Life on Planet Rock

by Lonn Friend

  I knew I was out of place, but I took a seat next to Lars and interrupted his conversation by congratulating him on the number-one record. I can’t recall the exact words he spit from his intoxicated tongue but they landed hard, and even though he was probably just teasing, I was poised for a meltdown and completely lost it in that moment. It was like I was the only person in the room standing stark naked and everyone was laughing at me. My heart sank in my chest, and all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of there, away from the scene, the stars, the stupidity, and everything else I’d become seduced by over the past several years. I headed straight for the exit. I never turned around to see if he was following me or even looking my way. I didn’t care.

  It wasn’t his rude dismissiveness that got my goat and caused me to race for the door. I’d seen him in obnoxious, inebriated states many times before. Something else was happening to me. A shift was taking place. The ribbing earlier by James and Nikki, and now my closest compatriot of all brandishing a sarcastic sword my way—it was as if I had ceased acting and was now solely reacting. It was getting to be too much to handle. In that microcosmic moment as I spilled out into the damp Munich night, I questioned the friendship of every artist I’d come to know since the day the RIP ride began.

  I grabbed a cab, went back to the hotel, packed up my things, wrote a very succinct “Fuck You!” note to Lars, slipped it under Ian’s door, and made a beeline for the airport, where I caught the next flight back to London and my family, the people who really loved me. When I arrived at Conrad London late that night, Joyce said that Lars had called twice but didn’t leave a message except to say call him immediately. I ignored him, explained to my wife what had happened, and ranted the victim’s rant. Joyce had made reference over the past year to my own narcissistic state. I’m not sure she empathized with me. I really can’t remember what she said. The drone of my own self-pity drowned out all external chatter.

  Three days later when I got back to L.A. and the magazine, RIP art director Craig Jones and I constructed a dummy opener for a Metallica article called “The Swelling of Metallica,” featuring a shot of the band with Lars’s head blown up to five times its normal size. The copy read, “ ‘It’s got to be white!’ shouted Metallica skinmeister Lars Ulrich into his hotel room telephone. ‘I mean, really white. You understand, fuckhead? Not some wimpy shit cream colored crap, but WHITE. White like the first virgin winter snow of my Danish homeland. HELLA WHITE! Get it!’ As the skin-bashing Mr. U. hung up the phone, he wondered to himself, ‘Will this leather jacket be different than all others created before it, or will people think I borrowed it from Axl?’ ”

  You couldn’t tell that the layout was bogus. I faxed the spread to QPrime as if it were authentic. “See what Lars thinks of the opening to my article,” I wrote on the cover note. The image was forwarded to the band while still on tour in Europe.

  The only thing good about insufferable, bombastic, back-slapping awards programs are the afterparties. A few weeks after my faux fax, I attended the Video Music Awards postshow soiree. MTV secured the entire back lot of Universal Studios for their thousand-plus virally imprudent pests, and that’s exactly where I reconnected with the guys. “Hey, man, that magazine layout was hella cool,” giggled James. “Lars stewed for days. I mean, it really fucked with his head. At first, everyone thought it was real. He’s been wanting to talk to you pretty bad.”

  I was engaged in meaningless dialogue with someone from the industry when he found me, took me aside, and started to speak from what I know was his heart. “I’m really sorry about that night in Munich,” he said. “I mean, I was just fucking with you. But I guess I came off as a bit of an asshole. Believe me, you weren’t the only one I was being insensitive to. Listen, man, you’re my friend. Not just the fucking editor of RIP fucking magazine. You’re my friend and that means a lot to me. Are we cool?”

  “Yeah, we’re cool, man.” And it hit me then and there how much I loved this band—especially Lars. And not because they were Metallica and they’d let me in to ride their lightning. But, rather, because they helped me to understand the ethos of celebrity up close and personal, Lemmy-sized warts and all.

  “I think of you as my friend, too, Lars,” I said. “I hope it’ll always be that way. But seriously, dude, you gotta lose that jacket! I heard Sebastian just bought one.”

  “Fuck off!”

  3

  Wonder in Alice Land

  WRITE THE THINGS WHICH THOU HAST SEEN, AND THE THINGS WHICH ARE, AND THE THINGS WHICH SHALL BE HEREAFTER.

