Chapter Twenty Four
I produced radio commercials in the front part of my office for various ad agencies in town under the banner of my company, Just For Fun Productions. It was 1975.
Just For Fun was originally set up to produce concerts. When I turned 30 I came into the trust fund the a.m. had almost willed away to Roger Brown.
A friend of mine had booked country/western superstar Waylon Jennings into one of the convention centers in Amarillo and had made about $1,000 profit doing so.
Lesson: Any profit in show business is a good thing.
I thought I could do better with another singer: a contemporary of Jennings named David Allan Coe.
Jennings and Willie were the leaders of the style, as was Texas artist Jerry Jeff "Mr.Bojangles" Walker.
Coe had written a hit recorded by Tanya Tucker called "Would You Lay With Me? (In A Field Of Stone)" that was getting plenty of radio air play at the same time as he was getting plenty of press for being a rowdy performer prone to starting fights and cussing up a storm during his concerts.
He'd done fairly well in Lubbock a few weeks before I booked him to come back for two shows there and then into Amarillo the next day for two more.
I paid him a total of $5,000 and he put on four extraordinary performances. In his final show, after having played an earlier 5 o'clock performance, he entertained the packed hall for three and a half hours straight -complete with 5 costume changes- before finally wearing both the audience and his band to a frazzle.
Not once did he make any kind of the trouble he was being blamed for. He made a lot of new fans, though.
When he first drove up in his bus in Lubbock and got off, the first thing he said to me was "You and I could be brothers, did you know that?" We both had wiry curly long hair that was totally unruly when the wind blew.
We do look a lot a like...so much so that it makes an orphan wonder...
But Coe's a pistol: a few years later an Amarillo folk singer, Jim Daniels, met up with him in a cafe somewhere in New Mexico. Since Jim had seen his shows in Amarillo he struck up a conversation with him. When Coe found out Jim knew me he told him I still owed him $50 for his concert.
He said I didn't pay for the hotel room they stayed in.
I told Jim if he wanted to play go between to tell Coe the next time he saw him to read the contract we had. I paid for everything in it.
And, I added, he might remind Coe that Jeanette didn't charge him for the gourmet home cooked meals she prepared for his whole entourage, either.
The next month I had Jerry "When You're Hot, You're Hot" Reed booked in the Civic Center Coliseum the weekend before Christmas. Jerry was well known for his hit "Amos Moses" but his star had lost its luster a little bit at the time.
It began to shine again two years later when he appeared in Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields.
When I booked him he'd just made the movie "W.W. And The Dixie Dance Kings".
I also booked one of the newer groups out of Austin, Texas to open for him: Asleep At The Wheel.
They played good country-swing a la Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and were a perfect intro for Jerry's more rockabilly country style.
No body could say I didn't put on an exciting evening of entertainment. People are still talking about those shows.
Unfortunately, I lost several thousands of dollars.
Lesson: Having fun is worth the cost.
About this time I was having trouble with my energy level. I couldn't walk across a room without feeling tired. I wrote it off to the strain of putting on the concerts and the strain of inventing and organizing an event called the Christmas Shopping Center.
The Christmas Shopping Center was designed to bring small stores together in a mall-like atmosphere where shoppers could come and browse and do their shopping without having to drive all over town to get to them.
I had 25 or 30 stores represented and it was a wonderful season for them. Everybody made money...but me.
I was attacked by the consumer advocate of one TV station because of a complaint that I didn't advertise there was a $1 admission charge.
In his report he neglected to say the dollar was deducted from the first purchase and that all participants had agreed to sell at least 10% off the prices at their main location.
Most stores were actually discounting up to 50%.
But the TV station didn't say this. They just spent two minutes of air time nailing me for not advertising the dollar admission.
It was a two day event and Amarillonians stayed away in droves the second day, after the report.
Interestingly, the stores represented at the "Center" did wonderful business with the crowds that did show up. Enough business to get most of them back a second time the next year.
Although I’d lost money, I believed in the event enough to try it again. This time I bought half page ads in the paper. I advertised the price of admission. I had billboards all over town. And again people stayed away.
Small town memories are not only short sighted but also close minded. There was a good enough turn out again for the stores involved, but I was hoping to make my money through the admission charges. Alas it just wasn't to be.
One store, a music store, did me some real damage in that town. The owner had laid out $50,000 for new guitars, keyboards, drum sets, horns of all types and amplifiers. She had originally signed on for one booth.
Then she took another and then another until she had the largest space in the hall.
She didn’t make one sale the entire weekend.
So she got on her soapbox, and it was a longtime Amarillo resident/businesswoman's soapbox, too. And she broadcast to any and all who'd listen how I was the biggest con artist to come down the pike.
She spoke of how much money she'd laid out for her inventory of instruments for the event and hadn't sold a thing and that I should be run out of town on a rail.
She did all her talking on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday following the weekend event.
By Friday her store was bare to the walls.
She'd had the largest rush on musical instruments since she'd opened her shop decades before. Everything was sold. All the stock she’d had on hand plus the stock she had brought in.
This evil minded, slandering, snake-ass, dried out, monkey nippled, severely balding, Cro-Manonic cess pool licking, mange-dog bitch didn't have the mental capacity the good Lord bestowed upon dirt to take into account that people came and "shopped" at the “Christmas Shopping Center”, and at her booth, and watched what little Johnny or Susie picked up and were interested in.
Then, when they were tucked away at school, Mom and Pop got out the credit card and high-tailed it to the store they'd seen the goods at, at the my event.
Only problem for me was, the vile, moronic, gynecologically odoriferous, mutant excuse for a human woman never told all the people she'd bad mouthed me to that she'd sold out.
She just shut up all together and savored the fact I’d put her in a higher tax bracket.
I was ruined.
She was fat and sassy.
Fat being the operative word.
To this day there's still an annual "Christmas Shopping Center" in Amarillo.
Only it's sponsored and run as a highly successful fundraising event by the city’s Junior League!
Lesson: Hell hath no fury like an ignorant businesswoman.
In the year and a half after I'd taken over the trust fund I had spent a good $125,000.
In the process I did fulfill a boyhood fantasy.
For some reason Jeanette and I bought an AMC Pacer when they first came out. Now, I wanted something snazzier.
Dressed in my grungiest cutoff jeans, a tank top and sandals I drove the little pregnant roller skate, as they were labeled, onto the lot of the Bradley Lincoln Mercury Dealership and bought a 1974 Metallic Blue-with-a-White-Landau-roof Lincoln Continental Mark IV two door coupe...for cash!
I checked it out, made them an offer and when they asked me if I wanted to trade the Pacer in on it I fulfilled that fantasy and told 'em no, I'd write a check for it.
I ripped it out of the checkbook and the startled sales manager immediately rushed to his little cubicle and called the bank.
After a few moments it was Mister Moeller this and Mister Moeller that.
The original fantasy was of buying a Corvette. Still, I was satisfied. After all, now I was a family man and needed the room.
I still fantasize about the Corvette; a fella can dream.
Lesson: Sometimes you have to wisely spend your money foolishly.
But I was getting more and more tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment