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

been the first suburban Long Island young white person to admit on a recording that he was using heroin, scoring it in the city, and he referred to black females as colored girls. The homeboy himself came to one of our showcases and publicly declared our version of his song was “the way it was supposed to sound.” But before I could ask him to share his drugs, he was gone.
    There were press parties, the Rainbow Room, and countless interviews that made it all very exciting, and I felt a flood of old memories from the successful Bob Crewe days wash over me with each round of media attention. I wondered if we might somehow have found our way back to the familiar but distant fame I occasionally had vague recollections of.Kimberly was mightily impressed, as was I, at the quirky nature of the business I had chosen to give my vulnerable gift to. The album, in spite of almost unanimous great reviews, failed to ignite the imagination of the public and we were left to wonder where we had failed. It was 1970. Many in the industry believed that Paramount, our record label, dropped the ball. I thought they might have, but it wouldn’t be on the part of the artist or, for that matter, their public relations department, which was at that time run by Danny Goldberg. Something had gone wrong because even Billy Joel, one of my stablemates, wound up leaving Paramount.
    The remainder of my time with Barry was a growing nightmare fueled by a band that was angry at birth and heavy into drugs. There were a few ventures into bonding with Barry that only left me depressed. For example, there was the day he invited Kimberly and me out to his farm where he took me for a ride in his brand new GMC four-wheel drive truck. He drove the truck to destruction, speeding in and out of ravines and ditches, over and through trees, burning out the transmission and ripping apart the outer shell. I didn’t think it was funny. Kimberly and I had no money and the waste made me angry, but I kept my mouth shut. It was his money to do with what he wanted.
    His wife, Connie, had been chased all the way to Morocco in his bid to propose marriage to her. While we were there, Barry fed their son J.J. raw, bloody beef as the child sat in his high chair. The baby silently sucked away on the blood from the raw meat. Connie would have killed Barry, had she been aware. One time we attended a party where there was only Barry, Connie, me, Kimberly; and their house guests,
Saturday Night Live’s
Gilda Radner and her boyfriend (and later husband), G.E. Smith. I don’t think Barry ever allowed anyone to really love him. I could relate to that.
    The business of the band was the topic of most of my communication with Barry. The earlier players who arrived for the reformation of the Detroit Wheels were more toned down and nowhere near as violent as the band that became Detroit. Boot Hill, the marvelous piano player, became disenchanted early on, citing his need to be near his woman as his reason for leaving.
    The same could be said for Ray Goodman, the guitar player who was a proponent of non-violence. (Ray and I continue to work together from time to time). John Sauter, the fretless bass player who had been recommended by Steve Hunter and brought up from the same farm country as Steve, appeared on a couple of tracks that ended up on the
Detroit
album. But, he couldn’t handle the metamorphosis into the band called Detroit. Mark Manko became another casualty.
    The band had a strange attraction for me as it reminded me of my early teens and the gang I belonged to under the leadership of Danny McCrary. A couple of the players had guns and short fuses, and very much liked the biker image we were living. The music was always powerful and filled with angry emotion, but it was spellbinding, sortof like a scripted snuff film. The public enjoyed it, but they always seemed a bit intimidated, unless we were performing for people of that culture.
    The tough guy image had a down side, though. We were performing in Boston at a small club when Ronnie Cooke decided to help himself to a bottle of whisky from behind the bar. At the end of the evening, after the band had gone back to the hotel, Cooke and J.B. went to the office to get paid. When they entered the room, the club owner was standing there with two goons from the club. They had emptied his safe of all the money and laid it out on his desk. Also on top of the desk were bags of cocaine. J.B. knew it was a set-up and started to