Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Meanwhile, the Spiders’ fame continued to spread. They played their first out of town shows, and were introducing more of their own material into the set. A snarling storm of fuzz guitar called, appropriately, ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind’, a song that had been a part of the live show since John Tatum was in the group, was completed, and Bruce and Dunaway came up with a solid R&B firestorm called ‘No Price Tag’ – two songs that the Spiders promptly earmarked for their next single.

  They recorded at a small studio in Tucson, Santa Cruz Recording, which in turn boasted its own label, also called Santa Cruz. There, studio owner Foster Casey watched the band stumble through what some sources have claimed was a near complete album’s worth of material, but just the two tracks would surface, to become a Phoenix chart topper that summer of 1966.

  “Recording wasn’t an easy chore for us,” Vince confessed in Me Alice. They had no clear idea of what they were doing, or even supposed to be doing, and while the studio provided an engineeer, his concern was simply to get the band’s sound down on tape. He had nothing to offer when it came to deciding what that sound should be. So, “We played our parts in unison and came up with a version of the song that sounded like we were all stuffed into a phone booth,” and Jack Curtis did the rest, arranging for friends, family and VIP regulars to deluge the Tucson radio stations with requests for the record.

  ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind’ eventually rose to number three on Tucson’s K-FIF playlist. But the real thrill for the Spiders, and a shock for Vince’s parents, came when they entered and won the latest Battle of the Bands contest. First prize – a trip to Los Angeles, then as now the centre of the American West Coast music industry. Make it there, it was said, and you could make it anywhere.

  In fact that was not, and has never, been true. History is littered with the corpses of bands who reached the top of the pile in California, but who could never take that one crucial step across the state line and into the rest of the United States. As 1966 turned into 1967, however, and the Spiders realised that they had taken Arizona fame and fortune as far as they could, the city was boiling.

  No less than San Francisco, half a day’s drive up the coast, Los Angeles was seething as bands like the Doors, Love and Buffalo Springfield added their twopenn’orth to the burgeoning psychedelic scene, and clubs like the Whisky a Go Go, the Troubadour and Gazzari’s flourished on the streets of dreams that the locals collectively called Hollywood.

  The Spiders knew they were not yet ready to compete on the same level as those other bands. But they also believed they were as good as some of them and, having now opened for almost every major group of the era (at least those that bothered to journey through Arizona), they had long since proved they could hold their own with the best of them.

  What they didn’t have was proof of their prowess. Writer Paul Williams, reflecting in Fusion a few years on, bemoaned the paucity of written evidence of the Spiders’ excesses of the age. “The only report tracked down of their early Arizona shows spoke of [Vince] leaning through a window sill held in his hands, wanking out some real psychedelic blather about leaning into the windows of yer mind.”

  Alice’s memoir, however, includes a passing mention of meeting Jimi Hendrix, as he opened for the Young Rascals in summer 1967: “One cool hipster and a nice guy. He let us buddy around with him,” (the same seemingly contrary billing played New York’s Central Park in July), while Michael Bruce’s autobiography recalls a night out in Chandler, just 25 miles outside of Phoenix, where a local redneck grew so tired of their performance that he flashed a switchblade in their direction.

  “It wasn’t that unusual for us to get chased out of town. We’d have bottles thrown at us, you name it.” Gang loyalties in mid-sixties Arizona, he continued, divided strictly down Cowboy and Indian lines, and it was rare for the two to join forces. Until the Spiders came to town. “We had to stay inside the National Guard armoury because the Cowboys and the Indians had lined up outside, ready to beat the hell out of us.” A new song, all minor keys and yearning sentiment, and suitably titled ‘Nobody Likes Me’, emerged from the experience.

