by Bobby DeVito
Boulder at that time was in the throes of the Jon Benet Ramsey case, and it was difficult to avoid all the media people, as the Shambala Center was directly downtown. Damn bad spot for a Buddhist retreat. The saving grace for all Buddhists was located up the street, and was nicknamed “The Buddha Superstore” by Phelps. This store held every size of Buddha statue made, prayer wheels, dharma accessories, incense, you name it. It was fairly expensive to be a proper Buddhist. The thing that killed me about Boulder is that they even had New Age music playing on the public buses.
I didn’t have any major revelations in Boulder whatsoever. It was a beautiful place to be for a few months, and one aspect of the trip that I enjoyed much more than I though I would was helping Bob work with the adult autistic men he cared for. We had two residents, David and John. David was a very prolific artist, and literally created so much art we had to carry it out weekly in garbage bags. I was very interested in how focused he was upon the process, yet cared little the about finished products. David did not speak, and mostly kept to himself. He also masturbated 4-5 times a day, and was hung like a mule. We could hear him in his bedroom as he pounded away on that thing at all hours of the day and night. One day Bob had me accompany he and the guys to a movie at a local shopping mall. The guys enjoyed the movie, and we made it through the entire picture with no problems. On the way back to the car however, David had been walking by one of those gaudy camera/ electronics stores one sees in malls that always have a live video camera on in the front window, so you can see yourself on video walking by. The cameras much have fascinated David, as he lagged behind while we unwittingly forged ahead through the mall. A few seconds later, we heard a woman scream behind us. David had whipped out his huge monster unit, and was busy flogging it publicly in front of the video camera, very proud of himself. I swear, I could have gotten that guy work as a stunt cock in the porn industry. Watching Bob Phelps trying to calm down the freaked out old ladies in the mall so we could escape unscathed was truly entertaining. At least David didn’t have the happy ending right on the window of the camera shop.
Coming back from Boulder, I ended up back in Sarasota. Another New College student had caught my eye, and we were dating. I had known Erika since her first year, and she was both an exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally sexy girl. I was in my mid-thirties and she was 21 at the time. Erika was finishing up her thesis, and had seen me at my worst after my divorce from Sara. I was doing some gigs in Tampa fronting a power trio, and had some legendary drunken shows that she had attended, whispering in my ear that I should come down to Sarasota to see her. I wish I could remember some of those shows, I know some of them were quite good. The club was called The Horny Toad, situated by the Port of Tampa in one of the roughest neighborhoods around. My friends Chris & Lisa owned it, and for a few months it was THE place to be in south Tampa.
Erika was a former competitive gymnast, with long chestnut hair and big brown eyes. She came from a high-end Chicago suburb upbringing, and had done a very impressive thesis on Russian Feminist Literature. She and I had some classes together during her first two years at New College, and we became acquaintances. And like every other guy (and many girls) at New College, I thought she was hot. Some days I would literally lag behind in class just to see her bend down to get her book bag from under the desk, as she rarely if ever wore bras. We kept in touch during my time in Boulder after a brief summer fling of drunken dating and seriously wild sex. She urged me to come back to Florida, and to live in Sarasota. Which sounded fine to me at the time, as I was going nowhere fast at that moment. I moved in with Erika, and managed to get an assistant manager job at a local music store. I basically became another $7 an hour working stiff, and sat home and drank the rest of the time. I had started making electronic music at this time, because I loved the music that Mike and I had done in LVX Nova, but wanted to do my own ambient music. Especially due to the heavy exposure I had been through writing my thesis, I had become much more of a fan of the ambient genre, and basically wanted to make the kind of music I wanted to listen to. Stargarden was born during this era.
