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

our tours were mostly thirty one-nighter dates in a row with no days off. Some of the guys missed home and family, the group was totally comprised of drug users or alcoholics, and we sometimes hated each other.
    None of that meant anything, though, when you asked someone who had been to our concerts what they thought of the band, because it was that energy and frustration and drive to do our best and succeed that they cared about. In Berlin we opened for The Dave Mathews Band and The Police. Tom Connor has a tape of that concert. We weren’t to be taken lightly.
    The band I fronted with Mark Gougeon, Billy Csernits, Wilson Owens, Rick Schein, and Joe Gutc would never be as famous as the Detroit Wheels, but they inspiredme and drove me to heights as an artist that the Wheels were incapable of doing. And it wasn’t the Wheels fault. It was Bob Crewe who killed all possibilities with that band.
    Unfortunately, the Thrashing Brothers and I had a lot of personal problems that we either buried, hid, or refused to deal with. Our life on the road, particularly in America, was dangerous, at best. It was proven that if we stayed on the road for more than three to four weeks without a break all hell would break loose. There were many fights and other destructive behavior, and the lack of privacy, since we all had to share rooms, had a great deal to do with that. There simply was no place to get away when any of us needed to be alone with our thoughts or to clear our minds.
    Whether it was demolishing a rental car outside a club in Germany, or starting a riot by refusing to take the stage, something always came up. Of course that wasn’t as bad as whipping our road manager with a metal chain across his face as he drove our limo. Those actions were the domain of the band Detroit. But we had a few members in this group who carried guns.
    One night we were all held at bay while our road manager poured lighter fluid on the club owner’s bar and lit it on fire, threatening to shoot anyone who called for help. My particular penchant for thrill came from urinating on stage. One night in Texas we performed at a club called Fitzgeralds. Doug English, a former Detroit Lions football player, had come as a guest of my wife Kimberly and me. Doug knew nothing about my dark side, and so it was with amazement that he proclaimed to my wife, “Kim, I believe your husband is pissing in that man’s hat!”
    Doug had brought me down to appear in a celebrity golf outing for one of the many charities he was involved in. I loved to perform charity work. I loved football. I used to go to parties at the home of Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Detroit Lions tight end Charlie Sanders on Outer Drive where he and I and a bunch of other guys stood on his front porch and sang. Same thing with baseball players Kirk Gibson and Dave Rosema. We partied together and one time when the Tigers were playing the Yankees in New York they brought down some of the guys for our show.
    But they never saw the
really
bad side of me. Even wonderful Ernie Harwell, the voice of the Detroit Tigers, used to announce the arrival of my wife Kimberly and me as we entered the park for a game. Ernie and I even collaborated on a couple of songs together. He used to say it was the biggest no-hitter he had ever seen. Celebrity carries responsibility and expectations and standards of conduct. Since my activities of vile and disgusting behavior were subterranean and below the radar of the standard press, these honorable men had no reason to doubt the full value of my stardom.
    Once and for all, just for the record, let me say that my antics regarding women, infidelity, drugs, lies, and a variety of minor crimes, like my time in the Los Angeles County Jail, were shameful, embarrassing, and without redemption. Sometimes I thinkthat is what this “Jerry Springer” generation wants to hear and read about, the more disgusting the better. Well, I did it all. For this I am sincerely sorry and apologize to those I have hurt. The list is too long to detail. It was a part of my life––a major part of my life––and it wasn’t going to become any better until I could purge the resentment and poison that had been spoon fed me in New York. The notion that I could succeed as an artist in Europe would slowly wash away the shit I had been handed in the “great” city of New York by the criminals that exist there in the form of the entertainment industry. Finding a good moral compass;