by Bobby DeVito
Luckily, I had started to audition with a new band that had relocated to Tampa from Huntsville Alabama, “Hatterfox”. They had been an “A” circuit band right there along with The X-Statics, so we had worked for the same agents and played at the same clubs and colleges. Jimmy and Joey were the core of this band, and their Dad had been a country songwriter who had a day job at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. A great deal of Alabama is pretty redneck, but Huntsville was relatively cosmopolitan compared to most of the state. There are a lot of military weapons specialists, designers, missile testing sites, and more. The brothers had made a good name for themselves, having put out two albums and touring incessantly. We found a great local drummer named Jay Arce, rented a practice space, and started sweating out the rehearsals.
Jimmy and I hit it off from the first day we met. He was a good looking blonde guy, long curly hair and total rock attitude. He could play good rhythm guitar and sing, and was married to one of the most amazingly hot women I have ever known, Lisa. They shared an apartment with a neurotic whippet named “Mick”, and were barely getting by at the time. The first time I met Jimmy, I went to their apartment where we went over the song list and watched MTV. Jimmy produced a sheet of blotter acid, and away we went. I spent the whole weekend over there, smoking joints and tripping. I don’t know how Lisa put up with us, as we were high all the time. Jimmy had secured a contract with the apartment complex where they lived, and he did all the interior painting for the complex. I immediately moved in with them to get away from Beth, and started working with Jimmy during the day, going to rehearsals at night. I managed to get Beth as far away from me as possible, by giving her my car and every penny I had to my name if she would promise to get in the car and drive it as far as she possibly could away from me. It was a relief to see her tail lights fade away into the distance, and I have not seen her since.
Hatterfox rehearsals were pretty simple, really. Take a quarter-ounce of pot, at least two cases of beer, and four musicians in a hot room. We practiced high and drunk, because we played our gigs high and drunk. When we were in the studio at $100 an hour, we stupefied the engineer Doug at American Music Works by consuming so much beer and pot at our sessions, he was amazed we could actually still play. We sounded like a very drunk Aerosmith, which is pretty hard to do.
Our rented practice space actually belonged to another Bay Area band, the Three Blind Mice, a band that was mining the rockabilly vein of music and were as drunk as we were. While painting an apartment one day, Jimmy and I had discovered a stash of Polaroid “swingers” photos. The stack of instant photos revealed a quite corpulent couple having sex and posing for nude photos. They were completely hilarious to us, and I kept them in my guitar case to scare other musicians. One night we were totally in the bag drunk and stoned at the practice room, our rehearsal having degenerated into a drinking contest.The walls of the Blind Mice practice room was literally a shrine to the band, as the bandleader/bass player Barney had covered nearly every open area of wall space with photos, articles, and flyers for the band. I began to slowly pull down certain items on the wall, replacing them with the scary swinger’s photos. It wasn’t until a couple of months later, after we were done rehearsing at the space, that we got a call from Barney – his parents (who owned the building) had stopped by and were admiring the shrine to The Blind Mice, when they began to discover the photos. I wish I would have kept that answering machine message.
We had that band clicking along pretty well, and headed to a studio in Alabama to record. We had a gig outside Huntsville, and played a club that can only be described as “surreal”. There was a basement in this club, with a small hallway that had closed doors on either side. Jimmy and I got nosy, and started going downstairs and just walking into rooms. There was gambling of all sorts, and we nearly got beat up down there for intruding. But once again, musicians have carte blanche most of the time, and we rapidly were spied by the local drug dealer, a late 30s woman in leather pants. She came up and offered us ecstasy. Both Jimmy and I had heard of the new wonder drug, and although it was $25 per pill, we each bought one and immediately ate it, even though we still had two sets to do. You just never figure when you’re doing drugs that each time may be your last.
The ecstasy hit me like a freight train. I had lost track of Jimmy, and I was back upstairs in the nightclub. Everything had become louder, brighter, it was almost too much to handle. I was taking off like a rocket, and was trying to just hold it all together. Joey came up to me, and could see the terror in my eyes. “Have you seen Jimmy?” he asked me. Neither of us was prepared for what we found.
