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

the mainstream yet but I was jackin’ around the outer edges. It felt good. Here I was in the beginning of the 1980s doing original contemporary material, finding success, being well reviewed, capturing new fans and what did I have back in America? The love affair with the German people was heating up and we made plans to return within months to enter into the studio again.

Chapter 27
     
    I N THE EARLY DAYS OF MY existence in Germany everything was magical. Even though I had first come dragging all of the bitterness and anger from my experience in America and wouldn’t have been surprised if that were to become the same in Germany, I was happily disappointed. It was as if someone had opened the gates to an enchanted castle and the band and I had free roam of the place. The friendships we were cultivating and the people we were running with, some of them with serious problems, were very open and wanted more than anything to please us. And in return, they wanted only for us to be their friends.
    I remember a combination pub and restaurant called the Pic N Pac putting out an entire Thanksgiving spread for us, even though they knew nothing of the significance of the holiday. How amused they were to watch us eat corn on the cob, which at that time was generally reserved for livestock feed in Germany. We listened intently and carefully as they spoke of their experiences growing up in a conquered nation sadly divided by the spoils of war. That division was important, because many of them had relatives and loved ones in the communist controlled East.
    Our record company promotion man took us over there one night while we were in Berlin. We went through the American controlled sector called Checkpoint Charlie to a bar seven blocks in. Images of old American spy movies danced through my head as the dank and sparse and quiet of the East became more present with each passing street. The walls of the buildings were cold and gray, and in need of repair and cleaning. The streets were empty and the cobblestones were difficult to walk on. But oddly enough, there was no litter. Anywhere. We had been told that East German economy was the strongest in the entire communist controlled satellite countries. But here––seven blocks removed from West Berlin and the wall, the neon lights and the streetsfilled with people, shop windows filled with things to buy and the sounds of music drifting through the air from apartments or clubs, and the wonderful smell of tantalizing foods drifting out into the streets from the restaurants––East Germany looked weak and impotent.
    We were also told that, although things in the East were inexpensive compared to the West, whatever change we received from our West Gernam marks would be in the form of Eastern marks, which we would not be allowed to take back with us. Therefore, spend wisely. I was told the reason we couldn’t take the Eastern currency back was because the government was embarrassed by the relatively low value of their money compared to the West.
    We thought we had gotten lost because we could not find the bar we were looking for. There were no signs outside. As we stood on the street one of the guys heard what he thought might be music. We headed toward the direction of the faint noise, reached the building it was coming from, and opened the only door available.
    It was as if we had gone to a speakeasy during prohibition in America. Once we opened the door the laughter and music drowned out our ability to talk and we had to yell to each other to be heard. The place was full of life and we drank a lot, and I think some of us ordered food. When it came time to leave I tipped our waitress fifty Western marks, which was around twenty-five dollars, and she cried and hugged me.
    The experience made me think about how difficult it must be for those generations who are removed from their fathers’ errors to be demonized, as the citizens of Germany have been since the Second World War. Then, to have the double whammy of one half of themselves painted as even more evil when they had no control over their circumstances. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, since my early years in Germany were spent in the relative wealthy confines of the West.
    Our home base in Germany was Hamburg. The stories of our drunken exploits around Hamburg in those early years were almost always true and factual, but I can dismiss them with no regrets because whatever the emotions and the feelings of the band were,