by Bobby DeVito
Burned
Living Through the 80s & 90s as a rock Guitarist BoBBy deViTo
disclaimer
This is a truthful record of my experiences and life. A few names have been changed, but the facts are the facts. I wish that I would have to make this stuff up; it would have been easier than living it. With any memoir-type work of literature, there may be small gaps in accuracy inherent within the creation. But I have strived to keep this as accurate as possible, going back to my numerous journals and records that I have managed to keep.
PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THIS AWAY FREELY, it took me years to write, and I deserve my $4.99 for it. Thank you!
Foreword
It was the title of this book that first caught my eye. After all, I’ve lived through the 80’s and 90’s, and I would consider myself a “rock guitarist” of sorts, despite the fact that I primarily play bass. Of course bass players are always infinitely cooler than guitar players, so my curiosity was piqued when I saw that a “rock guitarist” had written an entire book about his experience. Most of the “rock guitarists” that I have known in my lifetime would have a difficult time filling out a job application much less writing a short story, so I sat down expecting a mildly amusing, if not somewhat drab tale.
I also enjoy a quick and easy read, as evidenced by the ever-growing stack of books and Sweetwater music catalogs that constantly adorn my private meditation chamber (the john, for those not in the know). Nonfiction is always preferred, as our current reality is growing ever stranger and more fascinating. And reality with a pinch of fantasy thrown in for good measure usually insures success.
A quick scan of the pages herein revealed that the contents of this book lie somewhere between a Bukowski novel and the lyrics of Prince’s Little Red Corvette. As I pressed onward, a small voice in my head got louder and louder until I could no longer ignore the question.
Why in the world would anyone want to read a story about Bobby Devito?
6 | Life Story of a Guitar Player Sexual conquests and drug-a-logues notwithstanding, this is the tale of an atypical wannabe rockstar in the 80’s. I say atypical because typical “rock guitarists” do not generally write books nor attend colleges and have ‘A’ averages. The dichotomy of senor Devito is what separates him from the mainstream. Forget about cookie-cutter American Idols. Back then, if you wanted to be the best, you had to LIVE THE DREAM. The only way to “get there” was to EARN it. Bobby Devito has paid his fair share of dues. Unfortunately, in this economy there is only enough room at the top for a few. But to concentrate on being the top dog is to miss the point of this book completely which is the enjoyment of the ride itself. Not everyone who survived those days has remained as unscathed as Devito, which leads to my next question:
If this book is true, how in the HELL does he remember all of this shit? Maybe its because I grew up in the first “MTV” generation, but my memories of the 70’s and 80’s always seem to appear juxtaposed as if in a string of music videos, complete with the caption of artist, title, album and producer in the lower left-hand corner. Each colorful episode in Devito’s book fits perfectly within this mental scheme, and evokes dusty footage of big-haired icon Riki Rachtman hosting Headbangers Ball whilst channel surfing for Madonna videos to provide a much needed sexual outlet in the restricted cable access youth of the desolate American south. But I digress.
For whatever reason, Devito has managed to recollect (or is it resurrect?) a series of personal events that flow together like a collage of bandanas on the mike stand of Steven Tyler. Endearing terminology like “pity blowjob” (where can I get one of those!) and “strawberry shortcake on acid” leads me to believe that although Devito was discharged from the navy, he was rapidly advancing ranks within the KISS army.
Foreword | 7 Lastly, this book is about recovery. Recovery from what I’m not exactly sure, and perhaps neither is Devito. But at least he has the generosity to share his tale with the rest of us who may or may not be interested. There is a current trend in polarization of religious and anti-religious zealots world-wide. Perhaps the ghostly, grandfatherly intervention that spared his life from a near-fatal car wreck simply reminds us that there is something out there beyond ourselves worth investigating, and that things do happen for a divine purpose after all.
