Chapter 51- The Package

I GOT THE word BJ was coming back to LA. He called me when I was back at Oakhurst Drive in between girlfriends or visiting my parents. I must have still been with Robin, but things were on the wane in our relationship. It wouldn't be long now until the two-year stint with her would end. It must have been Thanksgiving of 1978, that’s why I was home. BJ had called to tell me he, and his friend Walter Hallanan, were coming back to take over the LA pop scene and he was going to send me a package and I was not, under any circumstances to open it. Me being the trusting lad that I was at the time, listened carefully to his instructions. It was going to be a box; roughly the size of a shoebox wrapped in brown shipping paper, and it would be sent to BJ Taylor at the Oakhurst address. “What’s in it?” I asked my friend and social mentor. “Don’t worry about it. But I need to know I can trust you not to open it. The contents are very personal, and it is something that will help all our careers.” I wondered what it could be. Were they contracts from a record company? Were they gold bars or coins that his aging mother and father had given him to get him back on his feet again in LA?

BJ had a business partner, Walter Hallanan, who had sold his house in the Philadelphia area and had bought himself a significant percentage of Taylormade (BJ’s music company) productions. He wasn't coerced, nobody held a gun to his head or even twisted his arm— he did it willingly and under his own cognition. As I mentioned before, BJ could sell Bibles to an atheist, or garlic to a vampire, and he had sold poor Walter the bill of goods, lock stock and barrel. Welcome to the wild, wacky, and wonderful world of showbiz, Mr. Hallanan.

The package arrived right before Thanksgiving, and I had already told my folks that it would be coming and not to open it. I knew that they would never open mail belonging to someone else, but I was only taking precautions since I knew how valuable it was to BJ—it was a matter of life or death to him. I must have been staying in my old room in the back because I was the first one to see that brown shoebox size package addressed to a Mr. BJ Taylor. I was curious as to the contents of this shoe-box size package. What in the world could it be? But being the loyal and trusting friend that I was, I didn't open it. I might have lightly shaken it, or sniffed it, but I didn’t open it. There it stood on the edge of the mahogany baby grand piano in my parent’s living room.

BJ and Walter arrived in LA about a week or two later and I picked them up at the airport in my Mom’s Mercedes. There were these two six-foot four-inch bearded Philadelphians that looked exactly alike. At first I thought that Walter was BJ, since I hadn’t seen BJ in a couple of years—that’s how much they looked like one another. We all drove back to Oakhurst, and I asked my folks if it would be all right if the two transient friends of mine could stay in the back room for a night or two while they went apartment hunting in Hollywood. Of course, my parents being the greatest people that ever lived said they would be more than happy to accommodate them. They were always so supportive of my friends and my endeavors. God, I miss them so much now.

I gave BJ the package and he said thanks. I thought he was going to open it right there and then to make sure everything was hunky-dory. He didn't. He asked me to drop him and Walter off at a friend’s house in Hollywood and would call when he needed to be picked up. He said it would be worth my while to be around when he called in a few hours. So, I hung around my parent’s living room, played a little piano, watched some TV, probably a Dodger game with the incomparable voice of Vin Scully and waited.  He didn't call that day. He didn't call the next day. On the third day he finally called to tell me that they had rented a house at the top of Sunset Plaza for a hefty sum of money. I was wondering how in the world he could afford something like that. When he gave me a call to come up and see the place I was amazed. It was a modern house with white carpets and built on stilts. It looked out over the entire city, and I felt that BJ was on his way back with a vengeance, and this time he was taking no prisoners. I knew that Walter had sold his house to help finance their move from the city of brotherly love to the city of angels, but there must have been something valuable in that box to allow them the extravagance to shell out at least twenty-five hundred dollars a month on a place in the hills, not to mention the car they had rented— and it was party time every night. The bar was always loaded (as were the patrons) with everything you could imagine, and the fridge well stocked with cold cuts and Heineken beer. There were always beautiful women there drinking and snorting a white powdery substance which, from time to time, I sampled myself, but mostly I partook of the green leafy substance rolled in a Zig Zag.