  Another night, Glen Buxton recalled, “We were playing for the greasy peoples, the beehive hairdos and the jocks, doin’ a place in Tucson that held 2,000 people.” He told Circus magazine, “It was back in the days when long hair was on women… and let me tell you, our hair was not short. We went dancin’ in there and the places was crawlin’ with greasers, and those guys were gonna kill us. There was about five guys lookin’ at [Vince] goin’ ‘Ah’m gonna gitchoo outside an’ Ah’m gonna beat the sheeit outa yoo.’ I was the first one on stage and I’m practically shitting my pants cause I have to get all the way over to the other side of the stage, and I’m scared outa my mind, and they’re all buggin’ me, and there’s this chick right in the middle.

  “She’s like this dirty, clap-ridden, pimply, braced groupie idiot that everybody hated, and I didn’t even know that, ya know? And I go out feelin’ like I’m walkin’ the gauntlet and the chick goes, ‘Play “Louie, Louie”. Play “Louie, Louie”.’ And I go, ‘Play “Louie, Louie”, huh.’ All this shit goin’ on and I’m going to get killed and she’s going ‘Play “Louie, Louie”.’”

  Many bands would have been cowed by such experiences. The Spiders simply shrugged and vowed that next time, they would piss off even more people. “We had bruises all over out bodies from the foot-poles,” Vince chuckled in an interview for the Story Of Pop encyclopaedia. “That’s how much promoters refused to touch us. So we decided to go on stage and do anything that we wanted. Some nights we used to stagger on stage so drunk, I’d pass out at least three times during a set. Surprise… surprise, people dug it and quite often they used to come along just to see what would happen to us. I’d just stand in the middle of the stage and pass right out and the crowd would cheer. The band would pick me up, I’d get back together again – take a swig of this gawdamnawful cheap Ripple wine – and crash out once again.”

  What was it about the Spiders that incited such hatred? Their hair, their noise, their apparent disregard for those tenets of law and order that redneck society – itself traditionally perched on the far right wing of American politics – held dearest. Rock’n’roll was still an affront to great swathes of society back then, and the deeper into the American heartland you travelled (and Arizona was almost as deep as you could go), the greater the hatred of its creators.

  The Spiders were not hated for who they were, but for what they represented, and besides, what were they doing prancing around like a bunch of fags on stage, when they should have been at an army office, signing up to go kill gooks in Nam? The United States had now admitted that its intervention in the east Asian civil war was something more than the advisory policing mission that had once been the official line, and was dispatching ever greater numbers of troops to the combat zone. Why, the rednecks wanted to know, were the Spiders not first in line to crush the rise of Communism?

  The Spiders generally laughed at such questions, behind their interrogators’ backs, of course. Three of the band – John Speer, Dennis Dunaway and Glen Buxton – were now attending college, generally regarded as the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to donning fatigues and fighting for freedom; the remainder, Vince and Michael Bruce, were still at High School, but they had their own plans for further education in mind. Or at least, they did before Los Angeles appeared on their horizon.

  Beginning in March 1967, the Spiders were making regular visits to Los Angeles, piling themselves and a slowly growing retinue of friends – roadie Mike Allen, manager Dick Christian and lighting engineer Charlie Carnel – into Bruce’s van for the six hour straight shot down Interstate 10, and from the moment they first set foot on Hollywood Boulevard, they wondered why they had waited so long to take the plunge.

  It was freak central. Every corner was littered with kids who, in the parlance of the time, had tuned in, dropped out and turned on. Every store seemed to be pounding out music, every bre
ath filled their head with unknown doors and unimagined highs. Those first few days in Hollywood, the days that the band originally planned would be devoted to finding work, were instead spent simply imbibing the spirit of the city and comparing everything they saw to its nearest equivalent back home.

  There was no competition. The shops were brighter, the girls were prettier, the locals were friendlier. In Arizona, having hair that went over your collar was regarded as a personal affront to every passing stranger. In Hollywood, the hair started at the collar and the Spiders looked positively bald by comparison.

  In Arizona, the Spiders were the wildest thing on ten legs. In Hollywood, every band was wild, and the ones that were left behind were the ones that simply weren’t wild enough. Right now, the Spiders fell somewhere in the middle and, as they window shopped through the thrift stores and head shops that lined the streets of Hollywood, and dodged the locomotive trains that still rumbled down the centre of Sunset Boulevard, their talk was full of the image changes that they could and would enact once they found a paying gig.

