Neither was it always a gratuitous act of violence. Sometimes, Alice insisted, it prevented trouble too.
The Sagnisaw Festival, on November 26, 1969, was already teetering on the edge of a full-scale riot when the Coopers took the stage. Presupposing the horrific security misjudgements that the Rolling Stones would make at Altamont Speedway just days later, the promoter apparently turned a blind eye to the local Hells Angels’ insistence that they be placed in charge of the venue’s security, and had already been beaten up by one group of bikers. Another posse had chained a girl to the back of a bike and dragged her around the grounds through the crowds. By the time Alice came out in his nightdress, singing “nobody loves me” in a little-girl-lost voice, the Angels were ready for blood.
They got it. As the rabbit appeared on stage and the band members started their own assault on its hapless form, the bikers leaped up to join them, beating and kicking and screaming for blood, while the musicians gathered around them to chant “kill it, kill it” to the rhythm of Smith’s drums. By the time the bunny was finally killed, Alice laughed later, the bikers were so exhausted that they’d completely lost their lust for more gore.
Over 7,000 onlookers gave the Coopers a standing ovation and that, says Shep Gordon, was the night he knew that Alice Cooper was destined for stardom. Yet, no matter how heavily the likes of Creem magazine (itself based locally) and journalist Lester Bangs championed the city’s favourite rock’n’roll sons, all admitted that it would take something like a minor miracle to ever push a Detroit act into the same commercial framework as a similarly placed New York or LA band.
There was a mood to Detroit rock, a feeling and a sense of purpose that simply didn’t sit comfortably with the USA at large, and no matter how hard the likes of the MC5 or the Amboy Dukes pushed themselves round the country, they were never going to shake off the “Detroit band” appellation.
Alice Cooper recognised this and, for the time being, accepted it. Live performances were no longer about clambering over the heads of out-of-town headliners to try and get attention, because audiences had usually already decided where their own allegiances lay. It was about pushing yourself ahead of the other bands on the circuit, building the impression of rivalry between one group and another, and then going head to head in the Grande Ballroom, to see who would come out on top this week.
In terms of theatricality, nobody streaked ahead of the Stooges. Fronted by the lean, lithe Iggy Pop, and powered by a cocktail of anger, adrenalin and whatever drugs the ravenous Stooges could get their hands upon, the band thrived on notoriety, violence and action.
Away from Detroit, knowing critics would look spiffily down their noses at the Stooges and describe them as naïve, banal, brutal. But Pop was a born showman, and the Stooges were a riff machine programmed to destroy every time it hit the stage. Alice Cooper realised that the first time they opened for Iggy and found themselves wanting in every department. But it would not take them long to catch up.
“I don’t expect people to understand our music right now,” Alice told Rolling Stone in 1970. “Iggy Stooge is using his music and theatrics as a totality too. No one considers that the music behind him is the whole backbone of Iggy. They just look at him on the level of his stage act. If he didn’t have Ron Asheton and the rest of those cats behind him it wouldn’t be the same.” Years later, he admitted that he hated having to follow the Stooges onto the stage. The audience would already be worn out.
The decision to relocate Alice Cooper to Detroit was not taken precipitously. In his all-encompassing history of the Detroit rock scene Grit, Noise And Revolution, author and DJ David A Carson notes how the Alice Cooper band only gradually infiltrated itself into the regional scenery as 1969 shifted into 1970. At the same time, however, the nature of the shows they played were ample testament to the speed with which the city accepted them.
Most of Detroit and, indeed, Michigan’s most legendary sons ran across the band at one point or another, and most came away with very firm opinions of what they witnessed. The Frost’s Dick Wagner, who would go on to become such an integral part of both the band’s and the solo Alice’s futures, first met the group on one of these visits, and ignited a friendship that survives to this day. Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, meanwhile, recalled “some incredible nights with Alice Cooper, those guys really thought they could put the drink away, which isn’t surprising given who they hung out with in LA. But then they came to Ann Arbor and it went up to a whole new level.”
