Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  It is a divide that has forever separated British and American rock’n’roll; in Europe, an artist’s image is constructed (by the public and media, if not the artist itself) around its capacity for sexual shock; in America, it is built around anything but. At least if you want to succeed. David Bowie conquered Britain by claiming to be gay; in America, he was a faggot weirdo until he dropped the make-up, stopped the talk, and started making disco records. Sweet, prime purveyors of British glam were pushed as a hard-rock combo in the States, and Marc Bolan scored his only US hit before the majority of the country had ever had the chance to take a look at his wardrobe.

  And all of this was not because the United States had anything against sex itself. It just liked violence better.

  Alice Cooper looked violent.

  “I think we were the start of glam,” says Neal Smith. “Dennis in 1968 was totally dressed in silver. It was a time when there were people trying to figure out all kind of categories to put us in but we were definitely the forerunner of theatre rock. The Doors had some dark stuff, Jimi [Hendrix] had some dark stuff, but nobody ever put it together on stage. When we started off, there was nobody doing anything except playing on a flat empty stage.

  “The lighting… we were the first ones to come up using big-time theatrical lighting; most of the time it was just the spotlight and whatever there was in the auditorium. Pink Floyd spearheaded it and of course there was a lot of psychedelic light shows in the sixties, but they still weren’t using theatrical lights and it was being done in a very different way.

  “We were the ground-breaking band of theatrics and there’s really not a lot of physical support of that beyond still photographs. We did a live trilogy. I know on the album it’s ‘Second Coming, ‘Dwight Fry’ and ‘Sun Arise’, but we started the show with ‘Sun Arise’, that was the beginning; there were a couple of diff versions but we started with that, and then the ‘Ballad’ led into ‘Black Juju’ near the end of the show, and after that, we really started getting our stage legs on creating a show.”

  In 2010, he reflected, “Alice talked recently about how he puts a show together and it’s exactly the way the band was doing it, we’d have the light opening, then we’d have the big theatrical centre section and then it turned heavy, and then the finale, the end of the show would always be the big piece. Instead of going out there like some bands and blam, blasting all the way through from beginning to end, we sort of built it. All the stuff he does today is almost exactly the same as we used to do, and that’s great. It was a formula that worked for us. It doesn’t work for everybody, but we were trying to do a theatrical piece and take the audience on a bit of an excursion, and I think it worked out. ‘Black Juju’ was the first time that it really worked out for us.”

  Everything had come together now. Early experiments with the cage of fire had failed; instead, the band had a life-size and lifelike electric chair constructed for their use, and every night Alice would be dragged across the stage, strapped in and fried. And it was not to everybody’s taste.

  “The advance publicity for Alice Cooper almost turned my stomach,” author and journalist Albert Goldman confessed. “The pictures showed a kohl-eyed queen, cadaver face framed in a rat’s nest of teased black hair, camping it up with a whole warehouse of lurid props, everything from a boa constrictor to an old-fashioned mission-oak-and-leather-strap electric chair.

  “The advertising copy was the usual ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it’ palaver about ‘contemporary theatre’ and rock as ‘total experience’ and the wondrous fact that we all have male and female traits. After surveying the whole hyped-up spiel, I concluded, ‘If that’s where it’s at, who needs it?’”

  But he was converted, as so many others were. “Then I saw the show and ditched my preconceptions.”

  Goldman’s article, published in Life magazine in July 1971, fascinates because it is one of the few articles in the mainstream US media to actually nail what lay behind Alice Cooper. “The moment Alice sidled across the stage – in a black leotard zipped down to his navel – I recognised that he/she/it was thoroughly professional. Every provocative move and theatrical flourish was carefully calculated and precisely performed. Far from being a freaky aberrant, Alice was a shrewd operator intent on translating to the fagged-out rock stage some perverse excitement of the Andy-Warhol, Sado-Masochist, Low-Camp Drama and Cinema.”

