Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Other scenes would take place in a psychiatrist’s office, a graveyard, the wild west and even a fully appointed Hollywood film lot, the band tuxedo’d and wigged to perform a slick and slippery ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’. Live footage would be pulled from a pair of shows in Texas in April 1973, and mayhem and chaos would rule the day, as a thwarted movie director teamed up on a tandem with a bearded Valkyrie to pursue the band across the globe. They escape on the back of a stolen elephant, to the strains of ‘Halo Of Flies’, In short, it was everything an Alice Cooper movie should be

  And the gigs kept on coming, so many and so time-consuming that Alice At The Palace was soon shunted backwards, postponed from October 1972 to an unscheduled berth in the new year, and then abandoned altogether, lost beneath a stadium schedule that kept the band on the road until the beginning of September; allowed them six weeks off to enjoy a vacation, and then sent them back out on tour once again, with a few dates in the US and then a longer swing through Europe. And while they gigged, the new single emerged to prove that ‘School’s Out’ was not a fluke. It was called ‘Elected’ and, although long-time Alice watchers knew it was essentially a cunning rewrite of their first album’s ‘Reflected’, to the rest of the world and the waiting media, it was their most audacious effort yet.

  The US Presidential elections were literally just around the corner; the country would be filing out to vote in November 1972, with Richard Nixon running for re-election to the most powerful gig in the world. And there was Alice, saying he wanted to run too. For the new party, the third party, the wild party. And what was his platform? Well, he knew that the world was in a sorry state, he knew that people had problems. And he couldn’t care less. In other words, the hidden subtext behind every party political bullshit broadcast ever delivered was placed on open display, and the worst thing was, Alice still seemed more trustworthy than the goons we always wind up giving the job to in the end.

  Alice traced the song back to its genesis; explained how ‘Reflected’ had simply been a rerouting of the notion that they had now returned to. 1968 was an election year as well, and Alice suggested writing a song called ‘I Shall Be Elected’. But somehow, smiled Circus magazine, “a political tune didn’t fit in with the whips, chains and bloody nightgowns they were toying with, and they buried the idea”. Now it was back, accompanied by a hilarious short film of the band cavorting with chimpanzees and cash, and providing the election season with its most engrossing campaign film yet.

  Sadly, the joke was lost on many people; America took its elections very seriously in those days, seeing the role of President as something more than merely a stepping stone to an overpaid career on the speaking circuit and a sinecure at the head of a multi-media corporation. No matter on which side of the political divide an observer stood, a song that essentially mocked the entire process, and questioned the fidelity of the candidates as well, was not something that could be comfortably broadcast too often. ‘Elected’ foundered at number 26 in the States, an undeserved fate for such a dynamic single, and neither was that a statistical blip. In terms of Top 10 45s, the Alice Cooper band would never score a true follow-up to ‘School’s Out’, but by now, they didn’t even care.

  “We’d done it once, we’d made our mark,” Glen Buxton shrugged. “Even if we’d released a dozen more number one singles, none of them would have had the impact of ‘School’s Out’, so people would have said we were failing anyway. So we didn’t worry about it. Besides, America was about the only country where we didn’t keep on having hit singles, because the albums were far more important.”

  ‘Elected’ climbed to number four in the UK, and John Lennon leaped aboard as a fan. “[He] told me that ‘Elected’ was his favourite record at that time,” Alice told Classic Rock in 1999. “He said that he’d listened to the song nearly 100 times, but then at the end of the conversation, he said, ‘Of course, you know that Paul would have done it better!’”

  And the single might have done better, too, if Alice’s latest British visit had not been confined to just one show in Glasgow, where Disc‘s Caroline Boucher proclaimed that, while “Alice still isn’t the ultimate in showmen, it was the best gig I’ve been to since early Led Zeppelin”.

  Three rows of trashed seats at the front of the Greens Playhouse testified to the power of the show; and Boucher spared a kindly thought, too, for the opening act, a duo that had been close to the Cooper camp since their days with Frank Zappa and Straight Records, the incredibly well named Phlorescent Leech & Eddie – aka Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, the former front line of the Turtles, more recently the backdrop to the Mothers of Invention, but most incredibly of all, an integral part of the sound of T Rex at its most potently successful.

