He remembered them immediately from their encounter the previous year, and shared their excitement at their upcoming record deal. With the under-age band members having all returned to Phoenix to get their parents to sign on the dotted line, the contractual paperwork was finally completed; Alice Cooper would sign to Straight the following day.
Hendrix was less enthusiastic about their plans to hand their management over to Cohen as well, though. Instead, he suggested they accompany him back to his hotel, the Landmark, to meet a guy that Hendrix himself had only just been introduced to, Shep Gordon.
New Yorker Gordon briefly outlines his career to that point: “I graduated from the University of Buffalo, and went to the New School for Social Research for a semester. And then to LA as a probation officer for a day.” Now he was selling copies of the LA Free Press on the corner of Sunset Boulevard, and living at the Landmark because he had nowhere else to go. But he was also in the music biz too; together with his business partner, accountant Joe Greenberg, Gordon was the West Coast agent for the Left Banke, fellow New Yorkers who hit a couple of years before with ‘Don’t Walk Away Renee’.* And he was always on the lookout for fresh talent.
According to Vince, laughing at the story later, it was Janis Joplin who introduced Gordon to Hendrix, but only after she’d decked him when he broke up what he thought was a fight between her and some guy. Turned out that they were fucking, and Janis was just being noisy, but she apologised the next morning when she saw him by the pool, and Hendrix did the rest. His attempts to give the Left Banke a foothold in Los Angeles notwithstanding, Gordon did not have a moment’s experience as a manager, but Hendrix shrugged his complaints away. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you? You should be a manager.”
Gordon agreed. On the spot, Alice Cooper was signed to the newly-formed Alive Enterprises and the following day in Zappa’s office, Gordon took control immediately. The proffered contract was for one LP, with options on two subsequent releases. He accepted that, and he nodded to Zappa and Cohen’s offer of a $6,000 annual advance. But when Cohen announced that Straight would keep the band’s publishing, Gordon swooped. They could co-publish. The band would keep 50 percent for itself. Later, he admitted that he didn’t have a clue what publishing meant. But if Cohen and Zappa wanted it, then it had to be worth something.
“The record and concert business was innocent and exiting,” Gordon continued. “Tickets were three, four and five dollars, and record companies helped to develop talent.” The manager, on the other hand, was there to “try to keep a sense of reality in the individual artists, though hard to do. A sense of how lucky they are and how fleeting success can be, and to hold onto what works and be thankful, rather than jealous, greedy, angry. These are always the things that seem to break up bands as they start to get successful.”
His own responsibilities were “manifold. But first and foremost to be the one person who isn’t a yes man… tell it as it is… protect their money… build a highway to fame and fortune that they can travel down and warn them when they take a wrong turn in the road or their ego starts to blur their vision.” And in return, he expected the artist “to show up on time and do their jobs”.
Gordon didn’t request, and has never accepted, a management contract with the band. Everything that he and Alice Cooper, individually and collectively, would do together was agreed on a handshake at best, including his 15 per cent share of the initial advance. He was already aware that he would be ploughing all of that, and more besides, back into the band; the $6,000 was not simply living expenses and play money, after all. It was intended to finance the recording of their first album too. A recording that Straight Records demanded be delivered to them within a month.
In the event, 12 of the 13 cuts intended for what would become Alice Cooper’s debut album were taped in three days straight, the band locking themselves away in the studio to play and replay their regular stage set live, and then go through the tapes to find the best-sounding takes. The 13th song, ‘Levity Ball’, was lifted from the Whisky tapes (although loyalties to their favourite hang-out saw the eventual album claim it was the Cheetah) after a studio version resolutely failed to capture the same energies.
It was basic, it was rudimentary, it was a far cry from the weeks and weeks that other bands liked to spend agonising over their art. But Gordon knew, and the band agreed, that Alice Cooper was not an act that lent itself to perfection. What the record would deliver was what the group itself distributed, a hard, loud, fistful of noise, pounding into the listener’s head forever.