  The problem was, every other band in town had the same idea. Audition nights in Arizona meant calling the owner of a club and asking if he would take a look at you. His answer would usually follow in the next breath. It was different in Los Angeles. The clubs in Hollywood held open audition nights, and you could tell when they were happening from the lines of musicians who started to congregate outside the venue that afternoon. “It was like a battle of the bands, every night every place we went,” Glen Buxton sighed.

  Neither was being at the head of the line any guarantee of being given a spot at the audition. Friends of friends of the club staff would call over, and be invited to queue-jump on the strength of a dropped name. Musicians would be pulled out of line because they looked so much better than the rest, or they might be told to go home because they looked so much worse. It was chaos, and that was only the start of it. Some clubs hit on the idea of charging the auditioning hordes an entry fee, and that took another bite out of a band’s hopes and dreams. Others got sick of the police hassling them about blocking the sidewalk, and began demanding musicians sign up in advance for auditions – and then, again, cherry-picked their friends and their friends’ friends from the lists.

  But slowly, the Spiders were able to make themselves heard, scratching their way into performing at parties, or making themselves available for any of the many free concerts that were springing up, often in strict defiance of the law, around the city parks. One of the first, if not the first, took place in Griffith Park on March 26, 1967. Two nights later, the Spiders opened at Gazzari’s, on the Strip, and that was how things went for the next few months. They would meet people and find friendly floors to crash on, or they would pile back into the van and sleep there as best as they could. But they were never able to put down roots because they always had to return to Phoenix. In fact some nights, the band would have time to do no more than play their set before having to leap back into the van and return to Phoenix, their brains still buzzing from the thrill of the show.

  “I was very naive when I arrived in California,” Alice told Spec. “I was like a lamb going into the slaughter. Coming from that church background I didn’t have any idea about sex at all. We lived right there in Hollywood in the heart of the Evil Hill, the area between Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards, just below the Whisky. I didn’t even know what a homosexual was – I just thought everyone in the neighbourhood was fond of poodles. Finally, I caught on. You get an education living in California.”

  There was no shortage of willing educators. The Spiders found a crash pad, courtesy of one Doke Huntington, who worked as a private secretary to actor Tony Curtis. His home on Weatherly Lane, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, became the Spiders’ home from home while they were in Los Angeles, and it was some time before the musicians finally realised why so many of Doke’s more flamboyant friends spent so much time hanging around the house, just watching the young men hang out. But the revelation didn’t shock them. They were in Los Angeles, after all, and after two or three trips out to the city, they finally made the decision they’d been talking about for six months or more. It was time to abandon Phoenix altogether and move to Los Angeles for good.

  It was a fresh start all round. Mickie Furnier presented the band with a new van, a distinctive yellow beast that allowed Michael Bruce’s old beater to finally retire. Another friend, likewise lit up with a Hollywood dream, agreed to accompany them as a roadie and lighting operator, handling the ramshackle collection of coloured floodlights that the group had recently invested in. And the Spiders became the Nazz, after ceaselessly spinning a recent Yardbirds’ b-side, ‘The Nazz Is Blue’.

  The band knew the lie of the land now, and those first weeks in the city were dedicated to rehearsing for the next round of auditions that they knew they would be attending, and checking out the kind of bands they knew they would be up against. They would borrow ideas, or steal them if they wanted to, and then insert them into their own brand of stagecraft – an increasingly riotous act that set every participant, musician and onlooker alike, into almost perpetual motion, Vince prowling the stage like a B-movie serial killer, his bandmates the front line of a menacing street gang, and the audience pinned to the walls by the noise as the musicians selected their victims.

  Their set was fast approaching the point where it was wholly self-composed. The occasional favourite cover would still surface, but often it was so mangled by the band’s imagination that audiences needed to have it identified for them. Other songs were torn straight from whatever the musicians were reading or thinking at the time, headlines from the newspaper, speech bubbles taken from comic books, queer expressions they’d hear on television and earmark for future inspection.

