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

hand-held tape recordings of melodies and lyrics. It also held paper after paper of thoughts and ideas and titles and poems. I opened up the case and began the writing process once again. I did not want our European fans to be separated from us for any length of time that would allow them to forget us. I cherish them and always find a way to get product, even though it is hard to find, into their hands. My European success is also a good record of my growth and progress as an artist, and is essential to whatever final judgment is made about my struggle and ability.
    I contacted Uwe about funding the record, which would be the first Line Record not recorded in Germany––and the first without Tom Connor. He eventually agreed and I began work on my fifth Line Record release,
Smart Ass
. The band would have a slightly different line-up because I had to let Wilson Owens go for stabbing one of our road crew in a fight. The new drummer was named Al Wotton.
    Although I didn’t know it at the time, Wilson Owens would return after the recording due to the untimely death of our new drummer. The songs were brilliant but again, because Uwe was so stingy with the funding, I was under a lot of pressure to do everything quickly and cheaply.
    The result exposed that the mixing was left to the ears of an engineer who was a drummer, and in the end that was the predominant sound. All the other parts worked well but were buried in the mix, and the vocal leads I performed were nothing more than pilot vocals. I needed a little more money to correct things, but Uwe was unwilling to give more and so I went with what I had. Uwe decided he didn’t like the album and therefore didn’t market it with the conviction he had for previous releases.
Smart Ass
later became an album that John Mellencamp plucked three songs from.
    Visiting the studio during that session was a woman named Mary Gail, whom I had met at Alvin’s. She was a singer who had recently been through a divorce from a doctor and she had a young daughter. Her father had run a successful booking agency in Detroit, and her brother was a star in Hollywood on a popular sitcom. Mary was driven to be successful, now that she was on her own. She was independent and I liked that. We began an on again off again sexual relationship that lasted several years. Mary moved to Berlin, and one time I ran into her she was very angry to find my entire catalog in all of the record shops. She wanted that for herself, but for the moment, she settled for me.
    Kimberly no longer had time to worry about where I was or what I was doing. She was caught up in a world that had her own friends and places. We still went places together, but the days of home-cooked meals were a thing of the past as we drifted further and further apart.
    I had gone back to Europe and Kim was going to attend a party at a friend’s house in Ann Arbor, a sixty-mile drive from our home. A week before I left to deliver the
Smart Ass
tapes to Uwe I bought a new car from my friend Wally Schwartz. A Riviera. While I was gone, I called Kim every day to ask how my car was. She always replied, “It’s in the garage.” I thought wow, when I get back I can’t wait to drive it.
    What she didn’t tell me was that it was in a repair garage. Apparently on her way to the party she ran into a divider on an entrance ramp and drifted into a twelve-wheeler truck. The entire front shell had been completely torn off. There were no fenders or hood. What remained was an engine, four wheels, and a windshield. Kim somehow proceeded to drive to the party, and a friend has a video of her pulling up to his house. There was no police report since the truck suffered no damage.
    Much of this was my fault for enabling Kim with money and time. Once Kim left Xerox she didn’t have to work again until years later when we finally divorced. But for now, and for the next ten years, she rose and fell with my fortunes. For the first time I was able to put a portfolio together with savings and stocks and metals. Sure, it was small, but it was a beginning. I paid my taxes on time and had some disposable income. The problem was, my guilt over not taking Kim to Europe made me decide to give her money.
    I still had to be careful because my career had never been consistent enough to make commitments to anyone. Not the church. Not the installment plan. Not anything that required regularity and consistency. And so you end up telling little lies and pray that something