A dentist’s chair, a surgical table, 14 bubble machines (and 28 gallons of soapy water), 400 pints of fake blood, 2,800 spare light bulbs, 6,000 mirror parts, 23,000 sparklers, elevated risers for the band members, mannequins and statues, a succession of props and costume changes. “It’s definitely more Alice Cooper stylised than ever before,” a gleeful Alice boasted to Circus that May. “It’s Alice Cooper theatre at its most intense.”
There were other changes. A new snake, Eva Marie, was introduced for the sibilant ‘Sick Things’; Yvonne had passed away in February and Alice guiltily confessed that it took him three days to realise, until the smell tipped him off. Neal Smith’s sister Cindy was recruited as a dancing (and oddly orgasmic) molar, to accompany A Clockwork Orange star the Amazing Randi, in his role as the demon dentist, through the nightmarish surgery that accompanied ‘Unfinished Suite’; on and on rolled the innovations, and the madness did not stop when the show was over.
A so-called party budget of $31,000 was allocated, and kicked off with a champagne luncheon in New York’s West Village for 48 invited guests, who were then flown to Philadelphia for a cocktail party, a concert at the 19,500 seater Spectrum, another cocktail party (this time on a boat), a luxury hotel and a champagne breakfast. One-third of the budget was blown that night.
The most sensational change, however, was in the nature of Alice’s death. He was back killing babies again, driving his sword through its hapless body and then impaling blade and babe alike between the legs of the little mite’s momma. But when he came to pay for his crimes (to which necrophilia could now be added), the gallows had been retired, to be replaced by a guillotine, again manned by the Amazing Randi.
Alice told Rob Mackie of Sounds, “People said after the hanging, ‘What can you do next?’ so we did the guillotine, which is an extremely dangerous thing. That guillotine weighs about 40 pounds, and if the safety device didn’t work, it would be all over. Be a great show but you could only do it once. I need that incentive, to know that I’m actually doing something death-defying for the audience.”
Caught on camera in the still-gestating movie, there are few images more iconic, or indicative of the age, than a grinning, sweating Alice leering through the guillotine’s frame, snarling his love of the dead, before he joins their ranks himself.
Originally, the blade was set to stop falling about a foot from Alice’s neck, giving him plenty of time and space to wriggle out of the contraption while the audience’s eyes were glued on Cindy Smith, lofting a severed dummy head from the basket. As the show was refined, however, so was the safety margin. Soon, the blade was halting no more than four inches away from him, “and I learned the art of timing!” he told Famous Monsters, “If I didn’t get out of the way, that 40-pound blade could have very easily broken my neck or cut my head off for real.”
The problem, he confided to Rock Scene, was, “Once you’re in the guillotine, you can’t get out. One time nothing happened, and I almost died… of humiliation!! Finally, I said, ‘HEY – get me OUT OF HERE!’ You know, that blade is razor sharp, and it weighs about 40 pounds!! If it didn’t go right, it could cut my head off – really. It’s far more dangerous than the hanging, because all that could happen with that was that if the rope broke you would get a rope burn.” There was a catch in the apparatus designed to stop the blade from falling the full length of the frame.
“But if that catch doesn’t work… Phewwwwwwww!” He shuddered. Every good magician knows that with the guillotine… there’s always the one time …”
And according to Melody Maker, whose New York correspondent Michael Watts was among the witnesses to the Philadelphia opening, that one time happened on night two of the tour.
Having long since abandoned its earlier, loftier disdain for the entire circus, Melody Maker opened its coverage of the tour by publishing a mock obituary of Alice, a hilarious spoof that declared, “The rock world today mourns the death of Alice Cooper who was accidentally killed last night when the safety screws failed on the guillotine he uses in his act.
“The singer, dressed in black, had just stabbed a plastic doll and was being led to the guillotine by mock-executioner, the Amazing Randi… mouthing the refrain ‘I love the dead before they’re cold’ as his head was settled on the block. The audience was totally hushed. Then… the heavy knife blade fell unexpectedly quickly and Cooper’s head jumped two feet into the air and then landed in the basket.”
