With Alice’s face perched just two feet away from Ezrin’s.
Afterwards, with the band off stage and the audience sat in shellshocked astonishment, the friend who Ezrin had brought along for the ride asked, “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” Ezrin slowly replied. “But I loved it.”
He tried to analyze his enthusiasm. Musically, he said, the band was terrible. But for the first time in his life as a music lover, he realised that didn’t matter. It wasn’t their ability he was buying into. It was their presence. “It wasn’t about ‘being good’. It was about ‘being.’ It was the complete integration of the point of view and the personality into the presentation. The songs, the antics, the theatricality – they were Alice Cooper. In a world of T-shirts, beards and jeans, they were so refreshing and energising.”
Back in Toronto, Ezrin added his voice to Gordon’s continued exhortations; he had, in fact, already promised the group that they had a producer when he met them backstage.
Yet despite his enthusiasm, he was also very cautious. Untried in any position beyond Richardson’s assistant, Ezrin had ideas and ambitions far beyond the glorified tea boy that the group originally thought he was. In fact, he would demand a lot of evidence to convince him that the Coopers weren’t a shambolic garage band with a nice line in snake-handling.
Moving to Detroit, Ezrin booked into a cheap motel and invited the band over to play him their ideas for the album. One song from their live show stuck in his mind, a sprawling piece that he thought was called ‘I’m Edgy’. The next time he heard it, in rehearsal, it sounded like an organ recital with a madman screaming over the top of it. It was actually ‘I Wish I Was Eighteen Again’, which they cut down to ‘I’m Eighteen’, but that’s how many minutes it seemed to last for on the tape they played him.
Dennis Dunaway told Goldmine, “Before we hooked up with Bob Ezrin, we had a tendency to try and force too many ideas into one song, and as a result it wouldn’t have any continuity. Ezrin was able to take those ideas and say, ‘OK, wait a minute. Let’s focus on this one thing and let that other thing fall by the wayside.’ He was like a director, which was extremely important for us. Ezrin came along at a time when we were ready to go in a more acceptable and less abstract direction.”
Neal Smith: “After our first two albums failed to launch us into Rock Stardom, we desperately needed a hit single. The summer of 1970, all five members of Alice Cooper were writing brand new songs in a much more commercial vein. Michael Bruce came up with the original idea for a new song celebrating the awkward teenage transformation from adolescence to adulthood.”
“The tapes were horrible,” Ezrin shuddered. “And I mean, horrible! They said, ‘We like this sound. Can we get it in the studio?’ I almost threw up.”
Instead he set to work. His job, as he saw it, was to transform what the band was doing on stage into something that could succeed on vinyl, an art that they had neither perfected nor even considered in the past. His abilities as an arranger were crucial, but so was the vision that fired those abilities.
It was Ezrin who essentially locked the band away in the barn that they used for rehearsals, out near Pontiac, Michigan, and kept them there for as long as it took (Alice remembers it being seven months, although his autobiographical chronology is notoriously unreliable), rehearsing whenever they were not on the road, and pushing each musician towards the personal peaks that he felt, or at least hoped, they were capable of reaching.
For Alice, that meant teasing out a distinctive singing voice, one that would be recognisably Alice the moment you heard it, in the same way, he explained, as you know it’s Jim Morrison when you hear him sing, or Lennon or Elvis. Right now, Alice simply sang; he had a voice, and he had a style, but he did not have an identity. Ezrin wanted people to know it was Alice from the moment he opened his mouth.
The same went for the rest of the band. Stop listening to your heroes to see how they play their instrument; listen to yourself. And slowly, over the course of their imprisonment, it made a difference. Essentially, he had them unlearn everything they had ever known, and then relearn it properly.
‘Black Juju’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’ aside, the band had just two songs primed for the next album as they marched into the RCA Studios in Chicago. The first was that brooding, pulse-beating throb through ‘Sun Arise’, hauled from the tuckerbag of Australian entertainer Rolf Harris. Live, it had been the Coopers’ traditional show opener for most of the year; on vinyl, however, it became the show closer, the promise of a new day coming to chase all the darkness away, but delivered from a place that was even darker still.
