“Glen [is] still real tired,” Alice excused him. He told Rock Scene, “Glen can’t drink any more – and he used to drink two bottles of whiskey a day! He’s completely changed now… he’s so tranquil, so laid back. It’s pretty weird to see someone who used to insult you for nine or 10 years to be like that! He’s so polite, it’s just not him!”
Yet his kind words disguised real suffering. Buxton was falling apart, physically and emotionally. Drink and drugs played a part in his collapse, of course, but there were so many other triggers that even his friends gave up documenting them, or even trying to work out which ones were true, and which were just another flower on the grapevine of rumours and “a guy who knows them told me …”
There was the night, early on in the band’s career, when his entire luggage, including every shred of ID he had ever owned, was stolen from the hotel – the shock of discovering himself, however temporary, with no means whatsoever of proving who he was transcended the simple calamity that it would prove to most people, and manifested itself as an absolute psychic shock.
There was another night, in an unnamed town on an undated tour, when an unidentified whisperer saw him reduced to emotional ashes by the demands of an especially twisted groupie.
And another one when the resolute (intolerantly so) heterosexual who, for reasons he could never fathom, was a magnet for every gay guy in town, went home with the hottest chick backstage, and never said a word about what had transpired when he saw his bandmates at breakfast the following morning. So they never said anything either, and they certainly never mentioned that someone else had told them that the chick was a dude… and an under-age one too.
Every band has those moments, every band has those experiences. But not every musician is equipped to deal with them, and whether or not any of the rumours were true, the fact is, Buxton was not one of those who could.
Without ever speaking publicly of the drinking and drugs that were taking such a toll on their guitarist, or the stress that he was trying so hard to combat but which only grew worse the more he self-medicated, Alice and the band made little attempt to hide their concerns for Buxton’s future, not only as a musician, but as a living, breathing soul. Hospital visits were becoming a regular occurrence; on his most recent stay, he had part of his pancreas removed.
Buxton’s own removal from the band would be a gradual process; he would remain a random spark in both the recording and touring process through until the end of the group. But Michael Bruce recalled the chaos that surrounded the quixotic Buxton’s departure. “Alice and Neal and I went to Glen and asked him to step down. We were still gonna let him come to rehearsals or do whatever he needed to do. We wanted him to get help, and we were still going to pay him whatever he was earning. But he refused. He was really stubborn. That caused a lot of problems, and I think it did make it easier for Alice to walk. It was easier for him to leave the whole band than it was for him to stay and add another player.”
For now, Buxton was still holding it together, at least on stage, if only because of the adrenalin combined with whatever else might be coursing through his veins gave him the necessary jump start. But in the studio, his only contribution to the finished recording was the sound of a guitar self-destructing in “Sick Things,” and Mike Mashbir, a Phoenix guitarist who had played with Bruce and Smith back in the early mid-sixties, was already waiting in the wings, an auxiliary guitarist in the live show, ready to step to the front line at a moment’s notice. As the Billion Dollar Babies sessions moved on, so Mashbir found himself called more and more often to step inside Buxton’s boots.
There was a problem, though. Mashbir knew the material, he knew the musicians. What he didn’t know was the studio, and the early sessions at the mansion were so chaotic and so unproductive that even Ezrin was at the point of giving up; abandoning work until the band was in a better state of mind or, better still, until Glen Buxton returned.
But there was no time for that. Instead, they decided a change of scenery was required, shifting across the ocean to London and booking immediately into Morgan Studios. The bulk of the album was recorded there, with Mashbir the reliable fingers on the frets throughout. To the world at large, however, he not only remained anonymous, he might as well not have been there at all. When ‘Slick Black Limousine’ fell out of New Musical Express, and the critics gathered to praise the slide guitar that shone through it, that ought to have been Mashbir’s finest moment, because of course he played it. Instead, he mourned, Buxton was handed a Golden Microphone Award, and compared to Eric Clapton.
