Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Besides, not everybody hated them. Journalist Eve Rizzo told Scene II readers, “Their sound can best be described as exciting… fast… loud – their set includes a variety of numbers – no single show is like another. Each performance is a surprise, due to their unpredictable use of costumes and scenery. Their costumes are absolutely gorgeous – all created by Neal’s sister Homer Fudgecake!”

  The album release drew closer. In March 1969, the Coopers played a festival at Speedway Meadows, in the shadow of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, alongside Crazy Horse and the MC5. The following month, they were opening a string of arena shows for the Mothers of Invention. A tour was arranged, criss-crossing the country in the weeks before the album’s release. Tentacles stretched as far afield as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Chicago, and in June they reached New York City for the first time, a couple of the shows at the Felt Forum giving way to a residency at the Scene, entrepreneur Steve Paul’s already-legendary hang-out on 8th and 46th Street in Manhattan.

  There, the likes of Hendrix, the Doors, Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground had already carved themselves into the local folklore; now Alice Cooper were to do the same with a string of five shows in six nights (they broke amidships for a gig in Philadelphia) that Glen Buxton recalled as “truly eye opening… because it was the first time we played to an audience that actually understood what we were doing”.

  New York and Los Angeles were more than the geographic poles of the American entertainment industry. Culturally, too, they were at odds, the one sunblissed and doped out, the other gritty and speeding. The Velvet Underground were a New York archetype, although even New York itself didn’t realise the fact at the time; so was the poetic beat madness of the Fugs; so were any of the many bands that musically, lyrically and most of all physically kicked the California mantra of peace and love back into the hippies’ smug, blissed-out faces.

  Alice agreed. He told Scene II, “Every audience is a positive or negative one, depending on what you give them when you first go on stage. It’s like a reflection. If you want to see it in the audience you have to produce it and they’ll pick up on it and then it becomes like communication. The things up on stage is contagious. If you smile a lot, or if you see someone who’s really happy up on stage or if you see someone who’s apathetic, you’re the same way. So it’s up to the performer.”

  Alice Cooper played to their own every excess, and New York howled for more. “Alice Cooper, a musically driving and visually exciting act, had a strong first set at Steve Paul’s Scene on June 12,” reported the trade magazine Billboard, wondering “how much of Alice Cooper is a put-on”, but essentially concluding that it didn’t matter. With their “big sound” and “good solos”, and the “wild ending” afforded by the showcased ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind Like We Did Last Summer’, Billboard was seemingly predicting big things for “a wild group”. And the magazine’s voice would not be in the wilderness for long.

  _________________________

  * Forty years later, Alice would recall the connection when he covered the Left Banke’s ‘Pretty Ballerina’ for his Dirty Diamonds album.

  Chapter Six

  They Kill Chickens (Don’t They?)

  With their first full US tour kicking off in June, the band was still on the road as the first reviews of Pretties For You came in, a mixed bag that ranged from Record World’s insistence that they had taken “a cue from John Cage and Frank Zappa… for this package of strange, discombobulated sounds and songs”, to the Arizona Republic’s somewhat puzzled contemplation of “music [that] is supposed to convey a happy, bright, optimistic attitude about life… in order to provide an alternative to all the social criticism and pessimism about the state of the world found in so much contemporary music.”

  The result, the paper’s critic concluded, “is quite comfortably at home in the ‘heavy psychedelic’ category, whatever that means”, and local feeling seemed to be more excited by the refusal of sundry local record stores to allow the album to go on display without a “censored” sticker to mask the flash of female undergarment that artist Ed Beardsley had included on the cover art. Zappa’s original idea of releasing the album in a cookie tin seemed so old-fashioned compared to the controversy that the band was now embroiled within.

