Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  A free concert was looming. The Nazz had a booking to play alongside Blue Cheer and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the Earl Warren Fairgrounds in Santa Barbara, on March 16, 1968 – Michael Bruce’s birthday. Delaying the declaration of their name change until they were actually on the stage, what happened next passed into both the band’s folklore and local legend.

  Alice told Fusion, “We’ve always been into liquor, but at that time it was almost the biggest thing in our act. We were into getting falling down drunk and then going out to play those long-ins, where you know everybody was really into the whole consciousness of this new dope scene and walking around saying ‘groovy’ and ‘oh wow’ to each other and making that particular social scene, which we never put down at all, it was just that we had our own scene, and right then our big thing was wine.”

  The problem was, “a lot of the kids were still at the stage where they were very puritanical about alcohol, and our main approach then was just to get as fucked up as possible and go play and see how obnoxious we could be. Just to create any kind of absurd disruption of that, what, sylvan sort of placidity we could. And it worked, it was great fun. People would walk around in circles saying, ‘Wow do these guys suck, who the fuck are they?’, and some would come up later and ask us why we were trying to bum everybody out.

  “One other thing is that at the time our music was almost total noise, no real order at all, and lots of people didn’t like that too much either. But we did, and we kept on, and every once in a while somebody would come up after we finished and say they really dug what we were doing, and we’d give ’em a swig of Red Mountain. Some of them were like intellectual types who tried to talk about atonality and chance music, but lots of times they were bikers who’d give us their wine or offer us some downs and tell us what a bunch of lames they thought all the hippies were. I think they really identified with the music we were doing better than anybody else, because it was so noisy they heard motorcycles in it.”

  All of a sudden, he smiled, “There was Alice Cooper. And people hated us. They hated us so much they came to see us. Even other bands hated us. Friends of ours started hating us. But they came to see us.”

  Chapter Five

  Pretties For Frank

  Without ever isolating an audience of their own, the Alice Cooper band had found a new way of making people talk about them – by alienating the people who did come to see them. At the festival, they determined to be the loudest band on the stage. Now they resolved to become the most colourful too, haunting the Hollywood thrift stores for the hippest women’s clothing they could find, a kaleidoscopic blur of lamé and feathers, corsets and stockings. It was a look that their idols, the Rolling Stones, may have pioneered a couple of years ago with the video shoot for ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’, but for the Stones it was simply a gimmick. The Coopers were determined to transform it into a lifestyle.

  Phoenix was already in their pocket. A local promoter, apparently enthused by both the band’s name and following, had offered them naming rights to a club he intended opening, as a Teen Gazette article dated Saturday, April 6, 1968, declares. “The Valley’s newest teen night club opened last night with Alice Cooper, formerly the Nazz, namesake of the club. The building, located at 5555 E. Van Buren, was completely redecorated, including wood panelling on the walls and pink crepe-like material draped from the ceiling of the lobby. With this combination, Alice Cooper is a sure winner.”

  Neal Smith recalls, “Somebody had this old country and western bar. They wanted to turn it into a rock bar and they said we could do anything we wanted to it. So we changed the name to the Alice Cooper Club and because they gave us carte blanche to do whatever we wanted, we painted the whole inside pink.

  “We were so inspired by the S&M thing from Hollywood that we had whips and chains and handcuffs and all this crazy stuff everywhere, although in the west, whips aren’t a big deal.”

  In fact the club remained open for just one weekend, two shows headlined by Alice Cooper and a third featuring the Music Machine, 18 months on from their Top 20 success with the Spiders’ old stand-by ‘Talk Talk’. “It may have stayed open a little longer,” Smith concedes, “but we didn’t play there again. Either way, it had a very short shelf life.”

  More and more of the band’s time was being spent in Los Angeles. Not every venue that they approached for an audition got past the photographs that the band would hand over, and even once they’d convinced the club owner to book them, there was still an audience to win over – or not. But throughout the early spring of 1968, Alice Cooper slowly found their world expanding, through their own machinations and those of their most infamous fans.

