Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Suddenly the Alice Cooper band was hot. But old reputations are hard to shake and, when Rolling Stone caught the band at Max’s Kansas City in September 1970, the legend that they remained the band that people loved to hate was not going away.

  Journalist Elaine Gross’s opening lines captured the antipathy that still faced the band. “‘You suck!’ shouted the drunk kid,’” and her observations could have been drawn from any one of a hundred earlier shows. As could Alice’s response.

  “‘Yes, I do,’ replied Alice Cooper, laughing. Alice proceeded to crouch down on the stage and began chanting softly into the mike, ‘Suck, Suck, Suck.’ But the kid really hated Alice, and like a perfect straight man screamed, ‘You still suck!’” Until, finally tiring of the aggravation, Alice motioned to security who led the heckler away.”

  And that, perhaps, was the biggest difference. In the past, Alice Cooper played to audiences and suffered whatever that audience had to offer them. Now they were big enough to control the environment. The crowd was still encouraged to get out of control. But only for as long as the Coopers remained in control.

  Yet no matter how stage-managed the act was becoming, still the group remained beyond the pale for many observers, and not only among their public. Their peers, too, continued to view the band with suspicion.

  On August 25, 1970, Alice Cooper arrived in Washington DC to take part in one of the summer’s most ambitious touring oddities, a mobile festival called the Medicine Show Caravan Show.

  Schemed and financed by Warner Brothers, the Medicine Ball Caravan Show was initially unusual in that only one of the bands featured on the bill, Stoneground, actually played every show on the itinerary. The true stars of the enterprise were the Hog Farmers, a gaggle of 150 or so hippies-and-co who travelled across the country, seemingly setting up random concerts wherever they touched down. The musical acts, who included the Mothers of Invention, the Youngbloods, BB King (who replaced the original headliners, the Grateful Dead), Doug Kershaw and Delaney & Bonnie, simply dropped in and out as their own schedules saw fit, with Alice Cooper’s involvement restricted to just this one single performance, in DC’s L’Enfant Square alongside Sageworth And Drums, Hot Tuna and the ubiquitous Stoneground.

  Frank Zappa, whose summer 1970 Pauley Pavilion show was one of those that the Hog Farmers descended on, was less than complimentary about the venture. He condemned “the hiring of fake hippies ($10 a day, 10 days, $100 to ‘Get out there on the psychedelic bus and promote this groovy movie’), and then send[ing] a bunch to… concerts… to pass out crappy little leaflets.” And Alice Cooper, too, found the venture more trouble than it was worth.

  The problems began the moment Alice Cooper arrived at the venue, to discover the Hog Farmers did not want them to appear. “They hassled us more than anybody ever did,” Alice told Rolling Stone a few weeks later. “‘We don’t like them, they’re theatrical. We don’t want them to go on. They might break our microphones.’ And we said, ‘What are you talking about? Warner Brothers hired us to go on this thing’.”

  What they were talking about was a gig back in May in San Francisco, with Alice Cooper sharing the bill with the Stooges and the Flaming Groovies. Alembic, the company providing the PA for the Medicine Ball, had been working that show too and, according to the company’s records, the Coopers were responsible for trashing three expensive microphones.

  The company did not want to see a repeat of the carnage, and was prepared to enforce its stance in the most dramatic way possible. Alembic was also responsible for recording the concert for the souvenir movie and LP that Warner Brothers intended releasing. If it refused to roll the tapes, there was nothing anybody could do about it.

  Alice Cooper would not back down either, though. They had been booked to play the concert, and they intended playing it. Journalist John Grissim, documenting the tour for the book We Have Come For Your Daughters: What Went Down On The Medicine Ball Caravan, continued, “The argument is heated and personal, but in the end the necessity of the moment produces a stalemate.”

  “We had to get the Washington police to let us on,” Alice told Rolling Stone. “And then [Hot Tuna] came up and told the people who were running the PA to let us play. ‘We dig them, and they’ll use our equipment.’ So we went on and used [Hot Tuna’s] equipment, and had the crowd standing. It was really incredible.”

  Alice Cooper took the stage and, true to his threats, Alembic’s Bob Mathews unplugged the 16-track. But nobody noticed and nobody cared. Clad in a pretty frock and a silk scarf, Alice commenced the burlesque grind that always announced his intentions, and began slowly to strip down to a black body stocking, “a gaunt-vindictive horribly anaemic wicked witch straight out of the Wizard of Oz,” shuddered Grissim, but of course the movie was only just beginning.

