Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  The theme of the album allowed greater elaboration. In the past, Alice Cooper had appeared to be on the side of the bad guy, the killer, the madman, the delusional loser. Now they were on the side of youth, as it fought to find a voice in an adult world, and leave aside the fact that ‘School’s Out’ was almost callously preaching to the converted, it also became precisely the soapbox that rock’n’roll had always proclaimed itself to be.

  “Say we don’t care about politics,” Alice told Rolling Stone’s Timothy Ferris. “And say MC5 does. They go out of their way to free John Sinclair and all this stuff, and they’re actually doing something political. But we are also doing something political, on the fact that a policeman doesn’t want his 16-year-old kid coming home with eye makeup on. That’s politics. That is going to hurt a policeman more than hitting him on the head with a brick, because the lump is going to go away after a while, but the policeman is still going to be thinking, ‘Oh, my kid is a gaf.’ That gets into politics there.”

  Naturally the single ‘School’s Out’ pulled the album of the same name in its wake, and that despite there being more commercial traction in the album’s packaging – an open-up school desk, with a pair of paper panties folded inside – than the music itself. Rolling Stone was especially harsh: “Not all of School’s Out is… rock. A good half is Broadway or movie soundtrack music, which is consistent with Alice’s vaunted theatricalism. But in an album which so obviously panders to the whole fifties rock mystique – rock as social protest – such material is especially confounding. On the evidence of School’s Out with its debt to Leonard and Elmer Bernstein, its plotting, its sound collages, Alice Cooper is more closely allied with the Emerson, Lake & Palmer wing which parades kitsch as art than with the furious monomania of Black Sabbath. This stuff is as bad for high-school kids as it is for their parents.”

  Especially once the Federal Trade Commission got wind of the panties and, presumably after conducting exhaustive tests, declared that they were a fire hazard and that the album could not be released in that form. As 10,000 copies of the album were shelved while the panties were replaced, nobody ever came forward to answer Alice’s bemused question, when he first heard the news of the FTC ruling, and the incendiary properties of the giveaway panties. “What sort of person,” he asked, “would be lighting a match down there anyway?”

  Probably because he already knew the answer; the same sort of person who would commission a cannon as part of his latest stage act, and volunteer to be blasted out of it, every night on stage. Melody Maker caught an early glimpse of the band’s proposed new stage show and raved, “It’s going to take the form of a Broadway spectacular – ten dancers, a choreographer, a pit orchestra, lavish backdrops, and touches of West Side Story. And of course, the cannon.”

  That delight, sadly, was still on the shelf as the band continued touring through the spring and summer of 1972. A return to the UK was scheduled for mid-March but cancelled when the hosting venue, the Rainbow again, closed its doors once more. It would be the end of June before a new show could be pencilled in, and Shep Gordon decided to play one of the biggest gambles of his life.

  The previous November had seen Led Zeppelin stage a couple of shows at London’s Wembley Empire Pool which, since the demise of the NME Pop Poll shows of the mid-Sixties that were headlined by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, had been used largely for indoor sporting events and iceskating. Now, the likes of T Rex, David Bowie and Slade were taking Led Zep’s lead in edging British rock out of theatres and into exhibition halls, either the Empire Pool or the more cavernous Earls Court. Without even appearing aware of the promoters who warned him that an unknown American act was never going to fill such a place (‘School’s Out’ was still awaiting release at the time), Gordon booked Wembley’s Empire Pool. Alice, he was willing to bet, would triumph there.

  It was a close run thing.

  They had America sewn up. As Shep Gordon details, “A great deal of the image was calculated to have parents hate it. This always drives their children to it. The essence of Alice and what he wrote about was rebellious and my job was to present that image in a concise and shocking way that would reach parents and get them incensed and tell their children not to go see Alice because he is disgusting. It drove the kids to Alice by the millions.”

