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

thought resolved in my life. Racism.
    Wilson was our black drummer of wonderful musical expression, but he also carried a ton of personal baggage into that arena. In the past I had gone to court in Ann Arbor to plead for his freedom on charges of possession of heroin, and promised the judge that he was essentially a good man who now had an opportunity to turn his life around by working professionally with me. I gave the judge my word that I would be his mentor. My name had once again become useful.
    But, Wilson was also a man with whom I had gotten into two different fist fights. In one of them he tried to kill me and we both bear scars on our faces from these encounters. He also attacked Billy Csernits while we were recording “Live Talkies” in Hamburg, knocking poor Billy to the ground and beating him as Billy tried to stand up with a full leg cast on, the result of a hip displacement from a show we had done days before in Paris at the Palace.
    Wilson also attacked Lance, one of our roadies, and cut him with a small knife. Violence aside, the man could play drums like very few others. But now, back in the studio, Wilson was quite often getting too drunk to perform his duties and a new confrontation seemed inevitable. I wasn’t going to allow Wilson to sabotage the album because of his mental problems. Everyone had put too much into this effort and we all wanted to hear the finished product. I was angry, but Wilson refused to hear any arguments against his behavior, choosing instead to cite racism as the reason for me singling him out.
    None of us were angels––and most definitely not I––but when it came to the studio I didn’t waste my energy getting too high or drunk to perform. That was hard enough without complicating it further. But all of us paled in comparison to Wilson. When he had a good buzz on he was a complex individual, and you wanted to understand him because he was gifted and talented. But once he started getting high it was easy to resent, and even hate, his behavior. He stole and lied and generally fucked you over until you could no longer tolerate the ordeal. So, at this critical time near the end of the album where he was single-handedly delaying the completion of the project with his behavior, we butted heads again.
    This resulted in another fight during which, for the first time in our long relationship, I called him a stupid nigger. He was not as surprised as I was. It was as if he expected that from me, even though he had to wait through many years of provocation. It only served to validate his sick view of whites. In hindsight, bad and even repugnant behavior is not the exclusive domain of a person’s skin color. To this day I am sorry for having said it. I regret what I called him, but I am grateful as well because it showed me the condition of my humanity and its weaknesses.
    Uwe was there and witnessed it. I don’t know what was going through his mind, since it wasn’t too many weeks prior to this that he had to pry Wilson off his wife as Wilson molested her in front of his eyes. It also showed me how far I had fallen, and how hateful a person I had become as life did its business of breaking us all down. I thought back to my days at the Village and with the Peps, when skin color meant absolutely nothing to my conscious mind.
    The project got finished and the band went into Hamburg for a few days before our departure, while I stayed at the studio to complete mixing and other details. We took the album cover photos at our then favorite pub, Onkel Po’s, and
Got Change For a Million?
was born.
    The songs on the new album were good, but the production quality suffered since I was maxed out for time and wore too many hats. The album did increase the size of our following, though, and guaranteed us a return visit. An unexpected bonus was to be nominated for the German equivalent of the Grammy Awards as best new artist of the year. We didn’t win, but it was fun. I was very pleased, and my belief in my artistry was complimented in another way as well. A couple of German artists did cover versions of several of the songs I had written. The song that got covered the most was “Ain’t Nobody White Can Sing the Blues.”
    On a subsequent tour I was watching a popular German soap opera and a male character sat down at a very critical emotional moment in the story and began to play one of my songs on his stereo. It was “Freezin’ in Hell” from the Vacation album. I was not in