Not a bad concept for a “rock guitarist”. Richard Vega
introduction
“You’re a fucking drug addict” The words reverberated throughout the small room where we were all gathered in a circle for yet another morning group. It was part of what our leader Bob Uzzo called “reality therapy”. And I had ended up on the hot seat that morning. This was my second time around in the world of rehab, after having graduated to this facility in sunny and plastic Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Two years ago I was on tour, playing in a blues band that toured Italy all summer long, reveling in the sights and sounds of my father’s homeland while partying every night and staying in four-star hotels. Now it has all come to this, my own personal VH1 “Behind the Music” story. I had officially become a fucking cliché as well as a fucking drug addict. And an alcoholic. Not to mention a passive aggressive, narcissistic control freak with borderline personality issues. I had begun to arrive at the conclusion that Bob may be right.
Looking back, it seemed like I had always been headed for a similar end. My maternal grandfather had been a hard drinking, hard living country guitar player who had been “blackballed” in the Nashville music world for being an alcoholic. And ethnically, I am a mix of Cherokee & Blackfoot American Indian, Irish, and Italian…quite a potent mix of the oppressor and oppressed, the question and the answer, New World and Old World. “I am large; I contain multitudes” wrote Walt Whitman. I have always been able to relate to that poem more than I would have liked. Multitudes? I contain the whole damn gumball machine!
10 | Life Story of a Guitar Player Bob Uzzo is a proud Sicilian man nearing 60, with the uniform seen on so many other northeastern “snowbird” type transplant residents in South Florida. Khaki cargo shorts, a sensible Seiko watch, and a button up cotton shirt topped off with just a couple of nods to his heritage – a Gucci link chunky gold bracelet, and a beautiful gold and onyx pendant studded with diamonds in the Narcotics Anonymous logo. The rumor around our rehab facility, called “Sobrenity”, is that a famous Hollywood actress gave this pendant to Bob. The pendant glints in the morning sunlight, briefly taking my attention away from the fact that I am on the hot seat, being grilled once again by “The Godfather’, as we have all nicknamed Bob. His face is red with frustration, and I can see many elements of my own angry Italian father from my childhood in this man. At least I can understand what he means when he lapses angrily into Italian curses.
“You’re a fucking drug addict, that’s why you’re here!” Bob exclaims again, trying to sink this message into my drug addled brain. I am still in my first few weeks, and have not yet “pulled my head out of my ass”, as The Godfather is fond of saying. He is trying to get me to realize the truth. But thirty-six years of denial and avoidance can be strong foes to realization. As I sit there in the hot seat with all my fellow inmates surrounding me, I realize that it’s taken a long time to get here and it’s going to take some time to get back. But back to what? My life was a complete shambles, I was married to a complete bitch with whom I had run away on a drunken weekend to Savannah…and she was pregnant with my child. I had no job and had sold my broken down car as scrap, promptly taking the money and buying more drugs to get high. And here I was in REHAB. Such an ugly word from the outside, a word infused with concepts like “failure, useless, piece of shit, derelict,
homeless, unwanted, broken”. I had been set to the island of broken toys, and was being systematically broken down for parts like my poor old car that I had sent to the junkyard.
Introduction | 11 This is my story, as I can best recollect it after all these crazy years. I write it for several reasons; partially as therapy and also to illustrate that there’s always hope. Bob would say that the concept of hope is lame; that we have to have faith. Hope implies that you expect something for nothing, and faith requires you to do some of the work. I hope this book doesn’t suck, and I have faith that I am going to write it as best I can. With all the recent publicity trained on writers like James Frey, there does seem to be a need for the “truthfulness clause” on the front page. I am trying to tell the truth completely here, even when it is ugly. Unfortunately, I don’t have to make up anything for this book.
