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

becoming very familiar to the public. Along with that came a higher degree of recognition within the music business. My booking agent, Frank Barcelona, had arranged a deal with Hasbro Toys to market a Mitch Ryder doll that was accompanied by a floppy version of “Sock it to Me, Baby.”
    Back in Detroit, Susan and I went shopping at a retail store and bought a few Mitch Ryder dolls for keepsakes. I settled into family life and fortunately for me, Sarah was not the kind of person to deliberately cause disharmony in my marriage. I believe she was leaving it up to me to make a choice over the future direction of my personal life, and at that time I felt confident that I would eventually leave my family for her.
    It was around this time that Alan, under Bob Crewe’s direction, created a plan to break up Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. One needed only look at the cover of the album to understand what was coming. In previous albums, the covers were images of me––and the band. On the cover of the album that featured “Sock it to Me Baby,” was an image of me alone with the band appearing on the backside. The shift in attention was not lost on the band. Plus, they hardly ever saw me except when we were on the road, and the sessions were now being recorded mostly without them.
    Beyond that, Jimmy insisted on keeping the group pure in the sense of its line up and I, now more than ever, wanted to increase its size to include my beloved R&B horn section. Under Alan’s direction, a plot was developed in which I would walk away from the Wheels while on the road. We had spoken to Johnny, the drummer, and he agreed to come along. Jimmy and I already disagreed on the matter, so it was pointless to ask him again. Joey was lost in a world that was destroying him physically, and our bass player, Earl, didn’t seem to care about much of anything except his girlfriend, who was the daughter of a well-established music business boss in Detroit by the name of Harry Balk.
    Early, like thieves in the night, Johnny and I made our departure as the band slept. But just as we were leaving the hotel, Johnny backed out. The years of manipulation by Mr. Crewe, the degrading humiliation of the band members, the loss of two of the original members, the constant bickering between Jimmy and myself, the well-meant intrusion of my peers––all of it had finally paid off. I was alone. I breathed an uneasy sigh of relief, but I was afraid and ashamed. The next day I did my scheduled appearance backed by a group called the Vagrants, featuring Leslie West on guitar. He wasone of the most underrated talents in our fair land, but came with a personality that had to be handled like a tube of nitroglycerine. After the gig I thanked him, but it wasn’t over for Leslie and me. We would bump into each other again under much different circumstances six or seven years down the road.
    The day after that, Alan and I, as we had planned, went to Baltimore and began auditioning horn players, and then went quickly back to New York to put together a rhythm section. It was well established at that time that the best horn players came from Baltimore or Memphis. We began rehearsals in Mid-town Manhattan and slowly the show came together. It was a mutated representation of what I had been striving for, but I threw myself into it thinking I would change things to how I liked them out on the road, away from Alan and Bob Crewe. Alan had brought in Jamie Rodgers, an accomplished Broadway choreographer who had done the choreography for
West Side Story
, to teach me basic dance steps that built into a dance routine that I performed throughout the show. He also taught the entire band a variety of steps they were to perform while they were playing. There was a stage set and expensive custom-made suits for me to wear during the show, and the band had to be fitted for tuxedos with sequined lapels and patent leather shoes.

     
    Lionel Bart
    One day a man arrived with a make-up case for me that was so large and professionally equipped it appeared to have been stolen from a Hollywood film studio. A bus was acquired to transport us, and Frank Barcelona went about putting together a tour that would not be equaled the rest of my career. I think when that tour started I only had fifty-nine or sixty days off the entire year. But before it began, Alan thought it would be fun to do something special to relax––something along the lines of the quiet before the storm.
    We flew