  To the rest of the media, and therefore the public at large, everything that Goldman claimed Alice wasn’t, they continued to believe – and in many cases hope – he was. They wanted him to carve up chickens and set dogs on fire. They wanted him to impale babies on pitchforks, and money on swords, and they wanted him to be dragged to the electric chair by two cops, and fried in front of a room full of people, all howling with the bloodlust of a Tyburn Tree tribunal. They wanted to believe, in that same way that every idol incites belief, that he really was as degenerate as he seemed to be. And why? Because that is what being an idol is all about; pinpointing your audience’s darkest deepest fantasies, and then bringing them to life.

  The death of Jim Morrison, lifeless in a Parisian bathtub that July, added further impetus to the band’s momentum. Morrison himself had grown bloated and disillusioned in recent months, a corpulent shadow of the man he once was, but he remained the epitome of revolution as it evolved out of the miasma of psychedelia. Without him to spell dissolution aloud for an audience searching for meaning in music, and with Marc Bolan’s UK fame yet to translate to America, the road was clear for someone new to drive down.

  The act “create[s] tension in the audience”, Alice told the UK magazine ZigZag in 1971. He admitted that the group’s props were contrived, “but they’re perfectly contrived. They’re like, abstractly, surrealistically contrived. There’s no real reason for the electric chair. There’s no real reason for the feathers at the end, except for the tension of the orgasm. Everyone can relate – they can relax at the end. After all the tension, they go ‘Ahhhhhh, finally!’”

  Only once did Goldman’s eye falter as he reached deeper into the crowd psychology in search of the soul of Alice’s audience. “What gets everybody uptight with Alice Cooper is the sacrifice he makes of shame. Confessing fantasies most people would sooner die than reveal, he becomes a scapegoat for everybody’s guilts and repressions. People project him, revile him, ridicule him and some would doubtless like to kill him. At some stage, he knocks out the young boys with the daring of his act and the rebelliousness of his image. After all, the ultimate rebellion of our time is the simple refusal to be a man.”

  Yet there was never any suggestion, once past the name, that any member of the Alice Cooper band, least of all Alice himself, was homo-, or even bisexual. That was Goldman’s own psyche talking and, within six months of that article’s publication, David Bowie would have seized upon that same notion and brought it to life. Alice Cooper, on the other hand, gave the impression that they would have stomped anybody who dared suggest such a thing, and they had the Women’s Lib pickets outside concerts to prove it.

  “Yeah, I did the whole trip with that,” Alice told ZigZag. “We got picketed in New York and everything… Women’s Lib hates us – they think rock lyrics are discriminating against women.” And Alice Cooper was not about to disavow them of that notion. “I said I think that women should be used as sex objects. I think that’s what they’re best at. Very honestly, I said I don’t think it’s any insult because that’s what their main purpose in life is – being sex objects. I mean, what’s wrong with that… they can still run a corporation and be a sex object. I think that Women’s Lib is pretty much a combination of horny dykes, which is cool. I like horny dykes… there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  The new stage show fell into place, set to go out on the road as Warner Brothers released the group’s third album, originally set to be called Honest Alice, but soon suitably retitled Love It To Death. Controversy, of course, had already dogged its genesis, as Warners took an eyeglass to the sleeve p
hotograph that the band insisted was the record’s front cover, and spied a teeny-tiny weenie poking out from Alice’s fly. Of course it was merely his finger, poked through the opening just to see if someone would notice, and the band made no major outcry when a revision was suggested. Word of the controversy just added to the album’s pre-release desirability, and the so-called censored cover became an emblem of the group’s taste for outrage. An outrage that was growing every time they stepped on stage.

  ‘I’m Eighteen’ reached number 21 in the US; Love It To Death peaked at number 33. Neither, then, set the world on fire, and a second single in the summer, ‘Caught In A Dream’, foundered at a lowly number 94. It was in concert that Alice Cooper were wining and dining ever growing battalions of believers, still taking every gig they were offered (for a healthy $1,500 a night), and then taking the audience as far as they could. A journey that Alice insisted, again to ZigZag, ended in the kind of rebellion that not one of rock’s more storied protest acts had even touched.