  Girls Together Outrageously (or Occasionally or Often, depending upon the mood) were an aggregation of Laurel Canyon groupies whose speciality was dancing together at various Hollywood clubs, clad only in skimpy white T-shirts and diapers, and revelling in the evocative identities that Tiny Tim had already conferred upon them: Miss Sandra, Miss Sparky, Miss Pamela (Miller – later to become a celebrated groupie and marry singer Michael DesBarres), Miss Cinderella, Miss Mercy and Miss Christine. Surnames were unnecessary; the girls’ reputation was identification enough.

  “We called ourselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company,” recalled Miss Pamela and, one night at a Mothers of Invention show at the Shrine Auditorium, while Zappa was “wandering around after the show”, she “made a point of slamming into him on the dance floor”. They fell to talking and soon, with Miss Christine installed as Zappa’s housekeeper, she was inviting her companions up to Zappa’s home, actor Tom Mix’s old mansion in Laurel Canyon, to entertain the other guests by singing and dancing to his Mothers of Invention records.

  It was a great act, or so Zappa thought, and he was soon laying plans to incorporate the GTOs’ routine into three of his own shows at the Los Angeles Shrine. There, Rolling Stone described their performance as “beautifully choreographed, and so what if one of the Mothers thinks they’re astonishingly flat and can’t carry a tune in a bucket?” The fact was, they brought further invention to the Mothers’ performance, as well as offering the more testosterone-driven members of the audience a ready outlet for their most primal emotions.

  Not all of the Mothers were thrilled by the girls’ arrival into their world. Bunk Gardner recalled them as “vampirish, black lipstick, black mascara, black everything”, and found them “a little bit too unattractive for my tastes”. But Zappa’s enthusiasm knew no bounds.

  Neither did Vince’s. He met Miss Christine at the legendary Cantor’s Deli one night and, confessing that “I had developed a little crush on [her]”, he began accompanying her to work, babysitting Zappa’s two children, Dweezil and Moon Unit. And Miss Christine started talking to her employer about him, probably not making too much of an impression on a man who spent every day being told about one band or another, until she said the magic words. “Their name is Alice Cooper. And nobody likes them.”

  “Nobody at all?” Zappa asked.

  “Nobody at all,” Miss Christine confirmed.

  The band had already started sending demo tapes and unsold copies of ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’ out to various local record labels, but always to no avail. That was no surprise; every label in the city was already being deluged by young hopefuls, and even Jackson Browne’s demos were binned by David Geffen before a secretary rescued them and forced him to listen. So Alice Cooper’s failure to find an interesting label probably had less to do with the fact that people hated them than the fact that they had been lost in the stampede.

  Zappa knew that, of course. But he also respected Miss Pamela’s opinions and, even more pressingly, he was actively searching for new talent (if that was not too grandiose a term for his intentions) to launch the pair of record labels he had recently launched, Straight Records, for what he considered mainstream acts, and Bizarre Records, for the more avant-garde.

  The GTOs were already on board and so was Wild Man Fischer, a paranoid schizophreni
c singer-songwriter who Zappa discovered busking a clutch of fragmentary ditties on a Hollywood street corner. Captain Beefheart was on his way, and all three, Zappa knew, fit the manifesto he had already composed for the label, that it would “make records that are a little different… present musical and sociological material which the important record companies would probably not allow you to hear”.

  The additional presence of folky singer-songwriters Tim Buckley, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester did negate those intentions somewhat, but still Alice Cooper sounded like they might make perfect stablemates for the Straight catalogue. But the group did itself few favours when they finally got to meet Zappa himself.

  “Frank was a guy that we understood,” Alice explained in that Famous Monsters interview. “He was a Dadaist. He worked in surrealism and he worked in a lot of media in his music. And he was funny! He was making fun of hippies and making fun of politicians and the straight people – everybody was fair game to him. Very early in our career we found out who Frank was, and we listened to Freak Out and Absolutely Free [the Mothers’ first two albums] and we just laughed because this guy is like the Spike Jones of rock’n’roll.