Musically, Asheton saw the early Alice Cooper as “a great rock’n’roll band looking for a reason to play great rock’n’roll. It wasn’t until they started hanging out with the Detroit crowd that they really got a handle on what they wanted to do because that was where they finally saw what was possible. Los Angeles sucks you dry no matter how creative you are, look at what happened to us [the Stooges spent an extraordinarily unfruitful few months in LA in 1973], but Detroit won’t let you rest, it won’t let you sit still, and they came up here and they just caught on fire.”
“We felt like fingers that fit into the Detroit glove,” Alice agreed in Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. “The Stooges, MC5, Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger and now… Alice Cooper! We were in.”
Checking into a succession of hotels, their residency usually dependent upon which establishment they owed the least money to, Alice Cooper leaped feet first into the local scene, musically and creatively. A close-knit scene with every band well aware of how it slotted into the local live jigsaw, Detroit recognised the Cooper band’s suitability as swiftly as the band did, welcoming them not as outsiders trying to stick a finger into the city pie, but as rank outsiders like themselves.
Times remained hard. Countless nights as the band pulled into another cheap no-name motel, the musicians would flip coins to see who got the bed, who got the foldaway, and who got the floor. Medical problems would go unchecked and untreated until there was sufficient money in the kitty to pay for a doctor’s visit, and the musicians were still more likely to self-medicate with whatever a fan or friend might offer them than sink hard-earned cash into filling a prescription. Not when it could better be spent on stage props.
The band’s wardrobe continued to expand, formal stage costumes easing in around the thrift store tat that the band had previously relied upon. Alice picked up a strait jacket; Buxton picked up a silver shirt; at a time when so many other acts on the circuit were purposefully dressing down and casual, wearing nothing more extravagant on stage than they would when they were mowing the lawn, Alice Cooper journeyed back to the golden age of glitz and glamour, and the belief that, if you wanted to be treated like a star, you had to look like one.
Alice Cooper had cut their second album now, returning to the studio with producer David Briggs, soon renowned as the co-architect of Neil Young’s sonic sculptures and laying down Easy Action, a set that was so many light years ahead of its predecessor that even their fans admitted it could have been a different band.
Only ‘Still No Air’ and ‘Refrigerator Heaven’ (a title that Alice alone would revisit in ‘Cold Ethyl’ five years later) looked back at the disconnected musical pastures of Pretties For You. Elsewhere, songs were formed and formulated now, ideas were harnessed and held down by something more than willpower alone. Yet there was something still missing; the sense that Alice Cooper may have shaken off their garage band past, but sonically they had yet to shake off the garage.
It is an extraordinarily varied album. ‘Mr And Misdemeanour’ opens the show, a swaggering rocker that blended the snarl that now took hold of Alice’s vocal with a singalong melody that stepped straight out of West Side Story, while Glen Buxton lay down a guitar solo that was pure Doors in devotion. ‘Below Your Means’ might have stepped off the Pretty Things’ Parachute, so seductively tight was it coiled, and later the Stooges were deliciously invoked by the pell-mell thrust of ‘Return Of The Spiders’.
But the heart of Easy Action lay in the sheer diversity of the band’s playing and mate
rial, a mood introduced by ‘Shoe Salesman’, a sweet semi-ballad that looked wistfully back at Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ while dancing around a teasingly mischievous drug-induced lyric. ‘Laughing At Me’, too, caught the band in introspective mood, while ‘Beautiful Flyaway’ was the kind of maddening ditty that Paul McCartney might have grafted onto the Beatles’ White Album. But the piece de resistance arrived with the album’s conclusion, a seven-minute revisit of ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’, all but unrecognisable from the two-year-old 45 as it drove back into Stooges territory on the heels of the same super-insistent riff that would, two years later, conquer the world as the Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’.
