“There’s nothing lewd in this show,” Alice insisted in an April interview with the Chicago Tribune. “I believe in suggestion. I don’t do it. I suggest it. I don’t even use animals in the show, other than myself. It is not an attempt to shock anyone. It’s just entertainment.”
“It’s just like a cheap Japanese horror movie,” Gordon concluded, and that was an excellent comparison. Footage from the television special was projected onto a backdrop which had been sliced horizontally so that Alice could suddenly and unexpectedly burst through it, his arrival cleverly synchronised with the image of him that was being projected until the exact moment he emerged. The costuming, though excellent, was deliberately exaggerated for the back row of the auditorium; the stage sets were grotesque and over the top; the dancers cartoony and comical even before they donned the glow-in-the-dark skeleton suits (left over, perhaps, from the Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper props; Alice himself wears one in the graveyard scene).
Even Steven’s toy box dwarfs the boy himself, and still the nuances of the performance itself, the expression on Alice’s face as he watches his toys bash one another over the head, for example, were not truly visible until the Welcome To My Nightmare concert movie, shot in London towards the end of the jaunt, finally arrived.
Unlike the spiders who emerge for ‘Devil’s Food’, and dangle and dance through one of Wagner and Hunter’s now-patent guitar duels, the new album did not devour the entire set. A few older hits were scattered through the show, not necessarily to the concept’s advantage (how jarring for little Steven to suddenly declare that he’s 18), but effectively regardless. Still there was no denying the show’s coherence, nor that of the nightmare concept itself, and no matter how often Alice, or any other performer for that matter, has attempted to conceive a similar convincing concert performance, Welcome To My Nightmare remains the closest that rock has yet come to staging a full blown costumed narrative production.
Support throughout the American leg of the tour was provided by another Detroit rocker, Suzi Quatro, as she attempted to translate her UK success to an American audience, and she looks back on the outing with undisguised glee.
“We were all on the same aircraft for 75 shows,” playing everything from poker and blackjack, to staging dart gun fights in their hotel, “using mattresses as cover. It ended up in the corridor. Alice peeked out to see where I was, and I shot him right between the eyes. He had to wear a bandage and also wore my T-shirt on stage out of respect.” Later, when he discovered Quatro would be celebrating her 25th birthday on the road (on June 3), Alice arranged for the entire touring party to fly down to San Antonio to see the Rolling Stones.
The two bands gelled. “Alice’s show was such a contrast to mine. I was just straight rock’n’roll, he was theatre. But we worked well together, and it was so well presented. The dancers and the props, and such a good band. Plus two members [Alice and Wagner] from our home town Detroit. It was like Old Homes week.”
A handful more shows also saw the package joined by a young British band, label mates at Atlantic Records, the Heavy Metal Kids, named not for the musical genre, but for a William Burroughs creation. Drummer Keith Boyce recalls, “We played some US shows with Alice, and then when he came to the UK, we were on the bill again. It really was special. I think we watched the show every night for weeks, and never got tired of it. Likewise, Alice would watch our show from the wings most nights. By now, Alice was a solo act and I think he could see that we were very much a band, and a gang much as the original Alice Cooper were. I think Alice dug that.”
Today, a tour of that size, and an album of that magnitude, would afford its creator at least a couple of years respite before being despatched to cut his next LP. In the mid-seventies there was a very different work ethic, with artists routinely contracted to produce a specified number of records within a strict time period, usually at a minimum rate of one a year. Alice had kept abreast of the contract’s demands with the Greatest Hits album, but the decision to take Welcome To My Nightmare to a rival record company, even if it was a part of the same parent organisation as Warner Brothers, did not sit well with the bureaucrats. The nightmare was still on the road, in fact, when the label stepped forward with a nightmare of its own.
Deliver a new album, or we will sue you. And it wasn’t only Alice who received the notice. The entire Alice Cooper band were hit with it too – and why? Because, like Dunaway, Bruce, Buxton and Smith, Warners viewed Welcome To My Nightmare as a one-off solo project, after which the band would reconvene for business as usual. And Alice had offered no indication to the contrary.
Push, as the old saying goes, was about to become shove.
Chapter Twelve
Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me
Two years had elapsed since the Alice Cooper group last came together in the studio, but Bruce, Dunaway and Smith did not need any reminders of where their strengths lay. All three had been writing steadily in the months, not only accruing material for their solo albums, but with a new Alice Cooper album also firmly in mind. Buxton, awash in a nightmare all of his own, seems to have been happy to allow the others to get on with things, though the door would always remain open for him to reassume his role when he felt able to contribute.
Meeting up at Smith’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, they began working through the songs they had to hand, and creating anew too. Musically, all were solid; lyrically they were more or less sketches, the same as they always had been. It was Alice’s job to write, or at least refine, the lyrics, and it was at that stage, too, that an underlying concept would be nailed down.
The one they already had going was a strong one, though. Among the biggest Hollywood hits of the past year was Rollerball, a futuristic sporting fantasy in which armoured speed skaters fought to the death. A theme that played loosely around the same ideas began to suggest itself, the notion that Alice Cooper had already broached two of America’s greatest fascinations, sex and violence; it was time they investigated the third, the country’s ingrained love of sport.
