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

perspective of someone on the outside looking in. If you’re in the business, the first hit record, especially coming from an independent label as ours was, is filled with enormous possibility. Not the least of these possibilities is financial gain, and every gamer involved switches into high gear and straps themselves in for the ride because every facet of your being is rushed into a measure of time a million times faster than anything you have ever known.

Chapter 11
     
    S USAN AND I TOOK TO MARRIAGE and parenthood quite naturally and even though we were young (we were both about to leave our teenage burdens behind us), we were happy and proud. It was nice to have the support of our families and we felt, for lack of a better word, adult. It showed in our caring for Dawn, in each other, and the way we assumed our responsibilities. My family concentrated their pride more in my career than my little family, and even though Susan’s parents and Aunt Betty were bragging about my career too, they cared more about Susan, the baby, and me as a good father.
    It is one of those memories that you can’t let go of. I was in our apartment, the Wagon Wheel Apartments in Royal Oak, Michigan, having not been home for very long, and Susan and I were awakened by the sound of the clock radio going off at seven-thirty A.M. to the sound of the band and me playing “Jenny Take a Ride” and the disc jockey screaming, “If this doesn’t wake you up, nothing will.” Our record had just hit number one in Detroit. We had done it. That unbearable separation of almost a year had finally begun paying dividends. On top of that, the band and I had left The Coliseum House in New York for good and we were all back home feeling secure and basking in the glory of success. Two weeks later the recording entered into the history books as our first top ten recording in the United States.
    Susan and I purchased our first vehicle, a small blue rear-engine Corvair convertible, which a consumer advocate later titled “unsafe at any speed.” Gone now were the early days of dating and going out with mostly Susan’s friends, because now we had to trade that anonymity for a more difficult proposition. We still saw most of her old friends when I was in town, and she kept in close contact with her friends when I was gone, but new friends were introducing themselves into our lives and we weren’t prepared for that aspect of budding fame.
    The way I had wished and prayed for fame was suddenly irrelevant when the object of my prayers began to reveal its definitions and demands. We were still fans and consumers of our musical heroes, and neither of us had been capable of making an immediate jump into the persona of the famous. We did a lot of things together in the beginning, trips to visit relatives, shopping for groceries and baby clothes, going for rides in the car, the zoo, taking Dawn here and there, going to Kentucky to visit my dear sister Nina, visiting friends of Susan’s, cooking and eating meals at home, even going to an occasional movie. Stuff like that brought a modicum of stability to my life and I loved being around and watching my baby daughter develop. At this point in time, she had not yet begun to walk.
    As I said, that first hit record is important and New York slowly, under the guidance of Alan Stroh, started to control time and space in such a way that it would not immediately shock my senses, but let me know that I was expected to make myself available for exploitation. Since we only had one top ten, no one knew for sure whether we were a fluke or something to watch out for. With all of the intrusions, Susan and I still felt together as a family, and she herself later said that during those early years I was a good father to Dawn.
    My time was now being divided between home and family, and touring. Sometimes we rented a vehicle and a trailer and did Midwest dates, but we were also put on a couple of Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tours. Those were different. We played big coliseums and arenas because we were part of a package show and were exposed to way more people than we would have been as a solo headliner with one top ten record. In those early days we set up our own gear and traveled to parts of the country that we never could have dreamed of going prior to our good fortune.
    Earl Elliot, the bass player, assumed the role of road manager, which he traded off with me. I was acting as road manager the night we were supposed to