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

war in Vietnam, for which I had gratefully received a dependent classification because of Dawn and Joel. It was against this backdrop and the aforementioned situations that Barry Kramer worked his magic.
    I was visiting an outdoor music festival in Detroit and as I walked toward the entrance a young, good looking, skinny, long legged woman with a briefcase ran right into me. She was full of life and had an engaging smile. It was Kimberly Priest, the girl from the office who had the kittens. My desire for her was so intense that I wanted to get her away from the other performers to a place where I could persuade her to be with me.
    I asked her to come to the
Creem
offices with me but she said, even though she would like to, she had to work with the booking agents at the concert as part of her summer internship. The only thing left to do was to become bold, so I told her if she didn’t come with me right then there would be no second chance. Fortunately, none of the performers at the concert had yet eclipsed my fame and as we drove back to the office my new single, “Sugar Bee,” came on the radio. She might have been star struck but I knew I wanted her, and we made arrangements to meet at her parent’s condo while they were out of town.
    Kimberly had one more year of study at Michigan State University, which happened to be Susan’s school, and to my surprise and the complete shock of her parents, she dropped out to live and work in Detroit. Kimberly got a place in the city and was sharing it with a girlfriend named Sandra who worked for Barry Kramer at
Creem
. I moved in, but Kimberly eventually lost her job and could no longer pay her share of the rent. It is the time honored question . . . what do you call a musician without a girlfriend or a wife? Homeless.
    I went into the hospital to have my appendix removed and returned to the relative inactivity of Larry’s apartment for my convalescence. There, I was interrupted by an offer, four days out of surgery, to appear in Puerto Rico in the middle of a Detroit winter. Naturally I took the offer and with Kimberly in hand and five day old stitches in my lower stomach, we headed south.
    Kimberly was unintentionally deceived into thinking that, because of my new recording on the radio, my flamboyant manner, and the sudden trip south, this would be the exciting, glamorous showbiz world she had anticipated. Boy was she wrong.
The Detroit-Memphis Experiment
died quickly––not because it was a bad recording, but because it was out of fashion.
    When we returned from Puerto Rico we found an apartment in Royal Oak and began living together. If the two of us had been clean and sober most of the time, she might have been able to better judge my situation and leave me for someone a little more promising, because I don’t think either of us were in love.
    Barry was still assembling the puzzle pieces and kept the band on the road as much as possible, and I insisted Kimberly stay on the road with me. The band rule was that there could be no women traveling with the band, so I circumvented that by traveling in the back of the equipment truck with Kimberly. It was the dead of winter and we had to drive to Kansas City. We brought some blankets and pillows, made a space for ourselves, and tried to keep warm. We could hear music from the cab where the two roadies were smoking pot, listening to tunes, and enjoying their heater. We were freezing in the trailer with the equipment. It was about twenty degrees outside with a blustery wind, but I was obeying the band rule.
    Then, as we had frozen our way to the Kansas border I felt the truck make an unscheduled stop. It only lasted a moment and we began to move again. Our little area was on the wall of the trailer that was attached to the back of the cab and I could hear laughter, but more important, I heard a female voice talking and laughing. I became incensed. Kimberly was freezing in the back of a truck hour after hour and the two asshole roadies were picking up hitch-hiking whores and treating them to drugs, a free ride, and a warm heater. I began to beat on the wall of the trailer, but the loud music and moving truck made it impossible for them to hear me. Or, maybe they didn’t want to hear.
    I looked around as Kimberly held a lighter, since we had no light in the back, and I found a microphone stand. I unscrewed the extension from its base, took the metal rod and began beating against the forward wall behind where the party was