Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Take that remark at face value, and it was ominous enough; not so bad that “Cooper band split” headlines started to appear, but certainly enough to cause Warner Brothers to make a few unhappy noises and, perhaps, point to a contract that demanded a second album before the end of 1973. So the retreat was cancelled. Work was still under way, said Alice, on the proposed Alice Cooper movie, and he was confident enough to start tossing around some working titles: Hard Hearted Alice (also a newly composed song title), Muscle Of Love (ultimately claimed for the band’s next LP) and Pelvic Thrust, the latter drawn from a lyric in a new stage play Alice had seen in London, and fallen head-over-heels in love with, The Rocky Horror Show.

  And, as for taking 12 months off, he admitted that he seriously doubted whether the band could survive even half that long out of action. “After two months, if we don’t get back on stage we’ll get so restless we’ll go crazy. We’ll probably all rent a jet and check into a Holiday Inn… for old times’ sake.”

  And, of course, there would also be a new album.

  Neal Smith: “After the overwhelming success of the Billion Dollar Babies album and tour, we returned to our Connecticut mansion to recuperate and begin thinking about writing songs for our next album. I, like Michael and Dennis, was always writing songs. After that tour, I was in a very melancholy mood and started composing some new songs, one of those songs was the original version of ‘Teenage Lament’.

  “None of us ever knew for sure if our songs would make it to the next album,” he continued; for now, they were just stockpiling material. Yet Muscle Of Love, the final Alice Cooper band album, ranks as one of the most disappointing LPs ever released by a proven top act. Even today, with so many more decades of crumbling heroes and one-trick ponies to wave their own dreadful wares in its face, Muscle Of Love stands as an album of such supremely ordinary material that even Alice has all but disowned it. Or, at least, passed the buck onto his bandmates by insisting in his autobiography, “There were a lot of compositions where I basically felt like I was going, ‘Okay, if you guys really like it that way’.”

  From the brutally juvenile humour that gave the album its title, through to the frankly boring cardboard box packaging that somebody, somewhere, thought would look good in the record racks, but which didn’t actually fit in them, causing much confusion on the front lines of retail, Muscle Of Love was as drably utilitarian and workmanlike as the photos of the offstage Alice that were now beginning to show up everywhere. The all-American beer-drinking boy who used to be a monster, but he’s all right now.

  There were all manner of reasons for the album’s failure, all kind of excuses. The most pronounced, however, were behind the scenes. Glen Buxton was not involved in the record’s creation at all, and neither was Bob Ezrin, away with Lou Reed and taking Steve Hunter and (for the most part) Dick Wagner with him.

  Jack Richardson took over, an older hand who had maybe not had a crash course apprenticeship in how to make an Alice Cooper record, but who could scarcely be condemned for a lack of experience. Now in his forties (he was born in 1929), Richardson might have turned down the opportunity to directly produce Love It To Death and Killer, preferring a more hands-off “executive producer” credit. But the Guess Who’s success was based on his abilities, and so was that of country rock heroes Poco. He had produced fine middle-of-the-road albums for Gypsy and Hope, and he and Ezrin were blooding a new producer, too, Jack Douglas. An engineer by trade, Douglas had already worked with the Coopers on School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies. Stepping up a notch was the most natural thing in the world.

  Unfortunately, he just would not have the materials to work with.

  “It was a little bit different working with those guys,” Smith explained. “Bob would help us with our arrangements, like he cut ‘I’m Eighteen’ down to three minutes, he crafted the songs and did the arrangements and I think great producers do that, they find the great hooks.” Richardson and Douglas, on the other hand, simply recorded what the band presented them with. And it was not enough.

  At different times over the years, Alice has tried to make light of the situation. Relaxed and casual, Muscle Of Love dispensed with all of the fascinations that had hitherto marked out an Alice Cooper album, and delved instead into what he described as “love, American style”. Lyrically, indeed, there was much for the band’s teenaged audience to get excited about as Alice led them by the hand into a world of fairly undisguised sexuality. The miscalculation they made was in thinking that the kids wanted Alice Cooper to teach them the facts of life, no matter how salaciously it might be done. Mom and dad did that, big brother or sister, or the kids behind the bike shed at school. Alice Cooper, on the other hand, was there to teach you the kind of stuff that the rest of the world cannot show, how it feels to kill yourself, the taste of blood and the smell of fear.