The other was ‘Is It My Body’, their response to the growing acclaim they were receiving on the road at a time when so many people remained convinced that the entire thing was just another of Frank Zappa’s crazy japes. But Ezrin remained unimpressed.
“Bob was a classically trained pianist,” explained Buxton, “and that was what he wanted to bring to us. No, not us. He wanted to bring it to every thing he worked on. As far as he was concerned, he was the artist, he was the creator, and we were just the guys who would let him get on with it. He wanted to be Phil Spector; he used to talk about the Bob Ezrin Sound, and we would sit there and crack up, this little kid with short hair and sticking-out ears going on about all the ideas he had for us, and what we would sound like when he’d finished, and finally Michael turned around to him and said …”
“Bob, you know we’re not Procol Harum.” Michael Bruce laughed at the memory. “Essentially, Bob thought much of the music wasn’t melodic enough. [So] he started working out all these classical parts for the songs. I’d say to him ‘… You can’t put stuff in the music that’s not us. We’re a live rock’n’roll band who eat little babies. We’re real treacherous and spooky …’”
“And he was making us sound like ‘The Long And Winding Road’,” Buxton shivered. The Beatles’ Let It Be finale was just six months old as the Cooper sessions got underway in September 1970, and the revisionist suggestion that the combination of Phil Spector and the Fab Four was anything less than genius was one that had still to enter the popular consciousness. Rather, the blending of Lennon/McCartney’s craft with Spector’s wall of sound art was still rebounding off the walls of pop genius, drawing comparisons that would have left the true Old Masters open mouthed with amazement. “They were pop songs with strings,” Buxton said. “And people were treating them like the second coming of Beethoven. Which is why we wrote a song called ‘Second Coming’. To see how far Bob Ezrin would go before he finally got the joke.”
He never did, but Bruce admitted he didn’t need to. “Bob worked really well on ‘Second Coming’. Alice had the initial idea based around this line he had, ‘Time is getting closer, I read it on the poster’, and Bob then added the piano piece.” A really pretty piano piece, bitter-sweetly tinkling beneath a lyric that itself seemed to pose more sad questions than arrogant answers, but also a line that fed into one of the minor songwriting controversies that the Cooper band would never escape from.
The band was in the studio recording the brief piano interlude that segues into ‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’. A girlfriend of the band’s, a lady named Monica, was on hand to provide the lost, spectral sob of “mommy, where’s daddy?” that sets the mood for the song, and Ezrin was playing the accompanying piano part. As he finished, engineer Brian Christian walked over and told him “That was really beautiful.”
“Thank you,” said Bruce, interrupting. “I wrote that.”
“And the whole room got real quiet. Bob never went out of his way to tell anyone I wrote that piano part. I mean, I only played it every fucking night live.”
‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’ was, and forever will be, one of the Alice Cooper group’s greatest accomplishments, and one of Alice’s own greatest performances – recorded, Bob Ezrin decided, with the singer lying on the studio floor, with metal-framed chairs creating a cage. His cries of “I’ve got to get out of
here” followed naturally from there.
Dwight Frye himself was the Kansas-born actor whom the Hollywood media nicknamed “the man with the thousand watt stare”, a hyper-intense, hopelessly handsome star who might have become a matinee idol had he only chosen his roles a little more carefully. Instead he became a touchstone for every aspiring horror film star of the age, a reputation that was defined by his portrait of Renfield in Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, and then enhanced every time he stepped in front of the cameras.
Fritz in the first Frankenstein movie; the halfwit Herman in 1933’s The Vampire Bat; Karl in The Bride Of Frankenstein, Frye was the man that Hollywood turned to when it needed a convincing lunatic. And when Alice Cooper needed one of their own, they turned back to their own love of Hollywood schlock and disinterred Frye (misspelling him Fry) for their own ends.