Neal Smith: “We wrote the music, and Alice would have written his own lyrics. Alice comes in and that was his job; he would have taken the song, rewritten the lyrics and I’m sure they would have gone in a whole different direction. We had great songs on there, some great ballads – ‘Rock Me Slowly’ was a great song, but that could have become ‘Go To Hell’, for all I know.”
It could have. But it wouldn’t. As the band’s sessions progressed, so it became increasingly evident that Alice was a no show.
Not that he ever said so. Dunaway told Goldmine, “We couldn’t really talk to Alice. People would screen our calls and tell us that they would get the message to Alice.” It took an age, it seemed, before Alice himself let them know what was going on. He was working towards that required new album himself, using much the same musicians and team that he employed on Welcome To My Nightmare. The band… the old band, the group he had grown up with and without whom he might still be attending track meets in Phoenix… was over.
Outrage, shock and disbelief. Smith speaks for all three players when he recalls the last time the team’s future was threatened, back in Los Angeles in 1967, with a local record label, Sound Records, gagging to sign the band – but only if they dumped their vocalist. “They stuck with Alice. They always stuck with Alice. But when things turned around, he decided to go out on his own. I can understand that from a business standpoint but it’s interesting to this day, our back catalogue still sells more than all four of us put together. It goes back to the old adage of the singer not the song, but all I know is when Jimi Hendrix left the Experience it wasn’t the same thing. I still loved Jimi Hendrix, I thought he was great… But he was not as great.”
Work on the new album was halted. Suddenly there were more pressing matters to attend to. Smith continues, “When Alice said he wasn’t going to come back, there were all these logistical problems because we all owned the name Alice Cooper, and we had to work that out.”
The spectre of legal action arose, but Smith shot it down. “It could have been the biggest lawsuit in rock history, but it would only have made a lot of lawyers rich, and made us all hate each other, and I didn’t want that because we were all best friends. And I said, ‘You know what? Every band breaks up, even the Beatles, and every band has to come to an end, and I’d rather do it when we were at the top rather than grind it into the ground.’ You can’t force someone to make a record that has any substance or feel to it if they don’t want to. Either we’re in there 100% emotionally or we’re not.” Alice was not, so a new arrangement needed to be agreed upon.
Alice would remain Alice. “Part of the settlement was that we all still own part of the name to this very day. Alice kept going and we all agreed to that, and to this day we all honour that. We encouraged Alice to become Alice.”
Finances were sorted out. Shep Gordon had long since housed the band’s earnings in a corporation, Alice Cooper, Inc. When the band broke up, the corporation was dissolved, and the money was distributed to the five shareholders.
And the band looked to the future, too. “We also agreed that we would take the name of our biggest album, Billion Dollar Babies, and we incorporated that name and we used it as our band name.” And while Alice, Ezrin and company set off in one direction, to record what would become Goes To Hell, the newly minted Billion Dollar Babies headed in another, to record Battleaxe.
Management fell into place, a demo tape was circulated. Warners, perhaps surprisingly, passed on it, but perhaps unsurprisingly, too. They too had never seen Alice Cooper as much more than one man and a band, and they already had the one man tied down. What did they need the band for? Billion Dollar Babies ultimately signed with Polydor and, sadly, everything went downhill from there.
With guitarist Mike Marconi joining the band from Smith’s solo sessions, and keyboard player Bob Dolin to complete the soundscapes, the hugely ambitious Battleaxe was recorded with producer Lee Decarlo at the helm, and swiftly swung out as a hard rock masterpiece – so much so that one can only imagine how magnificent it would have been had Alice worked his own magic on its contents. But the problems started early and they simply didn’t stop.
The first became apparent the moment the record hit the stores – or, more accurately, the moment the needle hit the vinyl. Mixing the album, the opening ‘Too Young’ was simply pushed too far. Two shots of sonics, the “dada da boom boom”, were mixed so high that the stylus literally popped off the record. A quarter of a million copies of the album had been shipped and sold, but the complaints flooded in and so did the returns. It didn’t matter that Billion Dollar Babies were about to launch their maiden tour. The record was withdrawn from sale while a fresh remix was hurriedly effected (Jack Richardson handled the duties), and the group was on its own.
The album stopped selling. The wait for the remix, Smith mourned, “took all the momentum of the original release and slowed it down. And then some other things that shouldn’t have happened did happen, and we realised that it was no longer the Alice Cooper machine we used to have. We were trying to reinvent the wheel and do the best with what we had, and there were just some things that happened that were very unfortunate.”
The band’s timing was perfect. Kiss were at their commercial peak, riding the Bob Ezrin produced Destroyer. Cheap Trick were rising. The Death to Disco campaign was gathering speed, the New Wave was around the corner. America wanted to rock again, and Billion Dollar Babies had the hardest hitting show of all.
Smith: “We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the theatrics. It cost us a lot of money and it was a great show.”
