“I had no doubts and thought that now that the door had been opened, we should make this even bigger, but they thought we should scale down. They said that because we were Alice Cooper, we would do just fine even in jeans, boots, and T-shirts. I said that was suicidal.”
Yet his own vision was scarcely less suicidal either, sinking every penny into a project that had no guarantee whatsoever of succeeding. Muscle Of Love had dented their confidence, but beyond that, so had the failure of so many other attempts to take what amounted to a theatrical production onto the road. The very same summer that Alice Cooper were discussing the nightmare, David Bowie had set off around America with what amounted to a full Broadway production, as he toured his Diamond Dogs concept album. The critics generally hated it, his own band all but mutinied, and audiences were none too impressed either. Finally Bowie abandoned the whole thing halfway through the outing, packing up the stage sets, sending home the dancers and boxing all the props. In terms of their American profile, Alice Cooper was a lot bigger than David Bowie. But their audience was just as fickle.
Alice was unperturbed. “I’ve often been asked why I fired the original band,” he mused to Classic Rock in 1999. “Well, I never fired the Alice Cooper band, the truth is they fired themselves. After Muscle Of Love had finished, we hooked up to make another record and everybody wanted to do their own albums. Dennis wanted to sound like Pink Floyd, Mike wanted to be James Taylor, I don’t know what Neal wanted, but none of them wanted to continue with theatrics… That was such a blow to the stomach for me. I mean, are you kidding? I said that we’d run the gauntlet of all that criticism, we were bloodied but not beaten and yet we’d got to the top of the mountain and now they didn’t want it any more? No way! For me it was time to take it to the next level while we had everybody’s attention.”
Reawakening all of the ambitions he had once placed around Alice At The Palace, he drew up a list of his requirements. Just like before, dancers, props, costumes, choreography, everything needed to be perfect. But whereas Alice at the Palace needed simply to find a home and then bring the audience to it, Welcome To My Nightmare would go out and visit the crowds. “It’s easy to say you want to do a show on Broadway,” he mourned to Rock Scene, “but the unions… God! Is it a problem. Shep had to go and wear a suit and tie to meet with them, they thought the kids were going to come in and tear up the seats – which they might have done, I don’t know. We couldn’t use any of our own road rats – we would have to use all union people, it just got ridiculous.” Touring Welcome To My Nightmare would allow Alice to handle things his way.
But that was not the whole story. There was another reason why Alice and Shep were so willing to gamble everything on this new venture, one which dated back to the days when Warners purchased the Straight catalogue from Frank Zappa, and back further still, to the contract negotiations with Zappa and Herb Cohen themselves.
For three years now, the publishing dispute that first raised its head around the time of Killer had been winding its weary way through the corridors of America’s legal system, but finally a judgement had been arrived at. Interviewed by Goldmine in 1990, Michael Bruce explained, “Shep had lost two-thirds of the publishing in a lawsuit – all the way up to Billion Dollar Babies – so he was basically faced with starting over.” Welcome To My Nightmare was the point from which he would begin.
Alice agreed, telling writer Russell Hall, “Shep asked how much money I had, and I told him he knew [the answer to that] better than I did. It turned out I had about $400,000 and he had about $400,000, so we put all that into the project. Our thinking was, ‘If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll start all over.’ We did everything we could to make sure it would be either the biggest success – or the biggest failure – we ever had.”
The financial risk was huge, then, but there was also a safety net.
Neal Smith: “There was a loophole we had put into our contract [with Warners]. When the Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night, it was on United Artists instead of Capitol, and that was because they had a loophole saying if they did a soundtrack they could find another record company to release it. So we had the same thing in our contract. Shep got it into the Warner Brothers contract and we wanted to use it for the same reason as the Beatles. Because you can get a huge advance [from a different label] if you ever do a soundtrack [whereas your own label would simply pay the same rate as usual].”