  “We didn’t really get into how good he was until after We’re Only In It For The Money and those albums, when he really started playing guitar and we really started listening to the songs and how brilliant this guy was. But he was the only one that was interested in Alice Cooper.”

  Alice had already invited Zappa to come see the band at Cheetah’s one night, and had grown accustomed to being brushed off. He refused to take no for an answer, however, and when he found himself at a party that Zappa was also attending, he determined to cajole the moustachioed maestro ceaselessly, wearing down his resistance. Finally, if only to shut Alice up, Zappa agreed to meet the band, uttering the words that would form the framework for one of the most infamous of all Alice Cooper legends: “All right. Come by in the morning and I’ll listen.”

  And so it was that at 7p.m. on a bright Sunday morning in June, the calm of Zappa’s sleep, and of Laurel Canyon itself, was disrupted by the sound of the Alice Cooper band, in full costume and full flight. Miss Christine had let them into the house and helped them set up their gear. Then, with the rest of the house still silent, they started playing.

  Zappa appeared, bemused and bathrobed, clutching a cup of coffee that he had scarcely been sufficiently awake to pour. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  They told him; he groaned. When he said “in the morning”, he’d meant later, much later. And when he said he’d have a listen, he’d been expecting a cassette. Not a live performance. But he allowed them to finish their short set, hummed and hawed for a moment to himself, and then asked the first two questions that came to mind. “Are you on drugs?” – no. And “Where are you from?” The moment they told him that they were from Phoenix and not some far-out corner of the traditional underground, he was sold.

  “I’d understand if you were from San Francisco or the Village or England. But Phoenix? OK, I’ll sign you.”

  It was as easy as that.

  Zappa was never to become an Alice Cooper fan. He signed them for the pure artistic notion that, if he didn’t, nobody else would, and because he thought that someone, somewhere in his fanbase might appreciate them. Later that day he called his manager Herb Cohen and told him to start drawing up a record contract and, having ascertained that the Coopers were also management-free, suggested that Cohen step in there as well.

  A couple of gigs were arranged to keep the Coopers busy. Zappa had a show lined up at the Wrigley Field ballpark in south Los Angeles on June 27; the Grassroots and T Bone Walker were already on the bill, but Alice Cooper were slipped onto the foot of the schedule. And they were as bad as he expected.

  Bunk Gardner told Zappa biographer Billy James, “They were pitiful musically, even embarrassing. But it was Theater of the Absurd and the kids loved it. Forget the music, it was the weird show that the kids loved. But I still cringed at how bad musically they were. I just didn’t understand why Frank and Herbie signed them to begin with.”

  Zappa added the Coopers to another upcoming show as well, at the Whisky A Go Go in July, and that was the cue for the same venue to call the Coopers in for another gig, a couple of weeks before the Zappa gig, opening for the British blues band Ten Years After on June 24. And there, Straight Records set the tapes rolling, to record the earliest known Alice Cooper concert tape.

  Twenty-five minutes on stage gave the band time to perform just eight songs, opening with the twisting time signatures and staccato riffs of ‘No Longer Umpire’ as an instant test of the audience’s sensibilities; bleeding into the marginally more conventional ‘Today Mueller’, a song written about a girl they knew back in Phoenix (‘who is a lot of fun”); and then into the first of their truly experimental numbers, a brief but brittle ‘Ten Minutes Before The Worm’ that took the two previous numbers’ penchant for twitching and twisting round the rudiments of melody and transformed itself into a medley of madness.

  Signature falsetto backing vocals soar; Smith’s drums scream like electric guitars; and no sooner does one eccentricity close than another, Dunaway’s ‘Levity Ball’, storms into sight, the most conventional song in the band’s entire repertoire, and destined to remain one of the finest, particularly around the mid section where the band’s love for Pink Floyd, who once spiked their brownies, was writ around its mock ending recreation of Syd Barrett’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.