Jimmy was curled up in a fetal position on the dance floor. When we found him, his eyes were closed and doing those sorts of rapid eye movements you see in sleep studies when people are dreaming. It was an instant crisis situation, and we had to get him immediate medical help. Which also meant telling his parents, as well as the doctors, what he had ingested. The ambulance came and carted Jimmy away to the Emergency Room, as his parents completely freaked out and grilled us all as to what happened. I had to try and maintain and act like I was straight, when in all honesty I was flying somewhere past Neptune at this point. And the club owner was pissed as well. I can remember very clearly that I was sitting on the toilet in the men’s room, experiencing some of the worst diarrhea I have ever had, with my notebook on my lap trying to come up with a song list where I would front the band as a trio for the remaining two sets. It was what we call in recovery “a moment of clarity”. I could see how fucked up we all were, I could see how much damage and confusion we were causing, and somehow I had to carry on. Isn’t rock and roll glamorous?
As I got onstage for those last two sets, it was a very weird experience. I was once again watching myself from outside of my own body. I plugged in my guitar and strummed a few licks to warm up, and it sounded like my guitar was louder than it had ever been, like I was in a huge Coliseum. I immediately turned it down a few notches, which freaked out our soundman, because I always played loud. I had my amp turned down to a whisper, yet it still sounded huge. I could see the face of my soundman as he tried to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. Somehow I managed to play those two sets, both singing lead vocals and playing lead guitar, and made it back to the hotel. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy my ecstasy experience very much. I ended up alone in my hotel room, paranoid that someone was going to discover that I had done it too. How come Jimmy ended up in the emergency room, yet I managed to deal with it? You never know, especially when it comes to bootleg pharmaceuticals like ecstasy. Jimmy’s pill could have easily had twice as much of a dose as mine. As I learned later, drug “chemists” will add all sorts of extra ingredients to MDMA, such as heroin, speed, or other fillers. Forrest Gump was right, you never know what you’re gonna get.
That little road trip spelled the end for Hatterfox temporarily. Jimmy stayed in Huntsville to recover, and I managed to hang out with a cute Ocean Pacific swimwear model for a few weeks. I don’t even remember her name, but she was stunning. Jimmy’s father saw me with her one night at a club in Huntsville, and commented about how beautiful she was. I didn’t have sex with her, although she wanted to and we slept together nearly every night. She would follow the band around, and get a much nicer hotel room than the ones the band would be staying in, so naturally I hung out with her. I told Jimmy’s dad that we were just friends, and he said “well son, don’t get BEHIND…you’ll never be able to catch up”. Sometimes I think he was right, I slept with the ones I shouldn’t have, and didn’t sleep with the ones I should have. Hindsight is a motherfucker.
As it became obvious that Hatterfox was on extended hiatus, I checked in with my parents. In 1987, my father suddenly expressed a desire to live in New Jersey again, and off my parents went to live in Bergen County in a very small town called Emerson. My dad ran a school in Paramus called “Computer Processing Institute”, and my parents had found a beautiful little house on 216 Main Street there in Emerson. My father of
fered me a job painting the entire interior of the school, and once again I packed up my guitar and headed north. On a frigging bus again, of course. Greyhound and Trailways have been the curse of my adult existence.
