Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  And if Alice required any evidence whatsoever that the public appetite for gore had surpassed even his greatest achievements, it came with the monstrous success of the movie The Exorcist – a film that some folk were saying might never have enjoyed such popularity without the Coopers to prime the pump, but which had taken their vision of cinematic horror to hitherto unimagined heights. As journalist Caroline Coon put it when Alice arrived in London for a three-day promotional visit in March 1974, in the same week as The Exorcist opened in London, “Alice’s reputation for daring to be more diabolically disgusting than anyone else on any legitimate stage in the word, took something of a knock.”

  People threw up during The Exorcist and left the theatre in fear of their lives, or at least their immortal souls. Cases of demonic possession were being reported or, at least, claimed, at a rate that was probably unparalleled since the Middle Ages. Membership of the Catholic Church was certainly soaring. Weakly, Alice Cooper’s supporters argued that they had got out of the horror business just in time, and that that in itself proved their artistic worth, but again, the band’s fans didn’t want them to be worthy artists. They wanted Alice to take on The Exorcist face to face, and ram the old demon’s green puke and bloodied crucifixes straight up where the sun don’t shine.

  And what did they get instead? Alice meekly proclaiming, “We’re not any more violent than most TV cartoons, comics or Grimm’s fairy tales, except that we are three-dimensional. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who takes me seriously on stage is really sort of weird, because I’m not taking me seriously. I’m doing a role just like Bela Lugosi acted Count Dracula. He didn’t go around biting people in the throat when he was off stage. I only take horror to the point where it is entertaining. I hear that The Exorcist prevents people from sleeping. I don’t think I’ve ever horrified people to that extent.”

  Three years earlier, such a blasphemy would have burned his tongue out.

  Disillusion kicked in. In May 1974, a Canadian coroner reported back on the apparent suicide of a 13-year-old boy, found hanged from a length of hemp in his bedroom closet. According to Rolling Stone, “The boy’s father told the inquiry that his son’s experiment with execution dated from his viewing an In Concert show aired in Canada in March in which Alice did his staged demonstration of do-it-yourself death with a gallows and a hangman’s rope.” Yet even the threat of a new plague sweeping the nation, and hordes of teenagers ending their lives in a slew of Alice Cooper “Hanging Parties” did not dispel the threat of imminent redundancy.

  Yes, a boy died and that was a tragedy. But that was nothing compared to the trail of terror that had haunted The Exorcist. The mysterious fires that broke out on set. The string of deaths – anywhere between four and nine – that struck the movie’s crew and cast. The night watchman at the studio, the guy who set up the ice machines that froze the climactic exorcism scenes, one actor’s father, one actress’s grandfather. The fact that after the movie reached Georgetown, the Washington DC suburb in which it was set, the local death toll rose. The number of heart attacks allegedly suffered by the movie’s audience. The lightning strike that destroyed a 400-year-old cross during the movie’s Italian premiere at the Metropolitan Theatre in Rome. Alice had admitted that his whole schtick was a joke. So his audience looked elsewhere for teenage kicks, and you could probably bet your life that the devil doesn’t play golf.

  Circus broke the news. “In what may turn out to be the career move of the century, the world’s favourite ghoul may give up a career of rock for TV and films. Why? The answer lies in a club and a golf ball.” An entire interview was given over not to Alice’s music, but to his love of the sport; his growing skill, the fact that he could now comfortably beat Norman, the bodyguard who first introduced him to the game.

  “Keeping his mind on the ball, and off his usual worries about record albums and concerts, Alice regards the golf course as his sanctuary. The golf course is the only place he positively will not sign autographs. Although his best score so far is a humble 94, he aspires to become a scratch golfer, and may one day retire from rock and roll to become a pro. That one day may just be around the corner. After all, the most thrilling moment for the rock and roll star in the past few years happened on the golf course, when he hit his first birdie on a par three. He said it was more thrilling than his first gold record.”

  The following month an era came even closer to its end when the Alice Cooper Mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, was destroyed in a fire. The band had largely moved away six months earlier, and nobody was on the premises when it happened. But still a lifetime of memorabilia was lost, and with it, Alice’s own most tangible links with his past. By the time he and long-time girlfriend Cindy broke up, in the midst of this tumultuous period, even Alice had to admit that it was time to move on.