Alice recalled his introduction to Frye for Famous Monsters, watching Frankenstein and then reading the credits as they rolled at the end. “And then it came up ‘Dwight Frye’, and I said ‘What a great name! That’s the kind of name you can write about.’ So the song was really meant as a tribute to this guy – this great actor who played the lunatic so well. There was a magazine when I was like 10 or 12 years old called Dig, and their mascot, looking over every page, was Dwight Frye. You could just see his eyes and hair as he would be looking over the page – he was sort of like their Alfred E. Newman. I used to get my allowance and I’d go down to the store and buy Dig magazine and Famous Monsters Of Filmland.
“So, there was a weird, wonderful connection there. He was always, to me, by far the most psychotic of any character in all of those old horror movies. He was this little shaky guy that was just – I mean, everything he said sent shivers down your spine. Even some of the voices I use – some of the Alice voices, like in ‘Steven’ and in ‘The Awakening’, were patterned from the Dwight Frye voice – that ‘heeee-heeeee-heeee’ laugh of his – I always though that that was one of the scariest, most demented voices ever.”
The song that bears Frye’s name would share those qualities. ‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’ is an epic, a fable of dislocation and instability that journalist Amy Hanson once memorably described as “the most convincing glimpse into the mind of a mad man that rock’n’roll has ever set to music.”
The most convincing ever to appear on stage, too, as nightly a nurse would emerge from backstage, leading a straitjacketed Alice behind her. Neal Smith: “We brought our version of Dwight Frye to life when Alice appears on stage wearing a straitjacket and makes a Houdiniesqe escapes from its restraints. The recording was helped along the way with Bob Ezrin’s classical musical influence and an atomic bomb explosion!”
“If ‘I’m Eighteen’ was the commercial side of Alice Cooper, then ‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’ was the darker, more theatrical side of our group,” Smith continues. “Most bands are influenced by others bands. But in Alice Cooper’s case, we were also influenced by old Hollywood moves, horror movies in particular. The original 1931 Dracula, with Bela Lugosi, one of my favourites, featuring the insect-eating character Renfield, a lost soul and disciple of Dracula’s. Renfield is played by actor Dwight Frye. Hence the name and direction of our song.”
Alice would perform the song bound, thrashing and crashing uncontrollably while his bandmates taunted and kicked out at him. As a commentary on the state of mental health treatment in America at that time… “Well, we all knew what went on in those places back then,” said Buxton darkly… it was cruel enough. But as a reminder of how society in general treats those that it considers less powerful, it was brutal.
Eric Carr, later to become drummer with Kiss, recalled the song’s impact. “You have to remember what it was like in America in 1970. Shit man, we were living in fear. In total fucking fear. Vietnam had torn the country apart, you were for the war or you were against it, and it didn’t matter how loud we were against it, if you were for it, you had the guns, you had the tanks, you had the bombers, they were all on your side and we all saw what happened if you stepped out of line.”
On May 4, 1970, a National Guard unit deployed at Kent State University in Ohio opened fire on an anti-war protest, killing four students and wounding nine in what was the clearest and most direct statement yet that the rule of law was not going to be disrupted by peaceful protest – or anything else.
Carr: “It was unbelievable. Can you imagine the outcry in America… the American government… if that had happened in any other country? Gunning down unarmed students because they didn’t agree with government policy? The strong taking out the weak, not because they posed a threat but simply because they were different. That’s what Alice was reminding us. That it didn’t matter how harmless something was, and Dwight Frye in the song, he was completely harmless. So they kill it because it’s different.”
Under normal circumstances, and by any other band’s musical standards, ‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’ would have been the new album’s crowning glory, a piece de resistance that the entire record spent its time building towards. Alice Cooper, however, had different ideas, and here Bob Ezrin leapt to their side. Privately he continued to doubt the band’s musical abilities, even after they proved themselves eminently capable of composing music that his own ambitions could seamlessly dovetail into. But even he confessed that when they pulled something majestic out of the hat, there was nobody who could stand in the same room. That something was ‘Black Juju’.
Remaining a work in progress until it progressed into the studio, ‘Black Juju’ now stood as the latest in a line of songs that testified to the band’s love of Pink Floyd. The percussive pattern that wove through ‘Black Juju’ owed much to the title cut from the Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets, and Michael Bruce’s keyboard line that gave the song such additional eeriness had a similar genesis. “Dennis Dunaway got real upset because my organ part was similar to ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’.”