  Their performance, a combination of coarse visual humour and sharp vocal harmony, had absolutely nothing in common with Alice Cooper’s high-camp hard-rock dynamism. But they set the stage for the headliners exquisitely, and anybody with an ear for the duo’s own recent musical history knew that they were fortunate to be in their presence.

  It was Flo & Eddie’s effervescent harmonies that rose above Marc Bolan’s trademark sound to push T Rextasy to its sonic peaks and, across the run of hits that stretched between ‘Ride A White Swan’ in 1970 and ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’ in 1972, Flo and Eddie could rightly proclaim “every major hit single he had revolves around us. We said that to Marc, every day of the week. There never was a time when we didn’t remind him that we had hit records before him and, if he hadn’t brought us in, he’d never have had a hit of his own. We always brought that down on him, and it just made him laugh.”

  Kaylan explains, “There’s a certain intrinsic whining quality to that kind of backing vocal, that I believe came largely from our time with [Zappa]. We were singing those notes all our lives, but there was a certain nasal-ness, a whininess to it, that came from singing those parts with a little tongue in cheek-ness. ‘Hot Love’, in particular, has a swaggering, fake sassy; it’s us pretending to be chicks, with every bit of the gris-gris-gumbo-ya-ya that we could muster. It’s almost mocking and it should be, because it’s guys. It sounds like two 300lb guys in tutus, daring you to lift their skirts.”

  With their Zappa commitments over in early 1972, Kaylan and Volman immediately inaugurated their own career as Flo & Eddie, with the Alice Cooper shows geared around the release of their own debut album. Yet their presence, first in Europe in late 1972 and then as the opening act throughout Alice Cooper’s 1973 US outing, marked an ominous crack in the world of Alice Cooper, as Howard Kaylan recalls.

  “At that time, Alice was trying to insulate himself from his own group and keep the name for himself after his manager, Shep Gordon, said, ‘You’re the band, you don’t need the guys.’ He abandoned them more or less, and ended up taking us to his press conferences even though we were just the opening act. He liked having us around as confidantes and sidekicks.”

  A divide was forming. Michael Bruce snapped, “Alice was doing articles and interviews, and he would talk about everything in the world except the band. I think that was bothering a lot of members of the group. Management… tried to keep Alice isolated from the rest of the band, and I think that’s what eventually led to Alice leaving. He was just in a world apart.” A world that saw him spending more time with his celebrity friends than he ever did with his bandmates; and allowing them, too, to gatecrash that most sacrosanct of environments, the recording studio.

  Howard Kaylan recalls nights in London when producer Tony Visconti “would just roll tapes and he’s got hours and hours of tapes of us just sitting in the studio as high as kites, going off on everything, singing Presley and show tunes. There’s one night where the two of us, Marc [Bolan], Alice [Cooper], Ringo [Starr], Harry Nilsson and Klaus Voorman wound up together at Morgan Studios and stayed up all night and did nothing, just got bombed and sang anything that came to mind, and recorded it all. It’s just incredible. You’re holding your sides.”

  The notion that a sundering of the
Alice Cooper band was not only possible, but distinctly plausible, was one that raised itself in rumour more and more as 1972 gave way to 1973. It was no secret that Glen Buxton’s health was giving way, lowering his input and impact imperceptibly, and years later even he would admit, “I was becoming the Brian Jones of the band” – a reference to the so-called Golden Stone’s slow decline into incapacitation across the last couple of years of his time with the band.

  But there were other concerns too: Bob Ezrin’s belief that Alice’s loyalty to his bandmates was holding his musical career back; Shep Gordon’s growing insistence that so far as the public was concerned, the only difference between promoting Alice Cooper the band and Alice Cooper the singer was how many ways the money had to be split. And, of course, the media was now so accustomed to deferring to the singer when discussing Alice Cooper that the musicians themselves began, for the first time, to feel themselves sublimated behind Alice’s larger than life persona. A mood that was not helped when Alice pushed himself even further forward than he already was.