  —Revelation 1:19

  What’s the best scene from the original Wayne’s World? C’mon, I’ll give you a hint: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” That’s right! Mullet-headed underground cable-access-TV hosts Wayne and Garth are at a rock concert, flashing their laminates proudly as they prance cluelessly about the backstage area, until they finally come upon the madman himself, who explains the linguistic origin of the word Milwaukee to his guitarist Pete Freezin’. “It’s pronounced ‘mill-e-wah-que,’ ” he says dryly. Dumbstruck at the sight of their hero in the flesh, the dynamic duo drop to their knees and launch into the now-classic moronic mantra, their arms and torsos rising and falling in rapturous praise to the one, the only Alice Cooper.

  That about describes my own adolescent adulation for rock’s mythological maestro. I discovered Alice in high school, early ‘70s, thanks to my younger brother Rick, who happened upon the LP Love It to Death in the cutout bins of Moby Disc Records in Van Nuys. “You have to hear ‘Ballad of Dwight Fry’!” he said excitedly, laying the platter on the turntable. “It’s amazing. I’ll get the tennis rackets! We have to air guitar!”

  Alice was blasting into the mainstream with “Eighteen,” but my brother and I didn’t really listen to the radio. We were album collectors, and it was our mission with each new record that entered the Friend enclave to dig deep into the grooves and suck out the vim, vigor, and venom of every song. We played Love It to Death to death (figuratively speaking of course; you can scratch vinyl but you can’t kill it) along with every single Alice LP over the next six years.

  Killer, School’s Out, Billion Dollar Babies, Muscle of Love, and Welcome to My Nightmare followed Love It to Death. Bob Ezrin, coarchitect of the Alice gestalt, produced every record. It represents one of the most prolific creative runs in the history of rock recording. Alice took me and mine right through college, bitch-slapping our senses over and over again with a horrific fun house of melodies, visual tricks, and unearthly escape routes that every kid growing up in the staid and sullen San Fernando Valley glommed onto for dear life.

  The Welcome to My Nightmare tour hit the L.A. Forum in the winter of 1975. This was rock-’n’-roll theater in its purest and strangest form—guillotines and spiderwebs, snakes and spooky images designed to shake us out of our collective San Fernando stupors. Leaving the building that night after the concert, my ears were ringing and my heart was soaring. It never crossed my mind that someday I would meet the mascara’d man, play a key role when his career reached a crossroads, and beyond that, call him friend.

  • • •

  Our first encounter took place on a golf course in the L.A. suburb of Calabasas on a rainy day in the spring of 1989. Epic Records A&R executive Bob Pfeifer set up the round. He’d recently signed Alice to a new deal, and there was great optimism around the label that this effort possessed all the earmarks of a comeback. Not that Alice needed to come back from anywhere. For two decades, he’d stamped his legend on the forehead of rock ‘n’ roll with a dizzying array of iconoclastic albums and tours. He’d long established himself as the godfather of shock rock, the emperor of onstage theatrics.

  But in the unit-driven, commercially conscious “what have you done for us lately” world of entertainment, Alice Cooper hadn’t seen a song ride the charts since his 1978 ballad “How You Gonna See Me Now.” Being a household name is one thing, having a hit is another, and the Cooper camp felt that they had a monster in th
e cage but could use a little help from the media to set that beast loose.

  Pfeifer and Epic’s publicity department made it crystal clear from the get-go. “We want the cover of RIP,” they said. We were riding a circulation and credibility high on the heels of our exclusive Guns N’ Roses and Metallica coverage. Everyone was talking about us, even the legends. Pfeifer knew that I played golf, one of Alice’s passions, though still in the closet at this time. But he didn’t need to romance me with eighteen holes or dangle any other carrot. Alice was one of my childhood heroes. I’d have stood on a mountaintop in an electrical storm with a five iron in my hand to make his hallowed acquaintance.

  The raindrops kept Pfeifer from joining us for the round, but that was just fine. This was about Alice and me. The Coop was on the putting green when I arrived. “I like a man who isn’t afraid to golf in the rain,” he said, shaking my hand. “Are you kidding?” I replied. “I’m ready for thirty-six!” The next four hours were loaded with laughs. He told jokes and stories about the wild, decadent days of old, like the time he was so drunk he passed out onstage with his head in the guillotine and almost broke his neck!