That was on March 17. By the following day, all hell had broken loose, with a caller to one of the other music papers, Record Mirror, asking for clarification of a story he had heard on the radio, that Alice was killed in a highway accident en route to a gig.
A call to Warner Brothers’ UK office should have dismissed it, but it too seemed to be both in the dark and labouring beneath a welter of worried phone calls. The BBC, whose monopoly on British radio at that time suggests it would have broadcast the original story, denied having said any such thing, and was fielding its own torrent of calls. And over at Melody Maker, things were even more chaotic as staff fielded “a fierce onslaught of phone calls – more than Osmondrama or Cassidymania produced. ‘Is he dead? Is he really dead?’ was the breathless question every MM reporter had to face on picking up a phone. On telling grief-stricken fans that [Alice] was in fact not dead, and that [the obituary] was a piece of intelligent ‘send-up,’ MM staff faced a barrage of sometimes obscene remarks….
“After two solid days of this, it became blatantly obvious that a large section of MM readers had swallowed the article down the wrong hole.”
The paper’s mailbag groaned along with the telephone system.
“Could you please, please tell me if Alice is really dead. You stated that Cooper had been killed. If this is not so could you define the article’s meaning” – from a reader in Cheltenham.
“I’m very sorry, but I don’t share your sense of humour. Fancy saying that Alice had been killed. Do you realise how many hearts you’ve broken. I couldn’t have been more heartbroken had one of my own family died” – from Julie Varley, of Wallasey, Cheshire.
And from Alice Cooper himself, “Gee, I wish it was all true! I lost $4,000 to Glen at blackjack last night. I could have died! Am I alive? Well, I’m alive and drunk as usual.”
By the following week, the hoax had been put to bed, and another inquest began into just how complicit Derek Taylor and his UK Warners team had been in perpetuating it. As week turned into endless week, however, Alice himself admitted that if the guillotine didn’t get him, sheer exhaustion might.
“I started this tour when I was 25,” he said. I’m 43 now and we are still touring,” he told Circus magazine. “The airplane looks like a flying three-month party. The whole back of the plane is covered with naked pictures. There’s about six card games going on at once. Everyone’s screaming and getting drunk at six in the morning. In Jacksonville, Florida, we had two days off and ran a 48-hour poker game in my room. When it was over, there were broken chairs, beer bottles and torn sheets all over the floor. You would have needed a steam shovel just to clean the room.”
There was talk of taking the show to Las Vegas and Alice still held out hopes for Broadway. And he continued to inveigle himself into new arenas of influence. Two years earlier, around the time of Killer, the artist Salvador Dali was quoted as saying he’d like to design an album sleeve for Alice Cooper. Instead, he created a holograph titled Le Brain of Alice Cooper, a clear glass cylinder in which floated the 3-D image of Alice’s head, topped with a tiara.
But a new foe, too, had arisen, the face of public decency. Alice had always run up against criticism of his act, and the larger he grew, the louder that criticism became. In November 1972, Alice Cooper were booked onto the maiden edition of ABC TV’s weekly In Concert, sharing the billing with Seals & Crofts (!) and attracting complaints before the program even hit the airwaves.
Shot at Hofstra University on September 21 1972, it was a stupendous broadcast, kicked off by a glitter-panted Al
ice pouting and preening through ‘I’m Eighteen’, tearing off his shirt as he teetered on his heels, and the guitars howled dissolute around him.
His reprobate bandmates get in on the act, racing him through a gritty ‘Gutter Cat’ then battling through a brutal ‘Street Fight’, the onstage action purposefully courting the objections as bodies fell, sirens wailed and suddenly there was Alice, stalking the stage unrepentant and rabid, eyes wide and gait unsteady, confessing ‘Killer”s crimes into the camera and not even blinking as he was led off to the gallows.
Only as the dry ice billows and the death march begins does he realise his fate, declaring his innocence and fighting the inevitable. But his heartbeat will halt before the beat of the drum, and before a purple-robed priest who awaits his confession, the killer is killed. Then he bounces back for a screaming ‘School’s Out’, delirious and defiant, taut and triumphant, and climaxed with an orgy of feedback, bubbles and a stage in ruins. Even the normally staid television audience was on the edge of its chairs, and in homes all across America, kids turned round to look at their shell-shocked parents, knowing that their every worst nightmare had come true.
