Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Nothing had come along to replace them, either, and the kids had no alternative but to return to the healthy, traditional values of the years before the revolution; values that the music industry determined should be epitomised by songs about High School, about being true to your school and obeying your teachers, and – of course – falling in love with the girl or boy of your dreams whom you might kiss goodnight but go no further. And so was birthed a succession of spot-free adolescents with neat hair and sunny smiles whose (almost inevitable) lack of singing ability was either ignored or else totally buried beneath layers of candy-sweet backing vocals and string sections.

  It was portrayed as Pop Music, but more than that, it was portrayed as a way of life. And the market was milked for all it was worth. In 1959 Tommy Facienda (a former member of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps) not only recorded a song called, quite simply, ‘High School USA’, he then rerecorded it 30 times. ‘High School USA (Boston)’, ‘High School USA (Buffalo)’, ‘High School USA (Chicago)’… on and on around the country, devoting a version to almost every major city in the land. Almost. Phoenix didn’t make the list, and maybe that dented the record’s local sales a little. But no matter.

  Every place there was a High School, the high school hits blared out across campus and any kid who turned up their nose at the noise, and thought leathers and grease were still the way to be dressed, well they were the bad boys and they always came to a sticky ending. The Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader Of The Pack’, which smeared its eponymous anti-hero across the tarmac, tells that story.

  At Cortez, Vince, Dunaway, Speer and a few more of their friends were paramount among the naysayers who threw their hands up in horror every time another fresh-faced imbecile started squawking on the radio, although they never really embraced the bad boy end of things either. Instead, their listening tastes moved towards the melodramatic end of the spectrum, the foreboding twang of Duane Eddy and ‘Peter Gunn’, the honk of Johnny & the Hurricanes, the moods of Henry Mancini, music that had little to do with the keening of the High School pack, but which whacked you over the head with something else, with a sense of adventure, of excitement, of drama.

  Occasionally something would fall out of the hit parade and capture their imagination. Vince was a big fan of Dion & the Belmonts, the hottest vocal group of the dying doo-wop era, and a fan too of the Four Seasons, whose syncopated harmonies and ethereal falsettos took the Belmonts’ sound to fresh epic lengths. He loved the sonic barricades that hemmed in each and every Phil Spector production, and every time he heard a Beach Boys record it took him back to Los Angeles and the life he could have lived had the family only stayed there.

  A chart-topper for the Beach Boys in summer 1964, ‘I Get Around’ still transports him back there. “When I was a kid, that was the ultimate dream,” Vince told Metal Hammer in 1994. “To have your own car, have your friends and just cruise the streets. There are certain songs that still stand up after all these years. You hear them on the radio and you just turn it up, really crank it. What I judge a song on is that if I get in the car and hear it on the radio, I turn it up. ‘I Get Around’ is one like that.”

  But that was all pop was for the early sixties, a succession of records, as opposed to artists, that made you want to run out and spend money. And then the Beatles arrived and everything changed, not just for Vince and the circle of his friends who fell so hard for the Fab Four moptops, but for American music in general. Suddenly pop was exciting again, and when the Beatles were followed by the Stones and the Kinks, Gerry & the Pacemakers and Freddie & the Dreamers, wave upon wave of British Invaders, all with their own take on a solid beat and a rhythmic heart, the winsome whining that preceded them wasn’t simply pushed out of sight. It was trampled underfoot. Not for the last time in Vince Furnier’s universe, school was out.

  The Beatles crept into every facet of Vince’s life. Training on the running track, he, Dunaway and John Speer would adapt the lyrics to their favourite Lennon-McCartney songs for the job at hand, and sing their hearts out as they ran around the track: “We beat you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” or “Last night I ran three laps for my coach”. They bought the records and clipped the pictures out of magazines. They lived for the group’s US TV appearances and dreamed that they would come play in Phoenix… they never did, not in 1964, nor 1965, nor even on their final tour in 1966. But that did not lessen their local popularity, not with Arizona in general or the Cortez campus in particular.