Emerson is a small Northern Jersey town, situated in one of the richest counties in the state. I loved the fact that I was only a short bus ride away from NYC, and my sister and I took countless trips into the city together. Hoboken was very close as well, and the music scene there was really cool. It was during this time that I began to take spirituality a bit more seriously. By this point in my mid-late 20s, I had seen and experienced a lot and was trying to make sense of it all in some small way. I became a student of the O.T.O., a magical society founded by Aleister Crowley. New York had quite a plethora of books stores and occult shops, and I became friends with a gentleman named Herman Slater who owned a great occult store in the city called “The Magickal Childe”. I had always felt that I was a very spiritual person, but had not been able to express it fully. Since I had pretty much rejected mainstream fundamentalist Christianity early in my youth, my main arbiter during my teens and twenties was a little book called the Tao Te Ching. I had been given the text initially when I was 12 by my karate teacher in North Carolina. Then later at 18, when the beautiful older Susie basically set me free after our six-month love affair, she gave me the beautiful illustrated copy of the Tao by Jane Gio-feng. Taoism and Buddhism had always felt like the sanest religions I had ever come in contact with. Somehow, I kind of figured that the religious idiots I saw in North Carolina that were speaking in tongues and handling snakes were not quite what I was looking for in spirituality.
One thing Bob Uzzo, the leader of Sobrenity, told me early on in my recovery has always stuck with me – “Spirituality is feeling comfortable in your own skin”. I was far from that ideal.
During my time in Emerson, I tried to make some sort of dent in the NYC music scene, but it was not to be. I went on some hilarious auditions, and even jammed with a band of crazy women called “The Cycle Sluts from Hell”. I got to see a very young Melissa Etheridge play, back when she was still acting straight and was trying to be a rock and roll chick. Obviously, she did a lot better later in her career when she basically gave up pretending, and was just who she was, a great lesbian singer/songwriter. A good lesson that was repeated to me during the height of my career as a “professional blues man” a few years later. One of my heroes, the great Buddy Guy, told me succinctly “Bobby, you play blues guitar as good as any black man I know….but….you’re WHITE son! You got to be what you are, go back and play that rock and roll”.
Working for my dad’s school was a cakewalk. I somehow managed to convince them to allow me to work from 11 pm until 8 am on the late night shift, so I could paint without any students or staff around. And it also enabled me to paint while I drank and listened to cassettes on my boom box as loud as I wanted. I would typically drink a couple of six packs every night, paint as much as I could, then go home the next morning and pass out. My mother had started to notice my drinking, that I would sit alone for hours in my room and read Crowley, drinking beer by myself. I argued with her, saying that I drank for fun and for relief, that I wasn’t driving drunk or hurting anyone. We alcoholics never think we’re hurting anyone and that if we’re only hurting ourselves we are OK. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I was far from discovering that truth yet.
In the financial aid department of my dad’s school worked a cute little Catholic brunette named Anita. She was a quiet girl, worked hard, kept to herself, and unfortunately for her caught my eye. I flirted with her for weeks, and we ended up dating regularly. A few weeks after we had started seeing each other regularly, I got the call from Hatterfox to hit the road again.
Jimmy rang me, and explained that the 45 single we had released was getting some good airplay on southern indie radio stations, and we had the possibility of doing a tour, if we could get the band back together. I looked at my situation in Emerson, and realized I was bored to tears and drinking myself silly with no hope of getting out of that situation. I had not done a gig in months, and once again felt like another poor working schlub. It didn’t take much convincing to get me back out on the road. Anita was unhappy about my decision, but there was no stopping me. I finished up a much of the paint job at the school as I could, bid adieu once again to my parents, and once again was on a Greyhound to Florida.
Hatterfox Mark II was very similar to the first incarnation. But Jimmy had discovered cocaine, and this was the start for me of doing it regularly. All during my time in The X-Statics, people offered me hard drugs like cocaine and heroin all the time, and I usually refused. However, Jimmy had started getting really good cocaine for very cheap prices, and suddenly there we were at 5 am in the morning, polishing off an eightball with the other guys in the band. We drank case after case of Miller, and I developed a fondness for the wino special wine, Night Train. Our band was a 60,000 watt party on wheels, and I think sometimes people showed up at our gigs to see if we would actually be able to finish the night.
