BURNED - Living Through the 80s and 90s as a Rock Guitarist

by Bobby DeVito

  So, all of us in Hatterfox finally left the club about 5:30 am. Jimmy followed me all the way to his turn-off, and tried to get me to come over and smoke a nightcap joint, which we normally did after a gig. I refused, knowing that I needed to get ready for school. Jimmy said he knew something bad was about to happen, but he could not convince me to stay. So off into the night I went.

  As I turned onto state road 580 there in Oldsmar, I felt pretty good, a bit drunk and high, and exceptionally tired. SR 580 is a long, dark affair with six lanes cutting through one of the little country towns surrounding Tampa. I was doing a good 85-90 mph that night, and passed out at the wheel.

  Let me preface this section by stating this is what actually happened. I tried, for some reason, to block this all out. It took my mother, and the police report, to convince me otherwise. I am not one of those “angel loving new age people” that you see with stupid bumper stickers like “My Co-Pilot is an Angel”, or any such nonsense.

  As the car skidded off the road at nearly 90 miles per hour, it woke me up. I tried to steer hard left, to get back on the pavement. This simple maneuver saved my life, as the car’s passenger side immediately impacted with a 4 ft high cement culvert which pushed the front end of the car all the way to the dashboard. The car went over 450 feet through the air, turning an entire flip, and miraculously landed on all four wheels and kept rolling…right into a huge telephone pole. I awoke in the car as it came to a rest against the telephone pole, surrounded by flames. Someone was knocking rapidly and insistently upon the window of the car, urging me “get out, get out, the car is on fire and is going to explode! Wake up! You have to get out of the car, now!” The voice was a male voice, and would not let me pass back out.

  I can’t express how it felt to realize the predicament I was in, being stuck inside a burning car. After being burned so severely at age 11, it seemed like I was back in that fiery hell again. I managed to break free of the seatbelt, and exited the vehicle. As soon as I got away from the car, I realized that both of my guitars were in the back seat. Me, being the crazy guitarist that I am, instantly without a seconds’ hesitation went back into the burning car to retrieve my guitars. As I turned away from the burning vehicle with my guitars in each hand, the car exploded, covering me with glass, fire, and ash. I hurried down the street, praying that I could reach a pay phone and call a cab – my drunken mind was going to simply tell my father that his car had been stolen from the parking lot of the nightclub while I was doing the gig!

  As I walked down the street with my guitars, I took a quick inventory. Here I stood, covered in blood and glass, wearing a leather vest and a pair of Lip Service lace up the side green velvet rock and roll pants. Behind me the flames raged at least 30 feet high as the car was completely demolished. I forged ahead in shock, trying to make it up the road a couple of miles to the nearest service station.

  Before long, an HCSO Deputy drove up to the scene. I will never forget our interchange. He initially stopped at the accident scene, noticing the obvious – a car completely engulfed in flames. As he shot his high beam spotlight forward, he saw my silhouette in the distance. Riding up to me slowly, he rolled down his passenger side window, looked at me, and asked “Son, is that your car back there?”

  I looked him dead in the eye and said “No sir officer, that’s not my car”. Which wasn’t a lie; it was my dad’s car. The Sheriff just laughed, opened the trunk of his car, and said “Son, why don’t you just put those guitars in the trunk and get into the back seat?”

  I figured at this point it sounded like a good idea. I placed the guitars in the trunk and took a seat in the back of his car. We drove back to the scene, where all sorts of local cops and state troopers had started arriving to view the carnage. My favorite comment came from one state trooper, who, upon arriving, immediately asked what they had done with the body. “Oh, him?” said the Sheriff. “He’s in the backseat of my car”.

  “He’s still ALIVE?” responded the surprised state trooper. I told the Sheriff my story, and this guy was really quite good to me. He took me outside, and showed me where I had taken the tops off the trees in my 450 foot automobile gymnastics expedition. I wasn’t prepared for what he showed me next, however.

  “You said someone stopped and banged on your window to wake you up, right?” asked the sheriff.