  SOUTHERN GENT ALICE, CIRCA 1974. TERRY O’NEILL/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE WITH PHOTOGRAPHER DAVID BAILEY POSING WITH BABY LOLA PFEIFFER WEARING CO0PER STYLE EYE MAKE UP AND BAND MEMBERS WITH MACMINE GUNS. THIS WAS THE PHOTO SHOOT FOR THE COVER OF BILLION DOLLAR BABIES IN 1973. TERRY O’NEILL/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE WITH PAMELA DES BARRES AND RODNEY BI NGENHEIMER. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGE

  ALICE AND IGGY POP AT THE WHISKEY A-G0-G0 IN LOS ANGELES. JAMES FORTUNE/REX FEATURES

  ALICE ON STAGE-AT THE LOS ANGELES FORUM. JAMES FORTUNE/REX FEATURE

  ALICE WITH HIS DRINKING BUDDY BERNIE TAUPIN, CIRCA 1975. FIN COSTELLO/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE ON THE GOLF COUR SE. REX FEATURES

  ALICE AND WIFE-TO-BE SHERYL AT THE STEVEN WYNN GOLDEN NUGGET CELEBRITY SOFTBALL GAME IN LAS VEGAS NEVADA. BRAD ELTERMAN/BUZZFOTO/FILMMAGIC

  THE HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES - ALICE WITH KEITH MOON IN LAIN 1976. DAILY MIRROR

  CLUTCHING A NEWLY AWARDED GOLD DISC ALICE MEETS QUEEN ELIZABETH II IMPERSONATOR JEANETTE CHARLES LEFT TO RIGHT ARE PETER SELLERS RICHARD ChAMBERLAUIN, LYNSEY DE PAUL AND PETER WYNGARDE DURING A RECORD COMPANY PARTY IN THE UK SEPTEMBER 1975. EXPRESS NEWSPAPER/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE SHOWS OFF HIS GOLF SKILLS TO FELLOW GUEST ACTOR PETER FALK AND HOST MIKE DOUGLAS ON THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW CIRCA 1977. MICHAEL LESH NOV/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

  ALICE ON THE 1975 WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE T0UR. CHRIS WALTER

  ALICE’S SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER TOUR 1978 WITH GUITARIST JEFFER SON KEWLEY. CHRIS WALTER

  FROM THE INSIDE L-R DICK WAGNER ALICE WHITEY GLAN (OBSCURED) PRAKASH JOHN STEVE HUNTER. CHRIS WALTER

  ALICE APPEARING ON US TV’S CELEBRITY SQUARES 1975.

  ALICE AND CASSANDRA PETER SON DURING THE 26TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS IN LOS ANGELES. RON GALELLA LTD./WIREIMAGE

  ALICE ON THE MUPPET SHOW. DAVID DAGLEY/REX FEATURES

  LOOKING GOOD IN LEATHER. ROBERT KNIGHT RCHIVE/REDFERNS

  _________________________

  * Pandel would shortly leave the Cooper team to set up his own independent New York-based PR company, The Image Group, retaining Alice as a client, then quit the PR game altogether and, with his brother Carl and one other partner, open Ashley’s, a bar, restaurant and disco on 5th Avenue at 13th Street which overnight became the hang-out of choice for all involved in the NY music business.

  Chapter Eleven

  Welcoming The Nightmare

  He really wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t said before, but it was Vince, not Alice, who gave the scoop to Penthouse all the same; Vince, not Alice, who distanced himself from the past, and Vince, not Alice, who was now looking to the future.

  So far as the world at large was concerned, Alice would remain the celebrity. Of course he would. But from hereon in, the line that divides the public celebrity from the private individual was not so much drawn in the sand, as painted in vast neon swathes across the page. He had always thought of Alice in the third person, but now he talked of him in that way, too.

  “Alice has a personality all his own. He doesn’t want to be involved with anything established, anything traditional. I play baseball, and I play golf, and I li
sten to Burt Bacharach, and I watch TV, and I drink beer. Alice doesn’t do any of those things. When it comes right down to it, Alice will not be involved with anybody except Alice. He’s too far apart from everybody else, and that’s his rebellion. He refuses to be like anybody in that audience or anybody on that stage.

