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

One of the things they didn’t leave behind was her father’s dark sickness. He was a short, wiry man with something to prove and one night, in a smoky, stale, beer smelling gathering, he got into a bar fight so violent his opponent plucked out one of his eyeballs and smashed it into the floor with the heel of his boot.

     
    Mitch’s mom, Jane Lucille McDaniel
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    That is something of where my parents came from. I was told many times growing up that I didn’t know what it was to be poor. Had I lived through the depression, as my parents had, maybe then I would know about hard times. Maybe. But either that bond, or some other mystical application, caused my parents tomarry. When I look at their wedding photograph I can see the sparkle of love in my parents’ eyes. She was so beautiful and he was so handsome, and they were filled with the classic beginners hope and happiness.
    Then life unfolded and reality became their truth. When America entered the war my father was called up, dashing his radio singing career into oblivion. When he came out of the war his singing career could not be revived and he had two children. He had to get what musicians and singers call “a real job.” He became a parts inspector for a small tool and die maker, a job he bitterly held until his retirement. My father made several attempts at getting back into singing, but each attempt failed and he never seemed happy with that. His dream of unbridled self-expression gleefully manifested itself one winter as my sister Nina and I responded to his call and ran outside to witness his creation of an anatomically correct snowman and woman. When the neighbors complained he, once again rejected, slowly but violently tore them down.
    My father died several years ago and it had a profound but controlled impact on my mother. She is now more than eighty years old and when we get together we speak only of happy times. For me, frankly, there weren’t that many. My father was a hard worker who left home early, came home late, and prayed for overtime. There was never enough money and as the family continued to grow there was even less. Everyone suffered. My mother, as mothers will, tried her best to make things work, but only to the degree that my father could provide.
    For years we had no medical or dental insurance and so, when I was four years old, I struggled with a high fever and hallucinations for days until the joints in my legs became swollen and I could no longer walk. I ended up with rheumatic fever and a heart murmur. That was one of many examples of a poverty I learned to fear and hate. I don’t fault my parents for the poverty. Maybe I am being too critical about something I may never understand. Being poor felt empty; my parents were stretched too thin.
    It is remarkable that so many people struggle with love. In reality, it seems that if someone didn’t care for you, you probably wouldn’t be alive. I could speak all day of people I know who have absolutely no use for love. For them it is a tool, useful only if it will help them reach their goal. Others make it the centerpiece of their beliefs and existence and end up being too vulnerable to control their own lives. One thing I will never forget though, is the calm and soothing sound of my father lying in bed, singing love songs to my mother long into the night, until we were all fast asleep.
    The home I grew up in, that is to say the house I lived in from the age of four to fourteen, sat in a small seven-block neighborhood in Warren, Michigan, north of the security gates for the U.S. “army tank arsenal.” A child during the Korean conflict, it became a game to breach security and dash through the armament on my bicycle while being chased by a jeep of MPs.
    I was an adventurous young boy, and by the time I was five I had run away from home twice. The houses in the area were almost always wood frame with no basements and they sat off dirt streets with open ditches that ran parallel to the homes. A very active insect population also lived in our neighborhood. We moved there before developers came along, so we got to enjoy miles and miles of open farm and swampland, which was quickly bought by General Motors and turned into their technical center.
    A bizarre, eclectic crowd who, with few exceptions, were culled from the debris of human failings and moral bankruptcy, peopled the neighborhood. There was alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, beating and battering, incest, adultery, child