  Even the panties, replaced by FDA approved fireproof pairs, would create a stir. Dan Reed, programme director at Philadelphia’s WXPN Radio, was just 11 when School’s Out was released but, having already been drawn to Alice Cooper by Killer, he was among the first in line to buy the new LP when it hit the stores. Or, at least, have his mom buy it for him. What a surprise for Mrs Reed, then, when she walked into her son’s bedroom a few days later and found Dan and some friends happily passing the panties back and forth between them.

  What are they? she wanted to know. What are they for? Where did you get them? And, when Dan told her they came free with a record, she demanded to know which record.

  “The one you just bought me,” Dan innocently smiled.

  “Mom freaked out.”

  Yes, America was Alice’s. Britain, however, was a tougher nut. Journalist Chris Charlesworth, then on the staff of Melody Maker, recalls, “One of the greatest rock publicity stunts ever was stage-managed by the great Derek Taylor. Derek, of course, was the Beatles PR back in the day but in 1972 he was the ‘special projects manager’ at Warner Brothers in the UK, and Alice Cooper was among their biggest acts at the time. He was coming to [Britain] and playing Wembley, and the concert was only half sold out. Big embarrassment.

  “So Derek rented a huge, like 18-wheeler flat-bed open truck and stuck an equally massive two-sided poster (like a roadside hoarding) with Alice naked on it apart from his snake hiding his manhood, and ordered the driver to drive up and down Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly all day, round and round the West End. And then – killer move – the truck broke down (the driver did it deliberately) right at Piccadilly Circus at 5pm rush hour. Chaos. Traffic blocked everywhere. Huge jams. Cops furious. TV cameras come down, the Alice poster is on the news. Concert sells out. Derek’s a hero.”

  And he continued to be one. It was during this same visit that Taylor booked Chessington Zoo for an Alice party. Guests bussed threre from London were met at the gates by female Warners staffers clad in skimpy schoolgirl uniforms and bearing endless trays of alcohol. First, guests were given the run of the zoo’s in-house fairground for an hour or so, then led to the big top tent that was also a Chessington fixture, for a full circus performance.

  Charlesworth continues, “High wire, animals, clowns, the lot, masses of free booze flowing all the time, topped off by a stripper or two which prompted several pissed and/or stoned partygoers to join in, including the schoolgirls, until there were about 20 naked and semi-naked people in the ring, schoolgirls in their underwear, men and women dancing together, whereupon some cops arrive and threaten to arrest everyone (especially Derek, who had probably tipped them off) unless everybody puts their clothes back on and go quietly to their coaches and back to London.”

  The following day, the newspapers had just one story on their mind. “ALICE COOPER ORGY SHOCK – Naked guests riot at VIP party for US shock rocker!” Of course, Taylor had been sure to invite a lot of photographers.

  Further headlines tumbled from the press. The News Of The World declared Alice Cooper to be “the weirdest rock’n’roll band [ever] to invade Britain”. The Sunday Telegraph described Alice as “a cross between Rasputin and Bela Lugosi, or Tiny Tim after tip-toeing through deadly night-shade, or Dracula risen from the grave once too often.” And television watchdog Mary Whitehouse, never one to miss an opportunity to get in on the act when subversion was in the air, urged her National Viewers’ And Listeners Association to call for ‘School’s Out’ to be banned before it incited every schoolkid in the country to rise up against formal education.

  Despite such acclaim (or maybe because of it – the music press could be very contrary when it felt like
it), the old guard in the UK media did their best not to be impressed. Michael Watts, a Melody Maker scribe who could take at least some of the credit for ushering both Roxy Music (who opened the Wembley show) and the simultaneously rising David Bowie onto the scene of ‘72, chided “[Alice Cooper are] the gross product of a rancid teenage sub-culture, a musical horror movie for an audience weaned on the stream of horror flicks shown around the clock on American television. It’s boloney when Life magazine portentously states that Alice ‘becomes the scapegoat for everybody’s guilts and repressions.’ A horror movie is a titillating experience, and titillation is what Alice Cooper is all about.”

  Titillation and, of course, yet another good old-fashioned dose of controversy. In August 1972, a Pennsylvania evangelist named Rod Gilkeson announced a national crusade to save American youth from the “perversion and violence” being espoused by this “ambassador of Satan”. He was talking about Alice.

  American youth responded by pushing ‘School’s Out’ even higher up the chart.

  _________________________

  * Jonny Podell was the son of Jules Podell, a noted speakeasy operator during Prohibition who went on to manage and finally own the famous Copacabana night club in New York.

  Chapter Nine

  Have You Ever Had Gas Before?

  The cannon was a no-go. But not because it was too dangerous. It wouldn’t work because it didn’t work. The idea was for Alice to be loaded into the cannon, given a moment to let himself out of a side door, and then the fuse would be lit and a dummy would fly across the stage into a waiting net. It looked good, too, in rehearsal.

  But the first time they took it out on stage, with 20,000 kids watching and holding their breath, the dummy simply flopped halfway out of the barrel, and hung there like a lump. Finally Alice himself pulled it out of the cannon, and kicked the dummy off stage. The next day, he laughed, the cannon was sold to the Rolling Stones. Nobody mentioned that it was faulty. But violence, and death, remained a key element of the show, with the new album’s “Street Fight” interlude taking on cinematic proportions.

  It was not a gentle routine. On a stage strewn with garbage, Alice was forced to defend himself against four marauding street toughs, whom he would ruthlessly dispatch with his switchblade. And when it was first introduced, the musicians did their best to pull their punches and get away without any bruising. It swiftly became apparent, however, that it wasn’t going to work like that; that it looked too fake. So the punches and kicks grew harder and harder, and the only concession to pain that they made was, they tried not to hurt Alice too badly.

  Still he acknowledged to Sounds, “I get beat up, the other guys get beat up. When I fall down the stairs I get hurt. But I know that’s what the kids want – I’m actually killing myself for the audience. You’re spitting at death, defying pain. I don’t really like pain at all. I would rather be killed in a car crash than get badly injured, because that would be hell, and dying might not be.”

  But he frequently came off stage nursing more than the occasional cut or bruise. One night, Alice said, he broke a rib. Another night, he broke three, and on another occasion, two knuckles were cracked. And the only consolation was, none of these injuries hurt at the time. “I didn’t feel it,” he continued in that Sounds feature. “But when I got off stage I went ‘YEEAAAOW, OOOOAH!, that hurts!’ It’s just that you have so much adrenalin up there, you just do not feel it. When you step on that stage, it’s my responsibility to destroy that audience. You have to stare at everyone in that audience and realise that you have got to have more power than any one of them. I assume responsibility of Alice Cooper. People are paying five dollars to see the show, and I kill myself to make sure it’s right.”

  Yet something had changed. The mood of the presentation had shifted, the moral of the story had warped. Unable, in the time allowed them, to work up a completely new stage show for the School’s Out tour, and with the cannon so regretfully mothballed, the band was still presenting the basics of the old Killer show; “modified to exclude infanticide and replace it with a knife-fight”, as Record Mirror put it. And that was the cue for an interesting reversal of fortune.

  In the past, as Alice was led to the gallows (or, before that, the electric chair), it was as punishment for some truly heinous acts, and though his audience never stopped adoring him, it could take solace from the knowledge that the monster was getting what it deserved. Hacking up babies deserves the death penalty.

  This time around, though, the monster was a monster only because he took four lives. The fact that the four deserved what they got; that Alice, fighting for his life against a gang of street toughs, was the hero of the piece, not the villain, seemed to have escaped the choreographers, but it did not evade the audience. Night after night, as Alice was dragged to the gallows, and the audience was exhorted to reprise the chant “Hang him! Hang him!” that had been one of the most chilling moments of the old Killer performance… they didn’t.

