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

didn’t know. What I knew for certain was that I was chasing stardom, and in the beginning of that journey nothing else mattered at all, except success. I was without question a star. But how big a star was what Mr. Crewe wanted to know.
    If I had to pick a moment in time that demonstrated I had found happiness it would have been my time with Susan and Dawn, and eventually our son, Joel Matthew. We were a young family blessed with good health, a little money and some success. I remember looking into Susan’s eyes and I could tell she had a notion as to the meaning of love. I, however, was having a hard time dealing with the very same subject she so easily seemed to embrace as the natural progression of things. It was as if she believed we would truly and forever be in love if we only had the chance to become familiar to each other.

     
    My fixation was a bit more complex and confusing and had very little to do with the love we needed to survive. But now, with the sorry benefit of hindsight, I know that my choice of priority on that issue stands foolishly alone as a monumental mistake. If you grew up as I had, with no mentors or role models to guide you to maturity, and instead stood alone your entire life in an open field greeting every fallen object from the sky that bounced off your head with a “what the fuck was that?” only then can you understand how difficult my responsibilities were. I began at the age of nineteen in trying to make a marriage work. The question that plagued me concerned my ability to hold on to what we had with regard to success andask myself, “how much of what I had was I responsible for bringing into being, and how much belonged to Bob Crewe?”
    Was my self-esteem so battered that I could dare imagine he could make a star of anyone? Was it that easy?” Was it as easy as picking from the enormous litter of young men who wanted to become stars? Something, at least in this instance, told me I had played a part in this success and I recalled what my high-school vocal instructor, Del Towers, had said about my being extremely talented. I decided it wasn’t all about Bob Crewe. It was at least about the two of us, and a good deal about the band.
    Being a star was only important for what it could bring into my life and all of the attendant changes therein. I wasn’t taking myself as seriously as some of my more successful and more intelligent peers in the business. No matter how well I performed, or how beautifully I sang, I hadn’t been the one down in the trenches with the lawyers and accountants hammering out the deals. This was all out of my control. I was simply along for the ride, and I often thought that my fellow artists who were paying attention to such details were being paranoid. My ego was maturing on style, as opposed to substance. As long as the hit records kept coming, I was safe from the ill will of an industry that, by nature, was insensitive and exploitive and whose executives were, for the most part, angry and bitter at having to suffer the childish abuse of so many of their client victims.

Chapter 13
     
    T HE FIRST GLINT OF SUN WAS just about ready to tear apart my eyes as it approached the crest of the hill we had staked out to park on. I had gotten out of the limo to take a piss before it became too light outside. I looked back at the limo and David Rudnick, our driver, slowly rolled down the power windows and a huge mushroom of pent up cigarette smoke billowed out into the fresh Long Island country air. The music from the radio was too loud with the windows down. Somebody would notice us. David turned off the radio and I watched with amusement as the bent coat hanger antenna on the beat up Cadillac limo jerked and twisted its way back into the fender.
    We hadn’t been sitting on the hill that long and we were beginning to sober up. A few hours earlier, at the conclusion of another boring middle-of–the-week Manhattan night, David Rudnick, club owner and artist manager Steve Paul, a few others and I had hatched a plan. After several large bottles of alcohol––to tide us over on the hour and a half drive to this mansion on Long Island––we began to make our move. I didn’t know any of the principles, or the victim. I just knew that at three A.M. it sounded like a pretty neat idea.
    Steve Paul’s Scene was one of the hundreds of trendy clubs that popped up in Manhattan and for some months, or hopefully years, would be the hip place to mingle with a