  “Trying to talk about Alice [is difficult]. Alice is such a different person. So individual that I can’t talk about him, because he lives totally on spontaneity. Me, I’m Ozzie Nelson off stage. I’m ‘Hi, guys, wanna go see a movie?’ That’s me, because I try to be so far away from Alice. I don’t even want to know him. We don’t stay in the same house!”

  Maybe there had been a time when Vince Furnier and Alice Cooper tried to share the same body, back in the first flurry of success with ‘I’m Eighteen’. But Vince got out fast. “I was kidding myself. I wore black leather and drank two bottles of whiskey a day. This is the honest-to-God truth. I was in a VO coma – a Seagrams VO coma – I was actually in a coma for days at a time. I started believing I had to be Alice all the time till I realised, ‘What am I doing this for? They may be killing Alice with alcohol but why do I have to go, too? Why am I involved? I don’t even know him that well!’”

  It was not a distance that he would always maintain. There would be moments over the next five years when Vince truly believed that whatever spirit possessed Alice, be it an English witch, a self-destructive drive, or simply a total lack of will power, owned him as well. But for as long as he could remain in control, he would, and when the strings that held the Alice Cooper band together were cut, so were those that bound Vince to Alice.

  Because they had been cut, irreparably and irrevocably, and the only question that nobody can answer, not even the principals in the now unfolding play, was when the blade touched down.

  Was it when they said goodbye at the end of the Muscle Of Love tour, and finally embarked upon that year off, knowing that Warners’ demand for fresh vinyl would be sated by a much deserved Greatest Hits LP?

  Was it when Michael Bruce sat down with Shep Gordon one day and told him he wanted to make a solo album, brushing away the manager’s warning that to do so could spell the end of the band?

  Was it when Alice turned around and cut his own solo record, and proved what Gordon and Ezrin had been telling him all along, that a solo Alice Cooper was just as strong as the five man version?

  Or was it when the five sat down and finally carved up the empire between them?

  All of the players have their own firm belief, and they have lived with those feelings for long enough now that they are unlikely ever to relinquish them. Tales abound of deals that were reneged upon, and agreements that were bent if not broken; of promises unpromised and ideas unrealised; of behind the scenes manoeuvring and front page headline manipulations; and the only thing that can truly be agreed upon is that they all have the right to disagree. Because there is no single truth to be found. Just a series of events that ultimately added up to one inescapable fact.

  Bruce was not alone in nurturing solo ambitions. Neal Smith, too, would take advantage of what they both fervently believed was a mere hiatus in the band’s career, and while Bruce’s In My Own Way was ultimately released in Germany alone, the drummer’s Platinum Gods went unreleased for now.

  Alice, too, was stirring, although his very first solo project would pass by almost unnoticed.

  Canadian songwriters Steve Hammond and Dave Pierce had invited him to participate in a planned rock’n’roll stage musical, Flash Fearless Versus The Zorg Women Parts Five & Six, a sci-fi themed epic designed to pick up on the recent success of The Rocky Horror Show in London, by realigning Rocky’s paean to old-time B-movies as a tribute to the episodic radio serials that once held the western world enthralled. Indeed, we join the adventure five parts into the action, with hero Flash and his crew already in the grip of the evil Zorg army.

  Grandiosely packaged with a comic book outlining the action as it was relayed in song, the ensuing album was essentially a lure for theatrical producers to step in and bring Flash Fearless to life. But Chrysalis Records picked up the vinyl rights and three months in the studio saw the team, abetted by producer John Alcock, reach out across the universe for participants.

  Alcock brought in his own most regular client, John Entwistle, who in turn invited along bandmate Keith Moon. Elkie Brooks, Robin Trower vocalist James Dewar, Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy, Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior, the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward and more piled into the proceedings. But Alice was the headline attraction, stepping out to perform the two songs that not only open the album, but would also become its first single, ‘I’m Flash’ and ‘Trapped’.

