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

electric guitar the great Eric Clapton. And, I sang with rock guitarist Jeff Beck at a club when Rod Stewart was his singer.
    Despite the company I was keeping––and my star status––I lacked confidence. I felt I was living a lie. Perhaps it was a latent psychosis or an uninvited monkey on my back, or maybe just the silent turning of the worm. Whatever it was, it gnawed at me constantly. I wanted to grow as an artist and I pleaded my case to whomever would listen that Bob Crewe was stifling my creative freedom with his ironclad control. All around me it seemed my fellow artists were making their own music and I just wanted a fair chance to prove myself.
    But then strange shit would happen, like hearing Jimi Hendrix do a cover of “Hey Joe,” or for that matter Jimi’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watch Tower,” which he performed at the New York City Center for the Performing Arts, with Bob Dylan and me and the rest of the world watching in awe.
    The drugs, the women, the rumors, and my street fame and behavior were out of control to the point that Mr. Crewe and Alan were becoming concerned with their investment. But, I continued on. Somehow it got back to them that I had spent several hours in the back of a Manhattan bus with the drummer from Sly Stone’s band circling the city, unable to remove our white powdered faces as we sat paralyzed for the afternoon. Neither Alan nor Mr. Crewe wanted to see me busted for drugs, or sleeping with trashy women, so they arranged a special meeting.
    It was a two-part plan. The first part was to get me back into the studio and keep me on the road as much as possible, and the second was to find a person to occupy my interest while I was in Manhattan.
    I was introduced to a young socialite from a wealthy family in St. Louis. Her name was Sarah Smithers and her family’s fortune had been created on a foundation of bar soap. Sarah’s father was a diplomat who did a lot of work in Europe, and her brotherwas, at the time I met him, in the military. As I recall, it was the Air Force. But the mansion in St. Louis was occupied by, and the family was run by, the grandmother. She was the one who was clearly in control of the family fortune.
    Sarah was a girl who could have easily been a model, except for her near-sightedness, which led to many unfortunate collisions. She was a close friend of Keith Richards’s girlfriend, Linda Keif. She was also a real blonde, not the kind that half the young women in America were becoming.
    Sarah calmed me down and took the wanderlust away. I almost stopped going to my old haunts altogether. We began seeing people and going to events that I considered a weird cross between outrageous and touristo. We went to museums, strolled in the park, and many times just stayed at her brownstone on the upper-east side conversing over music and literature. We dined with Salvador Dali and his wife at The Plaza and, while Sarah conversed in Russian with them, he and his wife’s hands accidentally connected under the table while each groped for my leg.
    Sarah was clearly upper class and well educated, but she was the black sheep of her family. She existed on an extravagant allowance that only the wealthy can afford their children. It was a new world for me, this calmness and order. It wasn’t that Sarah was incapable of being a wild woman, because she was that and more. It was the way she prioritized events and life that removed the chaos. When we were together we wanted to be away from the madness of the Manhattan trendsetters, whose world we now frequented only out of necessity.

     
    Sarah shared another piece of important common ground with me. She had an insatiable desire for sex. Sarah said she loved me, but I was unable to share that love with her because I was still unwilling to abandon Susan and Dawn. Sarah’s family had me investigated, and even after they made her aware of my private and financial situation, she held fast toher love for me. She persisted in trying to make a home for us in Manhattan. I was on the very edge of destroying my family forever when I reached out to Alan for help, which was ironic since he was the one who had introduced me to Sarah.
    As those days slowly passed, I was getting closer and closer to the superstardom that Alan and Mr. Crewe had worked so hard to achieve. Then came the release of “Sock it to Me, Baby,” our third top ten recording. When you threw in this additional top twenty hit, we were