Worse would follow, though, as additional plaudits for the album’s guitar work were spread even further afield.
Any number of special guests were filing through the studio doors. The cast of characters that Tony Visconti caught on tape one night was back, along with Donovan Leitch, the sixties singer-songwriter superstar who loaned some distinctive vocals to the song ‘Billion Dollar Babies’; Family bassist Ric Grech, who recorded a couple of jams with the band, but never found his way onto an actual song; Marc Bolan, who dropped by one day with Flo & Eddie, and dipped a few guitar riffs into the stew; and Keith Moon who, from all accounts, set up his drum kit and then fell asleep.
Dennis Dunaway refuted many of the legends. “I think Donovan was the only one. It’s too bad we didn’t get more. It would have been great to have backing vocals from Flo & Eddie, but I don’t think they’re on there. And Harry Nilsson had an incredible voice. It’s just unfortunate that it was uncontrollable because he was drinking so much. You couldn’t get anything done when he was around. He would just fall across the mixing board and knock all the faders out of whack. But then he would stumble out into the studio and sit down at the piano, and his voice and what he was playing would sound incredible. I was like, “I can’t believe this guy. Why doesn’t he just stay there and play and sing for the rest of his life?’”
A few more jams did make it onto tape, but there was little in the way of outtakes or extra material for history to get excited about. The band was so well oiled at that time, the demands of their career so painstakingly choreographed, that they knew exactly what they were going to play long before they got into the studio. Yet there were two players who did join the band in the studio, whose contributions would be preserved on the finished record, and whose presence would, in fact, change the dynamic of Alice Cooper forever.
Steve Hunter was born in Decatur, Illinois, 1948 a musical prodigy even as a child who picked up the guitar when he was about 12, and crash-coursed every American guitar band he could lay his ears on, before turning his hand towards the British Invasion.
Hunter formed his first band at High School – the Weejuns were named after a favourite shoe. From there he joined the Light Brigade, alongside future Rufus keyboard player Ron Stockert, pounding around area nightclubs and bars on the same kind of circuit as the Earwigs and Spiders were suffering in the southwest, and subject to the same deprivations: the five sets a night engagements that barely paid the cost of the beer that kept the players hydrated, the long drives into the middle of nowhere to play a dance that nobody told you had been cancelled; and so on.
Yet he was attracting attention already, a wild guitarist whose grasp of flash led many to compare him with the young Jeff Beck, and in 1971, Hunter moved to Detroit to join the Mitch Ryder band, at that time one of the toughest gigging bands in the land. Ryder was certainly a ferocious performer, with enough hits behind him to ensure a healthy live schedule, and Hunter fit easily into that regimen, both on stage and in the studio – where he met, for the first time, the man with whom his career has forever been linked, producer Bob Ezrin, as he spread his wings outside of his commitments to Alice Cooper.
The Ryder band split in summer 1972, but Ezrin and Hunter remained in touch. The producer had long talked about pooling the talents of a few favourite musicians as a kind of house band to accompany him on future production gigs and, over the next three years, that pack would both record and tour with L
ou Reed (Berlin and the epochal Rock’n’Roll Animal live album) and Peter Gabriel (his first, self-titled, post-Genesis effort).
It was at an Alice Cooper session, however, that Ezrin first saw this particular dream come true. “Steve Hunter played on a lot of Billion Dollar Babies. He’s my favourite guitarist and if you listen, there’s just no one else who could have played lead on ‘Generation Landslide’ or that solo in ‘Sick Things’ but him.”
Neither was Hunter the only guitarist added to the brew. Last time around, tiring of watching Buxton struggle with the chord changes that made up School’s Out’s ‘My Stars’, Ezrin brought in another young player he had earmarked for the session team, ex-Frost guitarist Dick Wagner.