  Which was when Dennis Dunaway had an idea. The Annual Lettermen’s Club Variety Show and Talent Contest was on the horizon, and Vince had already been given the task of recruiting the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t going very well, either. As he put it in Me Alice, “Nobody had any talent. Nobody even deluded themselves.” Vince had put up signs all over the school and, so far, just one budding talent had stepped forward, a would-be conjuror. Finally, “I called a meeting in the locker room before a track meet one day and asked for suggestions.”

  The first few weren’t too helpful, things like dressing Dunaway in drag and having him sing ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl’, and then tumbling downhill from there. But then Dunaway himself spoke up, asking, “Why don’t we all do it?” and the thought bubble just expanded from there. The first Beatles merchandise was already hitting the streets, Beatle wigs and Beatle guitars. What if the three of them… well four, actually; they had to find a fourth… donned a Beatles wig apiece? Their black track outfits could double for Beatles suits, topped off by the jackets that Vince was sure he could convince his mom to run up. They would carve guitars out of wood or cardboard, hire a couple of girls to set up a convincing barrage of screaming hysteria, and then lip-synch their way through their very own Beatles concert.

  It was a brilliant idea, and it quickly became even better. Another of Vince’s extramural activities found him working on the High School newspaper, the Cortez Tip Sheet, a four-page tabloid that kept the kids informed of what was going on around the campus. Vince’s main concern was an op-ed column called “Get Out Of My Hair”, based around the notoriety that developed not only from having cultivated the longest hair in the High School, but also from being on course for eight separate suspensions for his pains.

  He wrote beneath the magnificent pseudonym of Muscles McNasal, but the best thing about the job was that it brought him into contact with kids who might otherwise never have crossed paths with a field and track Letterman. Kids like Glen Buxton, a hard smoking, heavy fighting, two fingers up to authority boy who spent more time with his guitar than he did with his schoolbooks, and who didn’t care who noticed. One day Vince asked him why he was working on the Tip Sheet. “Because it’s a great way to meet girls,” the bespectacled, blond Buxton grinned, brandishing the camera that came with the post of staff photographer.

  Glen Buxton was born on November 10, 1947, in Akron, Ohio. The second of three children, he was also a born troublemaker or, as he impishly put it, “a bit of a rebel. James Dean was the man, I was still a kid when he died [in an auto wreck in September 1955] but I discovered him a few years later and that was it, man.”

  First his hair took on the distinctive wave that Dean had thrust into a shocked society’s face. He started smoking, and admiring fast cars. He chased girls and when the rest of his friends started worshipping rock’n’roll, he went one step further and positively deified it. He was 11 when he got his first guitar, a birthday gift that was contingent on him taking formal lessons, but of course they were simply a means to an end. He later laughed, “I never really got to grips with the stuff my teacher wanted me to learn, but I could play a really mean ‘Johnny B Goode’.”

  The Buxton family arrived in Phoenix in early 1961, after father Tom was handed a transfer from his job at Goodyear Aerospace’s Akron plant. Two years later, Glen entered Cortez High, a bad boy looking to be even badder “I met this guy named John Tatum, and we had a surf band together, then I met Vince on the paper and we started hanging, he brought in Dennis, and that was when we did the Be
atles thing.”

  It was Buxton who suggested that, rather than mime their performance, they should actually try and play it. He and John Tatum could and would provide the melodic bedrock; their own band had already eased a few Beatles songs into their repertoire, and so long as nobody tried anything fancy, all the bass and drums needed to do was keep time behind the vocals. Vince had already declared himself the band’s lead vocalist, so Buxton looked at Dunaway and another friend, Phil Wheeler. “Any questions?”

  None. Wheeler was installed on drums; Dunaway took the bass. “Glen went with me to Montgomery Ward [department store] and we picked out this bass that was called an Airline bass,” Dunaway told Ink in 2004. “I’d go over to Glen’s house and we’d pick out the notes of our favourite songs.”

