Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Those that remained, however, made an impressive audience in their own right: Sherry Cottle, who was already planning the group’s next appearance; Vito, the leader of the hippy choreography team Vito’s Dancers; and three members of a loose aggregation of local groupies who went under the name of the GTOs – Girls Together Outrageously. Next to Cottle, they would become the Nazz’s most tireless cheerleaders.

  On August 22, 1967, the Nazz played the first of seven consecutive nights at the Cheetah, opening for the funk-driven Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. It was an absurd pairing, but Cottle knew what she was doing. Audiences might not like the Nazz, but their loathing was contagious. Word of mouth spread, “You have to see this band – they’re atrocious,” and sensing the groundswell of interest, Cottle established the Nazz, alongside the somewhat less controversial Chambers Brothers, as the Cheetah house bands. By early September, the Nazz were opening two nights for Buffalo Springfield, and Cottle was opening up her own home, a three-bedroom house on Beethoven Street, to the band members.

  They were not the only musicians on the premises, though. Other groups shared Cottle’s hospitality, including, for a few days in late October 1967, a visiting British band called Pink Floyd.

  Still riding the British success of their debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and the attendant hit single ‘See Emily Play’, Pink Floyd were the epitome of the UK underground, at a time when it was still struggling to catch up with its American counterpart. Certainly three days at Winterland in San Francisco did little to impress the local freak community as the Floyd travelled without much of the lighting and stage effects that hallmarked their reputation, while frontman Syd Barrett was now firmly in the grips of the psychological malaise that would lift him out of the band and into rock legend before they even cut a new album together.

  The band’s management, watching Barrett’s disintegration drag the group’s reputation with it, was frantic, pulling out every stop to cancel the tour and bring the band home, but while they waited for their flights back to London, Pink Floyd made their way to Venice, and a memorable meal with the Nazz.

  A decade later, Glen Buxton recalled, “Syd was a very strange person. He never talked, but we’d be sitting at dinner and all of a sudden I’d pick up the sugar and pass it to him. It was like I heard him say ‘pass the sugar’. It was like telepathy. That was the first time in my life I’d ever met someone who could do that freely, and this guy did it all the time. He was definitely from Mars.”

  According to Vince, Barrett spent most of his time sitting silently in the kitchen clad in the same pair of crushed velvet pink pants. But the entire Pink Floyd made its way down to Gazzari’s one afternoon to watch the Nazz audition for a regular gig there, and offered their own contribution to the proceedings by first dosing their housemates with marijuana brownies. Then it was down to the Cheetah Club, where the Floyd were making their Los Angeles debut.

  “The Cheetah Club was the occasion that Syd decided his permed hair was too curly and had to be straightened before he could go on,” Floyd drummer Nick Mason recalled, a tale that Glen Buxton confirmed with his memory of being sent out to a nearby drug store to pick up a tub of hair gel. Which Barrett proceeded to empty over his head. He stepped out onto the stage and, in the heat of the stage lighting, “it looked like his head was melting”.

  Those other denizens of the Cheetah, the Doors, became friends of the Nazz, even inviting them into the studio to watch as they recorded their second LP, Strange Days; while other groups found their own paths crossing with the Nazz, for better or for worse. In mid-November, the Nazz opened for Clear Light, a band widely touted as the next Doors, and the year ended with another run of Cheetah shows that took the Nazz right up until Christmas.

  They squeezed out a new single. ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’ became the first and only release on their own Very Records label. It sold a handful of copies to the curious, and a few more to the odd soul who wanted a souvenir of the frenetic live show, but that was not the point. It was true that the Nazz had yet to make a mark on any place outside of Venice, but still six months in California had established them way beyond their expectations, and they were not as loathed as they liked to make out, either.

