Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Further Curtis clubs followed as the VIP Lounge was joined by a second venue, the Beau Brummel, and Dale Pitney, whose band the Motion was one of Phoenix’s biggest attractions, still speaks admiringly of Curtis. “Jack was a true friend of Phoenix teens. He put together clubs for young people to go on weekends where they could hang out with kids their own age and listen to Phoenix bands play their versions of the latest hits. A lot of bands got their start at clubs such as the VIP. As Motion, we had the best times of our lives until life caught up with us…. college, marriage, kids and mortgages which replaced the fun of the sixties.”

  Nobody remembers how long it took for the Earwigs to even be allowed to audition for Curtis, and when they did finally get to tread his stage, their initial response was that they had failed dismally. Days, even weeks, passed, and they heard nothing from him. Then one evening, John Tatum was at the VIP on his own, watching another band entirely, when Curtis caught his eye – and demanded to know why the Earwigs had not been back in touch with him. He wanted to run them through a second audition, just to iron out a few things he thought they could improve on. And so long as that went OK, he already had a date pencilled in for them to play.

  In fact Curtis had just one reservation about the band. He hated their name. And so, it transpired, did the band members. They, too, had long got over the jokey soubriquet they had coined the previous year. No longer were they the Beatles tribute act that formed as a joke for a letterman party. Now they were the Spiders. And they looked like they were from Venus – or so the excitable K-LIF DJ hired to promote an upcoming Tucson show insisted later in the year.

  “This Saturday night from eight until midnight and of course the admission is only one dollar… that’s one buck for the swingest show and dance in Tucson, the Tribesmen and the sensational Spiders from Venus!”

  The Spiders from Venus name would rarely, if ever, be invoked again, and it certainly does not appear on any extant posters or press coverage the band received. But six years later, English singer David Bowie would quite coincidentally christen his group the Spiders From Mars and, way out in some parallel universe where the Phoenix rockers never changed their name, the stage was set for a truly interstellar battle of the glam rock bands.

  Chapter Three

  Fresh Out Of Phoenix

  Jack Curtis became the band’s de facto manager. Learning that they had no transport, he bought John Tatum a car, a 1956 Chevy, and reminded the band they now had no excuses for being late to an engagement. Discovering that Buxton and Tatum both played through the same tiny amplifier, he shelled out for a second one. And, once he saw how quickly the group’s performances were taking off, he began impressing upon them the importance of image; of giving audiences something to remember them by. Music, he impressed upon the musicians, was only half the battle. Kids could dance to music all night long and never even glance up at whoever was playing it. Give them something to look at as well, though, and they were yours for keeps.

  The Spiders did not have the local stage to themselves, even after Curtis set about building them a stage of their own, a Spiders-only dais at the opposite end of the club to where bands usually performed, then decorated it with a vast spider’s web. The Young Men, the Next of Kin, P-Nut Butter, the Red & White Blues Band, the Precious Few, the Motion and many more vied with the Spiders for local fame, but Vince and his cohorts always seemed to remain one step ahead.

  They were, after all, a distinctive sight. Aware that their enthusiasm for playing still occasionally outstripped their abilities, they threw themselves into Tatum’s visual stimuli. They started interspersing the music with madcap comedy routines borrowed (and then adapted) from television’s then-popular Smothers Brothers. Long before anybody conceived of anything so fancy as a light show, the club’s doorman-cum-snackstand manager Bob LaFollette was turning a hand-cranked strobe light while they played. And any money the band members earned was ploughed back into clothes; not costumes, because that idea had yet to strike, but still they cut a distinctive shape. Their sonics were pulled along in the outfits’ wake.

  Vince later told the UK magazine Sounds, “We weren’t interested that much in the Beatles, but we were more interested in Jeff Beck’s guitar sound like on ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’, or the Pretty Things doing ‘I’m A Roadrunner’, all those early, really rotten, raunchy things. The early Kinks when they sounded like they were gonna break your eardrums.”