  Bruce and Dunaway gelled as songwriters, one bringing an instinctive grasp of melody and drama to the stage, the other digging deep into a macabre mind in search of ideas that made him shiver. ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’ was unquestionably written in the thrall of the Yardbirds, its guitars a snarling echo of ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’. But the title made the Nazz’s intentions clear and, as their repertoire developed, so did the rage with which they rocked. ‘Everything Is Orange’… ‘Mr Machine’… ‘Travel Agent’… ‘Animal Pajamas’… ‘Wonder Who’s Loving Her Now’. The music had cohesion and with it, the ethos that would become the band’s raison d’etre. As Vince liked to reflect, “The hippies saw the future in [the Nazz] and it scared them to death.”

  Chapter Four

  She Gave Her Mama Forty Whacks

  When we were starting,” Vince enjoyed reminding people, “it was the time of the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love.” Almost a decade later, in 1975, he told the New Musical Express, “We were competing against 20,000 other bands just in LA. We’d do things like ‘auditioning’ for three hours at a club, and then not being offered work: all people were really doing was getting us to play free at their club.

  “We were starving, physically starving, and we were tired of being fucked around. So our attitude was, we’re gonna make you look at us. We’re gonna grab your attention.”

  One evening, hanging around outside the Gaslight, a club on Sunset Strip, Vince fell into conversation with a band called the Rainmakers. One of the myriad acts that had finally got a foot on the first rung of the local ladder, the Rainmakers had just scored a week-long residency at the Gaslight, and Vince told them he’d be sure to come down to lend his support. He’d bring the rest of his band along too.

  They exchanged phone numbers and Vince went on his way, only to be stunned a few days later when the phone rang and one of these so recent acquaintances asked him a favour. The Rainmakers’ guitarist had fallen ill and they couldn’t make that evening’s show. “Sorry it’s such late notice, but could the Nazz fill in for us?”

  They could and they did, and the wheels began to turn. The gig at the Gaslight became a regular event; so did shows at the nearby Hullabaloo. And it was within this su
dden flurry of activity that they met Sherry Cottle, booker at the Cheetah Club, out on Venice’s Pacific Ocean Park pier complex.

  Sadly destroyed in the series of arson attacks that ultimately led to Ocean Park’s closure in the early seventies, the Cheetah was modelled on the club of the same name in New York City, a 7,000 square foot dance floor surrounded by stainless steel walls. The Doors had played there, Janis Joplin and Blue Cheer, alongside almost every other significant band that called the LA club scene home. Not quite sure what to make of the Nazz, but blown away by their enthusiasm and wit, Cottle invited the band to audition for the Cheetah, and was sufficiently impressed to rebook them.

  The Nazz made their debut at the Cheetah in early August, opening for the Doors at a concert marking the first anniversary (on August 3) of the death of comedian Lenny Bruce. Lenny Brucemas was guaranteed to pull an all-star audience, while the billing placed the Nazz immediately after the Butterfield Blues Band, a hard-driving Chicago blues rock outfit that many were then comparing to Cream.

  There was no way they could fail.

  To horrify.

  It was a rout. With the lighting blaring and the amps feeding back, they hit the stage in a flash of noise and colour, and plunged straight into the theme from television’s Patty Duke Show. They had, they assumed, rehearsed their set to perfection, every high and low exquisitely paced, every heartbeat choreographed for maximum effect. But very few people hung around to hear that. They cleared the Cheetah crowd in four songs flat.

  Journalist Howard Bloom elaborated on the occasion for readers of Circus magazine: “They came out in chrome coloured suits with fringes, while fog machines spilled dense clouds around them and black lights triggered the phosphorescent glow of spinning wheels at the back of the stage. Then they thoroughly antagonised a crowd that had come for Jim-Morrison-style rock by giving it a mixture of Dionne Warwick tunes and science fiction songs about computers taking over earth. By the time they got into their fourth number, 7,000 Doors fans had fled.”