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

perform two shows in St. Joseph, Michigan. Between shows I went to a trailer near the stage to get paid. In entering the trailer, the DJ who promoted the show greeted and paid me, while the spineless disc jockey who emceed the show alerted state troopers that he had seen a loaded .38 Special handgun in my briefcase. I was taken away in handcuffs through the thousands of teenaged fans and brought directly to jail.
    Because of my status as a major star on tour with a schedule to keep, we were able to get a judge to hear my case immediately. During the arraignment, I was stunned to see the judge was so drunk he could hardly take his seat at the bench. It turned out that his wife had died the afternoon before and he had drowned his sorrows in a bottle. It was for this reason that New York was able to get the incident quashed from my record because the only judge who could free me was drunk when I was arraigned. Turned out I didn’t even have to produce any documents regarding the gun.
    I later learned there was a small riot when fans learned I wasn’t going to get to play the second show. And to let you know, I had purchased the gun legally in Texas, and it was legal in Michigan. But, it was against the law in Illinois, where the disc jockey was from.
    Back in New York City, Bob Crewe flew me in to do another session as a solo and came up with a fantastic R&B ballad called “Takin’ All I Can Get.” It was such a good song and my performance was so emotional that Aretha Franklin, who had by now switched to Atlantic, was considering doing a version of it. But again Mr. Crewe had miscalculated the public’s appetite for a solo Mitch Ryder. He wasn’t even close to throwing in the towel, however, so now he had to try to keep the momentum of the group going and take us out of that mediocre territory called “the one hit wonder.”
    We went back in the studio to do several more cover tunes and add to the growing vault of recorded material being collected. It has been noted that, in the approximately two years and four sessions the band and I were together in New York recording, Bob Crewe managed to turn those sessions into the release of five albums of covers and originals, with the sixth album being the monumental disaster “What Now My Love.”
    The song he chose next “Little Latin Lupe Lu” was interesting as a single because it had been released just three months prior by the Righteous Brothers, and our version went higher up the charts than theirs, landing safely in the top twenty. It was clear to anyone paying attention that the group and I had a certain sound that was connecting with the public.
    The sessions that I worked on with the band took place at three different studios, and much of the solo stuff that Mr. Crewe did with me was recorded at Bell Sound Studios. When I made these trips into New York, as was happening more frequently, I stayed in a hotel and visited Mr. Crewe at The Dakota.
    The Dakota intrigued me because it was clearly prime Central Park real estate, but the stuff that went on in Mr. Crewe’s place betrayed the general notion that people of wealth comported themselves in a low profile, conservative manner. I don’t know if Alan was also living in the cavernous apartment, but every time I visited he was there. The cultural swings that were taking place in America at that time, I was convinced, had found birth either in The Dakota specifically or New York City in general.
    One day Alan attempted to have sex with me but ended up damaging me so badly he went, driven by shame and guilt, to Tiffany’s and bought me a watch that cost several thousand dollars.
    Alan now got down to the business of getting me a booking agent. He chose Frank Barcelona at Premier Talent, a place where I met Ritchie Nader, who later became a promoter of note. I ended up having sex with almost every one of Frank’s female secretaries, to the point that Frank begged me to leave them alone.
    I think what happened was a reversion back to my earlier reaction at the Village in Detroit after the incident with Timmy. I didn’t believe I was a homosexual, and so I went about proving my manhood and satisfying my perverted sense of sexuality, as learned in my childhood neighborhood, by having sex with as many women as I could. It did not occur to me that I was cheating on Susan because I wasn’t in love with any of the women I bedded, and I truly missed Susan and Dawn.
    My way of trying to solve the problem was to fly