  François Reichenbach, filming the event for the intended movie, was spellbound. Grissim again: “As Alice vamps and swirls, Francois likewise weaves in unconscious counterpoint, shouting instructions to his crew, pointing, gesticulating, clasping his hands, and beaming with unalloyed delight. Alice begins his finale with an eerie hypnotic ritual, removing his necklace to swing an amulet back and forth, repeating, ‘Sleep. All bodies need sleep,’ with the cracked voice of an old woman while the music takes on clockwork syncopation. The stage falls dark save for a single spot on the amulet.”

  ‘Black Juju’ had reached its appointed spot at the end of the set now, and while the planned execution was still in the wings, it was a shattering climax regardless. Still crouching in the dark, still holding every eye in the place in his grasp, he reached slowly down to the stage, to where a single dazzling spotlight had been secreted between the monitors. His fingers groped for a moment for the switch, as Neal Smith’s drums continued the clockwork beat. And then the spotlight flashed on and as the audience reeled back in dazzled shock, Alice was screaming “wake up!” and the band hit the riff that powers the song, a theme that restaged the Missa Luba’s ‘Sanctus’ in the heart of a voodoo swamp.

  Grissim again. “The stage is engulfed in a rainbow wash of flashing lights as Alice reaches for a large pillowcase full of chicken feathers and throws it out at the crowd… the flurry of feathers is carried back by the breeze to surround the chicken-feather flinger in a small blizzard. At this instant the crescendo reaches a crashing tonic chord that Alice punctuates by aiming a flare gun into the sky and launching a pyrotechnic rocket that explodes in a dazzling shower high over the square. That’s Alice Cooper – and at 9:40 P.M. that’s the show.”

  ALICE COOPER AND SNAKE IN LONDON FOR THE LOVE IT TO DEATH TOUR NOVEMBER 1971. MIRRORPIX

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS YOUNG VINCE FURNIER.

  ALICE’S HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK PHOTO. SPLASH NEWS

  ALICE FRONTING THE CORTEZ TRACK TEAM. SPLASH NEWS

  AN EARLY PICTURE OF SPIDERS PLAYING LIVE.

  ALICE IN 1969 – GETTING READY TO OFFER SOME PRETTIES FOR YOU. GETTY IMAGES

  THE EYES HAVE IT! MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE COOPER IN FULL KILLER MODE 1971. LEFT TO RIGHT DENNIS DU NAWAY ALICE NEAL SMITH MICHAEL BRUCE AND GLEN BUXTON. BETTMANN/CORBIS

  THE ALICE COOPER GROUP FLEX THEIR MUSCLE OF LOVE. GEMS/REDFERNS

  ALICE-AND GIRLFRIEND CINDY LANG. TIM BOXER/GITTY IMAGES

  ALICE AND HIS PARENTS MR AND MRS ETHER FURNIER. DALLY MAIL/REX FEATURE

  A POSED STUDIO PORTRAIT OF ALICE COOPER NAKED WITH HIS SNAKE. RB/REDFERNS

  ALICE AND THE BAND WITH THE LONDON TRAFFIC-STOPPING POSTER, 1972. NEAL SMITH ALICE MICHAEL BRUCE DENNIS DUNAWAY AND GLEN BUXTON. MICHAEL PUTL AND/GETTY IMAGES

  ABOUT TO APPLY HIS MAKE UP. TERRY ONEILL/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE COOPER AND HIS BAND WITH FLO AND EDDIE ATA SEX SHOW IN COPENHAGEN NOVEMBER 1972. JORGEN ANGEL/REDFERNS

  ALICE IS EXECUTED ON THE FIRST EUROPEAN TOUR OCTOBER 1971 COPENHAGEN DENMARK. JORGEN ANGEL/REDFERNS

  THE KING OF THE GLAM GHOULS. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

  _________________________


  * A new contract extending the original deal across two further LPs would be signed in October 1969, with the first of those discs to be recorded in November.