  “[‘Eighteen’] worked because people really liked it – they got into the whole idea of being 18… the frustrations. It’s sort of like an updated version of ‘My Generation’. We’re drawing 10 times as many people [as we used to]. And when all those kids are coming to see us, then going, ‘Wow, I think I’ll go home and put on some of Mom’s eye make-up’… and their dad’s a cop …” His voice trailed off. Fame was not all, after all, about dealing with the faithful. It was about confronting your foes as well.

  The Love It To Death tour kicked off in Pittsburgh at the end of March, and then continued almost without a break until the end of August, at which point the group would return to the studio to cut their next album, and then pack their suitcases and hit the road in Europe.

  Everywhere they played, the venue sold out. Groups they had once only marvelled at from afar were now opening for them: Black Oak Arkansas, Canned Heat, Steppenwolf and Spirit. They shared bills with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin; they took Detroit’s own Amboy Dukes on the road with them for one clutch of shows. Alice even began growing accustomed to having to follow Iggy Pop on stage, after the Stooges were added to a few midwestern bills. But the boot was firmly on the other foot now, as Stooges manager Danny Fields recalled.

  He told Iggy biographer Paul Trynka, “Iggy’s supposed to be on stage; you’re pulling a needle out of his arm and there’s blood squirting in your face. Meanwhile Alice Cooper and his band are adjusting their false eyelashes and powdering their noses in the same room. And I’m thinking ‘these Alice Cooper guys are not as good as this band, but they’re pros.’ That was sorta the metaphor – both bands are playing for $1,500, and there’s one that looked poised for stardom. And one poised for the floor of the bathroom.”

  “Every night when we went out there, we could feel the excitement going up a notch,” Glen Buxton recalled. “There were nights when the place was going wild before we’d even stepped on stage so when we did it was like a riot was kicking off. Even when we were opening for somebody else, we knew we had nothing to fear because we just grabbed their audience and took them with us. It was like the headliners were opening for us, and they’d just been put on last so the kids could have an early night.”

  The first major concert ever attended by late guitar legend Randy Rhoads was an Alice Cooper gig, at the Long Beach Auditorium. His sister Kelle Rhoads told writer Thom Hazaert, “I can’t tell you the impact this had on my brother. I told him, ‘We’re gonna go see Alice Cooper in Long Beach.’ So him and [friend] Kelly Garni and me, Kelly Garni’s mom had to drive us, we were just kids. And we went down and we saw Alice Cooper touring for the Love It To Death show, and… after Alice Cooper was done, my brother just turned white, and he was just staring at the stage, the concert was long over. And I think what happened that day was a light went on, and he got the idea that he could do this too. That was where I pinpoint him going, ‘I can actually make this my living. I can really do this. This is what I want to do. This is all I have to do.’ And I think that July 11, 1971 was when that happened for him.”

  “I hated playing on bills with Alice Cooper,” Spirit’s Randy California shrugged. “The kids didn’t even care about the music. They bought their tickets to see Alice get killed. How could any other band compete with that?” And they were kids, too. Without ever deliberately targeting what modern marketers would call a specific demographic, it became apparent very quickly that Alice Cooper’s primary audience was caught in the region of 12 to 15 years of age. Maybe, Alice reasoned, it was because their minds were more open; maybe it was because their social consciences were less developed, or maybe it was because teenaged boys really get off on twisted shit. They’re the biggest audience for horror movies too. But Alice was complaining.

  “We went to the Fillmore East the other night and all the audience kept screaming was ‘boogie,’” Alice sniffed to Rolling Stone. “Or the blues. How many times can you lose your baby? And jams. All those lame jams. Unless you’re somebody like Mike Bloomfield who really knows the technical aspect of it, most of the jams you hear are stereotyped. The people who dig groups like Ten Years After now are going to be washed up in two years. They’re just going to be like old married couples.”

