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.
No comments:
Post a Comment