  It was bad enough that he played golf in his spare time. Now he was putting his balls around on record as well.

  “Muscle Of Love was just more of a laid-back album,” said Alice in his attempts to defend the record. “We weren’t doing any sort of horror on it. We just thought we’d sit back and make the album we wanted to, a fun album that didn’t have any kind of concept. Usually we pressure ourselves into an image… the diabolical, notorious Alice Cooper. This time we thought we’d just sit back and have fun.”

  But what sort of fun was it really? Disco was just beginning to flex its muscles in the rock marketplace, and the first rock artists were beginning to pay attention. In London, David Bowie was in the studio with the Astronettes, cutting an album that (although it would not be released for close to two decades more) already predicted his own headlong dive into soul later in 1974. Marc Bolan was working with girlfriend Gloria Jones and backing singer Sister Pat Hall to transform the old sound of T Rexstacy into something gospel tinged and black. A lot of artists who really should have known better were making similar nods towards what really did seem like commercial expediency, but Alice Cooper should have been immune. As Neal Smith says today, “I can’t get around disco, because there was nothing danceable about our music.”

  He elaborates. “The Rolling Stones did ‘Miss You’ and I think because they had an R&B background, Charlie and Bill laid down a great groove and it was 100% Stones all the way.” Alice Cooper, on the other hand, delivered ‘Big Apple Dreamin” a tribute to a favourite night club in New York City. And even Smith admits, “It was definitely very danceable. That was the closest we got to disco”; and for many ears, it was too close.

  Perhaps no song better illustrates the depths to which the band’s creativity had sunk than ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, written after the producers of the James Bond movie franchise invited Alice Cooper to submit a possible theme tune. Last time around, Paul McCartney and Wings had hit hard with the theme to Live And Let Die, ushering in what was widely proclaimed as a new age of rocking themes for the world’s best loved super spy.

  “Can’t you just see the words ‘Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Salzman Presents …’ crawling across the screen?” a pink sailor-suited Alice challenged Rolling Stone as the song was being recorded. “Live And Let Die was the largest grossing film of [1973]. James Bond lives!”

  Alice Cooper did a good job, turning in a performance that was as inspired as any other past Bond theme, and a good few later ones too. But the sense of urgency and immediacy that once kept Alice Cooper ahead of all comers was gone. Rather than slam down the song in record time, and have it on the producer’s desk by breakfast, they took their time, deliberated, dawdled. And while they did so, the Bond crew got tired of waiting and went with a contrarily grisly offering from one time beat boom darling Lulu.

  Yet timing was not the only reason for the song’s eventual failure. Neal Smith confesses, “‘The Man With The Golden Gun’ is the one song, of all the eight albums we did, where I just wasn’t happy with the basic track. It was supposed to be a contender for the Bond movie and all the parts were there, but it just wasn’t as crisp as
it should have been. I was happy with the drum part I played all the way through every album, apart from that one song.”

  Once upon a time, every member of Alice Cooper would have fought against mediocrity, no matter how much his bandmates seemed to scream in favour of it. That is why time spent listening to the demos that eventually became Love It To Death, Killer and, in particular, School’s Out is so enlightening. You can hear the tension crackle between the musicians, you can hear their brains whirring and their minds turning the material over, looking for each and every way they can find to take a song to the next level.

  The music that comprised Muscle Of Love did not enjoy that progression. There is no mistaking the demos for their studio counterparts, but it’s rough edges, rather than rough sketches that characterised them, with even the lyrics sounding close to their finished form. True, ‘Muscle Of Love’ was originally titled, with somewhat greater subtlety, ‘No Respect For The Sleepers’, while the growing tensions within the band itself saw Neal Smith step out of the shadows to perform ‘Baby Please Don’t Stop’, and make a great job of it too. But it didn’t help; the song was canned at demo stage (he would later re-record it for his Platinum Gods solo album) and one of the best songs of the period was lost to Alice Cooper.