Frank Zappa had originally intended to produce the sessions personally, but it soon became apparent that his vision of the group was very different to their own. “I remember Frank came to only one recording session for the… album,” Michael Bruce told Billy James, while Alice told Canadian journalist Mike Quigley, “Frank wanted to produce us, [but] he didn’t get the feeling that we wanted. Nothing on him, but he wasn’t on the same trip. He started to, but we said we weren’t happy with the feelings we got off the cut… the album now is more us than the other production that Frank did. I think he was trying to produce more of a… sort of a cheaper image.”
Abandoned, too, was a mad Zappa scheme to press the album onto a series of five-inch “hip pocket” sized discs and package them in a biscuit tin, under the name Alice Cookies. Alice Cooper were essentially on their own. “Frank is too political,” Alice shrugged to Rolling Stone the following year. “He takes himself too seriously. He acts like Hitler, and with that moustache he even looks like Hitler.”
In Zappa’s stead, another member of the Mothers, Ian Underwood, was delegated to oversee the sessions (he would be uncredited on the final record), but a few of Zappa’s methods did survive the great man’s departure. Neal Smith told Billy James, “Frank Zappa said he wanted the album to sound like a car driving past a garage while a band was playing. That was his goal, and I think he more or less achieved it. He had us set our amps around the drum kit so there was total leakage. We would run down the song, setting the dials on our amps and stuff, just trying to get a proper sound going that we could record and Zappa would say, ‘We got a take’. We would be like, ‘What, we didn’t even play the song yet’.”
Compensating for what they lacked in studio finesse by amplifying the theatricality, the Coopers bar-hopped deliriously from the infuriatingly unfinished ‘Titanic Overture’ that opens the proceedings by leaving even the most casual ear expecting something more, through to the beat band psych of ‘Reflected’, a song that would enjoy a renewed lease of life three years later when it was redesigned as ‘Elected’.
Everywhere, the sounds of mid-sixties Stones, late period Pretty Things, off-kilter Beatles and a railroad disaster full of British Invaders was fed through the band’s own world view and spat out as something that could almost have been tuneful if it had not been so skewed. Painstakingly, the band learned a handful of themes from James Bond movies, then learned them again played backwards. Hey presto, a new melody. They penned their first ballad, ‘Come With Us Now’, drawing on Alice’s love of old Burt Bacharach, and for a while they used it to open their set, a deceptive calm before the upcoming storm.
They sat and watched movies, then imagined how they might have sounded if Alice Cooper had written the soundtrack – ‘Levity Ball’ was their imaginary contribution to Carnival Of Souls.
Onstage epics were exaggerated, minor ideas were laid down as they stood. Two years later, Alice Cooper would sweep up a clutch of these snippets, including the mood-mangled ‘The More I Want You To Know’, and convert them into one epic medley, the behemothic ‘Halo Of Flies’. Another loose sketch would one day become ‘Dead Babies’. But in 1969, the vignettes were allowed to stand on their own two feet, a fractured feature of an album that felt like a roomful of mirrors had just been shattered, then reassembled with no care for cohesion. What better title could there be for such a creation, then, than the one they all agreed upon? Pretties For You.
“I lik
e Pretties For You for its originality,” Neal Smith told Goldmine in 2000. “When you create music that sounds like other music that’s going on at the time, it becomes dated. On the other hand, when you do something that’s different, it has a better chance of holding up over time. Unfortunately, when we went into the studio we were very green and we didn’t know anything about the recording process.”
Alice Cooper gigged on. In September 1968, they landed a booking in Denver, Colorado, opening for Steppenwolf. October took them to Philadelphia for a show with the MC5, played out in front of an audience of just 100 people. They landed a three-night residency at the Bank in Torrance, subverting the subtle rent-a-rock pop of Three Dog Night, and Zappa seemed to line them up to play every California show he was offered, including a two-night showcase at the Shrine that he devoted in its entirety to the Straight Records roster. Pretties For You would not be hitting the stores until June 1969, at the behest of distributors Warner Brothers. But there was no harm in getting the buzz going early.