Erika finished her thesis, and we moved to Hyde Park in Tampa. I missed living there, and Sara had already moved away, so Hyde Park was mine again. It’s still mine now, regardless. Erika and I moved to a gorgeous older second story loft apartment with a grand balcony. I have always been able to find great spaces to rent for some reason, I just seem to stumble into them somehow. I quit the CD Store when we moved, and went to work for Border’s Bookstore, like every other liberal arts major. Erika worked on her master’s at USF, and taught gymnastics at a local gym for income. My life had become somewhat predictable, but it was a good time and a stable time. But it did not last for long. Nothing seems to anymore at this point. I worked at Border’s during the day, then would come home and record ambient music all evening, drinking myself into a stupor and smoking a fair amount of weed. I created a lot of fairly good music in this period, which is called Stargarden. I have done 4 albums of Stargarden ambient music so far, and the first two of those albums were recorded during this era. This was music created and recorded for the sheer joy of the process – and it’s been some of my most successful to date.
My skills in the blues music scene had gained me some notice.I managed to secure an audition to play with Sherman Robertson, and jumped at the chance. Sherman was an old school Texas bluesman who had played with people like Paul Simon, Clifton Chenier, and Bobby Blue Bland. Sherman has an amazing soulful vocal style, coupled with a super spicy Texas blues guitar attack. I borrowed the rhythm section from another local blues wunderkind in Tampa, Sean Chambers. Rich and Scott were a powerful bass and drum team, and I knew they could cut the gig from hearing them play with Sean. We never got an actual rehearsal with Sherman, but I attempted to teach the guys Robertson’s more complex than usual blues music. No one ever listens to me, it seems. We did manage to make it through the gig, and Sherman enjoyed playing with us. However, the bass player Scott had other ideas, and called Sherman asking if they could just leave me out of the equation and bring Sean along as the guitar player. As Hunter S Thompson said, “the music business is a hallway filled with snakes and whores…and there’s a negative side too”. In hindsight, things worked out exactly as they should. Sean ended up getting a gig being Hubert Sumlins guitar player, and he got a lot more mileage out of that than he would have gotten out of stealing the gig from me with Sherman. Bass players – you always have to keep your eye on them. And you thought they were the “quiet ones”.
I did manage to avoid getting snaked out of the gig by the bass player Scott, and now had to find a new rhythm section. The drummer, Rich Russo, was an amazing drummer who I completely clicked with – but he couldn’t go on tour, and remained behind playing with Sean Chambers. I managed to recruit young Jason on drums, a fresh-faced 21 year old drummer from Rockport IL. He had actually trained with Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick, so I hired him over the phone. And I recruited my bass player from college, Curtis Hayes. Once Jason arrived in Tampa, we began to rehearse the Sherman songs, and performed live all over the bay area as “Wallet Chain”. We had some amazing gigs together, usually at Dave’s Aqua Lounge, a local blues bar in St Petersburg. And now we were gearing up to do first a USA, then a European tour! Things were moving forward, and we processed for our passports and awaited Sherman’s arrival in Tampa.
From the beginning, there was tension. While Jason, Curtis, and I sounded pretty darn good as the trio, we were having a hard time gelling with Sherman. We did a tour of the northeast, playing venues like the House of Blues in Cambridge. Al Kooper was there that night, and we gave a halfway decent performance. Little did we know that we were on our way to the “lake of hell”, and a complete band disaster.
We ended up in Rochester, New York at a lake house on Lake Ontario owned by Sherman’s manager Catherine “Cat” Bauer. She stuck all of us in this little teakettle, and the tempest began. Ostensibly, this time in hell was planned so that we c
ould rehearse for the second leg of the tour, but by the end of the week we were all headed home. Sherman and Curtis had never quite seen eye to eye, and after a well-placed comment by Curtis (“Drive the van? What is this, “Driving Miss Daisy???”), he was immediately fired, and we all had to drive home to Tampa. One funny thing happened during that week that stuck with us. After most of the week of failed rehearsals and building tension, Sherman had a knockdown, drag-out argument with Cat. He intimated to me that he wanted me to take the guys and get out of the house. I loaded up Jason and Curtis into the van, and off into the upstate New York night we went. I had managed to get a local music magazine at The House of Guitars, and we found a local club that had an “open mic” night. We showed up with our van full of equipment, and loaded in our entire backline. There were possibly a dozen people there, and they watched in amusement as we unloaded the entire van. After we set up, we proceeded to barrage these poor patrons of the bar with the loudest, sloppiest set of music we had played in months. After enduring such an aural assault, we are lucky these people didn’t kick our ass and throw us out of town. At the end of our set, a very frustrated Curtis blurted out on the microphone “OK, WHO has got the pot??” Amazingly, some guy stood right up in the middle of the club and replied “I DO!”, then turned and walked out of the club. We followed behind him like ducklings following their mother. Curtis always did know how to ask for the sale.