  Alice, on the other hand, represented the future.

  Neal Smith: “The timing was right and that was key. I think a big part was the element of the band coming out of the Vietnam era; there were a lot of times when music is exciting but I think in turbulent times it is more so. There were so many huge elements going on, gay rights, the women’s movement, black power, Vietnam, there were so many things happening and there was so much music. I don’t think there has ever been a more exciting time.”

  Chapter Eight

  School’s Out For Killers

  Shep Gordon headed a team that was pushing Alice hard and fast. “Like most commerce, music is a team game,” he would state a few years down the line. “Jon Podell* has been Alice’s agent for 35 years, placing Alice in the right halls with the right opening acts. Pat Kingsley, Caroline Pfeiffer and later, Lee Solters did the press; in Alice’s case, this was probably the most important aspect because it drove his career more than radio. The other significant player was Bob Ezrin, who was able to take that rebellion and transform it into hit records.”

  Right now, however, the greatest role was played by Warner Brothers. “The record company was very significant because it financed a lot of our schemes,” said Gordon. “Things like wrapping School’s Out in panties. They didn’t understand Alice, but they believed in us and, with a bit of pushing, allowed us to do our thing.”

  Love It Do Death was just a couple of months old and already Warners were demanding a new album, something for the Christmas stockings of every kid who stood and howled at the concerts. The whole time they were on the road, then, the band was writing furiously. ‘Halo Of Flies’ had already made it into the live set, a furious improvisation built around a handful of songs left unfinished in the past, but towering over such unpromising origins thanks to an inspired lyric and an even more ferocious performance from Neal Smith.

  Centred on a drum solo that still conjures images of giant spiders dancing in the desert, “‘Halo Of Flies’ was pretty simple,” the drummer laughs. “We wanted all these fucking people who’d been saying for years and years and years that we couldn’t play. ‘what are you talking about?’ So we had all these little pieces of songs laying about that went back to Pretties For You, and by the time of Killer they were even more obscure, so we put them all together into one song and it was just a great song.”

  But other numbers were falling into place alongside it; taut, concise rockers like ‘Be My Lover’ and ‘Under My Wheels’, the western epic ‘Desert Night Thing’ (eventually recorded as ‘Desperado’), the makeweight but mauling ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ and ‘You Drive Me Nervous’, and finally, the two songs that could come to crystallise the Alice Cooper band’s reputation for all time, ‘Dead Babies’ and ‘Killer’.

 
Neal Smith recalls, “‘Dead Babies’ is another successful collaboration written by all five members of the band. The original idea for this song came from Mr. Black Juju himself, our dark side, Dennis. This was maybe the first true shock-rock song and was written to be controversial. But listen to the lyrics closely. It’s about killing babies yes, but by parental neglect. ‘Dead Babies’ really opened the door for us theatrically. On stage a swashbuckling Alice flaunts a sword held high overhead, that’s piercing a blond baby doll. While all around him are female mannequin body parts scattered over the stage.”

  Dennis Dunaway told Goldmine, “We often talked about having a ‘germ’ for a song, or an idea. And if a germ didn’t develop, it would fall by the wayside. In the case of ‘Dead Babies’, it originally had a verse that didn’t work, although I thought the chorus was great. I was very adamant about bringing the chorus back in. It so happened I had a bass line from a jam that was a completely separate idea, and one day I came in and suggested we try fusing the two ideas together. Nobody wanted to do it at first, but I finally talked them into it.”

  Still the band were not sure, but outside of their rehearsal hall, that big old barn on the outskirts of Pontiac, a captive audience, literally, was listening to their efforts and applauding this new song with gusto. A prison farm belonging to Oakland Prison abutted onto the Coopers’ land and, when the band threw open the doors on the hottest days of the year, every sound they made could be heard by the working jailbirds. Who would then let the band know how they felt about it with either silence or applause. ‘Dead Babies’ received a standing ovation.