Free Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend by Mitch Ryder Page A

particular part of the West side reminded me very much of the condemned buildings in Detroit, where people lived but nobody cared. It helped ease our homesickness.
    As a group, we had no money and we were very bored. Then the call came to do a gig; it was going to be our first gig in Manhattan. Finally the decks of playing cards were thrown away and everything became much more serious.
    We were given extended bookings in Midtown Manhattan at the Metropole, on the East Side at Basin Street East, and in the Village at the Eighth Wonder. The Metro-pole had a weird dynamic in terms of the entertainment. It was there that the band and I got to meet famed trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie as he performed on the very stage we stood upon. It was both a thrill and an honor. Then there was the night Gene Krupa, the great drummer from the forties, was doing a solo thing. Everything was going okay, but you could see in his eyes that he was so disgusted with his career being brought to such low depths that he had decided to get drunk. Sure enough, about two songs into the set he made a move forward, lost his balance and the whole drum set, including Gene Krupa, came tumbling down about seven feet to the floor. I was still years away from understanding the role of the faded star and the various ways of dealing with that. I felt sorry for him as he lay there, not wanting to get up.
    My favorite of the three places was owned and named after an old leather-faced, weatherworn but sociable, dyke with a gutteral laugh and twitchy trigger-finger anger, Trude Heller. Trude was the mother of Joel Heller, who owned the Eighth Wonder. From time to time Mr. Crewe would send some of his society friends and business contacts to catch the show. We always knew when such an event was about to occur because there would suddenly come a burst of activity, chairs and tables were moved around, and fresh white table cloths came out along with the rare emergence of Trude from the unknown place of her hiding.
    It was an exciting time to be in the Village, with all the artists at the different clubs and sometimes, after our show, we could walk a block or two and catch someone likeBob Dylan doing an acoustic act, or some nice jazz or blues. There was a lot to choose from.
    The Basin Street East gig also carries memories for me. Our band did a few turns as a house band backing up the stars. Mostly I just sat around while the band backed up different artists, and I got to do my show with the guys as the opener. One time I personally saw to it that Mr. Bo Diddley was served his barbecue ribs before each performance and wondered at his ability to leave the sauce on his hands and still play his beautiful guitars. I liked his Flying V with the tiger fur, sauce-stained, lining.
    One night a loud and boisterous gentleman came in as if he were crashing a party. I hadn’t dreamed that a homosexual could be so outwardly macho and physically menacing. Apparently the Marlboro Man had been alone out on the range just a wee bit too long. He decided he liked us and insisted we call him “Uncle Charlie.” We did. What was up with that? Back in Michigan we thought faggots talked with high voices, walked like women and bent over on command––or struggled to suck you off––and here’s this guy and he’s got fight scars all over him and he’s taking over the place. These New York queers were a different breed.
    More often than not, after our shows we all gathered for the subway ride to The Coliseum House and the safety of our rooms where we traded our “star” demeanor for the raucous frivolity of unsupervised teenagers. We sometimes set up an amplifier in the window and broadcast warnings to the mostly Puerto Rican neighbors of an impending space alien invasion, or went to the roof and papered the streets below with the latest versions of our aerodynamically correct invading space ships. But the opium-like suspended time factor was wearing off, and after months of such