  “The execution took on a kind of crucifixion atmosphere,” mused Record Mirror. “It wasn’t a baby-murderer they were hanging this time, it was their Alice. There was very little cheering or shouting at all as they dragged him to the gallows, and the thunder and lightning effects as he dropped through the trap seemed like a scene from one of those giant scale Hollywood bible movies. I don’t know what reaction I expected from the audience – cheers or screams or what – but the feeling of really heavy tension in the darkness was very impressive.”

  Such grey shades of morality were, of course, seldom debated as the spectacular continued to make it way across the stages of the western world; indeed, asked about his own intentions for the stage show, Alice’s eyes were now set on a venture that had exercised the band’s imagination since the days of Bye Bye Birdie back in Phoenix. Throughout the summer of 1972, Alice talked incessantly about Alice At The Palace, a Broadway musical that was apparently scheduled to open at New York’s Palace Theatre in October.

  “It is my intention to progress into total environmental theatre,” he told New Musical Express, “where nobody can get away, for the simple reason that they are part of the concept. As far as this show is concerned we’ll probably just do it for a week and then depending on the reaction we will either take it on the road or sell it to a touring company.”

  He told After Dark writer Henry Edwards, “We figured that Broadway has never seen real rock. Hair wasn’t rock. Our show is going to be a rock and roll combination on Hellzapoppin’ [the 1941 dance spectacular that remains a benchmark for Hollywood choreography] and Dracula.“

  Neither did the ambition halt there. Casting around for a suitable director, the name Michael Bennett came up, the Toby Award-winning director of Follies, itself one of Broadway’s biggest recent smashes. “If you’re going to do the best thing on Broadway,” Alice laughed immodestly, “you might as well get the best person!” And asked whether Bennett was already a fan, Alice laughed again. “[He] hadn’t seen us but he’d heard a lot about us. I guess we have a lot of notoriety!”

  Five years Alice’s senior, Bennett had been choreographing Broadway productions since 1966. Promises Promises, in 1968, was his first major hit; Company and Follies followed, and his greatest success, A Chorus Line, was still to come. But, as Alice said, Bennett was already regarded as one of the sharpest choreographers around, and though he may not have had much to do with rock, he had at least worked with pop; Promises Promises was built around a score written by Hal David & Burt Bacharach, arch purveyors of some of Alice’s own favourite songs.

  “I went over to Michael’s apartment and we talked a lot about it. Michael said that the kids are alienated towards Broadway and parents are alienated towards rock. We’ll have parents bringing their kids and kids bringing their parents. We’re going to lock the doors after the audience comes in. That will separate the men from the boys! We’re also going to have dancers and people planted in the audience. We’re trying to get a lot of Palace-type vaudevillians to be in it.
Not the dead ones. We don’t want to dig them up. But you’ll be seeing us with people you’d never expect to see us with. We’re trying to get the Three Stooges.”

  He was even intending to hire his own chauffeur, after discovering the old man had played “the Guy in the Straight Jacket” in Hellzapoppin’ back in 1934, and that opened up another ambition, to try and reunite as many members of the original Hellzapoppin’ crew as they could.

  Ambitious though it was, however, the stage show was just one of so many projects occupying the band and their management’s minds that summer. They talked, too, of a movie that would combine documentary, slapstick, performance and improv into one sprawling mass of disconnected madness. Ultimately imagining, perhaps, a cross between Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels and the Monkees’ Head, he outlined one scene to a scoop-hungry New Musical Express.

  “A guy comes out of a party in a Holiday Inn room. He’s really starving, it’s five in the morning, and room service is closed. Now you know how people leave the food they didn’t eat on tables outside their rooms? Well, this guy sees this piece of cake with only five bites taken out of it; really delicious looking cake. So he starts eating it and it’s really good.

  “All of a sudden the door opens and there’s this old man standing there with blisters bleeding all over his mouth, and he gasps ‘don’t eat the cake.’ Then he falls over dead. The guy runs to his room and desperately rinses with Listerine. It ends right there and goes into something totally different.”