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

know as Little Richard, was the brainchild of Bob Crewe. On the playback everyone agreed, including the two Rolling Stones, that we had a “hot” recording. The sessions were long, but we were able to compile nearly an album’s worth of material. We were then sent back out on the road.
    Bob Crewe knew how to use his energy to promote his properties, and had installed in his office one of the first technical marvels of that time. He set up a dedicated telephone line designed specifically to transmit a recording he could play for the person on the other end of the line. The signal from the recording went directly into the telephone transmission without exterior sound. But, every once in a while, Bob picked up a connected line, broke the signal and screamed words of excitement and encouragement to the promotion man or radio station he was calling.
    This was to work them into a frenzy of “I gotta have that!” He screamed out things like “Don’t you love it?” “Isn’t that great?” “I love it, I love it, I love it!” He snapped his fingers and was all over his office dancing about and jumping up and down like a wild man, very much the same as he was with us in the recording studio as he tried to inspire us to excitement.
    Those early hits we made couldn’t, as good as the band was, have had the element of alive insanity contained in the grooves without Alan’s personality inside the studio. I don’t mean in the control room. I mean actually in the studio, during the recording, flying about like a man possessed.
    We had taken an extended gig in up-state New York in a town called Massena, which lay off the St. Lawrence Seaway. We bought BB guns and spent our days going to the dump and picking off rats. At night we did five sets, forty-five minutes each, and had Sunday off. It was a grind, but somehow Earl Elliot, our bass player, managed to find a girlfriend and that pissed us off. One less gun at the dump. Then we got called back to New York to finish a few more songs. This time it was a different studio, but it was the entire band again and everyone felt positive.
    Just as we were feeling like a group, I was again invited to The Dakota where something very special was about to occur. I was picked up by a mysterious man with long hair on a Harley motorcycle and driven to Columbia Studios, where I was quietly ushered into the control room and allowed to witness Bob Dylan working on
Highway 61 Revisited
.I can’t explain it at all. It was an honor that still baffles me and I certainly hadn’t acquired the credibility to be there. My self-confidence had not yet proven itself worthy of such an event either. Whatever message Bob Crewe was spreading about the abilities of his next star was beginning to scare me because Bob Dylan was already a giant. More than anything else, I wondered if Bob Dylan knew I was there.
    As the summer ended we found ourselves playing a naval base in Newfoundland, where I actually died from a mis-read prescription for my annual shot of penicillin, a carry over from my days of rheumatic fever. I awoke to see a football helmet and felt a strong pain in my chest where a doctor had rushed from the football field to beat me back to life.

     
    Mitch and Alan Stroh
    Then, as it grew colder, near the end of fall, we returned to Massena for the grind once again. We didn’t know it, because we were in such a remote part of the world, but “Jenny Take a Ride” was coming up the charts. Then a call came near the end of our engagement. It was a call that would change my life so completely that, as it may have now become apparent to you, I stillmay not know fantasy from reality. But the reality on that most perfect of nights was the fact that we had to leave the next day to do a gig near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a place called The Little Red Rooster because “Jenny Take a Ride” had entered the top ten there, and was bursting into the top ten in Detroit, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and quite a few other major cities. But for us, the shocker was the fact that we were being paid for fifteen minutes on stage what we made for the entire week doing six days a week, five shows a day.

     
    An artist’s very first hit record is more a curiosity than a statement. It is a debut into a world so different from normal that it bends time and space around it. One has to wonder where such a terrifying power comes from, how is it kept under control, and who controls it? But that is only from the