Devoid of lyric until the song has just 30 seconds to go, this astonishing instrumental swerves and screams through any number of musical shifts and changes. But whereas the earlier Alice Cooper made such moves with their eye on keeping the audience guessing, this time the moods were exquisitely blended. Each passage in the performance bled from and blended into those on either side, creating a journey through musical space that might have had an eye on the old Pink Floyd influence, but did so with a very different goal in sight. For all their own denials, Floyd soundtracked a life spent getting loaded on acid. The Coopers sounded like they mainlined motor oil.
And so 1969 drew to a close with Alice Cooper looking at a new home, looking towards the release of their second LP, looking towards a future that seemed to dazzle with possibility. There was just one cloud on the horizon. The 18 months that had stretched ahead when the authorities first announced their intentions to hold a draft lottery were almost up. On December 1, 1969, Vince Furnier’s fate, together with that of 850,000 other potential inductees who were born between January 1, 1944 and December 31, 1950, would be decided by the drawing of 366 blue plastic capsules, each numbered to represent one birth date, from a glass jar. The order in which the capsules were removed from the jar would determine the order in which young men would be called up.
The first capsule was pulled and the number, 257, was read off: September 14. Every able-bodied man born on that day, in any year between 1944 and 1950, was assigned the first seat on the war wagon. They might as well start packing now.
Next out of the pot, April 24. Followed by December 30. And then, February the four… teenth. Glued to the proceedings like everybody else in the country, Vince held his breath every time the hand reached into the jar. But that was his closest call yet and, the deeper into the night the proceedings stretched, the more he relaxed. Out of 366 possible numbers, his birthdate, February 4, was the 210th out of the pot, a figure so high that even the most pessimistic observer acknowledged that it amounted to an automatic deferment. But if he needed any reminder of just how random the process was, there was that heart-stopping moment at the very top of the show. If he had been born just ten days later, on St Valentine’s Day with gruelling irony, he would have been considered A1.
Eighteen months earlier, dodging one draft-shaped bullet, the Coopers had celebrated by moving to Los Angeles. This time, they celebrated by leaving it. In May 1970, midway through another season of ceaseless gigging, the band officially took up residence in Detroit.
With Easy Action now on the shelves, Straight Records had handed them a May 1, 1970 deadline for their next album, an impossibility that was avoided only by Zappa’s own plans to sell the entire American Straight operation to Warner Brothers. It was not, he insisted, the fact that the label had done little to recoup any of the money invested into it; Zappa’s own workload had grown so heavy that he simply did not have the time or effort to give all the attention it required, and he had no intention of becoming an absentee landlord – one of the biggest complaints, of course, being levelled at the Beatles as they watched their Apple label subsumed into corporate anonymity.
Warners could not complain at the purchase price. Zappa put Straight on the market for a bargain $50,000, a fee which was utterly negated when one took into account the money owed to the label by the various artists on the roster. According to the Straight accounts, the Coopers were $100,000 in debt to the label – meaning that if they recouped even half of their debt, Warners wouldn’t have spent a dime.
The deal appeared straightforward but sadly, it was not. The question of the band’s publishing rights, 50 per cent of which remained owned by Zappa and Cohen, was somehow omitted or even overlooked in the shuffle. The ensuing lawsuit was to drag on for more than four years, and result in a serious blow to the Alice Cooper finances once it was finally resolved. For now, however, with the initial deal done and dusted, Alice Cooper found themselves with another six months in which to write and record their third album. And they were going to make every moment count.
The Coopers wrote furiously, but they were building not simply a new LP but also a new onstage persona. “It’s not that we threw all the rule books out the window,” says Neal Smith. “But we really had an open slate to work with. There were no preconceived notions. The thing about that group more than anything, and this is why I like to dissect all the musical angles about it, there was nothing from a musical background that couldn’t inspire us. We were honing our theatrics, and what we wanted was a way to kill Alice onstage every night, a song to perform while we did it. And by the time we reached the third album, we realised that violence was around us all the time. We never focused on it, but we were thinking we should have an execution on stage.”