  They sought a name and someone came up with Joe Banana & the Bunch. It made them laugh, but they dropped it when they realised that only the accompanying motto, “music with a-peal”, actually appealed to them. Besides, if they were aping the Beatles, they needed to be insects. They settled on the Earwigs, “after those little bugs that crawl into your ear”, Vince reflected. “A type of water scorpion that smell bad when you step on them and they can crawl through your ear and infect your brain.”

  It was an apt description. Even with the best will in the world, nobody in the Earwigs could imagine that what they had in store for their audience would be much less of an irritant than that. Resplendent in the tracksuits and the synthetic Dynel wigs that proved easier and cheaper to obtain than the Beatles ones, they took the cafeteria stage and, having abandoned the idea of actually playing their instruments at the last minute, they waited while a friend cued up the record player.

  They played three songs, then bowed out to the tumult of screams set up by the three girls they’d hired for the occasion. “Earwigs! Earwigs!” the trio howled, and the players left the stage convinced that any kind of cool standing they had ever had at Cortez was now dead and buried. “That,” Buxton shuddered, “was the most humiliating experience of my life.”

  So it was one hell of a shock to the system when the big night dawned and, appearing 12th on a bill of 13 acts, the Earwigs found themselves finishing second in the competition. The following week, when the Tip Sheet was published, two of its very own staff members, Vince Furnier and Glen Buxton, were front page news.

  Maybe it was the fact that they’d been so bad that they were good. Maybe it was because nobody could believe anyone would have had the nerve to put on a show like that. There were any number of reasons, and theories, for the success of the show. But the players didn’t care. Everyone was talking about them, everyone was patting them on the back. For the moment at least, they were stars, and they loved every ounce of the attention. “People complimented me the next day for having the guts to do it,” Vince recalled in Me Alice, “and girls started talking to me who never before would have anything to do with the skinny guy with the big nose from the track team. It stimulated my entertaining chemicals like never before. I got hooked on the limelight.”

  Phil Wheeler stepped back. It had been fun but he wanted nothing more to do with the Earwigs. For his erstwhile bandmates, however, that first taste of stardom was all it took. Recruiting their track buddy John Speer to the cause, the Earwigs were soon established as regular visitors to Buxton’s home, rehearsing in the family garage. That, the guitarist’s parents later recalled, was when “we realised it was getting serious”.

  The Buxtons were certainly accommodating. “We never objected to Glen bringing his friends home,” Glen’s parents told writer Patrick Brzezinski. “They were always welcome in our home. We were always interested in whatever he was doing.” They even tolerated the noise, at least so long as it didn’t disturb the neighbours, and the band was under strict instructions to wrap things up by nine each night. Jerry Buxton, Glen’s mother, recalled, “It would start out fine but get louder as the practice went on. Sitting in the house, you could tell when the sound increased as the walls would start vibrating. It kept us running out, saying the same thing, ‘Turn it down!’”

  Rehearsals were slow, as Dunaway and Speer learned to pick their way across their chosen instruments, while Vince continued working at moulding his voice into shape. But it was a sign of just how quickly the band were able to put their name about that, in October 1964, less than a month after the Letterman party, the Tip Sheet dispatched student Nancy Prince to interview the band.

  “Speer and Vince and I were all on the track team last year,” Dunaway explained, “and we used to make up words to Beatle songs to keep us in rhythm when we were running around the track. One day I stopped and said, ‘Hey guys, let’s get together and start a new singing group.’ We saw Glen and Tatum playing guitars and asked them if they’d like to join.”

  A manager was procured, he continued, after they saw “this guy riding down the street on a bicycle one day so we yelled at him and asked him if he’d like to be our manager”. Within 24 hours, Nick Sataslow “had a bunch of jobs lined up for us”.

  Entreating Vince’s mother, clutching rough designs for their proposed stage wear, the Earwigs were soon resplendent in vivid yellow jackets worn over black turtleneck sweaters. Musically, too, they were marching forward. Despite the Earwigs’ Beatlemaniac origins, the newly emergent Rolling Stones were the rock upon which the band was now being built, with Vince adding harmonica to his vocal duties in order to more accurately emulate Mick Jagger. Soon, the members were scouring the local record stores and radio airwaves in search of further catalogues to plunder. They were even beginning to write their own material, self-confessedly derivative, but that never erased the thrill of being able to announce “this is one of our own songs” from the stage.

