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

more crime here then elsewhere, but at least we had our own place. The house was in a section known as Warrendale. As I sat in the quiet of the house, the tranquility allowed me a moment to reflect on my life thus far and take another accounting.
    Over the years my relationship with Kimberly had gone through some subtle but disturbing evolutions. It was a difficult concept for me to take on because it was like a man capable of stealing a watch calling someone capable of stealing a wallet a thief. When Kimberly worked for Xerox, she had become accustomed to meeting with her co-workers after work for drinks. It was my belief that she and I were both now alcoholics. The difference was, and it really is no difference in the end, is that I believe she also required other stimulants as a part of her pleasure. As far as the alcohol, I held it better and had a higher tolerance for it than she did. We were now a very long way from the clarity and sobriety of those years in Colorado. Whatever meaningful conversations we attempted were now being cloaked and the truth concealed by substance abuse.
    But Kim and I were also spending more and more time together. We often went to neighborhood bars together and danced and enjoyed evenings of blind abandon. To the bar crowd we were a happy couple, and delightful to be around.
    But at home, in our new-found privacy, our communication often became combative and hostile, and we used our verbal skills and knowledge of each others faults and transgressions to hit hot buttons and torture each other with our words. Colorado had been a brief respite, and as they say in the “program”––and they have a million sayings––you pick up from where you left off.
    It seemed like a cop out to take counseling, because we were married to each other for better or worse for the rest of our lives. I had sworn that I would never get another divorce because I was haunted by the tragic mistake I made when I left Susan and my children. Plus, Kimberly and I had sacrificed so much to stay together. It was as if, in the face of those sacrifices and the absence of material wealth, I could make up for it all by staying with Kimberly. Sadly, we went on. Our current dysfunctional behavior was only a glimpse of the future.
    As always, I escaped into touring with the band, and putting in more miles as we crisscrossed the country over the same roads we had been doing forever. I was jealous of Tom because he had the comfort of remaining stationary. He also was able to enjoy a degree of family life that I couldn’t, even if I had the time. My life was a mess. Even though things were crazy between Kim and me, I still considered the house my home and when I was there I flourished in daily tasks that one did around a house: buildingthings, repairs, and especially working outdoors in the yard. It gave me peace and solitude, and time to think.
    Career wise I came to the conclusion that Tom was unable to take me to the next level. Yes, we had a good thing going in Germany but we had to live in America and I remembered that Tom and I had already failed with our own record label. Ultimately, I felt he was incapable of securing an American deal for my beautiful music. Tom and I desolved our partnership, but continued to work together in Europe. The next project he worked on with me was a compilation of materials culled from the Line Record catalog called
The Beautiful Toulang Sunset
. It contained two or three new originals, and the rest was a “best of” from previous releases.
    Here in the States the band was still thrilling people, but we weren’t doing many of the European releases because I became aware that our audience really only wanted to hear the hits from the sixties. That holds true even to this day, in spite of the excellent creations I have recorded in Europe.
    I became very pissed off one night when Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders came to one of my gigs in Dallas and asked that we talk privately for a few minutes. I found a table and had every intention of asking her to give me a few weeks to divorce my wife and marry her, because I was certain that our two talents together would produce the most acclaimed artistic children known to mankind. But the band had different ideas and would not leave us alone. She became frustrated and begged leave. I don’t know. Maybe
she
was going to ask
me
to marry her. She’s still very hot.
    It was time to prepare another album for Europe. I had a case in which I kept