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

attached. Volunteer work is admirable as well. There are a lot of good people in this country, but they are not from the upper class. They sincerely want to make a difference and, as small as it may seem to others, they understand that every little bit helps.

     
    Steven Tyler and Mitch in 2009 at Book Expo America at the Javits Center in New York
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    Hold on now and watch as your boss or the CEO of your company or whomever you work for doesn’t blink an eye when your job and future are given away with no remorse. They don’t have their lives shattered so completely, so very easily.
    Some of you will laugh thinking to yourself, “What is he saying? The nerve of him! How ungrateful. He’s one of the lucky ones. How did this hypocrite Mitch Ryder get a book deal if everybody wants to see him fail? What a crybaby. He makes me sick.”
    Good. It proves that the sick can be made sicker than they already are.
    For one thing, I’ve spent a good deal of my life with my creative abilities pushed by sheer will beyond my inherent capabilities. “He’s famous, or he used to be famous.” No, there is no past tense for fame. Once you earn it fame is yours for life. But fame, at the end of the day, does not magically turn into food on the table. The benefits of fame for me are the blessings I have mentioned, and the fact that I love what I do when I can do it. In my mind I have proven what I set out to do. I am an artist of great achievement in spite of the music industry’s best efforts to stop me. I possess one of the most unique voices in music and my lyrics are among the most truthful you will hear. Plus, I get better every day.
    I also have my fans but they, like myself, are growing older and fewer. I remember telling a friend of mine a long time ago that, “my fans, the people I can most relate to, can’t afford to buy my records and books.” It turns out I might have been wrong. I think the people I can most relate to will find a way hear my records and read my books. It has nothing to do with afford.
    Just as I stated in the beginning of this book, I look out upon the world of my misshapen time. The Midwestern staple of parochial intelligence, stripped naked by the cutting wind from the east, reveals itself embarrassingly thin and overmatched as it’s streaming, tattered flag of pride is ripped from it’s champion’s broken, bloodied hands and thrown upon the dirt of it’s own impotence. Democracy, taunting a person ho is afraid of water, invites him in for another swim through the cold raging waters of blessed freedom.
    THE END
From Megan

     

     

     

     

     

     

APPENDIX A
    When I am onstage I sometimes tell my audiences that one of the great blessings I have enjoyed from my roughly fifty years of entertaining is the opportunity to come to know many of my heroes. I take every chance I can to meet, and maybe sit and talk, with voices and musicians I have come to love and appreciate though their music. Sometimes there is even the chance to perform on the same stage or show with them. In the book
The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll
are approximately twenty-six hundred groups and artists dating back to the late 1940s. That is over fifty years––half a century––with fifty-two names a year on average. I am grateful and proud to be listed among those artists, so I thought it would be helpful to go through the list and see just how many of them I knew or had met or had played on the same bill with.
    It starts with Byron Adams whom I met when John Mellencamp took me to Philadelphia to hopefully perform with him at J.F.K. Stadium. Adams, when introduced, was kind enough but his face said something like “Where will I be in thirty years?”
    The Allman Brothers: I met Frank Barcelona for the first time in over four decades with Mellencamp in Philadelphia. The band Detroit and I were on the same bill in Florida with the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. That was an energetic show.
    Eric Burdon and the Animals: Eric and I go back a long way, from the time I sat in his trailer in Central Park and convinced him to perform a second show for the almost rioting fans, to several engagements over the years on shows all over the country. The last time I saw him he greeted me by saying, “Mitch, you son of a bitch,” and I responded with “Eric, you fucking British twit.” I’ll never consider Eric anything less than competition.
    Asleep at the Wheel: We did some gigs with these