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

was still willing to face it with me.
    Nina wanted me to go more deeply into her world but I felt, with some misgivings, that the communal experience, which had been badly tainted by John Sinclair’s vision, was not to my liking. And so, Kimberly and I set about finding employment in the “outside world.” Having been involved in music from the age of sixteen, and not feeling safe enough to go back to it, I chose the only work my past had prepared me for. I became a common laborer.
    My first job was hanging gutters for one of the church members who had a business doing seamless gutters. That’s where I met Forrest and Doll. They were great people from down Louisiana somewhere, but the job didn’t last very long once my fear of heights was exposed.
    My second job was the only other work I did while in Colorado. I became a warehouse worker for a chemical and scientific supply company called Sargent-Welch. I made friends, but the inevitable question always worked its way to the top. What are you doing here?
    Kimberly had gotten a job working for one of the Coors boys and together we now had enough money to get our own place. I don’t know how to fully explain how good that made us feel. We no longer had to live on the edge wondering where our next meal was coming from. As long as we remained healthy we could depend on a paycheck every week. We could make commitments and keep them. We could have some order in our lives. This probably sounds crazy to anyone who hates their job and the boring regimen of an eight-hour day, day after day, year after year, but you have to understand that we had never known the security of any constant in our lives. We had been stuck in that “glamorous” world of show business and our little jobs, as petty and unimportant as they might seem to anyone else, were a big deal to us.
    Denver, Colorado, as compared to New York City, was pretty laid back, but it had a subterranean cosmopolitan air that stopped short of the gates of Hell, which made nightlife for the adventurous something to do. We didn’t hang out that much becausewe were pretty wiped out after work each day. We usually ended up at the pool or a barbecue, took in a movie or, more often than not, headed to the mountains.
    Kimberly and I decided that we were going to get married. A retired judge performed the ceremony, and Nina and Willy stood up for us. The reception was held at Nina’s mansion and Kimberly and I both felt relieved after it was all over. I was actually afraid she might have said no, given all that she knew about me––especially the suicide thing. She certainly could have done a hell of a lot better than me. So we happily faced the future with the promise of peace and contentment before us, blindly overlooking the shit trail whose path reached all the way to our assholes.
    This, I think, would have been the perfect place to end this story, but that is what is so fucked up about my life. And that is what most people don’t understand about music.

     
    I admit to the unbreakable addiction of adoration and fame, but beyond that is the reward of the creative process itself, which, without the above-mentioned by-products is enough to sustain the drive and motivation of the artist. Music was my first love, but I also enjoyed writing, poetry, sketching, and oil painting, and after work each day and as a continuation of the therapy I had begun at Nina’s, I began to use those mediums to express the visions and feelings I had kept bottled up all day at work.
    My oil paintings were a source of great satisfaction and I would, years later, adopt them as album covers on the music and lyrics I wrote while in Colorado. I also wrote poems, some of which also found their way onto future recordings. But for the moment, it was enough to experience the fulfillment of creation, and I threw myself into the process using every available amount of time at my disposal. During my four and one half year stay in Colorado, I finished seven oil paintings, twelve watercolor and charcoal/pencil/pen and ink sketch books, two books of poetry, twenty-seven songs with music and lyrics, and a complete novel of fiction.
    I was not completely removed from live performances either. Obviously, I had not been allowed to keep any of my royalties and therefore I couldn’t sit back to take a breather from music. It pissed me off when music industry people said I had left the music scene. Artists who had control of their money and the luxury of