Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend by Mitch Ryder Read Free Book Online

way they are no different from the “healthy” status quo. Where it turns ugly is in the presentation of their political agenda, and for a very few, their views on children.
    While I struggled with that, bigger, more immediate problems began to surface. I was awakened by the force of my father lifting me out of bed and dragging me by the hair up the stairs, through the front door and, using his leg, pushing me into a kneeling position on the front lawn as he pulled my head upward and twisted it forward to face his car. Many of the neighbors on their way to work that warm summer morning stopped to marvel at the scene. The boy, dressed only in his underwear and held bowed like a tortured prisoner, and the car. The car stood there like a fantastic piece of artwork. There was a trunk, a bent hood, scraped doors, a roof and tires, but there was no front end and there definitely were no fenders. It slowly started to come back to me as my father screamed out the ridiculous. “Did you do this?” So that was the metallic sound I kept hearing on my drive home from the Village.

     
    Mitch’s dad, Bill Levise, Sr
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    It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Two weeks prior, my father had gotten a neighbor to drive him into Detroit at eleven-thirty at night to claim that very same vehicle from the police car pound where it rested after I had loaned it to Ronnie from my old group, the Peps. It seemed that Ronnie didn’t have a license. But, things had been building to a climax way before then.
    A month earlier I had borrowed my father’s car and was to pick him up at work. I arrived almost an hour ahead of schedule with nothing to do but sit in the car and wait. Raging hormones coupled with my particular sexual dysfunctions led me to masturbate so passionately that I didn’t see him approaching, as the car windows were completely fogged over from my body heat. Fortunately, I had just finished, but the look of disgust on my father’s face as he opened the passenger door and slid in could not stop my heavy breathing or the unmistakable smell of where I had marked my territory. I wanted to deflect his dagger-like stare and scream, “Parents can choose to have children but children can’t choose to have parents,” but that would not have been fair. Somewhere between my teens and the maturity of the years I am now burdened with, I began to understand and collect little sayings such as, “Teenagers: God’s punishment for a few moments of unprotected sex,” and “Hire a teenager while they still know everything,” and my favorite, and always the one to make me rethink the gauge and powder load of a bullet, “Teenagers rule.”
    At some point in everybody’s scheme, sacrifice has to be viewed as a measure of love. My parents had very little, but given their limited monetary resources, the fact that my mother had never held a driver’s license, and my father had precious little time, they were able to involve and convince producers and record labels in Detroit into releasing two single recordings of my performances. In addition, my mother set up an audition for me with Brian Holland, the famous producer and writer at the equally famous Motown Records.
    I feel awkward when trying to give my parents their due because they were rarely reliable when it came to my essential needs as a child, and so it becomes a question of how much their new-found interest and effort had been for their gratification, as opposed to mine. That also played well into my father’s “second chance” at music by living vicariously through his talented, singing son. It also went a long way into relieving some of the guilt my mother felt for having so many children that my father had to abandon his dreams. Cynicism? Damned right. Don’t leave home without it.
    The first recording, when I was sixteen, appeared on the Carrie label. My father had befriended a black gentleman named Wade at his place of work and was initially trying to set up a deal for