(Part 47) Old Dogs Like Me

TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2008


Excellent! Either my last post was completely uninteresting or I said something of an unacceptable nature. It doesn't matter I'm not trying to win a popularity contest I'm trying to tell a story. I am not trying to win you over or get you to agree with me. It occurs to me at times as I am remembering all this that I spent the last 40 some years blaming myself for everything that happened to me in the 60's. What I am learning, as I go, is that a lot of what transpired had nothing to do with me screwing it up. Don't get me wrong, I do a whole lot to screw me up later. My point here is that I always came up with the goods. I had the songs and I recorded them, how that was dealt with by record labels and music publishers was pretty much out of my hands.

I was 19 and 20 years old at the time this all took place. I had no power or control over anything except writing and singing the songs. From 1964 through 1966 I wrote and or recorded 7 or 8 singles and 2 albums. I'm So Lonely/I Wanna Love You, Okey Fanokey Baby/Meadow Green, All I Want Is My Baby/Each And Every Day, Rum Pum Mum Num/I Wanna Know, Please Mr. Mailman/I Wanna Know, Chris Lucey "Songs Of Protest And Anti Protest", Vietnam/Metropolitan Man, Reconsider Baby/Low Down Funky Blues, Gotta Find My Roogalator/Low Down Funky Blues, All Alone/Your Sweet Lovin and Jameson "Color Him In".

For all that, I received $250 and a $650 BSA motorcycle. Both albums and 4 of the singles were written and recorded in less than the period of a year from the end of 65 to the end of 66. Although I was using drugs and drinking they had not done to me at that time what they later did which was to completely and utterly destroy my life. From 1964 through 1968 I always showed up and I always did my work what was done with that work was under the control of others. What is becoming clear to me is that the basis for my later complete freakout started earlier and that is what I am relating in these pages.

A growing frustration that occurred over a number of years and culminated into a very different person than the one who started out writing songs and singing for the fun of it. If you think I am attempting to heap blame on others you're goddamn right I am, as much as possible, but if you think that I am not willing to heap blame on myself you're wrong. I, in the long run will eat by experience every single disaster that is the history of Bobby Jameson/Chris Lucey. I have not escaped any of the blame and or criticism that goes with being me. I have lived with all of this and still do for over 4 decades.

You cannot know, other than me relating to you, what it has been like and remains as such to this day. I have nothing to show for my work other than the work itself, I live in poverty. I am not saying that for effect I live and have lived in poverty for a very long time. I have a computer, my very first one, because a bootleg record company sent me a $1,000 when they illegally released "Color Him In" about a year ago, thank god they did and they're the only one. I sit at this computer and break my ass and my head to recall and articulate the facts as best I can. I am not interested in anything other than putting forward, for the first time, my side of my story.

I have been asked what I expect to achieve or gain from this and I have answered nothing, nothing at all except to know in my own mind that Bobby Jameson"s version of Bobby Jameson's past has finally been put somewhere where a small bit of attention may be given to a story that has been so taken out of context that I could no longer sit by and accept it. My belief is that someone will probably steal what I am writing and give me no credit. That is the world I live in. I am so sure that I will never gain anything from anything that I have done that it is now second nature to me. Maybe you think that's why things go wrong in my life, because I expect them to, I accept that. But old dogs like me find it hard to trust humans, because those humans have beaten old dogs like me. I am not interested in a better philosophy I'm interested in better people.