  ‘Lil’ Red Rooster’, with Buxton breaking out a mean slide guitar; a pounding ‘Dirty Water’; a hypnotic ‘Mona’; a blistered ‘In The Midnight Hour’; blues-busting takes on ‘I’m A Man’ and ‘Smokestack Lightning’; that was the fare with which the Spiders courted the hearts of Phoenix youth.

  They worked up a solid slab of Rolling Stones covers that ranged from the sublime (‘19th Nervous Breakdown’) to the ridiculous (a hesitantly sung, but contrarily beautifully played ‘As Tears Go By’) and on to the comparatively obscure. ‘Down The Road Apiece’, ‘Oh Baby, We Got A Good Thing Going’ and a Mach 10 ‘Surprise Surprise’ were all in their repertoire, and hissy tape recordings of the band’s rehearsals, and a couple of fragmentary live tapes from 1965-1966 testify to their ambition.

  In 2011, 45 years after those recordings were made, Vince laughed, “I’m [still] afraid to listen to the rehearsal tapes from high school,” but he need not have been so nervous. By the standards and expectations of the day, the Spiders were a damned good garage band.

  Vince’s voice is pitched as close to the nasal whine of John Lennon as it can get and, while the sound of the band is more clatter than clarity, the random guitar lines that chime through their own ‘Public Enemy #1’ can be readily allied with any of the myriad basement recordings that the CD age has exhumed from the British end of the beat boom.

  They powered through Chuck Berry with slathering élan, and if Vince could never emulate the bathos that Eric Burdon brought to the Animals’ ‘I’m Crying’, he compensated with a gutsy growl that offered an animalistic counterpoint to the band’s distinctive backing vocals. ‘Baby You Know’ offers another chance for Buxton to pull out his best Brian Jones-style solo, and a seething garage-choked take on ‘Talk Talk’ (a song that Vince would return to in a later lifetime) rocks with a sinister effect that points the band’s sound straight towards the twisted Californiana of their future.

  It was this solid grip on the Invasion that raised the Spiders above their peers, as Vince explained to writer Michael Delaney in 1971. “There were all these surf groups trying to break into long-haired Beatle music. It was so bad. The Byrds were the first to do anything that was original and then nobody knew which lead to follow. We used to do all kinds of obscure British stuff. Things like the Yardbirds and Moody Blues, the weirdest material that was coming over from Europe. It was an experiment in terror, I guess. There were all these groups trying to sound mystical and portentous and failing with each attempt. They tried to ape the Byrds and nobody can do that. We were ugly and couldn’t get across with Byrds music… the band was excruciating.”

  By summer 1965, the highlights of the Spiders’ repertoire were a pounding rendition of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’, by the minor league Merseybeat band the Blackwells, and a song they picked up from the latest Rolling Stones LP, a Bo Diddley-stylised version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Hitch Hike’. It was this pair that Jack Curtis seized on that September, when he took the Spiders into Audio Recorders, a recording studio further down 7th Street, to cut what would become their first single.

  It would be released on Phoenix’s own Mascot label, a regional powerhouse that had been around since 1961. P-Nut Butter (‘What Am I Doing Here With You’), Frank Fafara (‘Only In My Dreams’ and ‘Golden One’), Roosevelt Nettles (‘Mathilda’ and ‘Got You On My Mind’) and Jim Boyd (‘Don’t Ask For More’) had all scored regional hits for Mascot, rising up the K-RUX and K-RIZ radio charts, and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’ would deservedly soon join them, a solid reproduction of the “classic” British Inva
sion sound with Alice’s harp and mannered “yeah”s dancing around an archetypal guitar solo, and a solid grasp on the song’s ultra-contagious hookline.

  In the wider scheme of things, the Spiders’ version of the song was no more successful than the Blackwells’, but it was hot in Phoenix, and when you flipped the 45, ‘Hitch Hike’ rode a neat (if brief) call and response vocal and a lead voice that might be an octave higher than anything Vince would later lay down, but was distinctive regardless. Vince was washing the car in the family driveway the first time he heard himself on the radio. “I couldn’t believe it was me. It was… like meeting a twin.”

