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

was this group of musicians that was the line-up for the next tour and the next CD,
La Gash
.
    At this point it is necessary to stress how much sacrifice, professional hard work, tireless effort, and sheer belief in my future Marty Augosta had given to my cause for so many years. As road managers go, he was quality. The guy was made for the job, but personal matters, as they often do in music, compelled him to move away. But Marty never lost faith in the belief that I would someday rise again.
    I saw Marty a few years ago and he, like all of us, showed the unforgiving signs of life’s toll as we stumble through our variety of dreams in hopes of ending it all on a good note. I sometimes wonder, had we all been privileged and able to afford to avoid the pressures of bill collectors, street life, hustlers, con artists, ill-willed characters, police, drugs, overwhelming medical needs, search for decent shelter, and safety from the masses that tear each other apart like cannibals in order to eat enough to survive, would we still show the tell-tale signs of a life spent and wasted?
    I am blessed to have escaped some of this. There is no secret. It is just conceptually beyond proven truth for most of my fellow common folk. Love what you do in this life. In my life, that has sustained me, but I also had to take the ugliness and digest it into a form that, when put on display, looks charming and acceptable. Call it artistic illusion. Call it denial. But however I care to bury the distastefulness of life, I have not let it consume me. Some may laugh and say if that were true you wouldn’t be writing an autobiography. I’ll deal with that issue in my summation.
    On the musical side of life I wanted to make higher quality albums for my future works, but Uwe Tessnow was unwilling to put up the money necessary unless he was given a bigger piece of the pie. Because the growth of the music itself was so important to me, I gave him control of the masters and
La Gash
became another upward step in terms of my writing, production, and artistic growth.
    The weakest part of the album was Danny’s drums. Although he had come a long way in a short time, he was not a drummer of vast knowledge regarding the different musical styles I presented to him. Nonetheless,
La Gash
gave me more confidence and demonstrated to Uwe that I was capable of creating better and better music. The first single was called “Do You Feel All Right?” It is sometimes still included in my European show because of its mood and quality.
    This group would last a good while in America. One reason I believe is because most of the musicians wanted to continue to come back to Europe with me. We were wild on the road, but not the dangerous wild of former groups. It was an innocent, almost immature, kind of wild that made us do things like cover the door handles of rented cars with peanut butter, so when one of the guys went to open the car door they ended up with peanut-butter all over their hands. The ringleader title of these childish pranks was split between Danny McAleer and Joe Gutc.
    My personal life was transforming as well. I had never made a link between having a good personal human relationship and making good music, so I tended to separate the two. It was like being married to two different women, I suppose. After the divorce from Kimberly, indeed, while I was waiting for it to become final, I began a relationship with a woman named Megan, to whom I am still married. But it did not come without a price. The price she asked, to be in a relationship with her, was communication, truth,fidelity, sobriety, protection, shelter, ambition, praise, no abuse, and unconditional love. It makes me wonder as I write this if all of the above mentioned were unconditional.
    Unlike every other relationship with women that I had been in, my relationship with Megan did not start out sexual. We first met at a Kmart store. I was trying to figure out what I needed to plant roses, and while walking to the garden section fell behind a woman pushing three pre-school children in a cart. As she walked with her hair all wet, obviously having just come out of a shower, her sun-dress moved in the rhythm and fashion of a free, happy spirit who enjoyed life to the fullest with a basket filled with mischief-making children.
    We both arrived at the garden area at the same time. Then she turned, and our eyes met. Well, not quite. I had on a pair of very black sunglasses. But even through the