All across America, that is, except in Cincinnati, where the local ABC TV affiliate WPRC-TV station refused to air the band’s half-hour segment of In Concert altogether, and showed an old episode of Rawhide instead.
“We were so proud of that!” Alice celebrated years later. “It’s important to get on television, but it’s even more important to get thrown off television!”
Now, Circus reported, the freaks were truly coming out of the woodwork. And they all seemed to wear the badge of authority.
“In Shreveport, Louisiana, Alice walked cheerfully down the steps of his plane only to be met by a grim-faced sheriff who promptly growled, ‘Ah heerd about choo killin’ them chickens, an’ ah heerd about choo slippin’ them posters ‘tween you legs lahk they was your you-know-what. Yew do anything that ah even theenk is lewd, and ahm gonna slap yew in jail so fast yer ears are gonna fall off.’ That night Alice stood on stage as if he were frozen in place. Only his mouth and his vocal cords moved. ‘I couldn’t even touch a manikin,’ he says, ‘or he would have slapped me behind bars. I was scared. Just plain scared.’ In Memphis, the same thing happened all over again.”
Over the ocean, however, an even greater menace than a local sheriff had emerged, as plans for Alice Cooper’s next UK tour came up against the formidable twin towers of Leo Abse, Member of Parliament for Pontypool, and eternally vigilant TV watchdog Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association. Alice Cooper, Abse declared, was responsible for “the commercial exploitation of masochism” and, as such, was not the kind of entertainer that Britain should be welcoming.
“Cooper is peddling the culture of the concentration camp,” Abse told the Daily Mirror newspaper during a presumably otherwise quiet news week in May. “Pop is one thing – anthems of necrophilia are another.” His act “is an incitement to infanticide. He is deliberately trying to involve these kids in sadomasochism.”
Neither could Abse be accused of mere intolerance. Ferocious in his support of the repeal of Britain’s anti-homosexual laws back in 1967, he also let it be known that his wife employed a man servant, John Barker, who also worked (under the pseudonym Justin Dee) as a drag artist. So this was not simple prudery at play.
Neither would anybody have suggested that, as is so often the case, Abse was simply trying to deflect the public gaze away from any other current affairs, and it was surely sheer coincidence that Abse should launch his attack on Alice Cooper on the same day, May 22, as one of his colleagues, Lord Lambton, resigned from office after being photographed in bed with a prostitute. Rather, Abse was simply reacting in the same manner that any caring parent would respond, after being shown pictures of Alice Cooper by his presumably terrified children, and resolving that no other little Britons should be forced to witness such depravity or horror.
It was the duty of Home Secretary Robert Carr, Abse declared, to deny Alice Cooper an entry visa to the United Kingdom. Diplomatically, Carr responded that Cooper would need to apply for one first. No Alice Cooper tour had been booked or even discussed.
Alice was never formally barred from the United Kingdom; never did have an entry visa revoked for fear that he might transform a nation of law-abiding teenagers into snake-handling baby killers with a taste for masochism. But a full year after Leo Abse brought his name into Parliament, Alice found, suspicions did linger.
Flying into Heathrow in March 1974, he told MM‘s Chris Charlesworth, “I showed my passport to the customs… and the next thing I knew I was taken aside and kept for an hour while inquiries were being made. It seems that trouble with Leo Abse had caused my name to get among the list of undesirables. In the end they let me in, but that MP caused plenty of trouble. I’m thinking of dedicating my next album to him and his daughters who brought the matter up in the first place.”
He continued, “I’ve never been busted or had any drug convictions. I’m not a revolutionary who preaches communism and yet I’m placed on the undesirable list all the same.” He had even recently donated his time and image to a public information film warning young people to stay away from narcotics. “I said, ‘If I catch you taking drugs, I’ll come around and bite your puppy’s head off’.” Needless to say, “[that] got me into even more trouble”.