  The record’s success inevitably raised the band’s profile higher than it had ever been before. But it had more personal connotations for Vince. He was now involved with the High School sweetheart whom he still considers “my first real girlfriend”. Debby Hickey lived in the same housing project as the Furniers, Country Gables, and the two belonged to the same swimming pool association. In fact that’s where they met, dripping poolside one afternoon, and they wound up dating for three years. There was just one cloud on their horizon, Debby’s mother. Vince told Spec, “[She] hated me because my hair was too long, [and] just kept making it more and more difficult for Debby and me to see each other. What a miserable woman. She just hated my hair.”

  Vince’s response was to warn her that one day, he would be famous; one day, his band would be stars, and that she’d better be nice to him or else Debbie would lose out on it all. And he was convinced that the local radio fame of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’ bore him out. How he looked forward to rubbing the ghastly Mrs Hickey’s face into his success; and how bruised was his ego when the woman simply brushed the hit aside as a meaningless irrelevance and carried on as before. “She couldn’t care less. All she could see was my hair.”

  Away from the Hickey household, the Spiders continued their ascent. Jack Curtis’ contacts landed them a spot on local television’s The Wallace And Ladmo Show, an often lunatic variety show fronted by Bill Thompson (Wallace), Ladimir Kwiatkowski (Ladmo) and Pat McMahon. Broadcast by the independent KPHO-TV Channel 5 in Phoenix, the team spoofed the news, played skits and sketches, aired cartoons and generally created television mayhem in such fine style that the show remained on the air until as late as 1989.

  The show’s own musical troupe, led by another graduate of Jack Curtis’ stable, singer Mike Condello, specialised in spoofs of the week’s biggest hits and bands, and even spun off a selection of records of their own, including the spot-on Beatles parodies Blubber Soul and Commodore Condello’s Salt River Navy Band. But more traditional musical talent, too, was welcomed and so were the Spiders. Their television debut accordingly arrived in early 1966.

  Another, more unconventional, airing for the band arrived in the form of a few weeks spent performing in legitimate theatre, as New York actor and comedian Jan Murray brought the stage show Bye Bye Birdie to the Celebrity Theater. The Spiders played the Birdies, the backing band for singer Conrad Birdie (Murray), and the play’s run gave them an early taste for just how demanding, and also how satisfying, it could be to cross dirty ass rock’n’roll with the disciplines of a fully choreographed stage performance. It was all a long way from Broadway, and further still from the deliciously lush movie musicals that Vince had grown up loving and learning every word to. But in the back of his mind, and his bandmates’ too, a tiny seed was beginning to germinate, the desire not simply to play a gig, but to put on a show. A show with a story, a show with a plot. A show with a beginning, a middle and an end.

  Their ambitions lay quiescent for the time being. Back at the VIP Club, a list of the bands for whom the Spiders found themselves opening is essentially a who’s-who of the American tour circuit of 1965-1966. Them, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Animals and Peter & Gordon were just some of the names that passed through Phoenix, and most of them played either the VIP Club or, if a band was too big for that venue, the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and the Spiders would open for them there. Indeed, the Spiders were the first rock’n’roll band to play that venue after it was opened up to that genre, opening for the Byrds in November 1965.

  Perhaps the most memorable show the Spiders ever played, however, came the following September 4, when the Yardbirds passed through town. That was the night that the Spiders contributed their own piece of legend to the Yardbirds story.

  For the Yardbirds themselves, their latest American tour was a chaotic venture, scarred by guitarist Jeff Beck’s growing dissatisfaction with the life of a pop star, cancelled shows, and unimagined delays. But the headliners never forgot the night in Arizona where the opening act was a local band whose entire repertoire comprised Yardbirds songs.

  Vince explains, “We were the house band, and we were opening for the Yardbirds. Now, when we opened for anybody else, we would do all our Yardbirds songs, so we went out there and suddenly we realised that 80 percent of our set was Yardbirds songs, and they were the headliners that night. I talked to Jeff Beck once, and he said ‘I absolutely remember that, I remember this little group of kids doing our songs and we thought you did pretty good. You did a pretty good version.’

  “Of course then they got up on stage and they were the Yardbirds and they destroyed us.”