  Another Phoenix friend joined the family. Neal Smith was the band’s roadie. Like Glen Buxton an Akronite, he was born in Rubber City on September 23, 1947 before his family transplanted to Phoenix. A Camelback High graduate, he played in a band called the Holy Grail and was first drawn towards the Spiders not so much by music, as by a sense of homesickness; he and Buxton bonded over their Akron past, and their friendship grew from there.

  The rest of the band were not immediately taken with Smith. In fact Vince admitted in his Me Alice autobiography, “I always thought Neal Smith was a jerk. I first saw him at a Battle of the Bands in Phoenix when he was the drummer in a rival band, the Surf Tones. Every group in that particular Battle of the Bands agreed to pool their equipment so each band wouldn’t have to reset the stage after each set and lose the attention of the parking lot audiences. Neal… was the only musician there who was against it. He made all the musicians disassemble their equipment so he could set his drum kit on risers. Then in the middle of a 16-minute version of ‘Wipe Out’, he did a 14-minute drum solo.”

  Smith signed up as the Spiders’ roadie at first, while still looking for a band of his own. He was already there, then, when they received their first and, so far, only taste of record company interest. A label called Sound Records came knocking, and Smith recalls, “[they] wanted to sign them, but they wanted the band to back up another singer.” The Nazz refused. They had not come so far with Vince to drop him now. Either they signed as a unit or they didn’t sign at all. Their suitors took the latter option, only for the band to then discover they might be needing a new vocalist after all. Vince was off to Vietnam.

  Drummer John Speer had quit the band by now, walking out in December 1967 after one disagreement too many, and remaining tightlipped over the reasons for his departure ever since. Michael Bruce, however, remains convinced it was the pot brownies incident in the presence of Pink Floyd that did it. “He got really mad… [and] the next day he loaded his car and left for Phoenix.”

  His replacement, however, was already waiting in the wings. It was Buxton who pushed for Smith to be elevated from roadiedom to the band itself, and this time, it was Smith’s love of firearms that swayed him. Buxton was toting a Derringer at the time and loved nothing so much as driving out into the desert to practise his shooting. Smith, on the other hand, had a Thompson sub-machine gun. With the rest of the band toting .22 rifles, shooting practice had just gone up another notch.

  Smith slipped effortlessly into the vacant drum seat, bringing with him an education that had seen him play in orchestras and marching bands almost from the moment he could hold two drumsticks. And he was the first to learn that he would not be going to Vietnam, after one particular trip into the desert left him with a bullet wound in his foot.

  Aiming for a rabbit, Vince instead hit his bandmate, and that was the end of Smith’s military hopes. Particularly after Smith insisted he’d been trying to commit suicide at the time. In the eyes of the American military, it didn’t matter if you wound up dead once they had their hooks in you. Just so long as you weren’t the one who pulled the trigger.

  His bandmates were not so fortunate. Contrary to what they all believed, enrolment at Glendale Community College was not enough to convince the military that the Spiders would be more of an asset to the home front than they would being cannon fodder on the front line. Buxton, Bruce, Dunaway and Vince all received A-1 classification, meaning they were considered both suitable and available for unrestricted military service. Now it was up to them to convince the army otherwise.

  All four were still registered as residents of Phoenix, so it was to Arizona they returned, growing ever more fearful as the lights of Los Angeles receded into the distance. Yet they weren’t despairing yet. They had a plan. />
  The Southern Comfort flowed the night before they were due to appear at the conscription office, and wardrobes were ransacked for the most outlandish clothing they could find. The idea, shared with so many other would-be draft dodgers, was to appear so freaky, outrageous and all-round undesirable that the Army would rather lose the war than recruit them.

  At first, it looked as though their scheme would work. Dunaway was disqualified because of his appearance and the likelihood, apparent to even the most bull-headed recruitment officer, that there was no way he could be transformed into a lean, mean fighting machine. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

  Buxton was sent packing and so was Bruce, after he suffered what looked like a complete mental breakdown while actually on the bus to boot camp. Which left Vince, his head still swimming from the alcohol, resplendent in a pair of gold lamé trousers, his hair a tangled mass that reached towards his lower back, a hippy, a horror, a degenerate mess. Yet he, it was declared, was precisely what the army was looking for, and he knew why as well. The recruitment officer was the same lunkhead who’d just stolen girlfriend Debby away from him (much to Mrs Hickey’s relief), and who hated his old rival with a passion. Vince was told to go home and start packing. He was off to war.