  Muscle Of Love “is just so loose”, Alice told New Musical Express. “That’s what I wanted – a live-effect in the studio. I like mistakes. Billion Dollar Babies was too slick; it was so theatrical it lacked guts. So I thought back to my favourite Rolling Stones album – which was December’s Children because it had mistakes all through it. Muscle Of Love doesn’t have obvious mistakes, but there are a lot of dirty edges. In fact it even has a dirty stain on the cover.”

  Big deal.

  “The song ‘Muscle of Love’ was the new direction of the band,” Smith explains. “It was a really tough song. ‘Hard Hearted Alice’ I liked. But ‘Crazy Little Child’, I hated that song. Even when we were doing it, I was like ‘why the fuck are we doing this? It makes no sense’.” He turned his nose up, too, at the one song that did seem to offer a ray of light into the rentaday rock of the rest of the album, the teenage lament of ‘Teenage Lament 74’. And it’s ironic that he feels that way, because he was the one who wrote it.

  ‘Teenage Lament 74’ was written, he says, as a successor to ‘I’m Eighteen’, although it swiftly took on a whole different identity. “It was too sweet. ‘Teenage Lament’ was my song, I wrote it and I don’t like it. I just can’t believe it was chosen for the single. It changed a little bit from when I first wrote it, it came off OK, but I like the dark macabre stuff… it was just a weird thing, it was one of my songs hanging out when we were putting songs together and it developed, but it wasn’t one of my favourites. Personally I was surprised that ‘Teenage Lament’ was chosen to be the first single off the album. ‘Muscle Of Love’ was my first choice for single.”

  He continues, “The band rehearsed the song and Alice did a rewrite of the lyrics, which was his job. The song got better and better.” A reasonably promising portrait of disaffected youth was suddenly transformed into a genuinely affected slice of rock balladeering. Plus, Alice’s opening line about his gold lamé jeans sounds far better than the original complaint that he had “no money in my jeans”. After three years of non-stop hits, whoever was going to believe that?

  So far, so good, then. “But,” Smith continues, “while the vocals were being recorded, it was decided to add some female background vocals to the song. Not just any female singers, but an all-star line-up that included the Pointer Sisters, Ronnie Spector and Liza Minnelli.

  “Now I loved our theatrics, I loved our outrageous stage shows, I loved my monster drum sets and I loved my wild clothes, but I am a purist and didn’t like outsiders singing on our records.” To his mind, that was the end of the song.

  Yet what an appropriate release it should be. No matter that the accompanying promo film could as easily have been applied to almost any other song on the album, as the band stepped back to the golden age of the Keystone Kops and horsed around in prison break drag, the song was a glorious slice of adolescent angst that hit the UK record shops at much the same time as David Bowie (‘Rebel Rebel’), Marc Bolan (‘Teenage Dream’) and the Sweet (‘Teenaged Rampage’) were all delivering what could likewise be considered their personal iconoclastic valedictions to the glam rock movement. In summer 1972, these same artists had sounded the clarion call for teenaged revolution. In spring 1974, they lay down the placards and went home.

  Alice agreed. He told New Musical Express, “It’s about a kid who’s growing up today who doesn’t want red hair, or glitter on his face, or flashy clothes, but he has to conform because it’s a social thing. If I were a kid now, I’d rebel and go the other way. That’s how the whole Alice thing started, only it became accepted. This poor kid is just stuck in the middle. He doesn’t want to look like David Bowie or Alice. The song features the return of the individual.” It was, he insisted, his favourite track on the album and he was vindicated when ‘Teenage Lament 74’ reached number 12 in the UK.

  But there was no doubt that it was a farewell.

  Ever loyal, Circus described Muscle Of Love as Alice Cooper’s “latest and most shocking LP ever”, and Alice played along by outlining the concept that lay behind it. “We did School’s Out as a nostalgic look at the fifties. When I got the idea for Billion Dollar Babies it was just a series of songs. I wrote all those lyrics in one day, and the concept was right there in the lyric content… 16-year-old American kids driving Rolls Royces. Muscle Of Love is interested in urban sex habits.”