  “I take care of most of the ideas for the theatre part of it,” he told Teen magazine. “[I] write the lyrics, handle the interviews and the whole image of the group while the rest of the guys take care of the music.” But when he added that his chief influences were “a little bit of James Bond, a little bit of Barbarella and the rest from Burt Bacharach”, and applied that to the Broadway pizzaz that had certainly Fred Astaired its way through much of School’s Out, it was easy to wonder just how much of the music “the rest of the guys” really did have a hand in.

  Occasionally a journalist would attempt to correct the misconceptions. But rarely was it pointed out that the band’s songs were often a group-wide effort; nor that the rest of the band still called their singer Vince. Because when Alice Cooper went Christmas shopping in New York, and Alexander’s department store stayed open just for them, nobody even mentioned the gifts that Bruce, Dunaway, Smith and Buxton bought for their friends and family. Not when they could document Alice’s purchases: a sable fur coat, 22 rag dolls, 10 Blue Meanie dolls, 20 packs of playing cards and 57 original motion picture soundtracks from old Humphrey Bogart and Bela Lugosi films. And when Yvonne the snake curled up on a Monopoly board, Alice bought it for her.

  Writing for the band’s next album, meanwhile, continued apace. ‘Elected’ was already lined up for inclusion; so was the lacklustre ‘Hello Hooray’, a song composed by Canadian Rolf Kempf, and already successfully covered by folk songstress Judy Collins. Oddly positioned as a single in the new year, a ferociously vaudevillian retelling of the song was borne to number six in the UK (35 in America) on the strength of reputation alone; and so was ‘No More, Mr Nice Guy’, a song title that had already seen service the previous year, on the sophomore album by that other bunch of Los Angeles misfits, Sparks.

  Discovered, with a certain serendipity, by the man responsible for Alice Cooper changing their name from the Nazz in the first place, a now solo Todd Rundgren, Sparks were still a far cry from the lean, mean hit machine that would take the UK charts by storm in 1974. Indeed, if they had any musical antecedent, the first two Alice Cooper LPs came close – there was the same sense of artistic endeavour over musical prowess; the same eye for a quirky tune over a memorable melody; and the same utterly left-field approach to anything even remotely approaching commerciality. Rundgren produced their eponymous debut album; James Thaddeus Lowe, the former Electric Prune, handled A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing, and he later admitted that it was the failure of that album that pushed him away from the music industry.

  Few people understood what he meant. Again, as with the early Alice Cooper, it would take lashings of hindsight and a major retrospective reappraisal for the first two Sparks records to even begin attracting the attention they deserved, and ironically it took the same remarketing approach to do so. In early 1973, Pretties For You and Easy Action were bound together as a budget-priced double album titled Schooldays; a little over a year later, once their own hits started rolling, Sparks’ first two albums were likewise repackaged, and ears were finally opened to the final track on Woofer – ‘No More Mr Nice Guys’.

  Joseph Fleury, the band’s fan club secretary and, later, manager, recalled, “Alice Cooper originally contacted us to ask if they could borrow a lyric from one of Ron [songwriter Mael]’s other songs, ‘Beaver O’Lindy’… ‘I’m the girl in your head, the boy in your bed.’ We politely declined, and the next thing we knew, they just took the title from ‘Nice Guys’ without even asking.” Today, there would probably be a lawsuit, because that’s just the way the music industry works. Back then, vocalist Russell Mael merely, wearily, sighed, “Well, at least somebody discovered this song and made a buck or two out of it,” but he surely smiled wryly when he realised he probably wasn’t alone in feeling that way. The Monkees’ ‘Tapioca Tundra’ probably checked its own reflection every time it heard ‘Alma Mater’, from School’s Out.

  In truth, neither Sparks nor Alice Cooper could truly take the credit for coining the phrase, which had been a part of the vernacular for years already; and besides, the two Mr Nice Guys were wholly unrelated in lyrical terms, as Alice regaled his audience with a catalogue of the complaints he faced from straight society as he went about his business. Still it was an anthemically self-aggrandising slice of bad boy mythology, and its dip to a comparatively lowly number 10 in Britain was at least masked by another Top 30 berth in America.