He wouldn’t shut up about it either, especially after Rolling Stone picked up on the similarity in its review of the finished LP, and suggested that “the Coopers may yet have to answer to the Floyd in court”. They didn’t; bands were a lot slower to demand legal recompense for perceived borrowings and influences in those days. But still Dunaway worried and, finally, Bruce snapped.
“Come on Dennis, we are all big Pink Floyd fans. So what – we got caught on that one.”
Neal Smith refutes the entire story. “Believe me, Pink Floyd’s name was never mentioned while we were writing the song. We knew Pink Floyd, we hung out with them, I loved Piper and Saucerful, but we never ever sat down and said let’s sound like somebody. In all the years we were together we never wanted to sound like somebody else, we wanted to be us.
“There was tons of music always around, and I still chuckle when I hear Pink Floyd and ‘Black Juju’… I guess if you dissect any song, you could find something but drum wise, there’s nothing anybody ever did that sounds like that. When I think of that song I think of Dennis, he was a unique bass player and his vibe, the dark side, it fit in with ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ and ‘Second Coming’, a dark religious cult thing. Years and years later, somebody asked me what was the relationship between ‘Hallowed’ and ‘Second Coming’ and I said I don’t know… and I wrote them both. It never dawned on me that they were linked together. Plus, I wrote the lyrics to ‘Hallowed’ in like five minutes. It’s one of those things that just happened but it fit on that album really well.”
‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ nevertheless occupies a very special place in Smith’s heart, as one of the few songs he wrote for the band “that came out exactly as I wrote it. Even the guitar solo! I sang it to Glen and he played it as I sang it. I actually tried to sing ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ on the album, but it really didn’t work out.”
It would, however, afford the band another legend, as a gig somewhere in the American south introduced them to a large white cross that just happened to be lying backstage. Of course Alice couldn’t resist it
and, that night, as the band played, Alice draped the cross across his back, outstretched arms holding it in place, and affected his own passion. It was just bad luck, Michael Bruce later laughed, that one of his aunts, and a very religious aunt too, happened to be at the concert.
What the band could not have known as they put the finishing touches to the LP; what nobody could have realised as they continued to laugh off the Alice Cooper band’s cartoon theatrics, was that a lot was about to change. And all they needed to do was shave five years off their own lives. On February 4, 1971, Alice Cooper celebrated his 23rd birthday. But according to the lyrics that now screamed from every radio, hurtling off the single that Warners had just pulled from the completed session tapes….
… he was 18.
According to Alice, one of the first DJs to begin airing ‘I’m Eighteen’ with any regularity was a Missouri-based youngster named Rush Limbaugh, destined, in later decades, to become one of the American right wing’s most vociferous pit bulls. He was not alone for long, however. Radio latched onto ‘I’m Eighteen’ with a grateful passion, responding instinctively to its strut and roar, seeing in the Cooper band’s volume and snarl an antidote to everything that 1971 had thus far threatened to smear across the pop scene, the army of would-be James Taylors and surrogate Carole Kings marching to capitalise on the enormous successes those artists were riding; the crop of record company hopefuls aiming to step into the shoes of the recently sundered Beatles; unappetising candies from the bubblegum factories… the first glimmer of the Osmonds and the incipient Partridge family.
Across the ocean in the UK and Europe, Marc Bolan and T Rex were commencing their dizzying rise up the chart with ‘Hot Love’, the song (or, rather, the TV performances) that history has decreed marked the birth of glam rock. Surviving footage of ‘I’m Eighteen’ is the argument that threatens to burst the Bolanic bubble; in satin and tat, make-up and long hair, the Alice Cooper band not only conform to, they blueprint every visual hook, line and sinker that glam would now lay claim to. The difference was, they did it in a country that had no interest in glam, no sense of the sexual shockability that hallmarked Britain’s early seventies. America seized on the violence that was bound up in the Coopers’ appearance; the sense of society teetering on an edge of decay and degeneracy but, most of all, destruction.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 13