by Michael Fowler
I been in rock music from the very beginning, when the Berry-man did his first duck walk and Elvis petted his first hound dog and Halley discovered his first Comet, and I married me a number of rock women.
Truth, I been married more times than any Beatle, Stone, or Domino. I’m sure you heard of me –Pete Sturdley– but if you hasn’t that can only mean you ain’t in the business.
If you were Chuck, the Big Bopper, or David Bowie you heard of me all right. I had me a band or two that never caught on, but I also was sideman for some of the greats, playing any instrument they needed me to. With a career like that you know I got my share of women, inheriting most, you might say, from other musicians, since we players like to pass them around.
Lots of ‘em were written about in the music before or after I married them, and here’s the honest-to-Pete lowdown on a few of papa’s bags through the years. Maybe you heard of some.
Caldonia was my first little bride, and to speak truly I can’t remember if it was Carl Perkins or Little Richard who had her before me, but I think Richard. Or maybe Carl had her then Little Richard and then me. A wop lop a loo bop a wop bam boom.
But I was the only one who married her, I think around ’54. For that woman it was mostly about steppin’ out and doin’ me wrong. She’d come home late one night with potato chips on her breath. The next night, Clark Bars. I said, “Who you snackin’ with, Caldonia?” I knowed she was eating hors d’oeuvres with all of Bill Halley’s Comets and probably Gene Vincent’s Bluecaps too, but she wouldn’t admit it.
She told me she had to live her own life. I said, “Caldonia, I don’t own ya, I just wanna phone ya.” That was the last straw for her, and she moved in with Buddy Holly. I heard she got Buddy so mad, he broke his glasses. By then she weighed about 400 pounds from all her snackin’.
Maybellene was my second. I got her after Chuck Berry put her out. This was ’55, and I was still a fine young man at the time. A fine, fine, superfine man.
Still, most of my women trickled down to me from better known musicians. Don’t know why that was, I was so fine. Had me some velvet pants tight as sausage skins and a guitar covered in fur like Bo Diddley’s.
Though the Berry-man put her out, Maybellene claimed she had up and left Chuck, or up-Chucked as she said, because he had taken to foolin’ around with her sister Nadine who was supposed to be Little Richard’s woman.
It was complicated, but the fact was, Chuck put her out because she talked so fast. Good golly, that woman talked fast. You know those lead weights they put on new tires when they balance them? Maybellene talked so fast, she wore one of those weights on her lip.
Maybellene left me early on in ’56 when I started espousin’ leftist themes.
Boni Maroni was my big-boned dancin’ woman, and my third wife. But I’m goin’ to stop countin’ about here, ‘cause the numbers get too high.
She was a dancin’ fool, and a big one. I think she was Italian, with a name like that. But you never know. Macaroni comes from France, don’t it? So maybe she was French.
She and I danced our way into the ’60s on dance floors across the country and once on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand with Dick about twenty-one and perfect. When she took the floor and got into her stance, and got those big elbows and knees of hers to swivelin’ like ten guys pulling oars in a rowboat, then you knew that woman could shake a tail feather. She could pick you up like a threshing machine or a one-woman mosh pit and snap your spine as well as give you soft-tissue injuries.
I said, “When you die, Boni Maroni, those big bones of yours is goin’ to make some fine fossils.” She didn’t like the sound of that, though, changed partners in mid-dance and never looked back. The last I heard, she was playin’ tambourine for Steely Dan’s revival tour, really slappin’ that thang.
Patches was an Earth Mother, one of my first hippie chicks. She used to love to go skinny dipping in that dirty old river that flowed by the coal yard in old shanty town.
Afterward she’d shower to get the E. Coli out of her long, loose hair. This was, oh, about ’64 or 5.
She was a keen businesswoman too, though she come from a poor family and had only a seventh grade education. After we married she managed my band the Stanky Things, then when the band and the marriage folded she managed Jeff Stone and His Pebbles, that kid from the Donna Reed Show.
Finally she founded her own group, one of the first all-female bands ever, the Trinkets, and put out an album of straight-ahead, no-holds-barred piffle. Though she drowned in the song named after her, today she’s alive and kickin’, and after managing a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Ft. Lauderdale for a couple of years, she joined the Moonies. We still speak, me and Patches, but not in any known language.
Sloopy lived in a very, very, very bad part of town.
If Patches was poor and sort of unwashed, Sloopy was just plain scuzzy. A real scumbunny. I don’t what attracts rockers like me to poor girls, or them to us; pure James Dean rebellion, I reckon; but after Patches I just had to have me some more of that trash. And Sloopy was trash. So was her part of town. It was very, very, very bad.
Anyway, after she’d been hangin’ with the McCoys for a time, and not carin’ what her daddy did say, she up and run off with me. No hard feelings from the McCoys; Rick Derringer was my best man.
Our wedding night, Sloopy put a hickey on my throat round and red as a gunshot wound. Those were the times. Sloopy wasn’t musical, though, and turned down an invitation to appear on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert on TV. With my encouragement she got into D movies and then porn. Two of her flicks, Coed Firing Squad and Nun School Flagellants, made the drive-ins. Sloopy left me when she got a little money of her own, and died in 1982 givin’ birth to Rick James’ crack child.
I was a plumb fool to get involved with another woman in the ’90s, but I thought Layla was special. I should of knowed better.
I had more lines on my face than are on a pound of raisins. I looked closer to death than Keith Richards. Heck, I was older than Keith, if that’s possible.
And Layla was the kind of woman who had brung Eric Clapton, once known as God, to his knees. What chance did I have? Our marriage, begun in 1991, lasted six weeks, that’s what chance.
In the third week Layla told me she was expectin’ George Harrison’s baby. Three weeks later she got an abortion and told me she was goin’ back to EC. “I’ve got the Clapton again,” she said. Layla never smoked cigarettes, but did so much pot she died of lung cancer in ’94.
Folks ask me if I’m gonna marry again, but I say, “No way, Freddie.” I’m off the women for good, at least in this lifetime.
For me to repeat the old ball-and-chain number, I’d have to find me someone real special. Someone like, say, Mustang Sally.
Now there was a woman who could ride, shoot, and laugh till the smoke cleared. I hear she’s still livin’ too, in a nursing home somewhere in Mississippi. Maybe someday me and she’ll hook up. I can tell you if we do, I won’t want no more stuff again soon.
Aside from that one time, now safely past, he has been flat-out hilarious.