FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2008

(part 75) MY LAST DITCH EFFORT


Trying to make "WORKING" work was my last ditch effort as a recording artist in 1968. Parts of the album are in a way desperate, when I listen to how hard I was trying to make things work. Some of the vocals are exactly what I wanted some are attempts at it. As alcohol and drugs continued to play a larger and larger roll in my life during the recording of this album I would reach higher and fall lower than I had at any time previously. On some days I was completely ok on others I was prone to violent outbursts depending on what I had in my system and how much of it I'd had. I

n 1968, the past years had begun to take a serious toll on my ability to gage how loaded I was or how loaded I was getting. Trying to record in that self imposed environment was hit and miss to say the least. Because I was not only addicted to drugs and alcohol, but to fame as well, I lived at times in a world constructed of unreasonable demands and bitter resentment about my past dreams and current failures. My need for attention and my demands for it continued to wreak havoc with my personality throughout the making of "WORKING".

Unfortunately I was again putting all my eggs, as it were, in a single basket in the hope that this time was the time and that this record was the one, which it was not. I always seemed to do the same thing over again, as I'd done before, expecting a different and better result than I'd had in the past. It seemed to be the only way I could do things. I had never learned how to deal with anything, I just learned how to make records and write songs and then do it again and again. My skills at being a person were limited to being a recording artist and a song writer in search of fame and fortune.

To be honest, I didn't ever understand anything outside of that view of the world. There it was and here I was and my job was to get the world to accept me, rather than me finding a constructive way to fit into the world. So in essence, I was always at war with everything around me, unless it went my way. The drugs and alcohol just tended to magnify all of it and that is why "WORKING" was so important to me, then and now. It was my last cohesive attempt at getting the world to accept BOBBY JAMESON, which they never did.

I will attempt to make as clear as I can the ins and outs of constructing "WORKING" and the time spent with some extremely generous and talented musicians who helped me create the last album I released in 1969. The album is shot through with my then growing interest in suicide as an answer to my life. It was my fear of another failure at the time the "WORKING" album was recorded that is the source of the desperation and tiredness in these vocals.