A Hard Case of the Blues

To further complicate matters, one of the recordings that Relix leased from Ames was released by Relix as a live Johnny Winter CD called Walking by Myself, complete with liner notes written by Ames himself saying what a great 1969 concert it was.

Canova's voice rises with outrage as he remembers a letter concerning the CD received by a music magazine. "Relix is engaged in false advertising," the letter said. "This is a concert from 1977 from the Calderon Concert Hall in Long Island." As it happened, Canova says, the letter was right. That meant Relix had released a CD with music to which they had no legal right. Distribution rights to recordings made by Johnny Winter in 1977 are owned by Sony, not by Ames. So Ames wouldn't have been able to license those rights to Relix.

"We were hoodwinked," Canova says, "and now we're infringing on the rights of Sony. Those are big boys, we don't want to fight with them. And Roy Ames not only distributed material he had exclusively licensed to Relix worldwide, he had the nerve to come out on Home Cooking with Gangster of Love, which is a complete knockoff of material that is licensed to Relix."

With Sony in the picture, small squabbles could easily escalate to major ones. And there are more than a few squabbles appearing on the horizon. Jim Bateman, who has managed Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown for the last 20 years, says he has an attorney looking into issues related to Ames. And Paul Verberne, a Houston lawyer with an interest in entertainment law, says he's heard that a move is afoot to track down performers with complaints about Ames to see if a joint action of some sort might be possible. And George Jacobs, a B.B. King fan who prosecuted Ames when Jacobs was with the Harris County district attorney's office in the mid-'70s, has expressed curiosity over how someone with felony convictions could legally be involved in an import and export business.

Meanwhile, Ames continues operating Home Cooking and Clarity, getting notice in the blues magazines, fielding complaints from Houston musicians, filling mail orders for CDs and collectibles, and saying that he's done nothing illegal, that misunderstandings happen. As the lawyers begin to circle, he may well consider everything that's happening to be a big mistake. If so, he could well be right. Only the mistake this time would have been his.