It wouldn't be long until BJ had finagled studio time back at the Record Plant working with Michael Bronstein, a staff engineer who was employed at that studio. He had hired some of the best studio musicians including Jeff (Skunk) Baxter to play guitar, Earl Campbell on drums and many other giants of the music industry. I even played guitar on the two tracks called Rock and Roll City and Hollywood, the latter written about a woman named Holly, who would and could! The tracks rocked and I was getting caught up in the glitz and glamour of BJ’s world again. He was on his way back and I thought if I could hang on his coattails, success may just rub off onto my lapels. What did I have to lose? Silverspoon was a painful memory now and I had no idea what Blair, Stephen and Joey were up to. I had broken up with Robin and I was a single guy of twenty-six. Every night we would all meet up at Roy’s restaurant across the street from the famed “Riot House” and I would always sample their classic Hot and Sour soup or Chinese chicken salad. I never had to pay for a thing. But I would pay in other ways. There are no free lunches, or free soup and salad, as the case may be. It wasn't until a year later, maybe longer when I finally found out what was inside that shoebox wrapped in brown shipping paper. He told me that it was a large amount of that same white illegal substance he was sampling before that was the entire rave in Hollywood, if not the whole country—the finest that money could buy. I was flabbergasted. How could he use me like that? How could he jeopardize, not only my safety but the safety of my parents? “The end justifies the means,” he said, “and it’s not like you didn't benefit from the contents of the box, Jimmy”. I knew it was wrong and I felt guilty about what could have happened, but it was too late to do anything about it.

 This is the guy who once convinced me to charge a birthday present for my mother at Max Stollman’s Pharmacy, the family druggist (Mom had a charge account there) who had a shop on Wilshire and San Vincente. He emphatically told me we would pay the bill before anyone was the wiser. Well, the bill came before I had a chance to intercept, and the feces hit the fan. I took the fall for that and kept BJ out of it. This is also the same guy who, when I wanted to trade in my Martin D-18 in on a five-year-old Gibson J-200 at West LA Music, helped put me over the edge on my decision to acquire the guitar. I wrote a check for six hundred dollars on an account that only had two hundred in it. He said he had a check coming on Monday and it would be covered. It never came or came late, and the check bounced. My dad had to make up the difference. It wasn’t looking good for me in my father’s eyes then. Don’t get me wrong about BJ, I loved him like a brother, or as if he was a crazy old uncle, the kind you go visit and not mention it to the rest your family. This same guy also provided me with a beau-coup of opportunities in the music biz—he always promoted me as a great songwriter and would inspire me to play in my “Feely Wangbar” (surf-blues) Stratocaster style. He coined the name Feely Wangbar for me. I think he thought of me as his little brother—the one he never had. I was weighing my options, but I knew covering for BJ was getting old and I didn’t want to be taken advantage of—even though, in essence, it was a two-way street. I was a willing participant. Soon the money would be gone, and BJ would have to find other people (including Walter) to entice into his world of rock and roll and debauchery. I wasn't going to be one of them—not this time.

I (or Jim Phillips) had a new job selling typewriter ribbons and lift-off tape at Central Supply in Hollywood run by the irrepressible Ed Blair, who I had met at Alice’s house. Alice was the landlady of a cute little house on Laurel Canyon where Robin had moved into the room downstairs. I made sure she was close by since I had rented a treehouse on Gould—a studio apartment surrounded by Jacaranda and Night Blooming Jasmine. It was right down the street from Chas’s house on Walnut drive just off Ridpath in the famed Canyon. I don’t really know why Robin and I broke up, but it was over, and we both knew it by the end of 1978. Maybe it was because we were too much alike in some ways and totally different in others. Maybe it was the oceans of coffee she and I would drink trying to write songs. It was getting on my nerves having a lover who was also a songwriting partner. I knew it would be better for my psyche to be with a woman who had nothing to do with the music business. That would happen to me much sooner than I thought.