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

leave. The goons held J.B. and made him watch as they pistol-whipped the crap out of Cooke, opening his head in several places. Ronnie and J.B. ran for the truck, and while they were making their escape the club owner and his pals put several bullet holes into the cab and trailer. Unfortunately, this was not the only time someone got hurt.
    The violence worked in reverse as well. We were playing at a club in Detroit when some of the Renegades arrived to watch our show. A fight broke out between them and the club bouncers, and ended with the club in shambles and two people in the hospital. There was damage at all levels.
    One night in Manhattan we were playing at the Mudd Club. The crowd outside was angry because the doors were now more than half an hour late in opening. Inside, the leader of the New York Hell’s Angels was sitting at a booth with me, trying to get me high on coke. He kept feeding it to everyone off the edge of his knife. Then he began laughing at me. I wanted to open the doors before my fans got pissed and left. I decided to tell him I was going to open the doors whether he was ready or not, and as I went to wipe the sweat from my face I realized he had cut my nose open and I was so frozen I didn’t feel it.
    On another occasion Kimberly and I had been set up when we went to a party at a Canadian biker club, except there was no one there except one big biker with an attitude. He beat the shit out of me in front of her because one of our biker friends had done something, somewhere, at sometime. There were too many of these incidents connected to the band Detroit, and promoters were becoming aware of it. Barry had promoted the band as a bunch of street-wise, hard-edged hombres, and the band tried its best to live up to the hype.
    Finally, after two years of living out this image, came the predictable reaction on my part to an unforgivable wrong that I was being forced to live with. Poverty. My insecurities took me to the edge of reason as the band continued what was supposed to be a tour, but was really work when we could get it. The strain of almost two years on the road with no money, waiting in dingy broken down motels, unable to check out until the next job came along, the depression and loss everyone felt with the failure ofthe album, not able to pay our bills, not able to send money home to a wife or girlfriend, the endless driving around the country searching for something to believe in as we watched the changing seasons from the seat of a car far away down some unknown road. It all took a toll and a couple of us, upon returning to Detroit, insisted on a meeting with Barry and an accounting. Until this point no one had complained, but nothing had changed.
    Barry was more than a little nervous as we arrived at his farm, but it wasn’t because he was unprepared or unable to answer our questions. He was. It was the manner in which we chose to ask. Ronnie Cooke and I had both arrived with loaded firearms, which we laid openly pointing toward him on a table next to the tape recorder we brought along. We had put Barry in a position of no retreat in his own home. It was officially over. Years later I had the good fortune of being offered the opportunity to apologize to Barry for that evening from hell. He graciously accepted, which embarrassed me because there was no excuse for that evening. Just me.
    Shortly after I apologized, Barry had an accident in a Birmingham, Michigan hotel room. They found him on a bed with a black trash bag lashed around his neck and a tube of lethal gas running into the bag through the tightly bound opening and leading down to a large canister of gas on the floor next to the bed.
    As I stood there at his funeral I wished it was mine, and I thanked him for not letting it be.

     

     
a window to my soul
     
    
As a man in America today, on the issue of abortion you are allowed an opinion on the matter, but that is all. If you happen to be with a woman you have made pregnant and she respects you, she may allow you to have a bigger role in deciding what to do with the “fetus,” formerly know as “the baby.” This, of course, was before the baby’s validity and definition were reduced to incremental time passages by the cold clinical analysis of empty people who are not in awe at the wonder of creation and life, because it has no meaning for them. Sadly, in way too many cases, men are unwilling to take responsibility for the children they helped to create. I