  ‘Nobody Likes Me’, that self-mocking relic of the Spiders old woes, lopes past on harmonies and flashes of a Bo Diddley beat; and then another thrash as ‘BB On Mars’ (“it’s about this BB… on Mars”) mutates the group’s old beat-boom sensibilities into the kind of warp-speed demolition that sundry post-punk British bands would, a decade later, consider themselves very clever for concocting.

  The band’s subsequently publicised loathing of the blues does not stand comparison with ‘Sweet Low, Sweet Cheerio’, a song whose freak show lyric belies a quintessentially Quicksilver Messenger Service backing track, and makes a mockery, too, of the aspersions that were being cast on the band’s musicianship elsewhere. And then it’s into the closing number, a fiery ‘Changing Arranging’ that staggers in on a mood borrowed wholesale from Zappa’s ‘Who Are The Brain Police?’, but quickly shrugs off those trappings to develop into another of the deceptively poppy little numbers that Alice Cooper tucked away behind the shock tactics.

  It was a dramatic performance, devastating in places, and the audience response gives immediate lie to the ongoing insistence that Alice Cooper were the most hated band in LA. Neither was it a one off. In July, the LA Free Press caught them at the newly redecorated Cheetah Club’s Bastille Day party, and described them as “showstopping” but, in truth, appearing more impressed by the venue’s recent makeover. Gone, it celebrated, was “most of that obnoxious sheet metal which made one feel like the inside of a garbage can”.

  Another venue welcomed them through its doors, and introduced Alice, at least, to another piece of his own future. Located just off Sunset, Thee Experience was a new venture, operated by the same husband and wife team that had successfully run another club, Thee Image, in Miami, Florida, for the last couple of years. Even more excitingly, the Florida operation’s house band, Blues Image, were now themselves based in Los Angeles, and guitarist Mike Pinera recalls a vibrant scene.

  “Thee Experience really knew how to take care of musicians. Hendrix would be popping in, the Who, Jim Morrison was a regular, we had great bands there all the time. Alice Cooper became the opening band for the venue, so I used to see them every weekend. They had not yet made it, but they were on Frank Zappa’s label and they were quite bizarre for that time. They were already putting the dark make-up under the eyes and they looked very far out and I remember the first time we played together, I invited them into the dressing room and shared our sandwiches and our coffee and stuff. Whereas the rest of my band, the Blues Image, they stayed
away. They said, ‘They’re kinda scary man, just tell us when they’re gone and then we’ll come back’.”

  Already, however, it was apparent that Alice Cooper rose far above the reputation that their wardrobe and make-up had provided them with. Pinera continues, “What it stood for, the lipstick and the black stuff under the eyes and the lingerie, people didn’t like that but nobody could deny it was a good band, and their originals were very well crafted. So some people hated it, but others loved them. There were bands that were equally as dark with their persona and their appearance, but they couldn’t play worth the crap. Plus, Los Angeles was known then for all those guitar players with their acoustic guitars, doom and gloom and the end of the world, and it wasn’t good. Los Angeles needed bands like Alice Cooper.”

  And Alice Cooper needed Los Angeles. For now. Having stepped away from the crush of Sherry Cotelle’s Venice home, the band drifted across town to Watts, where the Chambers Brothers, the other house band at the Cheetah, put an entire basement at their disposal beneath their headquarters on Crenshaw Boulevard. There, Alice Cooper rehearsed for their biggest date yet, at the Newport Pop Festival, out at the Orange County Fairgrounds, on August 3. On an esoteric bill that sprawled from Canned Heat and the Chambers Brothers, to Steppenwolf and Sonny & Cher, the Alice Cooper band tore the afternoon to shreds with a set that defied all categorisation.

  The following week they were back home in Phoenix to headline an event named for one of their own songs, the Levity Ball, and a week after that, in Los Angeles again, they played the second Brucemas Festival at the Cheetah, out on the beach with the Doors topping the bill. And in September, watching the Chambers Brothers rehearse for their next major gig, opening for Jimi Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl, they were stunned when Hendrix himself walked in.