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

Richard Schein on guitar, who had replaced Wayne Gabriel.
    The truth was that Wayne had been disappointed in my inability to parley the album into a success, and it was too expensive to fly him from New York to anywhere America for each little gig we did, so I had to rely on Detroit talent.
    The night we took the band photo at one of our gigs, our opening band was from Indiana and its front man was a young singer who called himself John Cougar Mellencamp. Fate would eventually lead me to a future encounter with John under much different circumstances. With the release of the “Naked” album we again received good reviews and even got local airplay on a station called WRI.F with a song called “War,” but all of the ground-breaking artistry still remained the domain of the Vacation album.
    Bob Seger, however, liked the second album enough to insist we open a weeklong appearance for him at Cobo Hall in Detroit. I heard his manager, Punch Andrews,got really pissed because the original openers had shipped thousands of units of their own product into the market in anticipation of their appearance.
    We were also experiencing problems with our seven independent distributors. We couldn’t get them to agree on timely, coordinated placement of product, or their payments to our record company, and so everything from securing promotional budgets to development of new product began to suffer under the uneven cash flow.
    Tom found an agent out of Cleveland to carry our product to France for the music industry’s annual MIDEM (
Marché International du Disque et de l'Edition Musicale
) convention, an event where product was licensed or picked up by foreign record companies for distribution in their territories. We were desperately hoping for a foreign release while we tried to re-arrange our American strategy.

Chapter 25
     
    I T WAS NOW 1978 AND I was starting to feel more like a workhorse than an artist as we toured America with no hope of a breakthrough into the world of successful comebacks. Given the size of our nation, you wouldn’t think one could ever become tired of touring here, but I had now been at it for the better part of thirteen years and, at times, it seemed the only real change was the model of the cars we were renting and driving.
    Kimberly and I had been living in an upper flat in the Lonyo McGraw area of Detroit’s west side, about a mile from the Dearborn border. Even though we hadn’t been able to secure a house of our own, Tom’s creative understanding of financial institutions was able to secure us both new cars and the first valid credit card I had held since 1968, when I had filed bankruptcy. We were slowly working toward outward respectability, and clinging proudly to each little upward movement as if it was the only way we could measure our self-worth.
    We had become close friends to our landlords, Connie and Charlie Navarro, who lived downstairs. Although I liked them, I didn’t like the fact that when I came home in the winter I had to fight with the neighbors for a parking space on the street. Some people even placed chairs in their spaces. No one had a garage. Once, one of the neighbor’s children shot a bullet into our front window trying to kill our cat, and the Navarro’s son was shot in the leg. Kimberly helped clean and dress the wound, since nobody wanted the cops involved.
    Personally, Kim and I were drifting apart. She had found a new group of friends and I was always out touring. No longer were the days of traveling without her unbearable, and it didn’t bother me that I had taken to alcohol as a brain-numbing shield against the truth of our existence. Our marriage was tentative. There were too manyselfish expectations on both our parts, and too many unrealistic goals, given the reality of our situation and absolute denial about either of us having addictive personalities.
    While I have not mentioned it, Kim had not been a saint during our relationship and marriage either. With me around, how could she have been? But that is her story to tell. Two problems between us were that my dysfunction focused on other women, and I was okay living in an upper flat. Kim expected me to somehow manufacture money to raise us up and didn’t understand I was incapable. I believed in my music, but the issue was that I didn’t care if anyone else did or not.
    As far as family functions and traditions, we spent more time with Kim’s clan than mine. It was fun––mostly––because