It was a smart move, too. The band’s own movie, the long-mothballed (and newly retitled) Good To See You Alice Cooper, was finally ready for release, and Smith, Dunaway, Bruce and Buxton were all expecting that to be the project which triggered this clause. Instead, Smith remembers, “Alice used it on Welcome To My Nightmare. He used that clause on his own for his solo project, which was probably the first step towards pissing everybody off.”
Even before recording began, Gordon was in negotiation for one of the American television networks to pick up the nightmare for broadcast, finally settling upon ABC. (It would be broadcast on April 25, 1975.). And a record label proved just as easy to find. In the United States, it was Atlantic Records who stepped in with the riches Gordon was looking for; in the UK, it was Anchor Records. Both were willing to pay handsomely for the honour of having Alice Cooper on their label, and while Warners (and his increasingly estranged-feeling bandmates) howled in horror at Alice’s perfidy, Gordon put the deal in place. Alice’s ambitions went up another notch. A soundtrack album needs a movie to soundtrack. He got to work scheming that as well.
In March 1974, the team of Alice, Bob Ezrin, Dick Wagner and songwriter Alan Gordon (author of the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, among others) decamped to the Bahamas to write and demo new material, and Ezrin admitted the entire process was a producer’s dream. He had earned plaudits aplenty for his work on Lou Reed’s Berlin album, a set that was as quixotically orchestrated as it was depressingly dramatic – legend insisted that when Reed asked for the sound of children crying, Ezrin went home and told his own kids that their mother had died, and then taped their screams. And though both Reed and Ezrin have since denied that, the tenor of the album was such that the tale remains a touchstone of Berlin. Welcome To My Nightmare might not be able to boast a similar legend, but it would be no less intense for all that. Only this time, it was entertainment, not excoriation that Ezrin strove for.
There would be moments of supremely sinister sonics. ‘Years Ago’ and ‘Steven’ haunt with their calliope-like accompaniment, and Cooper’s voice twisting to that of an 11-year-old boy. And the necrophilia of ‘Cold Ethyl’ rocked as dangerously as any of the old band’s more straightforward three-minute thrashes, drawing its own share of brickbats after esteemed US agony aunt Ann Landers got to hear about it.
“It was so over-the-top that it had to be funny,” Alice told Rue Morgue in 2000. “Ann Landers wrote a big article about ‘Cold Ethyl’ and in it she said, ‘How dare Alice write this?’ I wrote her back and said, “Dear Ann: if there’s an enormous rash of necrophilia that happens in the next year because of this song, please let me know. 99.9 percent of the rest of us know it’s a funny song!’”
There was a nod back to the mood of ‘School’s Out’, as ‘The Department Of Youth’ took a cock-eyed look at Cooper’s own teetering place at the top of the rock tree, and acknowledged the fickleness of fandom. With a promo film shot against a scrapbook of photos and newspaper cuttings, Alice was the ultimate leather-clad rocker, the epitome of the spirit of rock, the ghoul we elected to make sure school stayed out. And he knows it.
“We’ve got the power,” the kiddy choir cries, and when a triumphant Alice asks who gave it to them, you know what he’s expecting them to say. The Billion Dollar Baby, of course. Instead, they answer “Donny Osmond”, because the kids from the far side of the Mormon divide were at the top of their game then as well, and all Alice can answer is “what?”
And there was a ballad, ‘Only Women Bleed’, which was destined to become one of Alice’s best-loved, an
d most covered, songs ever, and that despite not really having much to do with the nightmare, or even with Alice himself. The title was lifted from a misheard piece of dialogue on the television, the melody was something co-writer Wagner was doodling one day. But they were born to be together.
Cut with the Toronto Symphony under Ezrin’s expert hand, Alice (with Wagner) had not only written his first solo hit, he had also penned an international smash. Two years later actress and singer Julie Covington (a star of the original Rocky Horror Show) took ‘Only Women Bleed’ to number 12 in the UK.