Chapter 1
Beginnings
I was born in the early 1960s in a small town on the Jersey Shore called Long Branch in Monmouth County, New Jersey. My father’s father had come through Ellis Island like millions of other Italian immigrants, but thankfully since our family name was fairly short it remained “DeVito”. Our family hails from the southern part of Italy in Calabria, what we Americans would consider the “red-neck” part of the country. My descendants were goat farmers and olive growers, with a few standouts that include a professor of music who became a textbook writer and respected music theorist in the old country. My father’s family settled there in Long Branch, and began to build houses. My father was the youngest of the family, and grew up with a hammer in his hands, doing carpentry work along with the rest of his brothers for my grandfather.
My mother met my father in a bowling alley in Jersey, and they have remained together ever since. They were married in April, and I was born in September. Obviously, they had already forged a bond before the marriage, to put it delicately. My mother was from rural North Carolina, but was an early feminist and relatively free-thinker compared to the rest of her siblings. Both of my parents came from large families, but my mother was the oldest among her siblings. Mom was a registered nurse, and was the only member of her family to get the hell out of small town North Carolina when she was young. She had married once before she had met my dad to some guy who had attempted to initiate a lifestyle of domestic violence upon her. Notice I said “attempted” – she immediately took a frying pan to this guy’s head, and promptly got a “quickie” divorce in Alabama. No restraining order needed for my mom. She would still take a frying pan to you today if she felt threatened.
After I came into the world, my parents remained in Long Branch for a couple of years. My father worked for Electronics Associates Incorporated (EAI), a company that manufactured analog computers and had helped develop “core memory”, the forerunner to our modern RAM memory. My father had been an aviation electronics guy in the US Navy for four years before he met my mom, and electronics in the sixties was about as hot as it got for careers. Well, that and “plastics young man, plastics”…I remember little about this era of my life, other than our family dog which my father had named “Boats”, after the deckhands on Navy ships. Boats was a cute little collie-shepherd mix they had found at the dog pound, and I remember eating and sharing my meat bones from the spaghetti sauce with him. My father ended up getting a job with Control Data at this time, as he had encouraged EAI to start focusing on digital computers, but they were still just making analog computers and could not see the change taking place. So, we packed up and moved to Virginia, and left Boats behind.
Virginia is still in a bit of a haze for me. I remember being there, and I remember one event in particular. There was a huge drain pipe there that seemed to be 12 feet tall, and my mom told me there were giant snakes and monsters living in that pipe. Of course, I had to find out for myself. That seems to be a recurrent theme in my life; tell me the stove is hot and I immediately place my hand on the stove. I never did find any giant snakes or monsters in that pipe, but it wasn’t for lack of investigation.
The other vivid memory I have of that time was going to work with my father, marveling at the rooms filled with computers. I always respected my father and his work with computers and electronics and found it all fascinating. Control Data was on the cutting edge in the late 60s, and it was an incredible sight to walk by rooms with huge tape drives whirring, the punch card machines clicking and clacking away, lights flashing, and the smell of cleanliness and feeling of order. I was on “the inside”, VIP, all access backstage. The feeling of belonging, yet being elevated and above the masses. I must have been a pretty strange kid.
I will state one thing right here, right now – my parents truly did they best they could with the tools they had when raising me. It seems to me that parents are such an easy target for blame when it comes to addiction and recovery, or life skills in general. I am living proof that a person can be raised just fine, yet turn out as a complete disaster. My parental units were not perfect, but compared to the horror stories I have heard over the years from my friends, significant others, fellow rehab inmates, and just general conversation – my parents were saints. Although for years I have always addressed cards to my mother as “Mommy Dearest”.
My father ended up going to work for GTE Sylvania, and helped to develop their technical schools to train a much needed skilled work force in electronics. We lived in Lowell Mass, which during the early 70s was a clean little suburban life. Unlike today, where it is a gang ridden urban ghetto, next to one of the most polluted waterways in the entire country, the Merrimack river. We lived on 25 Luz Drive in Lowell, and were situated on the edge of the Pawtucketville National Forest. To say these years were idyllic would be a real understatement. Perhaps in some ways these were very formative years for me, in character and expectation of the world around me. “Old School” Alcoholics Anonymous members speak of a concept they call “King Baby”, which goes back to Freud. King Baby is that demanding, insistent little bastard that lives inside of me and wants what it wants, right fucking now. It is infantile, yet enormous in power. And yes, I have one.
