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

eighteen-year-old. I remember thinking at the time, when the boys and I boarded the train for New York City and Susan stood on the platform as the train slowly pulled away, that she was beautiful. I tried to imagine what our baby would look like and, as we waved to each other and she grew smaller and smaller, I determined that he or she would be beautiful, like his or her mother, and I wasn’t going to let my child go through a childhood like the one I had survived. But sixteen hours later, when the train pulled into New York City, paternal muse had grown smaller and smaller and the adventure had begun.
    It was not as if we had started somewhere in middle America, with its chaste knowledge of sophisticated big city intercourse, and slowly worked our way from hamlet to village to town to Mecca. No, we had pretty much gone right from an auto-body shop to the greatest party on earth, and we didn’t have a clue.

Chapter 9
     
    N EW Y ORK . I T IS SAID THAT first impressions are lasting ones and when we stepped out of Grand Central Station, stretching our necks upward to just barely see the sky, our smallness made even the wind-blown New York street trash look more honest and important than the everyday common-place litter on the weed-lined streets of Detroit. Around us lay the ultimate phallic monument to men who would be kings and we were being invited to sample the power of thousands of men, living and dead, whose dreams, even in failure, were greater than anything we dared imagine.
    In the outer extremities, such as Detroit, we had men of vision and power and drive who created their own monuments. But New York, as far as I could tell, was the living, beating heart of the matter and the depository museum of a greatness our Detroit boys had somehow been denied access. The Detroit power brokers had apartments and homes here somewhere, but that was only about money. What they didn’t have was their blood mixed inextricably with the paint on the Manhattan canvas.
    New York City was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I honestly did not know how to act. Should I try to act important, or should I just try to blend in with the general population as they raced by around us, unaware of the magic unfolding by the second? Suddenly Earl, the bass player, woke me from my dream and we began loading three taxicabs with enough equipment and baggage to cause a small bemused crowd to gather long enough to bring a smile to their faces. Hello.
    On the long taxi ride to our recording company, I began to hear voices and see strange visions, as the landscape and city blocks became a blur and I entered an hallucinatory state.
    The stares I now saw were not the blank, vacant stares of mindless wandering. Was this going to be a revolution? Will we stumble upon justice? My weak and abusedimmigrant cousins came from the world community running, crawling, scratching, and clawing. They wanted only the promise of shelter from a life that had already brought them to their knees. All they wanted was enough compassion to allow them to once again dream. But, their predators knew too well how big the pool of pickings would be. There was more than one god at practice here, and Paradise had many addresses. I had already begun to master bringing my eyes down to the floor, but I secretly held on to the beginning evolution of my dreams. In that I found the embryonic search for fame.
    For me, fame presented itself as “Genius, Inc.,” and the man who would radically offer up a cracked prism, a brilliant color kaleidoscope of New York fame and excess, first appeared before me as less than a pure socialite talent. His name was Bob Crewe. Within the hush of this marvelous secret world beneath my feet, creeping along like a slow moving mud slide, were the underworld and gangster connections that were so much a part of the New York music scene.
    But, before I begin my tell-all journey through New York City, let me share with you an impression I proclaimed in the writing of this book. Unbowed and with righteousness about my scorn for my enemies in the music business, I have been, until now, silently waiting for them to die choking on the vomit of their own larcenous victimizing. Their evil and perverse manipulation tortured what was, in the beginning, one of the most innocent and beautiful earthly loves I have ever known, my music and my song. What I brought to those confessions was the essence of my being and the vulnerability of trusting in love.