We made it home to Tampa, and I had to find another bass player immediately to go on tour to Europe with the band. Curtis was pissed, but relieved to not do the tour. I thought of the local bass player Robert “Freight Train” Parker, and gave him a call. He played with another local Tampa Bay bluesman Rock Bottom, and I didn’t want to piss Rock off, he was a 300 lb bluesman with a bad attitude. Robert is 100% Native American, and is one of the most solid blues bassists around. We rehearsed and learned Sherman’s songs together, and waited for Sherman to come back to Florida for more rehearsals.
At this time, Erika and I had been living together for a while, and had decided to get married. She continued to work at the Gymnastics gym and also worked on her Masters. I had become very close to her parents and grandparents, they were just an amazing, witty, fun to be around family. I miss them more than I have missed her over the years. But our relationship had begun to break down already before the wedding. I used to call home to say hello and touch base sometimes during my gigs. One night I called home to check in with her, and she informed me that she was busy watching a movie with her ex-boyfriend Jeremy. This was all well and good, except it was after midnight, and I knew the two of them were curled up in my bed. Erika was well known on the New College campus for being such a sexual dynamo, a beautiful bisexual creature that nearly everyone desired. And I “had” her, for a brief time. It’s tough to turn a Mustang into a plowhorse. I knew that marrying her was going to be a mistake, and so did Curtis. Erika’s best friend from her high school days came down to visit and spend a week with us, a beautiful ethereal girl named Vicki. I spent many hours with Vicki that week, and by the end of that time, she had heard to whole story and knew that Erika and I shouldn’t get married. But I felt completely trapped at that time, plans had been made, reservations and deposits had been placed, and I was once again getting married. Except Curtis had other plans…
Curtis had never liked Erika. Where nearly everyone at New College had loved Sara, Erika was a different story. I think many people were simply jealous of how beautiful and how daring and open she was. I went from a relationship where I almost never had sex, to one where the sex was some of the best I have ever had in my life. But the cracks were starting to show, and by the time we finally made it to the wedding day, we were near our breaking point. I knew that I should stop this from happening, but the momentum of the event carried me along and I just couldn’t make it stop. It was a beautiful ceremony at the Unitarian Church in Clearwater, with tons of family attending. Erika’s parents had spent a ton of money on a very nice reception at a local country club. Unknown to me, Curtis had ingratiated himself with the pastor who married Erika and I, and had managed to filch the wedding license paperwork from him, assuring the pastor that he was on the way to the post office and would make sure it was mailed. Luckily for me, Curtis simply filed the document in his folders at home, while Erika and I headed off to the North Carolina mountains for a quick honeymoon before I left on a European Tour.
We had an uneventful honeymoon, other than a couple of arguments along the way. Our car broke down outside Raleigh, and we had a devil of a time getting it repaired. Somehow we managed to make it back to Tampa intact. I already had my things packed, grabbed my guitar, and headed to the airport.
Jason and I met up with Freight Train, the bass player, in the Orlando airport. We flew to JFK in New York, and awaited Sherman’s arrival…in the bar, of course. Sherman had already begun to give me the evil eye for my drinking habits, but none of us ever drank before or during a show, only afterwards. We flew from JFK to Gatwick, UK, and did a seven day tour of London, Brighton, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, and Chichester. Most of the guys did not acclimate well to the British way of life, but I did. I loved Brighton the most, as it was such a beautiful town with beaches covered in small, smooth rocks and plenty of tourists from all over Europe. Our daily routine was simple: wake up early and travel, set up for the gig, do the gig, go out and party all night, then wake up early and travel again. As the bandleader, it was my job to find somewhere for us all to drink and party after the shows, and I took that responsibility seriously. We managed to have a great time in the UK, and then headed over to Germany to play a large concert called the Gaildorfer Blues Festival. This particular show was a highlight of the entire tour. We had flown from the UK to Germany on Lufthansa, and upon exiting the plane we were all given these nicely made bag lunches. There was a very large tour bus awaiting our arrival, and it was already nearly full of all the other bands for the festival. Our plane was the last to arrive, so some of these guys had been sitting there in that bus for hours waiting for everyone to finally arrive.