There were teething troubles, of course. Despite having the nature of the nightmare already formulated, Alice admitted that it was the most straightforward songs that came first, ‘Department Of Youth’ and ‘Only Women Bleed’. These first two tracks were recorded, and then writing resumed. ‘Years Ago’, the first of the album’s most crucial thematic numbers, slipped out. A trip to Rio De Janeiro spawned the rambunctious ‘Some Folks’, with its deliberate nods towards Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’; a visit to Paris unearthed ‘Cold Ethyl’ (“I guess I ate too many garlic snails,” Alice quipped.)
It was September before the writing was over, and drummers Johnny Badanjek and Whitey Glan, bassists Prakash John and Tony Levin and keyboard player Josef Chirowski could line up for sessions that shifted from New York’s A&R and Record Plant to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady, and up to the Toronto Soundstage, each one lending its own staff to the proceedings. And Steve Hunter was there of course, teaming up with Wagner to provide the album with what remains a headline performance quite apart from Alice’s.
Throughout Lou Reed’s recent Rock And Roll Animal tour, the pair had developed into a sensational double guitar attack, duelling wizards whose work on the ensuing Reed live album was already being talked of in the same kind of tones that accompanied the legendary Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page-fired Yardbirds of late 1966. The difference was, while Beck and Page rarely meshed in the manner that their subsequent reputations suggested they should; and while that line-up of the Yardbirds would pass with little more legacy than one fiery 45, Hunter and Wagner pulled it off every night. “Steve did a lot of ghost work for everybody,” Alice confirms. “Ask Steve Tyler about Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, and he calls them the dynamic duo because they are the best tandem guitarists in America.”
At first, Alice wondered how it would feel, stepping into the studio without the familiar safety net of Dennis, Neal, Glen and Mike surrounding him, and looking back he admits, “It was a shock. But at the same time. I was surrounded by incredible players, Dick and Steve and Prakash and Whitey, these were all guys who were really good players and they were all stage players too, so I understood immediately.”
Bob Ezrin’s Eastmans’ mentor Phil Ramone dropped in; so did the crown prince of Hollywood horror, Vincent Price, whose role as “the curator” presaged his work on Michael Jackson’s Thriller by eight years. And around this battalion of brilliance, Cooper and Ezrin worked the songs into the shape of the concept – a child struggling to awaken from the darkest nightmare they could envisage. ‘The whole thing,’ Alice explains, ‘is done on the level of a Peter Pan.”
Price’s involvement was an especial thrill and, talking to Hit Parader the following year, Alice remained as excited as he was the first day they met. “We were sitting around for him to come into the studio and expecting him to be dressed all in black, you know. He comes in and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and purple stripes pants. Everyone is going ‘That’s Vincent Price!?’ Then he goes in and he does this really Edwardian dramatic reading and it scares the hell out of you. Then you look at him and you just have to start laughing, because he looks like Ronald McDonald. I really get along with him, we are very good friends.”
Auditions were under way for the dancers who would accompany Alice through the depths of his nightmare and play their own part in its unfolding. Four spots were up for grabs, two male, two female, with the eventual victors being signed to a one-and-a-half year contract that incorporated a world tour, a television special, stage appearances and even the possibility of a movie.
Some 3,000 dancers turned up on the day of the female auditions, including one who did not even know who Alice Cooper was. Raised in Pasadena, California, Sheryl Goddard studied ballet until she was 16, when she switched to jazz. In 1975, she was attending Citrus College in Azusa, California, when some friends suggested she audition for the Alice Cooper stage show, and she went along as much out of curiosity as ambition. “I knew about Bach, not rock,” she told Phoenix Home And Garden 15 years later. “I had never heard of Alice Cooper. I thought I was auditioning for some blonde, female folk singer.”
Yet “the skinny little ballerina” as Alice described her years later, got the job and she also remembered the first time she ever touched her new employer, while teaching him how to stretch for one of his own dance routines. “I hurt him. He told me to never touch him again.” Before long they were an item, a state of affairs that caused some unpleasantness with Alice’s ex, Cindy Lang, who threatened to sue him for ‘palimony’.
With the cast now complete, attention turned to the television special, shot at a video studio in Toronto early in the New Year.
