoying the more I did it.

It had been that way with Tony Alamo, and with Andrew Oldham, and now it was happening again. I felt like a girl with a sugar daddy. Ok we'll pay your rent but you gotta do what we tell you to do. Bobby Jameson, the good little "pop whore." It was a trade off for sure. I wanted something so I had to provide something, and "they" got to call the shots because they had the money and the power.

My life was like a crash course in the music business. In less than one year I had learned a ton of shit about myself and other people. Had it not happened to me the way it happened, I reckon I would be a completely different person than I am now, but it did happen the way it happened and I'm still trying to sort it out. When you're as young as I was at the time, you are transformed by things much more than you would be if you were older and more settled. I didn't know shit, so all of these things affected me deeply.

On top of that I didn't have anyone to rely on, you know, like a person I could talk to about how I felt inside. I was always running around with that "pop star" look in my eyes, so people never knew what I was thinking or feeling. Anyway, I was living in Knightsbridge during this time and every day, like clockwork, Lady Grey would come to my flat and hang out with me for hours. When I say Lady, I mean like "Lords and Ladies", she was "Lady" Grey.

She showed up with her two little Whippet dogs and listened to me play music and talk. I never made love to her, although I believe I could have, I just never did. I can't really remember how we met, but I think it was through Peter Caine. I think she met Peter first and then me. I liked her a lot. She is in my memory forever. Her and many other details of what it was like to be an American "pop whore" in London, in 1964 and 65.

(part 23) TIME OUT TO REFLECT AND REMIND ME OF MY PURPOSE


Bobby Jameson 2007

I started writing here because I needed, for my own sake, to get a lot of garbage out that I have carried around for a long time. I did not start writing to get the approval of anyone, with the exception of myself. I want my own approval. It is an imperative part, maybe the whole part, for why I am doing this.

When I left LA in 1985 there wasn't 1 person to say goodbye to. My life had ground into a no win situation in spades. The music business had long since blown me off and I knew it. I had no job, no money, and no place to live, and I couldn't think of one reason not to leave, so I left.

I turned my back, as best I could at the time, on all of my years in LA. I wanted to forget who I used to be and everything that went with it, and that is the load I am now attempting to write down here. Because I have surfaced after 23 years, and made myself somewhat available to just about anyone, I find myself being almost dragged at times into controversies involving records I have made and songs I have written in the past.

It is a carbon copy of my life as I once knew it being rammed up my ass all over again and incredibly enough involves the very same issues, records, and songs that it did the first time around. People are actually upset that I am unwilling to sit by and let them profit from my work without requiring them to compensate me while they do so.

It makes me remember the deadening pain I felt for years listening to some of the most dishonest people I have ever met rationalizing, for their own gain, why I wouldn't get anything for the work I did. I sometimes wonder how I managed to keep myself doing it for so long without being paid.

The only answer is I kept believing that the next deal and the next record would be the one that got me to the top. It never happened. For a myriad of reasons, I never crossed over to the promised land.