  Chapter Seven

  Loving It… To Death

  Alice Cooper landed a cameo in Carrie Snodgrass’ new movie, Diary Of A Mad Housewife, splintered visions of the band thumping through a cover of Steppenwolf’s ‘Ride With Me’ while feathers billowed out around them. They intended it, Buxton said, to remind the movie’s producers that they’d wanted Steppenwolf to begin with, only for the ‘Born To Be Wild’ hit makers to demand too much money. Reflecting on the very different trajectories that the two bands’ careers would soon be taking, Buxton simply laughed. “That’s why we went into ‘Lay Down And Die, Goodbye’ at the end. Because we weren’t Steppenwolf.”

  The movie would be in the cinemas just around the same time as the band began work on the next album.

  Given the choice of every label in the land, Alice Cooper would not have gone with Warner Brothers. The company had ambition, that was for sure, growing from a marginally successful offshoot of the better known movie studio to become a key asset within the newly conglomerated Kinney empire of entertainment, art and parking lots. But it also had its fingers dancing in musical pies that were anathema to the group. The singing-songwriting self-flagellator James Taylor was Warners’ big star that year, and it was clear from both the music press and the label’s own projections that it was his brand of mood and melancholy that road-mapped the future which Warner and his brothers anticipated embracing.

  Alice Cooper, on the other hand, was simply another of Frank Zappa’s playthings, picked up along with the rest of the Straight label catalogue, because the price was too good to pass over, and Glen Buxton growled, “Warners didn’t have a clue what they wanted to do with us. Shep Gordon went to see them one day and the first thing they asked was whether Alice was going to keep the band around now there was such a big market for solo girl singers. They thought they’d picked up the new Melanie or Joni Mitchell or something.”

  Alice laughed, as he always laughed when such tales were relayed back to him; he knew how people still saw the name on the bill posters and thought it was a folk singer, and he knew what a shock they got when they found out otherwise. Shep Gordon laughed too, and he delivered the same response to this latest slab of corporate ignorance that he gave for every other stupid question. He simply smiled, nodded, and wrote another name in his mental notebook. One day, Alice Cooper would make all of these idiots eat their own words. In fact, they might already have been doing so, pushing the first shards of scorn back down the critics’ throats with the same loving care as Alice fed mice to the stage show’s latest acquisition, one solid stone of pure boa constrictor named Kachina.

  This latest addition to the band’s visual arsenal was inspired by the fan who appeared backstage at a show in Tampa, Florida, with a snake of her own. Alice jumped when he saw the beast, reacting with instinctive fear at the sight of the passive, coiled creature but then, he told his autobiography, “I thought, ‘Hmmm, if I reacted that way to a snake, other people will too’.” Plus, it fit the image. “If I were to pull out a three-inch worm on stage it would be a nine-foot python by the time it made the papers,” he mused once. “After I heard that, I went out and got a python.” In fact, Kachina belonged to Neal Smith, but the distinction was lost on the media. From now on, she was Alice’s snake.

  Introduced to the performance during the version of ‘Is It My Body’ that stretched far beyond its vinyl counterpart (and which incorporated elements that would later become ‘Halo Of Flies’ as well), Kachina swiftly became so familiar through photography and, later, television appearances that it was soon difficult to recall precisely how shocking, and indeed terrifying, her earliest live appearances were. But band and roadcrew alike recall entire rows of the audience recoiling in shock, and when the little girls at the front started screaming, it was not post-Beatles hysteria. It was fear.

  Gordon picked up a copy of the New York Times. There, beneath the headline “Boy Girl Alice puts on a freaky show”, writer Mike Jahn wasn’t simply reeling from the band’s New York Town Hall show, he was positively salivating over it. “On stage, the lead singer of a rock band, a young man named Alice Cooper, has taken off his silver jump suit to reveal black leotards and panty hose. Now he has a live boa constrictor and is wrapping it around his arm….”

  Newsweek had already labelled the band “Dada Rock”, and writer Lorraine Alterman was such a vociferous fan that she was already wondering what might happen if, one night, the constrictor constricted Alice. (“That’s too much to hope for,” replied fellow writer Henry Edwards). Now, the tale of Alice’s charming snake antics were spreading even further afield. Suddenly everyone wanted to see what it was all about.