Wagner, too, was still reeling from the loss of his band at the time. Detroit born, Wagner had guided the Frost through three stellar albums, 1969’s Frost Music and Rock And Roll Music, and 1970’s Through The Eyes Of Love before they broke up. Wagner moved on, relocating to New York and forming Ursa Major, who toured with Alice Cooper on a few dates of the Killer tour, and whose 1972 debut album was another Ezrin production. But the band split, also that summer, and Wagner, too, followed the producer’s dream. Now he was both playing and co-writing with Ezrin and, according to the producer, it was they who wrote what would become Billion Dollar Babies’ most dramatic piece, the finale ‘I Love The Dead’. “Alice threw some lyrics in,” Ezrin told New Musical Express. “[Then] they bought [Dick] out.”
At the time, it was still too early for anybody to see any genuine portents of the future, let alone the Cooper band’s ultimate doom, in the simple juxtaposition of a producer and his two pals in the studio with the group. But the seeds of the Alice Cooper group’s eventual destruction, sewn the previous summer by the first half-heeded whispers, were flowering nonetheless.
They were nurtured by alcohol. Alice himself was drinking heavily now, rarely seen without a can of Budweiser in the hand, and his bandmates were indulging appetites of their own. Glen Buxton confessed to having allowed great swathes of his most successful year to be blotted out by one excess or another, and observers around the band’s inner circle all point to their own favourite crop of anecdotes to reveal the sight and sounds of a band that was… not out of control, because there were very few nights when a Cooper show passed off with anything but complete audience satisfaction.
But off stage and backstage, the sheer weight of money, fame and opportunity that had showered down upon them could not help but turn heads, crush inhibition and, however fleetingly, fill everybody with the belief that anything was possible, and everything was theirs for the taking. When Neal Smith became engaged to a statuesque blonde model called Babette, an oceangoing vessel was hired for the party and the guests taken on a night-long sail around Manhattan, offshore being generally acknowledged as the best place to indulge unobserved in fabulously hedonistic behaviour. When the ship finally docked at dawn the bleary-eyed revellers were each given hand-stitched custom white T-shirts to mark the event.
Behind such fun and games, tensions were beginning to gnaw at the band. All five band members were still contributing songs to the group but increasingly, it was Alice’s that were the first to be seized upon by Shep Gordon and Bob Ezrin, the self-appointed deciding vote when it came to choosing material. In some ways it was understandable; alongside the relatively sober-minded Michael Bruce, Alice was the group’s most prolific writer. But was he the voice of the band as well as its face? That was the question that exercised his colleagues; that and the growing gulf in the band members’ personal income, as the songwriters soared into six figures a year, while the musicians remained locked in the lower-mid fives.
The very act of recording changed. Once the entire band had been in the studio together, watching and listening as the parts came together. The four musicians still worked like that. But Alice was no longer with them now, preferring to record his vocals alone with Bob Ezrin, as though he was somehow above his bandmates. Or maybe, as Glen Buxton mused later, “He thought there’d be less distractions if we weren’t around, and maybe he was right.”
When they did come together in the same room, the band’s schemes were as grandiose as they had ever been, only now they had the money to actually carry them out. Well, some of them. Early plans for Billion Dollar Babies to be packaged with a free dollar bill inside each copy of the record, as a thank you to the fans, were scrapped when the Warner Brothers bean counters pointed out precisely how much money such a gesture would cost, before the dollar itself was even factored into the price. Instead, a still costly, but more rational, fake billion dollar bill was inserted into the packaging, slipped inside a sleeve designed to resemble a green snakeskin billfold.
Billion Dollar Babies emerged one of the most elaborately packaged albums of an already extravagant year. David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery bookended a year that saw the LP designer’s art raised to fresh heights of extravagance, but still Billion Dollar Babies stood out, with its cut-out bubblegum cards, a functional money clip, and a vivid inner sleeve photograph of the babies rolling in dollars. The outer sheen could not help but communicate itself to the music within.
Yet still Neal Smith confesses, “I’m still amazed that in 1973 we had the number one LP with Billion Dollar Babies. To me, that was the peak of our career in terms of things happening out of the blue that we weren’t even expecting.”