  “Yes”, I replied. “He must have stopped his car, and basically forced me to wake up and get out of the car, and then I guess he just drove off ” The Sheriff studied me for a moment, and then brought me over to the car. He shined his light next to the remains of my father’s brand new car, and said “well son, there’s only one set of footprints near your car, and they are yours. There is no evidence that anyone stopped by your car whatsoever”

  This information managed to escape me completely, as my mother had arrived. She went to the police station with me, and the Sheriff only charged me with careless driving. The Sergeant on duty wanted to see more charges, but the Sheriff insisted that I had been through enough. My mom, to add insult to injury, kept saying to the cops “But he smells like a brewery!”

  Thanks mom. Months later, my mother reminded me of this story, and I had to take a look back on this experience. She was insistent that it was an angel that had stopped to make me wake up. And this time, I could not argue with her. There is no other explanation for what happened that night.

  If you do not believe anything else in this book, please believe this last story. I spent years of my life following the teachings of Aleister Crowley, whose aim was “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion”. I would be the first person to get up and walk away laughing at one of those new-agey Angels Conferences. To me this episode in my life recalls on of those formulaic Reader’s Digest articles my mother was so fond of. Months later, I tried to really remember, during meditation, on what the person looked like who banged on my window that night. It was an older gentleman, with a deep voice. I can’t help believing it had something to do with my grandfather, Slim Henderson.

  Slim had died in 1986 when I was on the road with The X-Statics. Knowing my grandpa pretty well, I don’t think he would have wanted me to cancel gigs to come back for his funeral. He died of a combination of alcohol and tobacco abuse, a long hard life of drinking. Several “psychic” type people had told me for years that he was still following me around. I suppose out of any of his grandkids, he’d probably enjoy my life the most, as I am still a regularly gigging musician hanging out in the bars. Slim, if you’re still out there, thanks. I know it was you that night.

  CHAPTer THree

  Academia and Beyond

  Recovery from the accident was pretty tough. I stayed at home for a couple of weeks, but it put me so behind in the honors program at school that I never quite got caught back up, and ended up finishing the entire semester with a “C” average, and that generous grade was a gift from the professors who felt bad for me. I had a great time in the IDS program, and we had started at the dawn of Western Civilization, and worked our way in two years through the history, philosophy, art, literature, and science of the span of Western culture. I had managed an “A” average until the semester of the auto accident.

  Bob Uzzo calls these “consequences”. If you want to know whether you qualify as an alcoholic or a drug addict, start with a list of consequences. Things like blacking out, crashing a car, getting a DUI, losing your job, ending up on the street…those are consequences. So is losing the respect of your friends, family, and intimate partners. Consequences start to really add up in the world of the alcoholic and addict. “Normal” people will experience some sort of consequence, and they will realize the error of their ways and make a correction in their behaviors. We alcoholics simply keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results. The true definition of insanity.

  I had maintained pretty well up until this point in my life. The program calls this a “functional alcoholic”. An honors student with an “A” average, I had a steady house gig
in Tampa at the Spinnaker Lounge with The Impacs that paid the bills, and I was selling and trading vintage guitars, synthesizers, and amplifiers. I sold celebrity-owned “rock star” guitars to the Hard Rock Café, and became one of their most trusted suppliers of instruments and memorabilia. I self recorded and produced my first solo album “Guitar Salad”, a very Joe Satriani/Eric Johnson sort of guitar instrumental album that managed to get me on mainstream rock radio in south Florida, and a gig at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. The future was so bright I had to wear shades.

  But behind these things, I felt something was inherently, spiritually wrong. I had a crisis moment, where for weeks I had trudged to school and would have almost fainting spells. One day on my way to the library across campus, I felt struck down by a bright light. I thought of Paul on the road to Damascus as I hit the ground. It shook me up pretty good, and I spoke to my classmate Mary Ellen about it. Mary Ellen was a GOOD GIRL, the kind parents love. She was in training to be a midwife, was sweet, intelligent, and a little rubenesque for my tastes at that time. We had a great friendship, although she was a devout Christian, and I enjoyed picking at the threads of her religious beliefs like a kitten with a ball of string.