  Recorded in New York City with Bob Ezrin (who also handled Jim Dandy and Keith Moon’s contributions), the two songs were delivered in classic Cooper style, but it did not help. The tidal wave of interest that the album’s cast was expected to arouse simply did not materialise. The single flopped, the album did little better, and the entire shebang effectively faded from view until 1981, when the slightly retitled Captain Crash Versus The Zorgwomen Chapters Five & Six opened at Richmond’s, a small theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard. Skewered by Variety (“an uninvolving space adventure spoof that tries desperately to be clever… but never even comes close”), it closed scant days later, forlorn and forgotten. Alice barely mentioned it again.

  In fact, it is perfectly feasible that he didn’t even remember it. Alice and Moon were partners in another venture around this time, an informal drinking-come-hell-raising club that also embraced a clutch of fellow hard drinking celebrity musicians – Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Mickey Dolenz, Bernie Taupin and, occasionally, John Lennon among them – and which christened itself the Hollywood Vampires.

  “I was always the life of the party,” Alice confessed to Classic Rock magazine in 2011. “If I felt good by just having enough alcohol, if I could stay on this golden buzz from the time I woke up till the time I got to sleep at night, I’d be fine.” The Vampires (“the Rat Pack with teeth,” he once quipped) offered him that buzz and even today, a secret loft at the back of the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles contains a plaque that honours its most celebrated coterie: “This is the lair of the Hollywood Vampires.” “It was expected of us,” Alice laughed, “to be the last one standing.”

  He did not drink like some of his friends. Moon and Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, he marvelled, could sink 36 brandies in a row, and still be back the next day. Like he said, he was content to simply maintain the buzz, and he didn’t even register the fact that every day, the buzz required a little more fuel to get it going. This was just a way to spend time, to have fun, to unwind, and besides, it wasn’t as if he was too drunk to work. In fact, one of the greatest ideas he ever had was conceived at the peak of the Hollywood Vampires, and the fact that he pulled it off so brilliantly more than outweighs another fact that is somewhat less palatable. He almost killed himself in the process.

  Welcome To My Nightmare was to be the most extravagant and costly venture Alice Cooper (and that is the band, not the individual) had ever attempted. Every cent Alice had earned so far would be ploughed into the venture, and when he first broached the idea among his bandmates, he knew he was stepping onto shaky ground.

  They listened, he has said, as Alice, Shep Gordon and Bob Ezrin outlined their ambition but they were also balancing the cost of the outing in their heads; lining it up against what Alice insists was the seriously defeatist attitude creeping into their heads. The relative failure of Muscle Of Love had seriously dampened the musicians’ enthusiasm for extravagance, he claimed, and so had the rise of Kiss, a band that had little to offer in the form of musical competition, but whose stage show – financed by the seemingly bottomless pockets of Casablanca Records – was allegedly devouring as much money per show as the Coopers spent on an entire tour.

  That, of course, was an exaggeration. But only in real terms. Visually, Kiss were a powerhouse of flame and levitation, of noise and explosion, a
nd no matter that their records were almost stultifyingly dull retreads of whatever old riffs the band members could come up with, Kiss were playing venues after one LP that it took the Coopers three or four years to visit.

  “We couldn’t believe that Alice wanted to go out head to head with Kiss,” Glen Buxton said. “That band had so much money behind them, it was like shooting an elephant with a pop gun.” He wasn’t impressed, either, by what he heard being outlined for this new Alice Cooper show. “It was visual but it was also very Halloween, whereas Kiss had a full armoury behind them. Dancers dressed as spiders against a guitar that shot out fireworks. I just couldn’t see it working.”

  Alice was less in awe of the so-called competition. He told writer Mark Brown, “When I first heard about Kiss, I read a thing that said, ‘Well, if one Alice Cooper works, four Alice Coopers ought to work.’ That was basically the idea – to put four Alice Coopers together. And it worked. We never really did the same thing. They were much more pyro. Alice is more intimately scary, creepier, more Broadway-ish than Kiss. Kiss is more comic book.”

  Kiss, however, were not the issue. It was the future direction of the band that they needed to determine, and Alice’s version of that discussion was straightforward enough. Two decades later, he told writer John “Shooter” Harrell, “The two albums before Muscle Of Love were huge hits, and we mutually began to think that the time was right for Alice to change – but in opposite directions.