While roadies Charlie Carnel and Mike Allen set about building the elaborate piece of stage gear they called the Cage Of Fire (an onstage box filled with plastic streamers that would be set ablaze for a dramatic but, sadly, highly dangerous and illegal spectacle), the band set to work on the song that would become the focal point for this climax, ‘Black Juju’.
Nine minutes of drum and basics, ‘Black Juju’ is a primal chant, a silent scream, a lullaby for the sleeping dead, a reminder that bodies need their rest – until it’s time to wake up, and the voice that calls for resurrection is one of the eponymous Cooper’s most terrifying.
It was Dennis Dunaway who came up with ‘Black Juju’ in the first place. “He didn’t get the nickname Doctor Dreary for nothing,” Smith continues. “He was one of the main creators of ‘Dead Babies’ too.”
At first ‘Black Juju’ was just an idea and a rhythm, pieced together while the Cooper band toured. “It was worked on in hotel rooms,” Smith recollects. “We really didn’t have a rehearsal studio, our rehearsal studio was the stage, so we sketched it out in hotel rooms on telephone books, and we all agreed it needed a heavy dark African percussion. I wanted to work on the percussion way beyond anything I’d done before.
“I was a percussionist. I learned all the rudiments early on and then went into orchestra, so my background was open to everything percussive, and one of my big influences was jungle drums, native American, African, raw percussion. I wanted it to be a big feature drum song, and it was the perfect vehicle. There’s a lot of music that uses that tribal primitive vibe, but for me it was like taking Gene Krupa and putting him on floor Toms. Gene Krupa in Haiti.”
The song would be unveiled at the band’s first major festival date of the year, on June 13, 1970 at the Cincinnati Pop Festival.
Promoted by Detroit’s own Russ Gibb and Michael Quatro, the festival was nominally headlined by such heavyweights as Grand Funk Railroad, Traffic and Mountain. Bob Seger, Ten Years After, Mott The Hoople, Brownsville Station, the Damnation of Adam Blessing and Zephyr also figured on the bill but today the festival is remembered for just two of its performers, who between them put on two of their most legendary performances.
Iggy Pop first. Topless and bedenimed, with silver lamé wrist-length mitts and a studded dog collar, he bemused the show’s commentary team, headed by a former Today Show announcer named Jack Lescoulie. “Since we broke away for a [commercial break], Iggy has been in and out of the audience three times… we seem to have lost him, we’re trying to get a light on him now… there they are …”
The camera clos
es in on Iggy as he accepts something handed up from the mass of bodies beneath him (the late Stiv Bators, vocalist with Cleveland’s Dead Boys, always maintained that he was the responsible party), glances at it for a moment, and then proceeds to smear it across his bare flesh. And then comes what remains one of the most surreal pieces of commentary any rock performance has ever received. “That’s peanut butter.”
But there was more to come. ‘Black Juju’ fell halfway through the set this night, but was already a theatrical tour de force, Alice stripping off his shirt and draping his bandmates in white sheets, prowling the stage while they hung motionless… and then a cream pie soared out of the audience and caught him in the face.
The cameras caught it, too, just as they caught the peanut butter, and it was that moment of utterly unchoreographed insanity that ensured the Cooper band would join Iggy in the ensuing 90-minute TV broadcast (Grand Funk, Traffic and Mountain rounded out the programme); ensured, too, that their local, Detroit, stock rose a little bit higher as either the footage, or talk of the footage, became the number one topic of conversation.
Journalist Cub Koda, whose band Brownsville Station, was also on the bill, laughed. “That wasn’t a music festival. That was a foods festival. Because first you had Iggy and the peanut butter, and then you had Alice and the cream pie. And I still cannot imagine what possessed anybody to bring a cream pie to a festival. Or how it remained intact until it came time to throw it.” Like the chicken at the Toronto Peace festival, there was just something about Alice Cooper that prompted people to bring strange things to a concert.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 11