  She drove me home, and I gathered all of my occult books, my years of journals from my work and study, all of the items related to that activity and took them to a remote area on Tampa Bay, where we ritually set them on fire and destroyed the whole lot. It was an enormous sense of relief to see those things floating away as ashes. I knew I had to make changes in my life, and this was one of them. My accident had taught me that things in this world may not be quite as I had imagined them and perhaps all those cheesy stories in Guidepost weren’t all lies and hackneyed writing.

  As the school year drew to a close, I had to make decisions about where next to pursue college. I was doing well with my music, but truly felt I needed a LOT more education and wanted to pursue it as best I could during this time in my life. The professors I worked with at SPJC were some of the finest teachers I have ever had; Ben Wiley, Joe Fenley, Janet Robinson, and the others – my hat will always be off to them. Ben Wiley suggested that I check out New College in Sarasota, the state of Florida’s honors university. The IDS program had previous students attempt to gain admission, but to no avail. New College is an incredibly progressive school, with no grades, a “write-your-own” education policy, only around 500 students attending at any given time, and the highest suicide rate of any school in the nation. It sounded to me like I had found my school, and my only other opportunity was going to USF, a boring school with 35,000 students, a completely impersonal college experience in my eyes. So I spent most of the fall still enrolled in SPJC, doing some remedial courses I had skipped in high school, so that I would be eligible to get my associate’s degree. New College required a barrage of entrance essays, recommendations from professors, and a very strict admittance policy. I followed each instruction to the letter, becoming obsessed with entry to the school. At 28 years old, I was 10 years older than the average entering Novo Collegian. I was called to Sarasota that spring for an interview with the associate director of admissions, Kathy Killion. She must have seen something she liked in me, as a couple of months later I got a simple postcard from her that said “You’re in!” I still have that card somewhere.

  During this time I had begun to live with my friend Mark’s sister, Lynn. She was a couple of years older than I was, and had graduated from my father’s computer school Tampa Tech, was in the Air Force as a “missile walker”, and then went to engineering school at USF. She was always one of my father’s favorites, and we got along quite well most of the time. We were both immersed in our studies, and we partied an average amount. My drinking had slowed down considerably since the accident, and I had started doing fewer gigs per week as I concentrated on school. It was almost like my disease, which is what the program people want me to call alcoholism, was in remission during this time. During my first year at New College, I had been working on a paper in the computer lab and glanced at a USF newspaper. In the classifieds section was an employment ad for BMG Distribution, an actual major record label job. I didn’t follow directions, just sent them a cover letter and told them of my musical history and knowledge of the south Florida music scene. I managed to get the interview somehow, and showed up as the last person to be interviewed. Everyone there took a break when I came in, so I was able to “spy” at all the other resumes on the table. They were all more qualified, educated, and driven than I was. I honestly felt like I had absolutely no chance at all to get the job. So when they all returned and interviewed me, it was basically just chatting. I acted like I didn’t want the job and we instead talked about some of the acts on the labels they worked with, and what places would be good for them to check out in town, etc. I got a call a week later, and had the job.

  Working for BMG opened up a lot of new doors for me. Suddenly, I was working with acts like Sarah McLachlan, Dave Matthews, Tool, Matthew Sweet, and many others. As the local marketing rep, I handled press, radio, retail, and concert promotion. The BMG internship was fully paid and voted the best internship in the music industry. Once again, I had landed on my feet, gaining entrance into one of the most difficult to enter colleges in the country, and I had one of the sweetest paid internships in the music biz.

