Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  They lived up to their own dreams. Four decades on, the version of ‘Under My Wheels’ that was turned out that evening remains a staple of rock television viewing, to the point of standing in as a proxy music video for the song. Their other performance, a brittle ‘Is It My Body’, while an entertaining off cut from the recording, catches Alice chatting away to the snake who had been hired for the occasion (Kachina was left at home to avoid customs hang-ups).

  “You’d make a great wallet,” he kids her, before making his way back to the dressing room he’d been assigned to, set at totally the opposite end of the studio to the rest of the band’s. Which itself was so strange that finally, he asked why. Because, came back the reply, it was official BBC policy to have separately located rooms for male and female performers. “Your name is Alice Cooper, after all.”

  London marked the last time the Love It To Death stage act would be performed. A new show had been designed, centred on a life-sized working gallows built at Warners’ movie lot and, following a couple of warm-up gigs in Saginaw, Michigan, December 1, 1971 saw the Academy of Music in New York become the scene of Alice’s first ever onstage hanging.

  “When we first did the hanging stunt, it took them three days to get me on the gallows,” Alice admitted to Melody Maker. “‘Alice, we’ve really got to hang you now’ they kept saying….”

  He was right to be nervous. On more than one occasion the gallows malfunctioned, and on one night they failed him completely. “What happened was, the rope suddenly broke during that part where I get hanged and I came crashing down on my knees at the back of the stage. It was a really bad fall. Apart from the initial shock and massive rope burn on my neck, I honestly thought that I had dislocated my neck and broken both my legs.”

  “Alice Cooper’s new production, Killer, had its premiere performance here… and, just as expected, it went well beyond spectacular,” swooned Circus. “Alice has always been more famous for his gaudy theatricality than, quite unjustly, for his music; but face it, any rock and roll act that offers a full scale hanging, complete with dense clouds of manufactured demon-fumes, more death-cult vibes than the Manson Family, and a super-heavy simulation of an artillery bombardment is not susceptible to mere musical analysis.”

  The speed with which Alice Cooper’s reputation rose from “worst band in Los Angeles” to one of the hottest bands in the country was not purely down to their theatrics, of course. Less than three weeks into the American dates, a hissy tape recording of the St Louis show became one of the year’s most celebrated bootleg albums, legendary enough to merit inclusion in the band’s own Old School box set 40 years on, and a prize glimpse into the sheer musicality of the onstage experience. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Shep Gordon and his team – which now included a quick-witted in-house PR called Ashley Pandel – worked tirelessly to ensure the band was never out of the headlines, backed up by a Warners press office that could not believe its own luck.

  Too much of the label’s home-grown output remained locked into a world of sensitivity, where the most outrageous headline imaginable probably revolved around the guitarist changing strings on his guitar, and where even James Taylor had wearied of constantly talking about the private life that his songs had made so public. As he finally snapped to Rolling Stone at the end of the decade, “They pick up on the mental hospital, family stuff, try to invent some category of rock that I belong to, or perhaps they pick up on my drug problem. [And] it gets to the point sooner or later when you start to think about your kids: ‘What does your daddy do for a living?’ ‘He plays the guitar and he talks about his drug problems.’ It’s embarrassing to read the drivel that comes out of your mouth sometimes…..”

  Alice Cooper had no such conflicts. Adopting former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s oft-repeated insistence that any publicity is good publicity, the band revelled in their notoriety. An idea only needed to sound like a good one for it to be pushed into play, and a rumour only needed to be more outrageous than the one before for it to be confirmed by a grinning band member, confident in the knowledge that it would be a headline the following morning. Alice Cooper was not simply a publicist’s dream. The band was a tabloid journalist’s dream as well.

  No story was considered too outrageous. The old lady dying on the plane was one; an entire audience being treated for shock was another. Back in Michigan, it was reported, they shot a commercial for indigestion tablets – they played your stomach before you took the cure. “As the… circus pulled into the next city,” Alice recalled in his autobiography, “there were four or five new fables of gore and excess awaiting us… incredibly imaginative rumours, and I could only shrug and say ‘that’s a good one. I haven’t heard that one yet’.”