In a strange case of synchronicity, both Anita and my parents moved down to the Tampa Bay area that summer, with Anita’s parents close behind. She and I had kept in touch, and I relished contact with her, as she was a link to a world of stability and normalcy that I rarely had. She and I moved in a couple of doors down from Jimmy and Lisa, and my parents moved back into the same house they had lived in previously. Luckily, in his mid-life crisis state my father had had the sense not to sell the house, but merely rented it out. Anita came down, and we had one of the most financially trying summers I can remember. Luckily I knew how to fish, and Jimmy and I would go fishing in Tampa Bay to catch redfish and speckled trout to eat. We continued to paint apartments, play music, and get high and drunk on a daily basis.
It was during this time that I met my teacher in the occult arts, Ray. Ray was a computer genius at USF, and was a direct living link to Aleister Crowley. I became a student of his, and had weekly meetings with him for years and years. He had one of the most impressive libraries I had ever seen, and he worked me pretty hard. The first task of a Probationer in Crowley’s order necessitates a HUGE reading list, over 100 classic works of fiction, literature, science, and all the major world religious texts. I have always been a voracious reader, and had stolen lots of books from the various colleges The X-Statics had performed at to keep from being bored on the road. Ray insisted that I should go to college, so I signed up for a summer course in Philosophy 101 at St Petersburg Junior College and started my academic education.
Near the end of my Hatterfox days, we played a show in Clearwater at a club called ML Chasers. The owner of this club was the epitome of all the bad stereotypes of rock club owners you see. He had a bad mullet haircut, an ever-present vial of coke in his pocket, and was usually surrounded by skanky stripper types. I had enrolled in college full-time by this point, and had classes from 8 am -2 m five days a week in the honors IDS (interdisciplinary studies) program at SPJC – my performance in the summer philosophy class had impressed the teacher, Dr. Joe Fenley, and he asked me to join the honors program that fall. So I was still doing gigs with the band, going to college full-time, and had my drinking and drugging career, which at times could be quite hectic.
The night in question was a true rock and roll evening. Towards then end of our night, in walked all the members of then super-popular metal band Warrant. They arrived in true rock star style with about a dozen strippers in their limousines. The club owner knew it was going to be an after-hours party, and began to eliminate the unwanted people from the club – if you weren’t hot, or didn’t have coke, you got the boot. Simple as that. Members of another hot local band were there as well, Archie and Earl from Bleeding Hearts. I had already polished off one bottle of Night Train, and was working on my second one when everything started to really get going.
Of course the guys in Warrant wanted to jam, and I had absolutely no objections to letting them do so. I was al
ready tired from having played all night, so I relinquished my guitar to Archie, and watched as this bastardized version of Warrant tore through bad cover songs at disturbingly high volume. Jimmy and I caroused with the strippers, who were all wearing less and less clothing, some opting to simply walk around in nothing but stripper heels. As we watched this debacle unfold, I looked at my watch and it was already 5 am. I knew I had to be at school at 8, and worried that I would not make it. As I took a goodly swig from my bottle of wine, I watched lead singer Janie Lane as he sang a bad version of ZZ Top’s “Tush” while one of the completely naked strippers gyrated and danced directly in front of him onstage. She began to bend over, leaning on the vocal monitors in the front of the stage, revealing her naked behind to Janie and the band. At that moment, Janie looks at me and I can almost see the little light bulb light up in his head, like an old Loony Tunes Cartoon. He motions me to come onstage with him, and he proceeds to take my bottle of Night Train and penetrates the stripper with it while she is bent over the monitors. We both began to fuck this poor girl vigorously with the wine bottle, which still retained the little metal ring on the top where the twist-off lid had been previously. I remember wondering that it must have felt bad, but Janie kept on singing “Tush” and fucking this poor woman with the wine bottle.
After witnessing this event, I had had enough, and knew I had to get back home and at least take a shower before school that morning. Tampa is very rainy during the summer season, and luckily I had stopped at my parent’s house earlier that night and had picked up my father’s brand new car because of the inclement weather. My dad was traveling a lot for work these days, and since my current car at that time (a 1974 Dodge Duster) was in horrible shape, I would sometimes use one of my parent’s cars.