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

a local crew to shoot the video for the single. MTV was relatively new, but old enough to have become an established part of the model for releasing records in 1983. I quickly found that was out of my hands. In fact, the entire process would be out of my control and I had to accept it on blind faith. How shitty could it get? John knew what it was like to grow up in the Midwest and what it felt like to confront the establishment in New York and L.A., and I believed he still carried that connection in his bones. My conflict was being able to let go of putting my own album together and trusting someone else to make decisions in my best interest.
    Behind the scenes in all of this lay the involvement of a man I consider to be a good friend. As you know, that is a very rare occurrence in my life. His name is Geoffrey Fieger, and he is an attorney. A year prior to these events now swirling madly about me, I decided to stop renting the house on Winthrop and made an offer to buy it from the owner. I was given a telephone number for an attorney who was familiar with real estate named Bernard Fieger, who was Geoffrey’s father. It was through Bernard that I was introduced to Geoffrey, whose brother, Doug Fieger, became famous with the group The Knack. You might recall a hit single of theirs, “My Sharrona.” Geoffrey had also gone to school with noted record producer Don Was, whom I already knew and had worked with. The two of them had gone to Oak Park High School, as had my first wife, Susan. When I went to Geoffrey’s house, a small bungalow in Oak Park, I was introduced to an extremely beautiful woman named Keeni. Keeni was from Garden City and eventually married Geoffrey.
    When the Mellencamp opportunity presented itself, Geoffrey served as my attorney for the contract negotiations, which really weren’t going to be negotiated that much because everyone knew I was not in a position to make many demands. It was more about Geoffrey taking care that I was treated with respect. Geoffrey also arranged a marketing deal for me and brought in an outside song, “The Thrill of it All.”
    I did however make one demand, and I stood fast on it. Everyone thought I was crazy. I demanded that Uwe Tessnow and Line Records be allowed to license therecording in Germany. I don’t think Uwe realized what that took to do and what it meant in terms of my affection for him.
    Uwe kept me on Line Records for a long time, but it had its foolishness and strings. For example, Uwe would, every three years or so, license his catalog to different distributors for advances. When I handed him
Smart Ass
and wondered why it wasn’t doing so well, he hadn’t bothered to tell me that the distributor dealt mostly with country music. And he still had the nerve to tell me the recording was not very good.
    Having signed the contracts, I appeared on John’s label, Riva Records, distributed by Polygram. Polygram did a good promotion but Riva could care less about the new album,
Never Kick a Sleeping Dog
. What I didn’t know, but was later told, was that John was re-negotiating his contract with Riva and could not, or would not, record a new album for them until the negotiations were complete. Riva desperately wanted to keep John, especially in light of his triple platinum success. Apparently there was a clause in the existing contract that, even though John could choose not to record, he was allowed to produce an outside artist. Hence Mitch Ryder, hence a budget, and finally continuous cash flow.
    John has publicly stated that he thought I believed his production and effort was going to be the last chance I would ever have at reaching comeback success in my career. Nothing could be further from the truth. I saw it as a great opportunity, but whether it was John in 1983 or someone else in another year, I believed in my soul, and do to this day, that I am capable of reaching the mass American public again. So if John’s efforts failed, it certainly wasn’t going to crush me.
    Besides, nothing could equal the beating I took from Stigwood and Prager. From that day to this I have never had another manager. I don’t know what opportunities or deals might have come my way if I’d had a big New York manager, probably quite a few, but the foul taste of Prager has kept me from ever drinking from that well again. That is why you have, in America, a very subterranean Mitch Ryder. As of this publication I have recorded twenty-five CDs. Can you name more than