Shep Gordon toiled furiously meanwhile, all but living on the telephone as he worked to book the band into every venue he could, no matter how far away it might be, or how askance the venue itself might feel. One of the first bookings he ever got for the band was at an army base in Colorado, the group billed as Alice Cooper & the Hollywood Blondes, and one can only imagine how the average military recruit responded when he discovered the true nature of Miss C and her playmates.
It was not at all unusual for the group to pile into the van and drive halfway across the country, just to fulfil a lone booking, but if they ever complained about the seemingly disproportionate effort that the journey required, Gordon had his answer ready. Too many bands became stars in their own towns, and were completely unknown every place else. Alice Cooper were spreading their name across the country, and no matter how far they had to travel to do it, if they could make one kid sit up and listen, then that was one kid who might buy the album. Or bring his friends to see them the next time they played.
Nobody doubted that it was Zappa’s name, rather than the band’s, that brought them the most work; sometimes Gordon only had to tell a promoter that Alice Cooper were signed to Frank Zappa’s label and he had another date filled on his desk calendar. And when they weren’t working, the band was in rehearsal, shut away says Alice in an empty building called Psychedelic Supermarket, named for but otherwise unrelated to the legendary club of the same name in Boston. From there it was just a short drive back to the Landmark, where Gordon had now installed the band members; and from there, it was just a short walk into the heart of Hollywood.
And it was Hollywood that created the Alice Cooper band, the materialistic hedonism of a city-within-a-city that was built upon the dreams of Mammon and Babylon, and which had fought so garishly for its own principles even as the rest of the world, or certainly the West Coast, seemed hell bent on reaching utopia. It was a dreamland, the home of the American movie industry, where the only currency that counted for anything was naked ambition. As Alice later remarked, no self-respecting rock star of the day would admit that they did it for the sex and drugs, the fast cars and flashy clothes, and even when Zappa’s Mothers of Invention drew a line in the sand, titling their third LP We’re Only In It For The Money, the confession was deflected by the sleeve design’s deliberate parody of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper.
Alice Cooper, on the other hand, made no bones of the fact that they wanted to be famous, wanted to make money, and they didn’t give a damn who or what they had to trample in order to achieve those ends.
They masked their backgrounds, their private lives, their inner selves. There would be no acoustic confessionals from Alice Cooper, even as the rest of Los Angeles lined up behind the ghastly sirens of James Taylor, Carole King and the rest of the singer-songwriter tsunami that swept out of Laurel Canyon to broadcast their neuroses to the world. Indeed, when history repeats the Cooper band’s claim that they remained renowned as the worst band in Los Angeles, it is merely parroting the words of the louder rock critics, those who found in Taylor and co a solace for their own private demons.
To the kids who packed out four nights at the Whisky at the beginning of 1969, whooping and roaring through a performance that was now so tight that the crowd could barely breathe, the Alice Cooper band was neither a joke nor a sore thumb. It was liberation. It was freedom. It was a reminder that rock could still roll, and that nothing could slow it down, not even the theft of the Coopers’ amplifiers from the back of their van one night in late January.
“The whole thing is a direct product of television and movies and America,” Alice told Michael Quigley in a 1969 magazine interview that was swiftly co-opted for the band’s own press kit. “Cause that’s where America’s based. That’s where their heart is from the sex and violence of TV and the movies, and that was our influence. We weren’t brought up under a blues influence. We were brought up under an electronics influence – the bomb (I’m not knocking the bomb, I think the bomb’s a gas), but television has been the main influence for this generation, and that’s why this whole thing is happening. You just let your lower self go, and then it takes on all these aspects of the society – the city with horns blowing, the people yelling things at each other, and the all-in-all violence and chaos of the city. Put that on stage with music, and that’s what this is.”
“The worst bill I ever saw was at the Whisky,” shuddered guitarist Andrew Gold, one of the myriad young hopefuls whose own laid-back ways and tuneful songsmithery were riding the new wave of adult balladeering. “Linda Ronstadt was playing a week there [February 19-23, 1969] and Alice Cooper was opening. I couldn’t believe it, nobody could believe it.”