  The tour was not only designed to promote the album, however. Indeed, close to a year on from its recording, the group had already outgrown it, and they readily admitted that, were they to be recording it today, Pretties For You would emerge as a very different-sounding disc. They proved that in concert by extending and elaborating the best of the record and simply shunting the remainder to one side, occasionally incorporating elements of one song into the birth of another, and pushing ahead towards the second LP that Straight was already demanding.*

  The tour was also a fact-finding mission, striking out into the unknown in search of a city that might prove more receptive to the Alice Cooper band than Los Angeles. Hollywood was home, but there were preconceptions there that might never be shaken, no matter how popular the band became elsewhere. Far better, Shep Gordon decreed (and the band readily agreed) to find a city that loved them from the outset; that could, in effect, become their own Cavern Club, a place to build and refine and build again, before an audience that was not constantly shouting out for ‘Fire And Rain’, and wetting its collective pants every time another solo troubadour washed up in town.

  All summer long, Alice Cooper played the festival circuit, sprawling multi-band events in Toronto, New York, Eugene, Vancouver and Seattle, and each one a chance to view the industry’s idea of the new decade’s up-and-comers first hand.

  In Seattle, they caught Led Zeppelin rising like Behemoth above the already anachronistic sounds of the Doors, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. At the Toronto Pop Festival, they played the Varsity Stadium alongside Sly & the Family Stone, Blood Sweat & Tears and Al Kooper (“I can’t believe I never realised how close our names were!” – Glen Buxton); in London, Ontario, they blew away even Keith Emerson’s Nice, and left the local London Free Press drooling, “Alice Cooper… a light-popping, five-man rock group from Arizona… stomped on a metal satchel, speared the big bass drum, threw microphones and stands on the stage, drummed out all the violent motions of war, and died. It was a groovy scene. And it happened in London.”

  Everywhere, the unknown and unrated Alice Cooper played their set, usually close to the dawning of the festivities, and then hung around to watch everyone else, meet the musicians, mingle with the audience, and just get acquainted with what, in the parlance of the times, might be called “the local vibe”.

  “Often when we perform,” Alice told Cream magazine, “people don’t want to get close; they think they might catch a crab that had the clap or something. They’re afraid they might understand a little. We get acid freaks at our concerts that get so tense they want to kill us or something. I remember one guy who was very big and muscular; he jumped on stage while I was doing my Errol Flynn act with a sword. I gallantly put the blade to his chest and he jumped off again. I was magnificent.”

  And then they reached Detroit.

  Michigan in general, but Detroit in particular, felt like home from the moment they arrived there. For Alice himself, that came as no surprise. He was born there, after all, and had spent much of the first ten years of his life in the city. But had he even told the promoter that, before the group was introduced on stage as a home-grown phenomenon? He didn’t think so.

  On August 3 at the Mount Clemens Pop Festival, on a bill nominally headlined by Country Joe McDonald, John Mayall and Muddy Waters, local heroes the MC5 and the Stooges were already set to tear apart a field filled with blissed-out blues aficionados and leftover psychedelics. The Coopers simply took their intentions even further, announcing their arrival in town with a vibrant blur of vision, sound and outrage. Days later, Detroit’s Eastown Theater took the band even closer to its heart and, by the time Alice Cooper returned to the city in October 1969, opening for the Who on th
eir triumphant Tommy tour at the Grande Riviera, the decision to relocate the entire operation to Detroit had been made in every way bar the bus tickets.

  Before that could happen, however, there was one more legend to hammer into place: a spot on the bill at the Rock and Roll Revival Festival in Toronto on September 13.

  Destined, by virtue of film-maker DA Pennebaker’s camera crews, and the rest of the day’s near-mythic status, to become one of the most talked-about events in the early history of Alice Cooper, the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival was, as its name suggests, originally intended as a showcase for a couple of returning old rockers. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were both scheduled to appear, with their own possibly dubious ability to draw the crowds supplemented by the addition of sundry bigger names to the bill.

  Of these, the promise of John and Yoko Lennon with an all-star Plastic Ono Band was the carrot that drew most fans to the festival grounds, albeit one that was to prove somewhat divisive. After a short set of rock’n’roll oldies, Lennon essentially turned the set over to Yoko, who yowled and yipped her way through two free-form numbers that really did seem to go on forever. Even the band, led by a bemused-looking Eric Clapton, seemed less than enamoured by her capering.

