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

ourselves to think we were beyond the reach of that terrible American hate. Joe, Ronnie, Tommy Stone (who was also one of the Peps), and I knew it wasn’t fair. We all wanted to be stars so we could somehow make up for that “something special” that was missing from our lives, and hopefully get the money we believed would insulate us from the injustice of our times.
    It was no different for Lee Rodgers, who had a local hit with a song called “Sad Affair,” or Leroy Belcher with his song “Superman,” or Little Bit and the Dreamers. I fell for Little Bit but she ended up calling me a dog because at that special moment of put up or shut up I chickened out. Nor was it different for any of the hundreds of young black Detroiters who over the years passed through the Village, sometimes launching a career from that building. The great performer Nathaniel Mayer with his “Village of Love” was one, as was Richard Street and the Distants.
    I don’t know what motivated Gabe and Leo Glantz to open that place, other than money, because they had no love for most of the entertainers. But, we all were thankful to have that stage available. In the end though, the Peps knew that no matter what happened, I could never really know about their lives because I had been born white. But for that God-sent moment in my life I might still be dressed in the cloth of ignorance. I soon became confident enough and good enough to go solo.

Chapter 4
     
    I T WAS, THANK G OD, ANOTHER GIG . I had every intention of adding it to the list of good ones I had privately come to distinguish from the sordid self-indulgence of the bad. The carefree youthful days of the Village were forty hard years behind me now. The blinding, swift complicity and love for the fame and fortune that followed was, by now, part of the historical record kept neatly in a trash bin somewhere. The rapacious, slow moving feast from that point to this was too large and tortuous to commit to film. Now I needed whatever work I could lay my hands on. Another gig in another faraway, hard to get to little town that had rocked with the entire American nation several decades prior to the irrepressible and exciting sound of my cherished string of sixties hit records. They had the money. They paid their deposit. And tonight, in the year 2001, I was still, in the minds of this audience, their “star.”
    “Does the smoke bother you?” the young monitor tech asked as we stared toward the stage and watched highly defined white beams of light, filled with slow floating patterns of exhaled carbon monoxide, move silently through the blackness of the auditorium. “No,” I said. “Not anymore.” I laughed, thinking how I wonder every day when those years of pain in my lungs will turn into something sinister and deserved. “No. It’s not as bad as the fog machines. That stuff makes my throat itch. It makes you dry, you know?” I added as I wiped the cold sweat from my plastic bottled water.
    “Do you still get nervous?” he asked, reacting to my irritated pacing, a result of his endless questions. “Yes,” I said, lying, just to get him off my back. But it did make me think. When did I lose that anticipation? At what point did I become so greatly confident in my ability to entertain that I no longer worried about how I was going to do? Or, conversely, when did I stop caring? All those years in so many different altered states, dragging and strip teasing my weaknesses and addictions and failings before myfans, yet, somehow managing to convince most of them they had witnessed my best. In the balance? Performances so shamefully ugly that no one at all wished to recall. Blind and pointless anger over something as insignificant as fading fame.
    I remember. Yes, I remember with great affection the first time I ever took the stage alone in high school. My knees were shaking and I could not open my eyes. I had held the microphone and stand so tightly there were marks in my skin. Then, when I finished singing, that magic moment of stillness and quiet, and finally, applause. In one motion it was both horrible and magnificent.
    Next, of course, came the Village and my run with the Peps, but getting top billing as the solo artist had proven to be much more difficult. The shining star at the Village prior to my solo debut was a man I’ll call Timmy. I had given Timmy’s endorsement of me for top solo billing to management, but only after his exit. That was Timmy way of repaying