  “It got to the point,” Glen Buxton mused, “where we didn’t even need to open our mouths any more. We just let the rumour mill go wild, then reap the benefits. As far as the kids were concerned, there was nothing we would not, or could not do; if it was sick and disgusting and cruel and outrageous, then one of us had done it, and the rest had probably helped.”

  Rolling Stone witnessed the birth of one such fable, sitting interviewing Alice when the phone rang. “That was Shep,” a grinning singer reported after he had hung up the phone. “Telling me about a page story in the Charlotte News that said ‘Girl Sickened By Rock Show’. She had to be taken out of the theatre when she saw us do ‘Dead Babies.’ Isn’t that neat? So they did a big story on her.”

  Now that story was winging out on the wire services and, the following day, it would be all over the country, log-jammed with all the other exaggerations, rumours and outright lies. How the ASPCA was still monitoring the group’s shows to ensure that Alice did not bite off any chicken’s heads. How their concert in Atlanta went ahead only after they gave their assurances that there would be no gallows, electric chairs or feathers on stage. How a groupie girl broke her back trying to eat herself out for the band’s amusement. How Glen Buxton shot an over-amorous gay fan, and then Alice fucked the bullet holes. Nothing was too outrageous, nothing was too obscene, and the more the media questioned the band about their degenerate lifestyle, the more that degeneracy would be thrust into the spotlight.

  “You just haven’t been in Virginia long,” asked a newsman in Roanoke, VA.

  “No, I haven’t been in Virginia about a week,” replied a straight-faced Alice. “She left for the coast.”

  Or.

  Have you ever studied witchcraft?”

  “No, I’m not into organised religion.”

  A lot of the tales that the band members heard about themselves would become enshrined in legend by the band’s own songwriting. Much of the subject matter broached across 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies LP was based on the group’s own supposed lifestyle, from the rumour that swept British playgrounds that Alice’s father had once been a dentist who was struck off for operating without anaesthetic, to the worldwide belief that the Coopers’ favourite groupies were the dead ones, and that every time they hit a new city, roadies would be dispatched to undertakers and cemeteries to round up that evening’s post-performance entertainment.

  Even the true stories somehow twisted into fables. One night in Knoxville, Tennessee, Kachina got loose in the hotel suite and, according to legend, was last seen vanishing down the toilet bowl and into the city sewers. A search of the building certainly failed to find her and, while Alice was last seen heading into a pet store, where a replacement reptile, Yvonne, was purchased for $40, Kachina was alleged to be roaming the drains of Knoxville. Yet she reappeared a week later, nestling happily in what had been her former master’s bed, and it’s hard to imagine who was the most shocked by her discovery. Singer Charlie Rich, who had booked into the room that Alice had vacated? Or Kachina, to find herself suddenly cuddled up with a country and western singer?

  Kachina found a new home with one of the hotel’s employees; Yvonne, meanwhile, proved herself to be just as cool a trouper as her predecessor. At least once she’d started
eating; for a long time, she simply refused her food. Finally, a vet suggested she be force-fed a rat. Or, according to another variation on the story, a groupie.

  The stories emanating from the band’s tour bus were legion, then. But the fables really kicked into overdrive once the band bought its own home, the newly christened Alice Cooper mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  In a small town better known for the homesteads of Rita Hayworth, Nelson Rockefeller and Bette Davis, the band had taken over the 40-room mansion that crowned the Galesi Estate, built in the thirties by a Broadway producer, and once fabled for having every wall covered with mirrors. The room at Number 17 Hill Road included a chapel, a ballroom, a library and a secret passageway that led to the kitchens, to allow the serving staff to pass discreetly through the building, all spread out across 15,000 square feet of living space.

  “It’s a dead ringer for a Vincent Price film set,” Melody Maker mused. “It incorporates the unmistakable style of a man with money and a sadly demented mind. In the dark hallway lurks Alice’s. Electric Chair, and next to that the skeleton of a pin-ball machine….”

  Rolling Stone picked up the tale. “The band moved in and stocked Skippy Crunchy [peanut butter] in the kitchen, stocked artillery in the cupboards, tacked swastikas on the ceilings, installed a sauna bath over there and over here… in the middle of this vast, airy gymnasium-sized ballroom cluttered with beat-up amplifiers and trash… a man hangs from the ceiling, high above the Xmas tree. His plaster face tells you nothing.”

  But a friend of a friend who has a brother who knows somebody who works there, he could tell you a lot….

  Occasionally, Alice would put a brake on a particularly repugnant rumour. Like the one that suggested he rehearsed for the stage act by dismembering the runaway kids who would turn up at the mansion, wanting to meet Mr Cooper, or training them to dismember one another. He told The Story Of Pop, “We do it strictly for the audience. We’re their outlet. We aren’t condoning violence, we’re relieving it. Just because I hack the head off a baby doll doesn’t mean some kid has to run out and re-enact that situation with a real child.”

  At the same time, though, he admitted, “I never get repulsed by an audience’s behaviour. In fact, I often think that it’s real healthy. When I’m down on my knees hacking that baby doll’s head off, I imagine that the girls out there, screamin’ for the bits, would secretly like to change places with me. To be quite honest, I think I’m doing an artistic thing on stage… something that’s never been done in rock until I came along. Not only am I giving them music, but also an image for them to think about.”

  The Killer tour wrapped up with a grand party and a prizegiving ceremony, as the band received their first ever gold disc. Rising to the very fringe of the Top 20 in America, the album had notched up sales of over half a million in the US in a matter of months, and it was a sign of just how quickly it had done so that the commemorative discs themselves were not actually ready in time. Instead, band and boa gathered in the office of Warners Executive VP Joe Smith to be presented instead with gold pressings of Jimi Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge soundtrack.

  At the same time as it celebrated the triumph, however, Warners was growing impatient. In less than a year, Alice Cooper had grown from a tax loss for Frank Zappa’s label into one of the highest-grossing live acts in the country. Yet that gold disc marked the sum of their achievement. ‘I’m Eighteen’ was routinely described as a hit, but it never cracked the national Top 20, and the two singles that spiralled off Killer had fared even more poorly. ‘Under My Wheels’ made number 59, ‘Be My Lover’ climbed 10 places higher. Now, with all the promotion in the world, Killer was resolutely stalled at number 21.

  Nobody was yet saying out loud that Alice Cooper had found their commercial level and were doomed to remain there for the rest of their lives, a great concert act that never made the push onto the next level, but even Neal Smith looks back and admits, “We were climbing the charts all through the heartland of the USA. Unfortunately and unbelievably we were still not able to crack the Big Apple on the East Coast or LA on the West Coast. We were being rejected by the two largest music markets in America. The powers that be thought Alice Cooper was just a fluke. The music world also thought we had a theatrical rock show that overshadowed our questionable musical abilities.”

  There was, the band agreed, just one way to stop the sniping. “We desperately wanted to write a rock anthem that not only would get airplay in the US, but also in England and Europe as well.”

  Work on the band’s next album was continuing as they toured Killer, but whereas that album slipped seamlessly into place around the indisputable epics that devoured almost half of its running time, the new material was proving harder to bed down, both in the live show and around any kind of LP-length statement.

  Having exhausted, they thought, the theme of crime noir horror that was the overriding mood of Killer, the band worked now on a loose premise of juvenile delinquency. Ears lent to the material that was stockpiling, however, saw little in the shape of a single, much less a hit and much, much less an anthem. It was, Smith, admits, “crunch time”. And that was the impetus that Glen Buxton was awaiting.

  Alice had had an idea. One night as he watched a rerun of the forties TV hit The Bowery Boys, he was struck by one particular piece of dialogue, one character turning to the other and declaring, “Hey, Satch, school’s out!”

  The expression was old-time slang; it actually means “stop taking things so seriously. You’re not in class now.” But you could also take it literally, and that’s where Alice’s mind was wandering. What if school really was out?