  My job was immediately bountiful; I had passes to all of our shows that came to town, a virtual truckload of schwag that would arrive weekly, and the corporate expense account to host listening parties and the like. BMG would bring us all to the CMJ conferences in NYC every fall, and to huge BMG conferences all over the US. In my couple of years with BMG, I had done everything from wash floors in a Bowery soup kitchen with the staff of Windham Hill Records, and also stood next to Clive Davis on the floor at Irving Plaza, while we both grooved to The Bogmen – everyone else at the label was upstairs in the VIP area eating the free food. I always respected Clive, and was sort of mystified how everyone in the crowd, whether they knew who he was or not, gave him about a 3 ft personal space that was not infringed upon. And Irving Plaza was sold out that night. I tried to give Clive a copy of the advance tape for my project LVX Nova, but he said “sorry, I’m going somewhere else after this” – a very Zen-like solution to saying no to the demo.

  Being a part of the BMG family was great; I got to see a lot of young performers when they were at their best. Jeff Buckley always has left a strong impression on me, after seeing him at Sin-E in the old days. Chris Whitley blew my mind, and changed my life. I would have never met Buddy Guy, and traded Stratocasters with him, if it was not for BMG. And Buddy, if you or your people are reading this, I apologize for selling that red polka-dot Strat you traded me to the Hard Rock – but that money paid for my last year of school. In some ways, my blues hero put me through my last year of college.

  And New College was an experience as well. I met people there like Curtis Hayes and Tony West, who have turned out to be lifelong friends. New College was voted “the reefer madness college of the south” by Rolling Stone Magazine, and they were right on the money. Our school was a motley crew of overachieving Merit Scholars fresh from high school, alongside the kid that looks like Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club all dressed in black and looking sketchy. We had some frat boys and sorority girls, but that sort of college experience was severely punished by the rest of the students. My first day at school, I was in line to meet the director of the music department Dr. Stephen Miles. Behind me in that line was Curtis Hayes. Between the two of them, they both constituted the majority of my college life.

  Curtis was a young premed student, a very educated and cultured young guy who had descended from Peruvian royalty. He was allegedly going to be a doctor. However, he had already begun to change his mind about that, and after we met he decided to switch over as a music major. I don’t think his parents ever forgave me for that. We hit it off as friends immediately, and it was a big help to me socially, as Curtis was an RA at the dorms, and knew most of t
he other students. I was kind of an outsider, and had not spent much time on campus other than being in class. And New College is ALL about being on campus. Our school is a beautiful, amazing, sometimes crazy place. I saw more rampant nakedness and sheer drug ingestion there than nearly anywhere else in my life. At the same time, many of us were doing amazing academic work, along with whatever creative pursuits we had. For Curtis and I, it was the “Curtis Hayes Blues Experience”. Curtis had met another guitar player much like myself, Bob Phelps. Bob was a couple of years older than me, and had gone to the famed Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood in the late 70s. Bob was an inventive, somewhat crazed guitarist who inhabited regions more akin to Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead, and I was the blues rock phenom that I had always been since I first learned Eric Clapton solos off the Cream albums in the early 70s. Curtis had started out by playing guitar, but Bob and I took one look at each other and handed him a bass. He picked it up and played it correctly, and with feel immediately. He’s never stopped playing bass since that moment. It’s all my fault.

  Our band was a college favorite. We are playing “jam band” music a good 5 years before it started to become “hip”. Curtis likes to remind me that he “told me that kind of stuff was gonna be popular!” I just could never see it; we would take an old blues classic or R&B classic, like “Take Me To The River”, and then go off on wild tangents for 10 or 15 minutes, somehow eventually getting back to the song, and just jamming and soloing and having a good time. I could think of nothing more boring than just watching people jam like that.That kind of music is more fun to play than it is to listen to in my opinion.

  Dr. Miles was the other person I met that day, and he influenced and inspired my entire academic career. I nearly always followed his advice, and he never let me down. New College is a tough school to graduate from – you must make it through every semester unscathed, then write a Master’s thesis and defend it to graduate. There can be up to a 40% attrition rate at New College due to the demands of graduation. I simply focused on taking all the courses I could in order to further my artistic vision – and leave me enough free time to party and jam.