  Beck’s bandmates Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty, too, recalled the night. Vince continues, “I was interviewing Chris and Jim for my radio show and I was telling them about the time we opened for them while we were in High School and they said, ‘Yeah, and you guys did all of our songs before we did, then we got up and blew you off stage.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you destroyed us,’ but they said, ‘But you did really good cover versions’.”

  Amid so much triumph, there was one cloud on the horizon. While the bulk of the Spiders were thrilled to be sharing a bill with the Yardbirds, and relished every opportunity to sit at the feet of the next beat-booming R&B band, Tatum’s eyes were opened widest by the Byrds and the Hollies, groups whose use of and love for harmonies opened up vast new musical vistas in his mind, vistas that he knew the Spiders would never entertain. He was also aware that one of his own friends, the XLs’ Bill Spooner, had a band that fit his musical ideal to the letter. The day in spring 1966 that Spooner mentioned he needed to add a new vocalist to the group’s front line was the day that Tatum quit the Spiders.

  It was not a move he reflects upon with any fondness. Three months later, the group broke up, but it was too late to return to the Spiders. They had long since replaced him with guitarist Michael Bruce, the sole applicant to the ad they had pasted up on a music store noticeboard.

  Arizona through and through, Michael Bruce was born on November 21, 1948. Like Vince he was still attending High School, across town at North High, but he and the Spiders had crossed paths several times as they turned out in sundry Battle of the Band competitions, and invariably came up against either the Trolls (aka the Duels) or the Wildflowers, the bands that Bruce had led since he first seized control of his guitar.

  The Spiders fascinated him, he admitted. They reminded him, he often said, of the gang members in West Side Story, the epitome of street fighting cool. But Bruce fascinated them in return. A Wildflowers single, ‘On A Day Like Today’ (backed by ‘A Man Like Myself’), had already proven at least as successful as the Spiders’ sole waxing, but there was one other thing that pushed Bruce to the fore. He had a van, and now that Tatum and his Chevy had driven off into the sunset, transportation was at a premium. Bruce later joked, “I think they wanted the van more than me.”

  He did not immediately throw his lot in with the Spiders. At no point did his new bandmates ever tell him that he was actually in the band; rather, they’d just tell him when the next gig or rehearsal was, and expect him to be there. Looking back, it was fairly clear that he did have the job, but Bruce remained uncertain enough that he never left the Wildflowers, either. He just adopted a stage name – the distinctly un-pseudonymous Bruce Michael – and continued to play and record with them, even cutting a second
Wildflowers single, ‘More Than Me’/’Moving Along With The Sun’, before finally accepting that he was a full-time Spider.

  Throughout the first years of the Spiders, Vince remained a paid-up member of the Church of Jesus Christ. His father was now a pastor, a skilled preacher who was destined eventually to become a church elder, and every third Sunday, the Furnier family would sit in the congregation while dad turned the full force of his rhetoric upon his flock.

  How that congregation would stare as Vince took his own seat in the church, long haired and increasingly outlandishly dressed, and how the old ladies would tut and whisper as word spread of the boy’s latest transgressions. How he had been suspended again from school, for refusing to get his hair cut. How poor Mrs Hickey was at her wits’ end with daughter Debby’s choice of consort. How he was seen out late at night by one person, or seen playing rock’n’roll by another. His name was mentioned on the radio whenever a local jock role-called the musicians responsible for the Spiders’ first single, and that set the tongues wagging as well, because everybody knew that a career in rock’n’roll was the first step on the slippery road to Hell.

  Everybody, that is, apart from Vince’s father. Mickie Furnier may not have wholly approved of his son’s choice of activity, and might have fervently prayed that it was just a passing phase before Vince embraced the church for the third generation in succession. But he was not going to put his foot down and tell the boy to stop, for the same reasons as his own father had never tried to force his religious convictions down his children’s throats. The boy would come to his senses when it was time for him to do so. Until then, Vince was simply asked to remember his father’s status and not to do anything to embarrass him. In return, Mickie came along to a few Spiders shows, and appeared to have a great time while he was there.