They knew, of course, that the album would be a hit. They hoped it would be bigger than School’s Out. But in an age when no more than a dozen albums, and sometimes less than that, were ever likely to top the American chart in a year; and with the likes of Elton John (Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player), Led Zeppelin (Houses Of The Holy) and Pink Floyd’s already perennial Dark Side Of The Moon all there or thereabouts, what chance did Alice Cooper truly have of bucking the statistical odds?
But in its first week of release, in mid-March 1973, Billion Dollar Babies became Warner Brothers’ top-selling album, and having entered the Billboard chart at number 98, the following week it was number 18. Seven days later it was number 10, behind three previous album chart toppers (Elton, Carly Simon and War), and the flukish triumph of the Deliverance soundtrack. And then it was a two-horse race, Alice duking it out with Diana Ross and the immortal soundtrack to Lady Sings The Blues. But even Ross’ initial supremacy only delayed the inevitable. On April 21, Billion Dollar Babies topped the American chart. A year later, with Shep Gordon proving as shrewd a financial investor as he had become a business manager, Alice was on the cover of Forbes magazine, headlining an article on “The New Millionaires”.
“There I was with the hat, cane…. that was the best,” he told Kerrang! in 1989. “I have it framed and on the wall, it meant so much, because we really hit the heart of America. Before that I’d been in Rolling Stone a few times, the cover of every major rock mag numerous times. But after Forbes I’d step on to a plane and they’d say, ‘Excuse me Mr Cooper, you must be in first class’… and I never, ever sat there! I was always at the back, drinking too much. So they’d sit me next to these grey suits who’d ask me if I could sign their copy of Forbes for them…. because it was their bible. That was when Alice really had arrived.”
And the rest of the Coopers were stuck back in coach.
Chapter Ten
Can’t Think Of A Word That Rhymes
The band hit the road as slickly choreographed as ever, but with an eye on the slickness more than the choreography. “We change it a little bit every night,” Alice told Rock Scene magazine. “It really depends on what people throw on stage. Like if someone throws a baseball hat on stage, that’ll change my whole way of moving around.” Recently, they had seen a flurry of sex toys, vibrators and dildos, appearing amid the nightly rain, “so I’m still inventing things to do on stage. I get excited by the music, I really like it. By the time we get to New York at the end of the tour, the show will have really developed. It’ll be so smooth.”
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p; Not everything that landed on stage was welcome, however. Violence was becoming commonplace at gigs, both in the audience and in the audience’s reactions; as though the challenge that Alice Cooper had once thrown down, of appearing the biggest, baddest, meanest machine in town had drawn from the audience a need to be even bigger and badder. And meaner. By the mid-point of the tour, Neal Smith once said, the musicians were seriously considering wearing football helmets on stage.
Fireworks became an occupational hazard, including several that came close to doing serious damage. Massive M-80s exploded on the stage in Canada; another night, a smaller but potentially equally deadly firecracker landed in Michael Bruce’s hair and it was fortune alone that ensured it was a dud. In Seattle, Alice was hit by a flying bottle. In Chicago, Neal Smith was struck by a dart.
Logistically, too, the tour was a nightmare. With Shep Gordon declaring it one of the highest-grossing tours in rock history, ticket sales in excess of 800,000 grossed some $4.5 million across 56 nights – a million or so less than Three Dog Night claimed their 1971 workload accrued, but they did not need to factor in the sheer cost of the extravaganza. Joe Gannon, a stage and lighting designer who had previously worked with Tiny Tim in Las Vegas and Neil Diamond in New York produced a Hollywood Squares-like set that weighed eight tons, soared 25 feet into the air and cost $150,000.
The tour covered 28,000 miles in the US alone, and featured around 70 press conferences in front of some 2,000 journalists. The band travelled aboard the Starship, a chartered four-engine, 48-passenger jet; their equipment was carted aboard two trailer trucks capable of holding 40 tons of stage gear.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 19