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

Jr. Life doesn’t get much better than that. And that recording, along with my fearful swirling brain, was what I took to the meeting with Barry Kramer.
    Barry Kramer was a local Detroit boy with national intentions who had a love for the written word and a soulful desire for money. This was the late nineteen sixties and hippies, drugs, love, and peace were about to bring the status quo to its knees. Barry was going to be intentionally near the front of the movement by capitalizing on his representation of that culture through an alternative magazine he called
Creem
. The password became “Boy Howdy.”
    Barry was a short man who was naturally high-strung and nervous, and who chain-smoked more than a cowboy on the range during breeding season. When he was still a child, his father suffered a fatal heart attack while playfully lifting Barry into the air. When they hit the floor, Barry had to struggle to break himself free of his dead father’s grasp. Barry’s eyes were green and cold, as if this unexplained hurt was forever trapped behind them. He had a great sense of humor, but unfortunately it only showed when he was stressed and angry.
    I discovered many years later that Barry had photographed some of my publicity shots in New York. The infamous swimsuit collection, to be exact. What made that shoot important is that back in the day I was having difficulty getting on the covers of the teen magazines. I was discussing this fact with Connie my publicist when she said, “To be frank, you’re just not pretty enough.”
    At that time, Bob Crewe would have done anything to attract the teen mags, and that was a big difference between his expectations and mine. The last thing I wantedwas be on a cover of a magazine. But, the shots with me in various styles of swimwear were taken anyway.
    The
Creem
offices were in a mostly abandoned three-story building in a seedy section of Detroit on the Cass Corridor near Wayne State University. It was the perfect location for Barry’s embryonic, youth-oriented publication. Before he was finished, he would have a magazine that threatened to rival the fabled West Coast rag,
Rolling Stone
. Barry Kramer was all about business.
    Larry and I walked through the broken glass and empty, dust-laden barber chairs of the vacated beauty/barber shop on the first floor and up the stairs to Barry’s office. I don’t know exactly what made Barry decide to take on my resurrection, but I was very relieved when he did because I was at the end of my rope and couldn’t bring myself, for any reason, to go back to New York. I don’t believe Barry, or even Larry for that matter, sensed how desperate and insecure I was about being Mitch Ryder.
    Bob Crewe had told me I would never be a star again, and I had managed to make many enemies before I left New York. Sadly, I didn’t realize at the time that paybacks to powerful people in the music business were an option I could enjoy. On the back cover of
The Detroit-Memphis Experiment
I took a written swipe at Robert Stigwood, calling him “an old ass I once knew.” That, along with what I said about him personally, his relationship, and the manner in which I left his partner, Robert Fitzpatrick, would all come back to bite me in the ass down the road.
    But, here and now in Detroit, what happened in New York didn’t seem to matter. Here, I was a star. I still wouldn’t have to try very hard to get laid. I hadn’t been in Detroit much up to this point, so fame continued to have it’s totally unbelievable effect on the female population. Had Detroit been unforgiving, this place in time most likely would have ended the Mitch Ryder story, but being divorced and broke was something that was overlooked as the name marched on.
    One of the biggest problems Barry faced was the fact that he now had to divide his energy and attention between the two different entities he controlled. I remember very well the initial displeasure of the
Creem
staff upon the announcement of my arrival, but beyond their displeasure there was curiosity as to how Barry, whom they admired, was going to pull this whole thing off.
    One of the first people I met was the magazine’s chief photographer/layout man/graphics specialist, Charlie Auringer, who over the years has revealed himself to be a genuinely nice man who had occasional bouts of binge drinking. At the time I met him, he had an insatiable desire for young beautiful girls who, when asked what they did for a living, would all