Over the course of five days, with a full team of musicians and dancers adding to the $20,000 cost of simply getting the proceedings on film, 11 songs were performed for the cameras, painstakingly retelling the story of the album for a project that was so revolutionary that nobody even knew what to call it.
Rock video was not even a minority interest in early 1975; would not be envisioned as a commercial contender until the end of the year brought Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ extravaganza. A few artists had used film in the past, Alice Cooper among them, but generally as nothing more than a means of promoting their latest single without having to tour the world. But you had to reach back to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, in 1967, to find a comparably album-sized venture, and that was the role model Alice was aspiring towards.
Alice explained his plans to Record Mirror‘s Martin Lang, “The idea is to put on a musical nightmare. And not only will there be the film and the album, but we’re also going to put some of the scenes in the new stage act. There’s plenty of room to work with so we’re going to make it as much fun as possible, and with Vincent Price in the thing it can’t fail to be.
“I look at it as a formula, a fun formula. We always work in total concept. So Welcome To My Nightmare is going to be… well if you really think about a nightmare it’s totally absurd, a Hellzapoppin’ experience. Lyrically, the LP is on a nightmare level, where it jumps around but at the end it leaves you like you went through somebody else’s nightmare, you went through Alice’s nightmare. It introduces a new character, this guy Steven. I don’t even know him yet, but he’s frightening as hell. He’s a nice little kid but he keeps going back and forth and you never know where he is. He’s part of the nightmare. It’s fun, it’s a fun type of horror show.”
Reflecting from further afield, as he prepared the album’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare sequel in 2011, Alice continues, “Welcome To My Nightmare was a very classy album and a very creepy Alice. It was a very rich sounding album. Bob [Ezrin] brought that to it; it had a very rich sound to it, it didn’t have the normal rock instrumentation that we’d always used, except for ‘Cold Ethyl’ and songs like that, those were pure Alice raunch songs. But even ‘Welcome’, the theme, was – wait! It’s almost jazzy, and it still worked, and I think as long as it’s Alice singing it, the audience allows me to go in some weird directions.”
The album was complete, the TV special was in the can. Now it was time for the stage show. Over $250,000 was earmarked for the outing, beginning with another Joe Gannon extravaganza for the basic set. A towering cyclops was constructed, first to menace Alice during ‘Steven’, and then to be beheaded. Producer-director-choreographer David Winters, a choreographer on West Side Story, was hired; and so were four professional dancers who, Alice delightedly insisted, had bee
n “thrown out of Las Vegas for indulging in lewd activities”. They hadn’t, but it was a great story.
As for the skyrocketing costs, he simply shrugged. “I don’t really care whether the thing comes off commercially, as long as it’s entertaining. There’s going to be things in the stage act that kids have never seen before.”
There were close to five months of rehearsals to negotiate. The Disney studios were commissioned to construct the stage set and accompanying props. Fresh backing tapes needed to be recorded to ensure the seamless reproduction of the music onto the stage, and elaborate choreography was required to allow each night to run as close to clockwork as possible. And once all of that was in place, there was still the business of the tour itself.
The itinerary was enormous. Over 70 shows were ultimately lined up around the album’s release, an exhausting routine that saw Alice scour the United States before moving onto Europe in the autumn; he could not, then, have been faulted if he breathed a sigh of relief when he learned that a proposed swing through Australia had been cancelled after the government weighed up his potential impact on the country’s youth.
“I am not going to allow a degenerate who could powerfully influence the young and weak minded to enter this country and stage this sort of exhibition here,” huffed the responsible minister, and so the likes of the young Nick Cave and Jim Thirlwell, just two prime examples of upstanding Aussie youth, were deprived of the opportunity to catch a show that had been happily broadcast on American TV. “The head of Australian immigration has called the new show obscene,” Shep Gordon sniffed. “He said that Alice eats live chickens on stage… he says that Alice has a tendency to drop live hornets on his audience… and he said that Pat Boone wouldn’t let his daughter see Alice’s show.”
That, apparently, was the big one.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 23