  It was pure chance that saved him. Chance, and the US government’s decision to try and quell mounting criticism of the seemingly indiscriminate manner in which American youth was being harvested for the war. Shortly after Vince’s 20th birthday in February 1968, but before he received his actual call-up papers, it was announced that the military was reverting to a practice that was last seen in 1942, drafting future conscripts by lottery. All pending inductions were placed on hold until the drawing took place on December 1, 1969.

  The possibility of being sent off to war still hung over Vince Furnier. But he had about 18 months of freedom ahead of him in which to get on with his life. At the beginning of March 1968, the Nazz returned to Los Angeles with just one goal in mind. To become so huge that, if Vince did end up being hauled off to the war, it would become the biggest headline news since Elvis Presley was drafted. Because they would already be the biggest stars since him.

  The little boy who used to swung his hips in the mirror was about to grow up.

  The reprieve gave the band a whole new outlook. Like a dying man anxious to cram as much into the time that was left to him, the band turned everything up full blast; their look, their sound, their music, their attitude. And their name. Word had filtered through of another band called the Nazz, a Philly-based outfit led by one Todd Rundgren, and the fact that the Venice Beach Nazz heard the news long before their Pennsylvania counterparts became aware of them suggested that any attempt to hang onto their name was doomed. It was time for another change.

  A handful of names was bandied around, including the distinctly memorable Husky Baby Sandwich. But the title that would soon be ascending to infamy was not granted by any earthly power.

  Or so one of the stories goes.

  The group was back in Phoenix now, returning home for the Christmas holidays and then staying on to build up another stash of cash, “a war chest”, as Neal Smith puts it, of four to five thousand dollars, with which to finance their next assault on Hollywood. One night, road manager Dick Phillips invited the group round to his house, where his mother had set up a Ouija board. Immediately, an unseen force began manipulating the pointer, painstakingly spelling out a name that meant nothing to anybody. It was Alice Cooper.

  They asked the board who she was. Its reply arrived with chilling deliberation.

  ALICE COOPER IS VINCE FURNIER.

  They could not allow the matter to rest there. Over the ensuing years, the band members and friends threw themselves into research, and soon a tale of supernatural fear and superstitious horror presented itself. Alice Cooper was an English woman, born in the 16th or 17th century, one of two sisters who were widely believed, or at least accused, of practicing witchcraft, at a time when the craft was a capital crime.

  The authorities came for Alice’s sister first, dragging her away in chains, imprisoning and interrogating her, extracting and believing the kind of confession that would not even pass muster as the script for a modern lowbrow horror film, and then condemning her to death at the stake. Alice watched in terror as her sister burned, and she knew that she was next. Days, maybe even hours, before she was arrested, she committed suicide by poison. Vince, the Ouija board told the band, was her reincarnation. Or, perhaps, she was his. Driving back to Los Angeles a few days later, the band was involved in a highway accident that wrote off their van and came close to writing off the band as well. As they stared in disbelief at the wreckage of their transport and the broken gear strewn across the highway, the question came to every mind. What if Vince really had died in the crash? And what if Alice, the 16th century witchy Alice, had reanimated his corpse for her own wicked, vengeful purposes?

  They had their story. Or one of them, anyway, because there would be a lot of others.

  In an age when many of the biggest hits of the day seemed to be by wholesome female singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, Melanie Safka and so on and so forth, Alice Cooper was precisely the kind of name that would be attached to an all-American blonde folk singer. Wouldn’t it be cool, Vince laughed, to draw in an audience expecting an evening of lightly strummed earnestness, and then hammer them with the full force of the Nazz?