  What all three singles had in common, however, was a sense that whatever Alice Cooper were planning for their sixth album, it would be a far cry from the studied darkness of Love It To Death and Killer. They were brighter, they were cleaner, they were sharper. There was no sense of menace any longer, complained a handful of critics, and no sense of danger. It was as if Alice Cooper were cleaning up their act. School’s Out had already hinted at that with its studied insistence on placing style above substance – its eternal title track notwithstanding, only ‘My Stars’ truly slipped into the kind of musical milieu that Killer and Love It To Death had so relentlessly made their own, the guitars that slash, the vocal that snarls, and the melody that is as lethal as both of them. And what became Billion Dollar Babies would prove even more studied, even more slick.

  And it would become their biggest LP yet.

  The most commonly circulating demos for Billion Dollar Babies, spread across a bootleg that has been around since the late seventies, are, in fact, the quadrophonic mix of the finished LP, replayed with one or more of the four channels muted. The band members admit, however, that the portraits it paints are not far from the actuality, and that the album’s contents arrived in the studio lacking only Ezrin’s vision and sheen. An early take of ‘Sick Things’ eschews all but a fractured guitar fuzz and shattered keyboards, as Alice intones the lyric with a lasciviousness that is positively palpable. The album’s undisguised rockers, ‘Raped And Freezin” and ‘Generation Landslide’, rock even harder; and its most scarifying sequence, the Rodgers & Hammerstein in Hell of ‘I Love The Dead’ (a song, incidentally, that Michael Bruce found too macabre for even his tastes), is all empty spaces and guitars that sound like flies, buzzing around the cadavers’ eyes.

  And while they laboured on that, more new music emerged. Early in the new year, Alice Cooper were voted top in three separate sections of New Musical Express’ then-prestigious annual readers’ poll in the UK. They responded, Alice told writer Roy Carr, with the need to “give something in return – something positive and direct. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for us to play a concert in Britain because we’re up to our necks preparing the new stage show for our three-month American tour. So we got real drunk one night and said, ‘Hey let’s send them a record’.

  “But we didn’t want to send something already on the album, or due for release very shortly. It had to be something new and exclusive. We’d always thought that it would be a real goof to do an Elvis-type thing. Yer know, all grease ‘n’ echo… a real boppin’ rubber-legged knee-tre
mbler. Well it so happened that Dennis (Dunaway) had written ‘Slick Black Limousine’, which was that sort of song, but there was no room on the new album for it and we’d already fixed up the next single. So we laid down the backing track at the mansion and put the vocal on when we were in London.”

  Ominous, however, was his insistence that Alice Cooper was expanding. “I don’t always wanna be known as Alice Cooper the snake charmer. I want to expand the whole Alice Cooper idea. I want Alice to be a lot of other things.”

  For ‘Slick Black Limousine’, he was portraying “Alice Cooper – greasy rocker”. But the new album, he was suggesting, would have even more varieties in store. And so it turned out. Billion Dollar Babies was, of course, a triumph, musically, lyrically and commercially. It topped the chart on both sides of the Atlantic, and positioned Alice Cooper, however briefly, among the biggest-selling acts on the planet. Yet in terms of the band’s own musical development, and to place the Coopers amid the cinematic allegories that they held so dear, it is a Technicolor Hollywood epic which swamped its black-and-white B-movie predecessors only in terms of budget, casting and special effects.

  The songs were nasty, but they were gratuitously so, a cut and paste of the very best rumours that had hallmarked the band’s reputation in the past. Male rape, necrophilia, homosexuality, BDSM… dentists…. All filed into place on an album that could, and maybe should, have been a facile rejection of all the things that had made Alice Cooper such a vital commodity in the first place. But it succeeded all the same, buoyed not only by the sheer lavishness of its presentation; not only by the incredible momentum that had built up around it but because, like ‘School’s Out’ (the single, not the album), failure was never an option.

  As usual, Bob Ezrin took charge of the production, and the handful of cynics who still argued that Alice Cooper was a below par garage band who’d had a few lucky breaks, could take some satisfaction from the legends that circulated around its creation, and particularly, the lengths they would be forced to go to to camouflage the disintegration of the player whom even the band’s detractors acknowledged as probably the best musician in the group, guitarist Glen Buxton.