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

the hotel, as the neighborhood became increasingly worse with each passing block, I wished I could someday have what I had just seen. Not anything Mr. Crewe held out or represented. Just the kind of material wealth he had access to. I could give those things to Susan and she would know I was a success. My malleability was beginning to drip down my leg, as was my compulsion to have that which I had not earned. I began to walk faster. I became anxious about what to tell the boys when I got back to the hotel because I knew they were going to want to hear everything, and I began to edit out things I thought might make them jealous. How stupid of me. Mr. Crewe hadn’t even mentioned the band. Nor had we spoken of recording or anything else they might want to hear. This was going to be a disaster. Well, we were still all in this together. I stopped walking and slowly turned my focus back on the band and said to myself . . . wow, here we are. New York.
    Everyone I had talked to over the months, from the trash man to the store owner, agreed that for what I was trying to do, New York was the place. But the chances of success as opposed to the probability of failure were not in my favor and most peoplehere, like everywhere else, were simply trying to survive. So what secret promise would it take to make someone want to die trying to survive in New York City?
    While I waited for that answer I began an entertaining observation through which I watched the futility of the attempts the wealthy employed to balance their egos against their fake humility and gratefulness. New York City, because of its symbolic value and name recognition benefited from the term “great city” in the same manner Washington D.C. enjoys its symbolic crest as a “bastion of freedom,” while not having to look more than a few miles in any direction to see the not so pretty side of the democratic experiment. It is a facade made credible by the numbers. Is New York different from Detroit? Yes, but only because it has the cheapest to most expensive food on the menu.

Chapter 10
     
    T HE PROBLEM, AS IT WOULD BECOME clearer over the length of the relationship with Bob Crewe, was the fact that this successful music maker represented an age and philosophy in American music that had only recently begun undergoing––and was not responding very well to––great changes. These changes were occurring as a result of a relentless onslaught being promoted by the British money hounds. If we were to give proper credit to the British music industry, it would have to be for their uncanny opportunistic instincts and an undying love for American culture. After all, when you live on an island the only thing new is whatever washes up on shore. So, in terms of music, it was the British beachcombers that instigated the regurgitated “new” sound of the British invasion.
    The Brits began their exploitation of an America that was smothering under the gloom of a presidential assassination, a quicksand foreign war in Vietnam, an increasingly violent civil rights struggle, and a conservative mind-set that was falling under its own weight. That is why, when they did appear, the British were such a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t about their music. In the beginning they were all doing covers of American artists. But then, just to make the trail a little colder, they began doing covers of what had been, until then, largely overlooked black American recordings. I have to marvel at their pious declarations and justifications. The British claimed it was a response to the undeniable racism being practiced in America. They were simply giving credit to artists who were shunned because of America’s racist practices.
    Wow! I had to go back and look, but I discovered that the British had such strict immigration policies in place at that time that they hadn’t given themselves proper credit for that day in the future when the “Empire” would come home to roost on the peaceful, loving non-racist soil of Great Britain. Weren’t these the same British whohad subjugated entire continents of people who were not white? Of course they were. And wasn’t that going to be a special day for “Great Britain” when the Empire’s people of color came home to collect that which was promised them? Yes, indeed it was. But, it wouldn’t be financially or morally prudent to face that truth just as you were waging a campaign to spank Americans for being so naughty. So, they would eat their