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

twirling and desperate dreams, unaware or even caring whether he was liked or not. The audience always sat there momentarily stupefied until I, or some other patron, tossed a lit cigarette onto the stage as his non-sexy ass wiggled in our face and waited for the inevitable moment when his bare foot came down upon the fires of hell.
    Eventually I decided I was ready to leave school. What was I giving up? High school football games? One night at the Village I witnessed a young man so driven by anger he hand forced a ball point pen all the way into another man’s stomach. No, if it were violence I craved it wouldn’t be the organized brand I got at football games. The alcoholic gatherings of my peers? At the Village they were laying out pills and powders and pot. Another state competition award for singing semi-classical music? I had come to prefer the raw, untrained, unrestrained emotion and potency of rhythm and blues.
    And what would I be leaving behind at home? An evening with the family? It didn’t exist. I remember when I was a child we would sit at the kitchen table, all of us, staring at the radio or some individually reserved space on the wall listening to Arthur Godfrey or
The Lone Ranger
or
The Green Hornet
and not once making eye contact with each other. It was no better when my parents purchased a TV, except we then had a plausible justification for the direction of our eyeballs. There were some wonderful programs:
The Sid Caesar Show
,
The Honeymooners
,
I Love Lucy
. Comedic. Geared to entertain, make you laugh, and communicate to a family that had never learned to communicate with each other. At least with radio we could imagine. With TV, nothing.
    At the Village I began to make friends with many of the black artists. Great entertainers who might never see success but were just learning to walk, as was I, through our anticipation of anything better than what we knew. Some would go on to become stars with Motown Records, a huge worldwide recording label out of Detroit. Others, like Darryl, would swallow defeat and disappear.
    I was invited to join a black group called the Peps. Because I sang my heart out I was allowed to do lead vocal from time to time. If those men knew how much confidence I gained by their acceptance of me, especially Joe Harris, they would no doubt laugh themselves silly. They didn’t just let me sing, they let me into their world, and Detroit in the early nineteen sixties was a tinderbox ready to burst into flame. There was a history of precedent with regard to race relations in Detroit and none of them boded well for the future.
    Many of the performances we did were for black audiences and in one instance I remember a very charming lady walking over to me and saying, “You sing so pretty and you’re so light.” The world was my oyster and everyday brought more knowledge. I learned how essential it was to value the moment, because it was futile to think long term. I learned if I was somebody’s “boy,” I was a short-term investment. I got good at spotting the unmarked police cars that held the “big four,” undercover policemen who were looking for a reason. But, more telling than anything were the unmistakable signposts that outlined the disparity of laws between black and white, and the resulting damage to a human condition forced by white society to singular survival. The uninvited rage that lives on in the flesh of impotence. It was my first opportunity to challenge my racist feelings that were deeply buried beneath the innocence of a young man who believed a class war was more appropriate to his surroundings than a race war.
    I needed to open my eyes a little wider. Of course we lived in a racist society. I could see it in the hesitation of my high school classmates when they refused acceptance of my invitations to watch me perform at the Village. I could see it when we drove through the suburbs and Joe Harris and Ronnie Abner from the Peps would sink down into their seats until their heads were no longer visible. I saw it in the anger of whitepolice who stopped us, who put them in jail and let me go. I knew that whatever I did I couldn’t change the color of my friends’ skin and, like the other members of the Peps, I felt powerless to change the beliefs of people who fostered the institution of racism.
    We weren’t politically motivated civil rights activists. We were teenagers, and every time we performed before white audiences and got applause we allowed