But he was right to protest. For a couple of years now, Alice had told visitingjournalists that he was more Leave it To Beaver than Polanski’s Macbeth when it came to his private life; and it was no secret that domestically, he had been settled with the same girlfriend, model Cindy Lang, since they met on the Killer tour. Now, however, he seemed determined to come out of the respectable closet, declaring himself a convert to golf, that so-super-staid sport with which – although it was initially no more than a source of media humour and jokes – he has since become almost as synonymous as he is with rock’n’roll. It is a theme that dominates his own autobiography, his struggle for acceptance by his peers on the course lightened by the fact that he already had fame and fortune, but significant all the same.
It is golf that he would later credit with helping him through the hard times that were to come, certainly as he came to battle the twin demons of alcohol and a commercial downturn in the late seventies. Yet it could also be argued that it was golf that helped cause that downturn in the first place, as kids who had so far grown accustomed to viewing Alice Cooper as the hydra-headed embodiment of every nightmare they had never had, suddenly saw him revealed as something else entirely.
Image, as any artist who has ever succeeded… truly succeeded… in creating a larger than life persona will tell you, is a bitch. It requires careful nurturing, regular feedings and it demands to take on a life of its own. And it will reward its owner with untold riches.
But the mask cannot drop for a moment, because even the tiniest chink in the armour lets in the daylight of reality. And the more egregious that reality appears, the more at odds with the image itself, the harder the artist will need to work to keep the fans on board.
Golf was not the reason for the Alice Cooper band’s so-precipitous decline. People did not band together to burn all the albums the first time they caught wind of Alice stalking the golf course in wide grin and denims, after going a round with Bob Hope, Groucho Marx or any of his other new showbiz friends.
Neither could you blame such intemperate comments as Alice blithely informing Cosmo that the best thing about his fame was “the bread I get from records and concert appearances”, another remark that was apparently designed purely to sink his old image of being a ghoul for the sake of ghoulishness. Hell, they weren’t even fazed when the UK teen mag Jackie caught up with Alice and found him relaxing in his hotel suite with his mother and pet puppy, coming on for all the world like an elder Osmond on day release. Or when mom punctured his pontifications about school by turning around and chiding, “You worked very hard, dear. I don’t remember you not
liking it too much.” She turned to the writer. “I guess he just says things to make you laugh. He always liked to make people laugh.”
And so he did. He joked about going head to head with boxer George Foreman, and boasted that the band had spent a staggering $32,000 on beer in the past year. He bragged, too, about his intake. “I used to drink a case a day, now I’m down to three six-packs.” In other words, he was a typical all-American kid doing all-American things.
“Off stage, I’m the nicest guy in the world,” Alice confirmed to Hit Parader that summer. “And it’s so difficult for people to handle. What they don’t realise is that it’s really a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ kind of thing. Sure, when I’m performing I become totally decadent. A depraved animal. I suppose you could say that I’m the ‘new streamlined Frankenstein’. But, the truth is that once I come off… I’m really Ozzie Nelson.”
None of these matters, individually, could be said to have snatched away the cloak of invincibility that once draped Alice Cooper; none of these things sent the kids in search of new nasties. But people did stop believing in what they saw on stage, and they also stopped insisting that what he sang about was real.
At the top of the pile in summer 1973, headlining one of the most extravagant and costly tours the United States had ever seen, Alice Cooper had reached a plateau and, while Alice himself now says, “I am happy with the fact that [we] got as far as we did,” hidden within that remark is the acknowledgement that they had also got as far as they could. The only way to go now was down and, in an ideal world, the backstage machinations that were still gnawing at Alice to strike out on his own would have been raised a notch once the tour was over.
Instead, Alice was allowed to remain loyal to his bandmates, so that together they could discover that their day was soon to end. Indeed, they were still celebrating the final calibration of figures from the tour, everything from the cost of nine cases of beer a day for 96 days, through to the final expenses of $3.5 million. But in July 1973, Circus reported the first public airing for the tensions that were tearing the band apart, as Ashley Pandel*, head of Alice Cooper’s promo team, declared, “They’re going to pull back from the public life and do just one tour a year. The rest of the time they’ll probably do things on their own. Alice would like to get further into motion pictures. Mike Bruce wants to do a solo album. Dennis Dunaway is into art and will spend more time painting. And no one knows what Glen Buxton will do. He’ll probably go to a casino and try to win it.”
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 20