  The Andy Warhol circus came out on their side. Every time the Coopers ventured into Manhattan, the Factory would disgorge its own retinue of brightly coloured he-she denizens in the direction of the venue, to see and be seen, to pose and be posed. Nightly, too, rumour insisted that this was the night that Warhol’s whip dancer supreme, Gerard Malanga, would join the Coopers onstage to strut stuff with Alice. He never did, but the Coopers’ act flagellated the dance floor regardless.

  “We act as a mirror,” Alice shrugged in that New York Times story. “People see themselves through us, [and] many times they react violently because they don’t like what they see.” Other times, however, they simply didn’t like the group.

  Certainly Jack Richardson, the Canadian producer who had nursed the Guess Who to hit status, seemed desperately unimpressed when Shep Gordon offered him the chance to produce the band’s next album. Gordon had been in Toronto, killing time while he waited for the promoter to pay up for Alice Cooper’s performance at the Strawberry Fields Festival. He knew Richardson’s name, so he stopped by the producer’s Nimbus Nine offices and deposited on a desk whatever Alice memorabilia he had on his person – the two albums and some promotional photographs that left the watching Richardson aghast.

  Richardson knew rock, and he handled it well. But he was strictly traditional in his tastes. Raised on the show bands and pop of the pre rock’n’roll age, he had been working in advertising at Coca Cola when he opened his first studio. The Guess Who, the band that would ultimately spin off US million sellers Burton Cummings and Bachman Turner Overdrive, were both his first rock experience and his most lasting; the only other band of true note he had worked with were ultimately of no note at all, RCA half-hopers Noah.

  He had no interest whatsoever in Alice Cooper. But, and he threw this out as much to try and get rid of his visitor as for any other reason, there was a kid in the office who might be.

  A year younger than Alice, Bob Ezrin had been working as Richardson’s odd-job studio lad for the past couple of years. He was not an especially prepossessing character, but he had an ear for arrangements and grandiose notions, and Richardson essentially let him find his own way, working with visiting bands on their material, suggesting sonic effects that might further their vision, and just generally making himself useful. Right now the boy was in class, studying record production at the Eastman School of Music under tutor Phil Ramone. But when he gets back….

  Ezrin told the New Musical Express, “I went up to the office one day and everyone was in hysterics. The cover of Easy Action was laying around, and we were all really straight guys y’know. I mean, I was never really that much into rock ‘n’ roll. I had arrived at it more or less through things like Simon & Garfunkel. Anyway we put on the album and just broke up laughing. We didn’t know if Alice Cooper was a guy or a chick and eventually it became a standing joke around the office that if anyone messed up that week, [they’d] be forced to go and work with Alice Cooper.”

  Apparently Ezrin had messed up. “I wasn’t interested in the least. I hated the record, but [Shep Gordon] made my life such hell with his persistence that I reckoned that I’d go and see ’em just so they’d get off my b
ack. So I went to meet them at Toronto. I walked into their hotel and… these five guys – everyone of ’em is a faggot, every one of ’em and they’re all after me. I can tell.

  “The road manager is a faggot, the roadies are faggots. I’m sitting there in my blue jeans, with my short hair, shaking inside, man, and here’s this guy Alice Cooper – his hair is stringy and down to his shoulders, his pants are so tight I can actually see his penis through the crotch – they’re slit at the side. He’s talking with a slight lisp. I just could not handle it. Anyway they said, ‘We’re great and we want a producer’. Finally we parted company and I was like so relieved. It was such a horrendous experience – I was such a straight guy before all this started – and I just forgot.”

  He was soon given a brutal reminder. With Gordon still begging Jack Richardson to give the band a chance, Ezrin was dispatched to the band’s Max’s Kansas City show to see what he thought, not only of Alice Cooper but of a few other bands who had crossed Richardson’s desk recently. “[I] followed the searchlights to the club and suddenly I was in this dark den of spandex, spider eyes and black fingernails,” Ezrin recalled. Alice had recently taken to positively smothering his eyes in arachnoid mascara, borrowing the imagery from the Alvin Ailey dance troupe, but already he had made it his own. There is a difference, after all, between seeing a clown cavort behind a bizarre blur of make-up, and a six foot serial killer, and if Ezrin didn’t know that when he first walked in, he quickly found out.

  He settled into the table that had been reserved for him at the front of the stage, and then almost leaped out of it again as the band appeared on stage in total darkness and, to the accompaniment of three vivid orange flashes, launched into their opening number, ‘Sun Arise’.