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

where I was informed that I was closing the show. I was pumped to think that I was headlining, but that soon took on a different color when I discovered I wouldn’t be going on stage until two a.m.
    We were now faced with the prospect of spending the next eight hours hanging out. Under normal circumstances that might have been hard, but tolerable. The thing about this band, the Thrashing Brothers, was the fact that everyone except Richard Shine didn’t handle alcohol very well. We were led to our dressing rooms and began to make up ways to busy ourselves. Unfortunately, there was plenty of food and a wide variety of alcohol.
    Tom and Uwe were walking around somewhere and a plot for the conquest of Europe was being painstakingly formulated. They were both nervous and had popped in on Kim and me several times as they made their way back and forth through the hall. Night approached and the show was about to begin when I ran into the two of them again in a hallway. Uwe was in tears. Apparently he had entered one of the dressing rooms to bolster the spirits of the band members only to discover two of the boys destroying the room in the heat of a fistfight.
    This band was different from the Detroit band in that physical violence was directed inward toward each other, as opposed to an outside entity. Over the years to come there would be many fights, but most of them included Wilson Owens, our drummer. I managed to convince Uwe I had things under control and not to worry. Then I made a half-hearted lecture to the band about self-conduct. Now we gathered around some of the backstage monitors to watch the other acts.
    Something from my past has always forced me to view other artists on the same show as competition. Only then could I allow myself to be entertained and appreciative. The hours rolled by and I noticed that after each of my co-star’s shows were finished, they were led to a backstage area where they were interviewed and asked to sign a portable guest wall that contained autographs of the great artists who came before them. When my chance finally came I defaced the wall by writing my name over the names of as many of the other artists as possible.
    We had worked hard to obtain the optimum buzz for the show, which we had already approached and lost several times, when the unthinkable occurred. For one reason or another some genius had decided to place our interview
before
our performance. Why? Why didn’t we get the same treatment as the other acts? I became angry and indignant. Did someone need to clean up early and get the hell out? Was it a union problem? Were the other acts so boring that they had lost all meaningful numbers in terms of viewers? I was pissed, and I was about to become legendary.
    When I approached the area where the interview was to be held everyone was smiling, but you could easily sense the nervous nature of their friendly status. After all, they knew very little about me, compared to my co-stars who were still connected to the industry in America. They had come to Germany to pick up some extra cash and be seen by a large number of viewers who might then be tempted to buy their successful American product. I had come to start a career. I was no longer connected to the industry in America. My product had been rejected by anyone who could have seriously helped.
    I didn’t see Europe as a market. Tom did. And Uwe did. I saw Europe as a wide-open, fresh piece of canvas. I saw it as a place where I could be allowed the respect of an artist, which was the very thing that had been called into question, ridiculed, and denied in the United States. But first I would have to try to destroy that opportunity with the pre-show interview. I was fueled by a blood alcohol level that would have killed a horse.
    The man chosen to do the interview was young and English, and had a reasonable grasp of the German language. Like so many of the interviews I did in Germany, he asked me a question and then translated the question and answer in German. I wondered how it had come to be that he had been chosen for this job, because it seemedto me that he would have been better suited for some important role with the BBC. His name was Alan Bangs, and as much as I tried to fluster and irritate him, he remained focused and steady.
    He asked me the usual questions, but then would pull something out of the blue worth answering, and I was starting to enjoy him. Since enjoying him was against my mission, I walked over to a