  “The name started simply as a spit in the face of society,” he cracked to Rolling Stone in 1973, fully mindful of the fact that the magazine was one of those that had foisted such fare upon the public. “With a name like Alice Cooper, we could really make them suffer.”

  On other occasions, he simply mused on the “Baby Jane Lizzie Borden sweet and innocent with a hatchet behind the back” prettiness of the name. “There was something axe-murderish about Alice Cooper. It reminded me of Lizzie Borden. [It’s] got a Whatever Happened To Baby Jane feeling to it. It was like feminine, but it wasn’t feminine. It had some sort of ring to it, something disturbing.”

  And on others, he dismissed all those other tales and told what he swore was the “honest-to-God truth”. And it is just as likely (or otherwise) as all of those other explanations. In 1975, he told Circus, “We were sitting there, we were still high school kids, and we were over at these girls’ house. They were secretaries, and they wanted to be a band. They were called the Weeds of Idleness, and they really were sincere, but they were horrible. They worked as secretaries and they would really help us out. We would go there every night and they’d prepare us all this food. So, it was over at their house and we were sitting there saying, ‘We got to find a new name’… and I said, ‘We don’t have anything to lose, let’s do something that no one’s going to relate to at all.’ I could have said Jennifer Smith or Mary Truesdale, but it just happened that Alice Cooper came out. It was the very first name that came out too.”

  Further variations blossomed. “It is rumoured that Alice’s real name is Vernon Harlipp,” announced Teen magazine in November 1972. “Alice Cooper is his mother’s maiden name and the family is distantly related to the late Gary Cooper. However, Alice refuses to comment on any of the above.” And in late 1973, Melody Maker reported that Alice’s childhood pet was a baby King Snake that he found in the garden one day. “[He] called the snake Alice, because it was the name of a little girl at Sunday School. It wasn’t until it died that he found it was a man snake, after all. Vince was so upset as its death he cried for days, and there was nothing his mother could do to console him. [But] he never forgot that snake.”

  Glen Buxton, however, mused on a more prosaic influence, as Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ hit the charts and ignited a counterculture-wide fascination with English author Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass/Wonderland tales. Alice, as the titular heroine of both those story books, was a popular name in 1967 and early 1968, as popular as another folk hero of the age, the Mini Cooper motor car, winner of the 1967 Monte Carlo Rally.
The combination of two such powerful icons, the fantasy of psychedelia and the style of Swinging London, seemed irresistible to a bunch of self-confessed Anglophiles whose greatest thrill so far had been to meet Pink Floyd on their first visit to America, and whose own musical dreams remained locked solidly into the turbulent thrash of the British Invaders. They could as easily have named themselves Lucy Lotus.

  But they didn’t. They were Alice Cooper and Sherry Cottle sprang into action, designing new identities for the musicians, to be smeared across their press releases. Vince was sorted; he was Alice. But Glen Buxton became “a brooding figure of the past, a black knight once feared by many”; Dennis Dunaway was “an artist of the courts, painting the picture of history, knowing the colours of tomorrow”; Neal Smith was “a warrior king, born of power, bred in the stronghold of the gods” and Michael Bruce became a “poet of the streets, writing songs of centuries, a figure in the fields of tomorrow”.

  And where their identities went, their wardrobe would follow. Their hair was already reaching lengths that even the established long hairs of the day would have looked askance at. Now their costuming, already absurd and borderline bordello, began to echo the nomenclatural deception. Neal Smith’s sister Cindy was the co-owner and designer at a Phoenix boutique; she became the band’s official costumier, and while she worked on her first designs and outfits, the Coopers set their sights on a suitable scene in which to debut their new-found depravity. As Vince wondered aloud in a 2010 interview, “Why do we always have rock heroes? Why not a rock villain? I was more than happy to be rock’s Darth Vader. I was more than happy to be Captain Hook.”