  “Sex openness is really healthy,” he continued elsewhere. “In two years it’s not going to be bi, homo, or lesbian sex. Sex is just going to be sex, and I’m preparing the kids for future shock.”

  Sadly, however, what promised to be the most shocking song of all never made it to the recording studios, the sad tale of a lonely housewife “who falls in love with her dishwasher detergent. Her husband’s at work. She squeezes the bottle and white stuff comes out the top and goes into her dishpan. That’s how Madison Avenue designed it. It’s real sexual. Unknowingly, the lady falls in love with the bottle and sleeps with it.” Perhaps equally unknowingly, that outline becomes an analogy for all that was wrong with the album. They had fallen in love with their own packaging, and forgotten the human (or, one might joke, inhuman) element within.

  Certainly good reviews were at a premium, with perhaps the most vicious job of all delivered by Los Angeles scenester and record producer Kim Fowley, savaging the disc in Phonographic Record, calling for the immediate return of Bob Ezrin and aligning his absence with so many other critical partings. “When the Coasters lost Leiber & Stoller, they failed; when the Beatles lost Epstein, they failed; and when the Rolling Stones lost Keith Richards (think about it) they failed!”

  He growled at the inclusion of the disco song; slammed ‘Crazy Little Child’ as “Alice’s Leon Russell neo Randy Newman opus,” and pounded ‘Woman Machine’ as “sexist slop. Shep Gordon is a genius. Bob Ezrin is a genius. Alice Cooper is a genius. But Muscle Of Love isn’t… genius…. The LP by Queen on Elektra tries harder than Muscle Of Love. Buy it instead.” How odd that Fowley should be among the co-writers with whom Alice would begin working on his next album.

  The band toured Muscle Of Love, but the outing was short and generated few headlines. Melody Maker‘s Chris Charlesworth, now the paper’s US editor based in New York, was on board for part of the tour, flying out from La Guardia with Shep Gordon to Madison, Wisconsin, where snow covered the ground: “Shep gave me an Alice medallion to wear,” he recalls. “It was a big, chunky piece of jewellery. The actress Cybill Shepherd was also accompanying Alice, covering it for some up-market magazine. We interviewed Alice together in a hotel suite, and for a moment I thought she and Alice were an item but they weren’t. Each morning, on the Starship, we were all given a bag of vitamin pills by his road manager, Dave Lieberman.”

  Charlesworth also r
emembers that Dick Wagner was playing guitar in the wings. “It was the first time I’d ever encountered a situation where there was a hidden guitarist that the audience couldn’t see. No-one tried to hide this from me… it was regarded as perfectly normal but I remember thinking how outrageous it would be if, say, the Who or Led Zep had a guitarist in the wings covering for Townshend or Page… unheard of! And the Cooper band was aspiring to the same level. I remember talking to Michael Bruce and he seemed a bit pissed off about it. Glen Buxton was obviously somewhere else entirely.”

  Live recordings from the tour, back-of-a-barn type tapes for the most part, show how easily a handful of the new songs slipped into the repertoire, but it was only a handful, as though the band had already conceded defeat; knew that they would never be able to replace the existing stage highlights, so they didn’t even try.

  It was as though a world had ended and the last people to know it were the people who created it. Other musical fascinations had arisen; and other preoccupations too. Alice made his non-singing television debut in a lightly supernatural TV movie called The Snoop Sisters and, after it aired, claimed to be receiving around five new scripts a week to consider. No doubt they took his mind off the unfolding catastrophe.

  A show in Binghamton, New York was cancelled because the city fathers refused to allow Alice Cooper to play there; another, in Tampa, was canned because of unexpected winter weather. In Toledo, a rain of fireworks forced the band to walk off the stage, while seven carloads of police were called in to quell the 8,000 strong crowd. Eva Marie, Alice’s latest snake, passed away. A projected European tour was cancelled.