  Smith continues, “Glen came up with the intro and guitar riff for the ages and ‘School’s Out’ was born. It was one of the most successful collaborations written by all five members of the band,” while Alice was quick to tell Melody Maker about one further contributor. “We worked with Bob [Ezrin] like Elton John with Bernie Taupin. It’s more than a producer/group thing. He’s a genius. When we wrote ‘School’s Out’ we never reckoned on strings and that. But Bob put them in – strings and horns. He made them just tasty. They haven’t taken a thing off the hard rock approach. You see we’ve hit a level now that people know our music – they know it’s Alice Cooper, and can only be Alice Cooper.”

  Looking back from decades into the future, Alice described a communal spirit that infused not just the band, but the entire record label. It was as though everybody knew rock history was about to be made, and they all wanted to be there to watch. In 2000, he told Live Daily writer Don Zulaica, “When we did ‘School’s Out’, the president, vice president, head of A&R at Warner Brothers, everybody was at the recording studio at 2:00 in the morning, talking about lyrics, the tracks, the concept. They were so involved in the career building of Alice Cooper, they wanted Alice to do 20 albums with them. That’s when a record company was a record company.”

  “And the rest as they say was rock’n’roll history,” Smith concludes. “We got the national and international airplay we were looking for.” – and the summer of 1972 had the song that would define the era, not only in the USA but this time, across the globe. ‘School’s Out’ soared to number one in the UK; number seven in America, and the band that Warner Brothers once worried might never break out of the cult bag was suddenly the biggest group on the planet.

  Bar the Osmonds.

  “Now there was no doubt Alice Cooper was for real,” Alice celebrates in his autobiography. “Our remaining detractors had been silenced for good.”

  ‘School’s Out’ dominated that summer; soundtracked the summer holidays. Just as the band knew it would. The first time they heard the finished mix back in the studio, and maybe even before that, they knew there was no way they had not written a hit… not created their own ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘My Generation’, or any one of those songs, so rare in an artist’s career but so crucial to the legend of rock in general, that will forever be an anthem. And in interviews around the release
of the record, Alice expounded on his own reasons for creating the song.

  “Pupil Power is a great thing,” he told New Musical Express. “So long as it has some kind of constructive purpose. I’ve noticed that the kids today are a lot smarter than when I was a kid. Personally speaking, I feel that if a kid can take care of himself then he should be encouraged to do so. It makes him more of an individual… it gives him more confidence and eventually makes that person far more self-assured. Believe me, I am in total sympathy with many of the kids in what they are forced to endure under the present education system.”

  The notion that institutionalised education and institutionalised prison amounted to much the same thing was scarcely a new one. But Alice voiced it anyway. Touring through the songs that made up the new album, he told Circus, “‘Luney Tune’ and ‘Public Animal No. 9’ are like a combination of being locked up in school and being locked up in jail. One line says, ‘Hey, Mr Blue Legs, where are you taking me’, which is the policeman, and another says, ‘Hey, Mrs. Cranston, where are you taking me,’ which is the teacher. What’s the difference between being locked up in school and being locked up in jail?”

  And then there was ‘Alma Mater’, a paean to Buxton’s school days and, in particular, “the time we took that snake and we put it down little Betsy’s dress. Now I don’t think Mrs. Axelrod was much impressed.” As journalist Howard Bloom mused in Circus, “It seems Mrs. Axelrod took umbrage at Glen’s misuse of her laboratory reptile back at Cortez High School and tossed Buxton out of the bio class. Little did she realise that one day the lad would get a loud and final revenge… in song!”

  The band stretched its wings. In his autobiography, Michael Bruce explains, “There was a side to the band that was sort of beatnik or jazzlike. Dennis used to say that if he had a club, he would call it The Blue Turk. It was just one of those things we would talk about, and whenever we were in New York we would get into that beatnik, back-alley frame of mind. There were all these sides to the band. There was a psychedelic side and a hard rock side and a beatnik/blues side – and of course a comic side. ‘Alma Mater’, ‘Slick Black Limousine’, ‘Public Animal No.9’, those were things we sort of picked up from The Beatles, like little skits. There were all these sides to the band, which I felt would have allowed us to go on and do a lot more recording and a lot more records.”