  What struck me even deeper, however, was that the man Alice Cooper was the absolute antithesis of that deep, dark, sinister character that had welcomed me and mine into his devilish nightmare at the crack of the ‘70s. He asked questions about my wife, where and when I got married, how I liked running a magazine, and when I had picked up the game of golf. He popped open cans of Diet Coke every other hole and shared a package of Cheez’N Crackers with me at the turn. He was warm, funny, and utterly, humbly human.

  At the end of the round we had a sandwich, and Coop handed me an advance cassette of Trash. “It’s unmastered but I think you’ll get the idea,” he said. No pressure, no hype, but his eyes beheld a sense of both pride and enthusiasm. “Hey, let’s play again sometime,” he smiled. The next morning at the office, after spending the evening with the tape, I green-lighted the cover story, sans protest from the staff. Del asked to write the story but I assigned the piece to Bruce “Screamin’ Lord” Duff, a massive Alice fan who’d made the plea first.

  I gave the task of taking the cover photo to the eccentric Glen LaFerman, one of the best portrait rock photographers around and a giant Cooper fan. When Glen shot the artists that he truly loved, the real magic would materialize. Coop was having a blast as Glen cranked Trash on the stereo and danced about with his Hasselblad. “He’s having a great time,” said Coop’s longtime assistant, Brian Nelson. “This is going to be awesome.”

  Brian was right. When the Cooper camp received the proofs of our session, they went crazy for one of the images, a beautiful, pensive shot of Alice with his head down. Both Pfeifer and Alice’s manager, Shep Gordon—who had watched over the icon’s career since day one—called my office and asked if Epic could procure a shot from our session for the cover of Trash. I was honored but conflicted. If I gave them my session, what would I use for the cover?

  RIP’s success was predicated on our devotion to quality of content in text, image, and graphic design. Our insistence on exclusive photography helped give the magazine its cool look and vibe. As luck would have it, noted photographer Lynn Goldsmith appeared on my radar to solve the problem. She offered to photograph Alice and turn the shots around in a day. And even better than that, Epic offered to pay for the session and give RIP the exclusive cover image. It was a win-win proposal.

  Lynn delivered a spellbinding full-bleed facial image of Alice on a washed-out snow-white background, his hands clinched close to his chin grasping a pair of handcuffs, his eyes piercing the camera. Glen’s shot adorned the cover of what became Alice’s first multiplatinum release in ten years—fueled by the big-hook vintage-riff single “Poison”—and the October RIP went on to become the second-biggest-selling issue of 1989, a notch behind the April “Axl with Shotgun” cover.

  It was the first time in my life that I felt like I’d given something back to one of the rock heroes that had given so much to me. But I didn’t realize the extent of Alice’s appreciation until a specially created plaque arrived in my office one afternoon. It was a framed, autographed original print run of the Trash cover. “Lonn, it’s your cover. Thanks. Alice.”

  Cooper and RIP joined forces again for his next LP, Hey Stoopid. We did a hilarious session of Alice in a bathtub dropping an electric hair dryer into the water for the cover of the October 1991 issue. Neal Preston shot Alice in a Hannibal Lecter leather mask for the inside spread, and Del James finally got to interview Alice for the feature, “The Silence of the Coop.”

  Alice Cooper put the bottle down for good in the early ‘80s. Here was a man that rocked the bottom of a glass since fame and fortune arrived shortly after “Eighteen” rearranged the pop culture in 1971, twenty years before Nirvana evoked the same postadolescent angst in their apocalyptic “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The anthem made Alice an overnight hit, and an overnight drunk. But I never personally knew the intoxicated Alice.

  Our friendship grew throughout the ‘90s on a foundation of the dimpled white ball. He nicknamed me “Angry” after reading my editorial in the September 1990 issue of RIP we devoted to censorship. “Wake up and smell the oat bran, youth of America,” I wrote. “Censorship is alive and well in the great U.S. of A.! It’s coming at ya in many forms from various sources, and it’s affecting what you’re allowed to see on TV, hear on the radio, listen to on your CD or record player and, we kid you not, read in your favorite heavy-metal magazine.”