  The Doors were there too, and through their auspices, Gene Vincent, perhaps the greatest of all the fifties originals, and a man whose friendship with Jim Morrison is the kind of relationship from which novels are made, a twilight noir zone in which one broken rocker’s Hemingway slurs up to the other’s shattered Dylan Thomas, and they drink one another under the table.

  Except Morrison was still firing on all cylinders at that time, hanging out at the Shamrock Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard, just enjoying being famous, with his own disintegration far, far off in a still unscripted future. So Vincent took on both of those roles for himself.

  Jim Morrison himself summed up Vincent’s appeal. “He was always doing weird stuff like jumping out of cars, breaking his body, and never seeing a doctor. We drank two bottles of bourbon a day. I don’t remember the first time we met because I was trying to be drunker than he was. I was in the studio when [he] recorded ‘Caravan’, which is a very difficult vocal. Outside he was shaking like a leaf from all that alcohol in his system, but he went in and sang it in two takes and walked out completely sober.”

  It was Morrison who bartered, begged, and finally blasted Vincent onto the Toronto bill, and the initial idea was that the Doors would join Vincent on stage and give everyone a treat. Scheduling snafus ensured that it didn’t happen like that, but Toronto was a triumph nonetheless, and not only for Vincent. It was a triumph for his backing band as well: Dennis Dunaway, Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce and Neal Smith.

  It was the band’s success at the Toronto Pop Festival earlier in the summer that nudged them onto the bill. Smith remembers, “We were beginning to get a reputation up there, which was why we were booked. And then we were asked if we’d back Gene as well, the Doors were supposed to do it and for some reason they couldn’t, so we were asked and we jumped on it like a heartbeat.

  “It was great. We were in rehearsals for a couple of days in somebody’s basement in Toronto, Gene was there and he was a very, very cool guy, we got to know him really well, and of course he was a big inspiration for the Beatles and the Doors as well. Gene was one of the first people ever to wear black leather pants on stage and a lot of people followed that, like Elvis and of course Jim Morrison, and all the guys from the Doors were on the side of the stage watching the show because they were such huge fans of Gene’s.”

  Indeed, by the time the set climaxed with a scorching ‘Be Bop A Lula’, half the crowd was in rapture, half was stunned into silence, and John Lennon was on stage, embracing his idol in tears. And the Cooper band was reeling from the sheer dichotomy of the afternoon. Right now they were conquering heroes, the unrecognised faces who pushed Gene Vincent to his greatest musical triumph in a decade. Less than an hour earlier, they were demons on the verge of crucifixion.

  The Coopers’ musical performance that day rarely receives any mention, and that despite a slew of semi-official live albums circulating of the show, most of which not only, laughably, completely misname the songs performed, but also add a couple that have nothing to do with either Alice Cooper or the festival – ‘Ain’t That Just Like A Woman’ and ‘Goin’ To The River’ were recorded by Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins in 1964!

  But fine crunches through ‘Fields Of Regret’, ‘Freak Out’, ‘Nobody Likes Me’ and ‘No Longer Umpire’ are joined by a surprise leap back to a lyrically revised ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind’, while a lengthy instrumental thrash looked forward to the renewed version of ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’ that would soon be taped for the Coopers’ second album.

  Neal Smith recalls the band’s stage show at that time. “We’d have the smoke bombs and Alice was ripping up the feather pillows, and Mike Bruce had some CO2 canisters and would blast the feathers into the audience, and that was the finale of the show. It was,” he understates, “very explosive.” Tonight, though, all of that paled into insignificance alongside another onstage accoutrement altogether – a chicken. Well, a chicken, and the guy who thought it would be a good idea to bring a live bird to a rock festival, and then toss it onto the stage while Alice Cooper were playing. Alice threw it back – he thought it would fly away.

  “I mean, they have wings, don’t they?”

  Instead, the audience ripped the bird to pieces, and the next day there was just one talking point in the press. That Alice had bitten off the bird’s head and sucked out its blood. “After that,” Alice said ruefully, “we had to check in with the Humane Society every town we played.”