Growing up in Lowell was very Beaver Cleaver-like at that time. I had watched the Apollo moon missions with great interest and excitement. My mother was very attentive to me, buying me the 8x10 color photos from the moon mission, as well as the lunar lander toys. She had basically decided to stay home with me and raise me full time until I was old enough for grade school. She taught me to read herself, and I remember being able to read “Reader’s Digest” before I entered kindergarten. Childhood traumas? My memories from this era are golden and beautiful. I remember going out into the large forest, seeking out leopard frogs and various brightly colored salamanders. I caught lot of snakes, reptiles, amphibians, and brought them home to scare my mom. I had a real interest in nature, the woods, and the outdoors. I also had a bit of a dark side, as I remember killing some of these creatures in various ways, like blowing up toads with firecrackers.
One experience that has stayed with me was when I caught my mother lying to me. I had found a book of matches, and like many young boys had a slight streak of pyromania. I was playing with them, lighting them up and burning them. I believe I set the whole book on fire and watched it burn out in one of my mom’s many huge ceramic 60’s ashtrays. Smoking used to be a whole lot more glamorous and accepted back then, and the ashtrays were a lot more interesting to look at, huge asymmetrical creations in usually one of those classic colors like harvest gold or burnt orange. My mother arrived home and saw the smoking carnage I had created in this huge ashtray, and she completely freaked out. There was a neighbor across the street from us who must have been a HAM radio operator, a scanner enthusiast, or simply someone with a fetish for antennas, as he had all sorts of these aluminum creatures emanating from his house like some sort of signal-gathering octopus. My mother promptly informed me that this guy was the culprit, and with his magic antennae he was able to SEE WHAT I WAS DOING inside of our house, and that he could even read my thoughts,
and that was why she had come home suddenly – he had called and informed her that I was up to no good and was burning down the house.
Even at the age of five, I intuitively knew this was bullshit. But it scared me deeply that there was the Orwellian possibility that someone was secretly watching me and my thoughts. When I read “1984” a few years later, I could completely identify with the concept of “Big Brother”. And I suppose it partly explains why I always had a fascination with HAM radio and electronic warfare to this day.
My parents had the typical middle-class early 70s life. My dad went to work Monday through Friday, 9-5. He came home, my mom made dinner; we had family time in front of our Zenith console TV, or listened to our gorgeous sounding all tube Zenith console stereo. I used to turn it on when no one was around, and tune it in to the local rock station. An early song from Steely Dan used to really catch my ear called “Do It Again”
“ You go back, Jack, Do it again Wheel turning round and round” The sound of this song was unlike anything my parents listened to. My mother, who had been called “The Little Kitty Wells” at age 14 on the Grand Ol Opry, preferred to listen to hardcore female country singers like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. My father liked cheesy Italian music by the Mantovani Orchestra, or “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. Come to think of it, Neil Diamond ended up being cooler than I initially thought. My dad was right about a few things.
Things were rapidly changing in society in the early 70s, and so was I. I seemed to have an early fascination for women, and got caught in my new obsession by my second-grade teacher. During class I had written a note for one of my female classmates, detailing how I was going to ride on her bus instead of my own, and that we would then get off the bus at her stop, go into the woods, and she would pull her pants down and show me her stuff. The note was intercepted by my teacher, her of the horn-rimmed glasses, puffy cotton dresses, and stern looks. She read the note and I could see her face sink, and she looked at me like I was the lowest form of life on Earth. I’ll never forget the utter disdain in her eyes that day, but it didn’t curb my prurient interest in the opposite sex. Heck, I still want to go home with strange women on the bus and get them to take off their pants.