  The cover of that issue featured Ozzy Osbourne with one of those old PMRC warning stickers over his mouth. Kindred spirits in the foundation of heavy, avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll, Alice and Ozzy always had a flotsam-and-jetsam relationship based on creative integrity and mutual respect. Ozzy had even laid down a guest vocal on Hey Stoopid. They had never, however, appeared together on the same radio show until May 24, 1992.

  I was hosting The Pirate Radio Friendship in L.A., the 100.3 FM local forerunner to my syndicated airwave adventure Pirate Radio Saturday Night with Lonn Friend. Ozzy was live in the studio with me and in rare form. He’d brought his eight-year-old daughter, Amy, into the booth with him, so terribly shy she barely uttered a peep the entire two hours her daddy was on the air, except when the Oz asked her if she read Hustler magazine. “No,” she giggled, “but my dad makes a very nice shepherd’s pie.” After ten minutes of warm-up banter, Ozzy went to the bathroom and I had my engineer, Jamie, dial up Alice at home. I’d set the call to surprise Ozzy and the listeners, having made no promotional announcement about what was about to become a historic radio moment.

  Coming out of the song “Hey Stoopid,” I opened the mike and let the god speak. “How goes it, Alice?” roared Ozzy. “You know I never got a chance to thank you for allowing me to sing on your record.”

  Alice thanked him for the comment and replied, “I think we’d met each other like four hundred times, but we were both so drunk, we never remembered it!”

  Whereupon Ozzy responded, “Isn’t it funny that all of sudden you get sober and say, ‘Hey, I know that guy!’ ”

  Then I asked, “Who drank more in the ‘70s?”

  “I don’t know,” giggled Ozzy. “I think it was a toss-up between Alice and myself.”

  “When I went from beer to whiskey, I obliterated at least six years,” added Alice.

  “Well,” fired back Ozzy, “I suddenly woke up and found out I was married … twice, and had seven kids … and had been on the road for ten years!”

  Alice then commended Ozzy for the blistering antibooze ballad “Demon Alcohol” on his latest LP and laughed, “You know, I had a blood test last week, and I haven’t had a drink in ten years and I’m still legally drunk!”

  When I left RIP in 1994, I lost touch with a lot of the rockers that’d I come to know well during that magical seven-year run. One artist, however, that I got closer to after RIP was Alice. In fact, it was his creative counterpart, Bob Ezrin—also known for his work
with KISS and Pink Floyd—who helped resurrect my media career in December 1999. That’s when I was hired by the legendary record producer and former Motörhead comanager Rob Jones to oversee the editorial content of KNAC.com, a live, streaming Internet radio station devoted to hard-rock music.

  And so it happened, the unexpected. I was on a short personal trip to Phoenix. My youngest brother, Michael, had just landed the front-office-manager position at the Pointe Hilton, Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Scottsdale. Fifteen years my junior, Michael was my biggest fan. He was going to college in Virginia during the years I was on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and called me on more than one occasion, slightly hammered, with a potential angelic conquest in his sights. “Bro,” he’d slur, “tell Debbie you’re my brother. We’re watching you right now! Dude, she doesn’t believe it!”

  Whether my being on MTV or the backstage passes I gave him ever got Michael laid or not is irrelevant. He wanted to pay me back in his own way. “Come down and I’ll hook you up for a nice suite, comp’d. The property has an awesome golf course, too. Call Alice. The pro down there will flip out!”

  The day was perfect. Warm, slightly breezy, late spring—an Arizona postcard. It had been a while since the Coop and I had played a round together, but we picked up right where we’d left off. He was beating me and I was fine with it. What became evident somewhere around the twelfth hole, however, was that the content of our conversation had completely changed. I was confessing to my hero-turned-friend the changes that I’d been going through over the past few years, how things at home weren’t that good. My wife didn’t seem to understand me anymore. No one did. In midlife, I’d become more of a misfit than the kid who once lip-synced “Billion Dollar Babies” into the teeth of a hairbrush.

  I told him how much I loved my daughter and how I was feeling a bit guilty about checking out of the family and not being as devoted a dad as I could. And then I mentioned what books I was reading, that I had been studying yoga under the Kundalini master Guru Singh. I could see in Alice’s eyes that he was down with my struggle.