  Four years later, he related the story to the New Musical Express. “Someone threw a chicken on-stage. I chased it around for a bit and finally gave it to someone in the front row. Now, if the chicken later died, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. Next day, Frank Zappa came up to me and said, ‘I hear you tore the head off a chicken and drank its blood’. And I said, ‘Oh really?’ But I didn’t deny it. I love rumours.”

  In fact, Alice later claimed that the truth was even sicker than the rumours. In 1997, he told Kerrang!: “The first 10 rows of the audience were all the people in wheelchairs. The cripples tore the chicken to pieces ….”

  Of course, the headlines screamed louder than the truth. With Shep Gordon gleefully egging on reporters who came to his office for confirmation of the story, not quite confirming it but certainly not denying it either, Alice’s onstage chicken sacrifice became one of the year’s biggest stories, known even to people who might never otherwise have heard of Alice Cooper.

  “There was a lot of cool stuff that happened that night,” says Neal Smith, “that really gets overshadowed by the chicken incident. That was just a great sound bite for the press and the media. But the thing with Gene Vincent was really really cool and it was almost like a rite of passage for us.”

  It was also a passing of the flame. A decade earlier, after all, Vincent had been regarded as controversial, even distasteful, as he dragged his crippled frame onto the stage and made no attempt to disguise the lame leg legacy of a near-fatal motorbike accident. His own defence was that he was simply being himself, and he was; how much more distasteful would it have been for him to have hidden his disability away, as though it were something to be ashamed of.

  Alice Cooper did not have a disability to flaunt. Not physically, anyway. But mentally? That was another matter entirely. Gene Vincent had a twisted body. Alice Cooper had a twisted mind.

  Neither was it simply the gullible public and sensation-hungry tabloid hacks who were hooked by the Coopers’ craziness. The Who’s Pete Townshend was so outraged when he heard the most distorted version of the chicken incident, and so unshakeably convinced by its veracity, that a couple of years later he included a reference to “bands that kill chickens” in the song ‘Put The Money Down’. And when Rolling Stone interviewed him in 1982, and the conversation t
urned to stagecraft, his continued disgust would have been admirable if it wasn’t so palpably, foolishly misplaced.

  “I remember being horrified seeing Alice Cooper beheading live chickens on stage. And it didn’t really redeem him that I had smashed guitars, y’know? Somewhere there was a line. I don’t know whether it was because it was live, or because it was real blood. But the fact that he later went on to make some great records didn’t redeem him either. He’s sick, tragic, pathetic, and will always be that way. I’ll say hello to him on the street, but I’ll never tip my hat to him.”

  The fact somebody as intelligent and media-aware as Townshend should not only believe the hype, but actually convince himself that he had witnessed the crime with his own eyes, is a potent advertisement for the pervasiveness of Alice Cooper’s growing reputation.

  Yet the chicken incident would soon become just one in an entire litany of legends that hovered over Alice Cooper’s head. Soon there were reports, according to writer John Grissim, of Alice “floating a weather balloon full of worms over the audience and popping it with a BB gun. Or tearing apart crabs and fish and throwing the pieces to the crowd. In Chicago he once terrified the Kinetic Playground by toying with a giant boa constrictor that had just eaten rabbit. He once shaved several cats (his own he claims) from the waist down, spray-painted them, and released them into the audience. One time in Vancouver, B.C., a naked girl ran onto the stage and was promptly incorporated into the act when the group covered her with shaving cream, added a bag of feathers and flagellated her with dead chickens.”

  One night, Alice reported incredulously, he was asked if it was true that he had set fire to a dog on stage. He did not deny it and, while the attentions of the animal welfare departments (not to mention the band members’ own sensibilities) ensured that there would be no repeat of the chicken incident on stage, Alice Cooper used their reputation to their advantage anyway, rarely contradicting fans who passed on their own favourite tales of dismembered dogs and crucified cats, and throwing further gasoline on the pyre by incorporating an inflatable rubber rabbit into the stage show, and killing that instead.