Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

toxic materials, the sewers and water systems were badly in need of repair, as were their electrical and gas supplies. Their roads and highway systems were horrible enough to shake the teeth from your head
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Of the pre-war buildings left standing after the Russian’s vicious, criminal, and punitive military assault, those that remained––along with the street lights, traffic signals, tunnels, sidewalks and bridges––were falling apart with broken and shattered brick and mortar lying about everywhere. The bending and rusting of faded and twisted tired steel and metal was as if we had been transported back to the First World War and no one had done any repair. It was the same in the West in 1945, but the Allied Forces, along with the Marshall Plan, went right to work making the infrastructure new and safe. The Russians didn’t have the resources, and had suddenly, but not unexpectedly, become our enemies. The war had practically destroyed them
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If it hadn’t been for the Americans, the allied countries would have been in the same condition. Britain was especially hurting. Unless you knew the address of the building you were looking for, there was no way to find it. And many times you couldn’t find an address. There were shortages of everything in the East including good housing, which was a laughing and shameful matter. The police, under the directive of Stalin, spied on everybody, and neighbor spied on neighbor. Alcohol became the soothing balm. I could relate to all of it
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    Many of the fans I culled from this situation were not so angry with the Russians, because many of them were children and grandchildren of mixed marriages between German woman and the occupying Russian soldiers. Most of the German males had found their end fighting for the German army, but those who remained together with their wives after the war gave birth to what became the elite of East Germany. Pure Germans. Pure survivors. Information was at a premium in the East, and that explained the beautiful image as I stood for the first time looking over East Berlin and saw the color gray like a giant forest. Except there were no trees.
    There were, however, television antennas reaching for the sky everywhere you looked, all searching for a view of the West. The East Germans had the highest GNP for all of the communist block countries, but that was more a tribute to the character of the German people than anything else. To contrast that against the excesses of the democratized bold swagger and decadence of the quickly adjusted behavior and post war inheritance of the West was to create a vision clouded by tears.
    My original fans were in the West and even though they felt the pressure of gross American capitalism, they were culturally distinct from American kids. It was not their abhorrence of materialism or the language barrier that set them apart as much as it was the result of the British, French, and American occupation.
    This provided three different views on instilling democracy and each is very distinct. In a nutshell, the British occupied the North, which included such cities as Hanover and Hamburg, while the French occupied the part of Germany that ran next to it’s Eastern border around cities such as Saarbrucken. This left the Southern half of Western Germany pretty much to the Americans around Bavaria and cities like Frankfurt. Berlin, the half that was given to the Allies, was shared by all three, and sat in the middle of the Russian sector completely surrounded by the Russians.
    Naturally, because the Americans were the only one of the allies in a strong economic condition after the war, the cities to first rise up from the ashes and devastationwere those in the American controlled zone. Even though all three allies had a say in the fate of Berlin, it was the Americans who helped West Berlin survive the Russian attempt to blockade and starve the West Berliners into submission, demonstrating courage, commitment, and compassion. This was the better side of my homeland. When the attempt failed, the Russians, with their East German puppet government, built a steel and concrete wall that spanned and separated the entire city into two halves. They could no longer tolerate the free flow of their brightest and most industrious escaping to the West.
    Children born in the West at this time developed a hybrid philosophy of French liberalism, with a hint of socialism, British conservatism, paranoia, and American conquering hero