Saturday, April 11, 2009

(Part 26) So Now What Do I Do? Number 2

TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2008




After the "Thank your lucky stars" debacle I felt like hiding underground forever, but the the publicity raged on anyway and I couldn't believe they were still promoting the record after what I had done on TV. I wasn't able to get Andrew to talk to me and I could only assume the worst. He had no plans to talk with me, ever. I complained to Lee and Peter, but they were unsuccessful at getting any response from Oldham. It began to become apparent that Andrew had done a one shot deal with his Bobby Jameson project and if "All I Want Is My Baby" wasn't a hit, which it wasn't, he was not planning to do a follow up.

The investor friends of Lee Karsian, the people who paid for me to come to England, began questioning Lee about the Oldham deal and any further plans regarding the next record. From what I could gather, because again I wasn't in on the original deal Lee and his partners made with Andrew to get me to England, Lee had simply trusted Andrew and there was no contract, or it was limited to a single release. I still don't know. So much for trusting the adults. In both the case of Tony Alamo and Andrew Oldham there were no contracts that I have ever seen or heard about.

It seems that people were just taking shots and releasing a record and seeing how it went. In the case of "I'm So Lonely" it did pretty well, but in the case of "All I Want Is My Baby" it did not. Tony and I could have continued, but he had flipped out as far as I could tell. Andrew on the other hand appears not to have had any follow up in mind unless my record was a hit, which over time it proved not to be. Although I had been treated pretty well since I'd come to England and lived in a extremely nice flat and was treated like a star things began to unravel over the next couple of months. the mood changed.



Lee had obviously pissed off his London contacts when they learned there was no real agreement to continue forward with Andrew Oldham and Decca Records and I was just someone who had cost them a lot of money and didn't pay off as they had believed I would. I was now just dead weight to them. A bad investment. Lee Karsian bailed out and went back to America, saying he had to leave because of pressing business in the states. I have never spoken to him since that day. I was notified that I still had the use of the flat, because of a lease, but that it would not last forever. As if things weren't going bad enough, Peter's girlfriend Susi came over to London with Lois Johnston out of the blue.

It seems as though Susi had come to London to tell Peter that he could either stay in England forever with me or go back to America with her it was one or the other Peter told me. He said he had no choice but to go back with her and within a week or so they were gone. I was now in London alone and was 19 years old with no one to turn to except myself. I had been at the top of the pile a few months before, but now found myself struggling to make sense out of what was going on. When I least expected it Lois showed up at my door. (In case you don't know or don't recall Lois was the ex wife of the man Tony Alamo had conned into guaranteeing payment for the Billboard ads.I'd been living with her in L A before I came to London.)

Anyway here she was standing at the door looking like a million bucks and I had mixed feelings about her showing up. Why? Because she had come with Susi over a week before and this was the first I'd seen of her. It seems, according to her that she had been a guest of Victor Loundes (not sure of that spelling) who ran the Playboy Club in London. So here she was coming over to visit with me. I told her I wasn't too happy about playing second fiddle to that guy and asked her, why she even bothered to come at all? Her reply was almost life threatening at the time.

I was already feeling like an abandoned child, because everyone had left when Lois lit in to me saying, "I was a failure and everybody knew except me and that she had decided that if no one was going to tell me she would." Her words hit me in the face like a hammer and I told her to, "shut up." She just kept going and going like a mother scolding a child. I lost it. I slapped across the face and told her to, "Get the fuck out and leave me alone." She refused to leave and I slapped her again. I had never hit a women in my life, but I hit her. I was not prepared to handle her verbal attack on me and hitting her was all I could come up with to make her stop. There is no justification for what I did. I am telling you what happened. It is for the reader to decide how I should be viewed in light of this information. Lois finally left and I sank into a state of depression like I had never known. I was totally alone and had no idea of what to do.

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