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

Elliot survived Vietnam, came out of the Marine Corps, and put his bass guitar away for good. He retained his love of art in spite of the Marines and was beginning to direct his life to a place where he would be happy and prosperous. He had a distinct talent for floral interior decorating design, and went on to achieve great success with it. He was an entrepreneur who later became an import/export student. He also opened a gay bar in Detroit. Earl, it was suggested, was happier to stay away because he hadn’t had the chance to experience fame beyond the initial hit recording and therefore hadn’t truly been bitten. Barry and I debated the merits of having Earl rejoin and decided not to ask him.
    Joey . . . now that was a different story. Joey Kubert was a strong-willed person, but when you mainline drugs it is possible to become weak very fast. He had gotten hooked enough to stay out of the army but then had to sit on the sidelines, a practicing drug addict, as he watched his group score hit after hit without him. It was eating him up. We cautiously approached Joey with the intent of rejoining the band and he swore up and down he was no longer using. Sadly, he wouldn’t last. In the original group he had played rhythm guitar and now he was being asked to play lead, which he wasn’t very good at. We decided to bring in a second guitar to do leads and Joey’s precarious ego was so damaged that he left. We blamed his decision on the use of drugs, which was ludicrous because we were all doing drugs. Of course Joey was doing the horrible heroin, while we were only doing marijuana, hash, speed, downers, and LSD. Blame is the last resort of self-denying liars.
    This was a time of great confusion in America as millions of people bought into the ideals of the “drop out” hippie culture. But the train kept rolling, and soon enough it seemed that everyone owned the required trappings of psychedelia and had learned how to flash the peace sign. In the music business world of the new counter-culture, record company vultures ate their same old meals but with a new set of clothes, a ready supply of drugs and long hair. It felt as if any recording group that was inclined to promote drug use through their music or persona instantly became stars.
    FM radio replaced AM and there were no longer three-minute limitations on the length of the songs. Bob Dylan had seen to that. The quality of the artistry on many of the recordings slipped from time to time as the artist struggled to remain coherent while their brains struggled with each particular drug. However, as the level of consciousness rose so did the lyrical messages, and artists found a relevance to the new culture in much the same way as the previous generation had when they brought forth their rebellion. It was a pity that drugs had to play such a large part in the scheme of things.
    Kids rebelled against the restrictive mind-set of their parents and left home to join the pilgrimage to the “hip” Meccas of the counter culture where they found themselvesbroke, in some cases, and at the mercy of predatory street people or semi-conscious well-wishers.
    Communal living appealed to many white kids, not because they had an overwhelming desire to become communist-like, but because they didn’t feel safe enough to make it on their own. Some hip icon that promoted the intellectualism of natural choice, screamed out for sexual liberation and many people threw their rubbers and birth control pills out the window. College kids had the added bonus of bringing about liberal change, which was, in many cases, funded by their unsuspecting parents.

     
    Smoking pot became the new national pastime and entrepreneurs scuffled frantically to keep up with the will and desire of the people. Detroit had a place called Plum Street that became the place to go for “authentic” hippie supplies. It was the “peace love” generation.
    Most of this came about only a year or two after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. It meant very little to most white kids in suburban Detroit, except to make them even more suspicious and afraid of blacks, after having witnessed the riots and Motor City burning on television. I was in Detroit during the riots and I remember being diverted away from the city by an armored tank as I cruised in my Cadillac Eldorado. To quote Bob Dylan, this car was, “a good car to drive after a war.”
    The only legitimate protest white kids seemed to embrace was the