  “When we first started, we did nothing but the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who and all the English rock bands that were an alternative to the Beatles,” Vince told Hypno in 1996. “We wouldn’t even do their hits, we’d do their obscure stuff.”

  He dismissed the other musical heroes of the day. The first time he heard Bob Dylan, for example, he simply laughed. He thought the nasal ragamuffin was a comedian and could not comprehend why so many people took him seriously. He told Penthouse, “He was singing about dogs falling off a cliff and things like that… I thought it was the silliest thing I’d ever heard in my life.”

  The band’s musical brew was not, all concerned have admitted, always the most appetising, even after they started gigging out and about. The musicians were learning on the job, often stopping songs that were already in motion so someone or other could try again at a tricky riff or fill. In any other, larger, city, the Earwigs would probably have been squashed on sight. But they were not in a larger city. They were in Phoenix, a city where local live rock’n’roll was at a premium, even at a grassroots level.

  The band played its first live show, booked for a sweet 16 party being thrown by a girl at school. According to Vince, they were the only guests who showed up. But slowly, things began to come together. They made themselves available for every school dance they could find, whether they attended the school or not; and at Cortez, they found work by arranging shows themselves.

  The same month that the Tip Sheet article appeared, the Earwigs could generally be heard most lunch times and, when the end of the month brought the school’s Pit & The Pendulum Halloween ball, the Earwigs were the house band, and they proceeded to bring the house down. They built a guillotine on stage and, while it was never intended to be anything more than a prop, the gasp of shock that arose from the audience as the band appeared around it was a memory they would one day return to.

  They landed a residency at the Pizza Pub (without the guillotine), where they were paid with all the pizza they could eat, and that brought bookings at similar venues, ensuring that the Earwigs remained well fed if not well paid.

  Parking lots were another favourite haunt. Another local band, the XLs, were in much the same place as the Earwigs (they too began life as a Beatles cover act), and so
the two would stage Battle of the Bands competitions at the Christown Mall parking lot, with the afternoon’s honours going to whichever group played the loudest. A decade later, several members of the XLs, including frontman Bill Spooner, would be touring the world as the Tubes.

  Yet it wasn’t all plain sailing. Local licensing laws meant that the bars were generally out of the band’s reach and, even when they could get a booking, it would be without their frontman. Vince’s dad was, considering his religious beliefs, surprisingly tolerant about his young son’s musical activities, and even encouraged them to an extent. But there was one rule that could never be violated. Vince was not permitted to perform in any venue that served alcohol, and with his romantic life still bound up in parental strictures, his bandmates soon learned to amuse themselves by regaling their frontman with tales of their own booze-fuelled nights of sexual abandon. “Actually we were as sexless and sober as he was,” Buxton later laughed. “But it was still really funny.”

  Clubs that catered to a teenage audience were springing up, though, as well as other venues where alcohol was not on the menu. And of all the local venues, the one that the Earwigs, like every other band in town, were most desperate to get a foothold in was the VIP Lounge (later the VIP Club).

  The VIP was the brainchild of Jack Curtis, a promoter and booker who had been working on the local teen scene since the dawn of the decade, when the one-time entertainment columnist for The Arizona Republic newspaper opened Stage 7 at the back of the Phoenix Junior Chamber of Commerce building on N 7th Street in February 1961.

  Initially he concentrated on local talent. The opening night was headlined by Ritchie Hart and the Heartbeats, a group whose name was redolent of the music in vogue at that time. Slowly, however, he began reaching out to more renowned, national, talent. B Bumble & the Stingers, the instrumental band best remembered for the novelty classical mutilation ‘Nut Rocker’, were the first “hit” band to play for Curtis; Jan & Dean and the Righteous Brothers, the Coasters, Bobby Vee and Del Shannon followed, while Curtis also branched out and began presenting shows at the larger State Fairgrounds.