Ronstadt was still rising at the time, still working to shrug off her early folk roots in favour of the broader pop confections that would ultimately establish her as one of the biggest female American superstars of the seventies. Her debut album was awaiting release; most people knew her still as the voice behind the Stone Poneys. But a sizeable crowd would turn out anyway to experience what, even then, was widely regarded as the most beautiful singing voice in Los Angeles. And what they did get as an appetiser?
“This is a song called ‘Ten Minutes Before The Worm’… this is ‘Earwigs To Eternity’. this is ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’. this is ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind Like We Did Last Summer’.” And every one, howled the hippies as they fled for cover, was distinguishable from its predecessor only because the band seemed to play a little louder each time.
Glen Buxton flashed an evil smile. “If we thought an audience needed something extra, if we knew before we went on that they probably wouldn’t like us, we would start loud and then just keep inching up until by the end, we were deafening. Some bands start loud and they have nowhere to go, but it’s like the guitar in Spinal Tap that goes up to 11. Mine went up to 20.”
“People were walking out, leaving their drinks on the bar and just walking out,” Gold recalled. “There were more people on the sidewalk outside than there were in the club, but you could still hear Alice Cooper, and I still say that the band wasn’t even playing music by that point, they were just making a free-form noise with everybody screaming over it because they didn’t care. They wanted to make their mark on the night and that’s what they did.”
Alice did not argue. “It’s like an art experiment to see what you can do to make people react,” he told writer Eve Rizzo that same year. “And what you can present in a certain way. Most of us were art majors in college for two years and the same philosophies hold true in art and music. Alice Cooper’s specialities have no boundaries… whatever comes up, comes up… and we’ll do it!”
Buxton however denied that the band ever abandoned their set in order to further enrage an audience. “We would never have done that. For a start it wouldn’t have been fair to anybody who did want to watch us play. And secondly, we were already most people’s worst nightmare, playing our normal set. Why would we need to be any worse than that?�
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At the same time, however, the band did little to counter the rumours or, indeed, the criticisms that circulated around their performances, positively revelling in their reputation and even smiling indulgently when another group came along, the quirky sibling-led Halfnelson, that threatened to dislodge them from that roost.
Soon to emerge on a wider stage as Sparks, Halfnelson were fronted by the brothers Ron and Russell Mael and, by their own admission, they eyed Alice Cooper’s reputation for a theatrical presentation with some awe. It was not, however, until the entire band went to a Coopers gig in the meeting room above the cafeteria at the UCLA that they realised just how much further they had to go.
Halfnelson drummer Harley Feinstein recalls, “We sat down on the floor right in front. At this time Halfnelson was in a very early stage in its development. We had talked a lot about the concept of adding theatrics to our live performances but I don’t recall that anyone had come up with any specific ideas other than wearing some make-up and fancy clothes.
“The band took the stage, the stage lights went on and they started playing. We were thunderstruck. We had been saying, ‘We need to do something theatrical’ and Alice Cooper was already doing it 1,000% more than we could have possibly imagined. One of the young ladies in our entourage, Diane Cunningham, who was an intellectual artist type stated that she checked her pulse while ‘Sun Arise’ was playing and her pulse was beating precisely to the beat of the song. After it was over we just said, ‘Wow could we ever be that amazingly good?’”
Sparks would, of course, come to grips with their ambition in the end. But for now, Alice Cooper had the field to themselves. “We were going out of our way to be obnoxious,” Alice admitted to journalist Michael Delaney. “We used to get so drunk that we couldn’t play. I’d wear a pink clown suit and go on stage and pass out after two numbers. I’d tell the kids to get lost and they would. They loved it but they left. I was so drunk. We were notorious for things we hadn’t done. People were making things up about us and writing them down. They were taking Alice Cooper and making us into this anti-hero thing.”
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 9