By the time I got on the bus, nearly every seat was taken. And the seats were taken by some of the most legendary bluesmen alive. Gatemouth Brown was sitting there, Billy Branch, Joe Louis Walker, Kenny Neal, and many more Chicago legends. The only seat I could find was next to a very imposing Matt “Guitar” Murphy. I have met many of my heros and influences over the years, but I was a bit hesitant to sit next to Matt. Plus, he was NOT in a good mood, having been forced to wait hours for everyone to arrive. And we were the last band. I could see it in his eyes. So I timidly asked him if I could sit next to him and he gruffly replied “Sure, why not?” I tried to settle in quickly and appear non-existent.
Matt began to talk to me little by little. We exchanged musical pleasantries, and I complimented his guitar work on the Blues Brothers movies. He noticed my little brown paper bag, and mentioned that he had not had anything to eat in hours. I sensed an opportunity to make a friend, and opened up the bag to reveal a pretty nice sandwich. Matt’s eyes grew to great proportions as he eyed the Lufthansa sandwich. “Take it”, I said “they gave it to me on the plane, and I can wait until we get to the festival grounds to eat.
So for the price of a sandwich, I made a friend for life. Matt never forgot me for giving him the sandwich, and when I would run into him later on tour, he would always greet me with a smile and a “thank you” for that sandwich.
Gatemouth Brown from Texas was the headliner that night at Gaildorfer, but he had no idea that another Texas bluesman would steal the show that evening. Sherman’s slot was just before Gate, and we played possibly the best show of the entire tour that night. Jason’s drumming was top notch, Freight Train was as solid as a rock, I had everything together, and Sherman was truly giving one of the best shows I had seen him do. We literally blew Gatemouth off the stage, and had thousand of German blues fans going crazy. Our set ran late, as the people would not let us stop. I still remember Gatemouth cursin
g Sherman all the way to his backstage trailer. By the time Gate finally played, about ¾ of the people had already left, and the ones that were still there were in a daze after our show. Afterwards, we walked through the audience and made friends. I ended up hanging out with a beautiful blonde German girl named “Sabine”. We drank huge 22 oz beers that were allegedly local production, and I didn’t get back to my room until well after daybreak. Just in time to catch the plane to Italy.
This was a peak time in my life. Finally I was playing shows to thousands of happy people, instead of 20 drunks in a bar in Tampa. I was on top of the world, staying in four-star hotels, eating at amazing restaurants, and playing some of the biggest blues concerts in the world. What could possibly bring me down?
We made it safely to Italy, and played shows all over my father’s homeland in Termoli, San Severino Marche, and many other Italian towns. San Severino stands out to me, as now I had become the target of Cat and Sherman’s criticism. We did a great show with the amazing blues and jazz guitarist Robben Ford. I played that show pissed off and basically staring at the floor. Once we were finished, I raided the backstage area, got an armful of beer, and headed back to my hotel room and drank by myself. Normally, I would have been a lot more excited to hang out with one of my heroes, but I opted to get silly drunk by myself instead. Alcoholics tend to isolate, and I had been an isolator since I was a child. The only saving grace of that evening was a lovely young Italian woman who lived across the street from my hotel room. I was up on the sixth floor, and basically sat in my window drinking beer all evening. I noticed this shapely young woman as she began to undress, right there in her window. She looked up and saw me there, wide-eyed with my beer in my hand. She smiled, and pulled her dress off in the moonlight, allowing me to see her entirely naked for a few moments before she waved and turned out the light. Thank you, beautiful Italian girl. At least you took my attention away from focusing on my sad self for a few brief moments.
