Bobby Jameson - The Life And Times Of Bobby Jameson (Autobiography)

Peter Caine was a good guy. He was also a photographer who got hustled by Tony into taking most of the later photos for the Billboard ad campaign. Peter ended up being my only friend and helped me 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 for.

In this case that someone was Gordon Gessler the son of some 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 soon to be ex wife Lois Johnston who was 29 and I was 19, wow was she hot. Part of the star game is beautiful women and I was sure I'd made it when I 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 across from Detroit where a 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. Whatever, the point of this is that now I was in demand so Tony could go to work on some 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, 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 and make the earlier successes almost null and void. An example of this would be, I was out touring around the country and Tony sent me with some other people to Denver, Colorado and said we were booked into the Denver Hilton and that we were expected.

So all we had to do was go there and we'd be welcomed with open arms. All of this was true. We were greeted by the hotel manager and staff and taken to a suite of rooms. About five o-clock in the morning we were awakened by security and removed 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 con man 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 and 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'd say, "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 had never happened. 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 it was the pot talking or not I began to feel 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.

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 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 midwest 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 back then. It was during this period of working hard that Tony first introduced me to 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, butTony was booking me all over the country and 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 till sometime 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. Why are you people so mad at me?" The DJ said, "Because a couple of weeks ago the mayor of Cincinnati and 1100 kids waited at the airport for you in the rain 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 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 get me a band to work with me on the road. I told him how hard it was just to go out 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 money for anything. Always getting someone else to do the work and he collected the money.