His enthusiasm remains undiminished, even today. “I had hydraulics under my drums, and I did one solo where I went up at a 45 degree angle; I was strapped to my seat and all the drums were strapped down and I played the solo like that. But then at the end of the show, from underneath my riser came a full size regulation boxing ring, with my drums raised behind it. Then Mike Bruce came out dressed as a modern gladiator with a battle axe, which was a guitar with a big axe on it, then Mike Marconi came out with another one; one was green, one was red and they started battling to the death.
“On either side of the stage, there were these 15 foot high thermometers, marked out in million dollars, and every time you dealt a blow, that would be a million dollars, and the death blow, when you got your opponent on the floor, you’d go over and get the battle axe itself, which was this huge blade like something out of a science fiction movie, with a really sharp blade and Mike would lift it up and put it between Mike Marconi’s arm and torso, right into the ground, and then blood would fly everywhere and then the thermometer would go to a billion dollars.
“And all the while this was going on, it was like Emerson Lake & Palmer, Dennis on bass, myself on drums and Bob Dolan on keyboards, and we would play the ‘Sudden Death’ piece from the album, which was a great jazz-rock fusion kind of song; we did a long version of it which was really, really amazing, so we pushed our musical boundaries. Then we’d have the smoke and the lightning, and we’d come back out, Mike Bruce had a bottle of champagne and we did the song ‘Winner’; we squirted the champagne, the confetti would come down, and then we’d do ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ or ‘School’s Out’. It was really a great show, but unfortunately we couldn’t take it more than four shows…..”
Management problems. Promoter problems. Record company problems. And, finally, tour problems. Four shows into the outing, gigs in such midwest Cooper strongholds as Flint, Pontiac and Muskogee, everything ground to a halt.
“And that was it. We’d put a lot of energy into it and one thing led to another. We needed certain things to happen for this to continue, and a couple of them fell out of place. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone out with such a big, extravagant show, but that takes the fun out of it. That’s what we were about and that was the show. It was a lot of energy, plus it was an emotional time for all of us because there had always been the hope the group would get back together and this was us acknowledging that that wasn’t going to happen. We tried very, very, hard to do it and we were pumping tons of money into it and you just reach a point of how much more….”
Billion Dollar Babies disbanded, but if Alice had assumed that fortune would smile any brighter on him, he too was in for a rude awakening.
Shep Gordon defends the decision to shatter the band. “The manager needs to understand the root popularity of the artist, and help him manifest projects that get that across, and can be financially successful.” Welcome To My Nightmare had done both of those things, and done so with such panache that it was no wonder Gordon and Alice believed the band was no longer necessary.
What they had perhaps forgotten, however, is that a band is more than a bunch of guys who hang out with the singer and take away their own share of the income. A band is often also an organic part of the singer’s whole, a sounding board and a source of inspiration, a creative hydra whose input is based not only on current requirements but also shared experience.
Alice re-created that to some extent by surrounding himself with a new team of regular players, and of course Bob Ezrin and Shep Gordon both offered a degree of continuity. But though they shared his life and many of his likes, they had never shared every one of the experiences that made Alice into the performer he now was; and no matter how remarkable their own suggestions might have been, often they were only suggestions. As a band, Alice Cooper had always done what they wanted to, and five heads are always more headstrong than one. Alone, Alice still looked to his surroundings for guidance. But those surroundings had changed completely, and the new album would be cut in their image.
Welcome To My Nightmare was still on the road when Alice was obliged to turn his attention towards a new LP. With tongue possibly firmly implanted in his cheek, Alice opted to call it Hell. It was, he explained, envisioned as a sequel of sorts to Welcome To My Nightmare, with that album’s protagonist, Steven, now being told a bedtime story. So Hell (o
r Alice Cooper Goes To Hell, as it would ultimately emerge) follows its titular hero into the underworld, where he gets into a fight with the devil over who is the coolest ghoul.
The possibility that hell is itself a disco is never far from the surface; indeed, it is one that Alice has often returned to, as 2011’s ‘Disco Bloodbath Boogie’ testifies) and when Alice realises that he is effectively trapped in Hades, he always seems aware that he has one chance to escape – to sing the kind of pretty song that neither the devil nor most disco dancers could tolerate. He chooses ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows’, a song made so achingly immortal by Judy Garland, and he makes his escape, although he knew he was taking a chance – with his listeners’ tolerance, if not the Prince of Darkness’.
“We did it… I said let’s do it the way Alice would imitate Eddie Cantor,” Alice laughs. “That’s part of Alice. There’s something about that old vaudeville that seeped into Alice.” But was it likely to seep into his audience’s consciousness too? That was a question that time, and record sales, alone would answer.
The sessions were rushed. ‘I’m The Coolest’ was intended as a duet between Alice and actor Henry Winkler, “the Fonz” of television’s Happy Days fame, and negotiations developed far enough for Alice to abandon attempts to line up a replacement on the off chance that Winkler should back out. Which he did, ultimately declaring that taking on the role would leave him typecast forever in the role of a wisecracking supercool soda pop dude – something, presumably, which another few years of filling that role on one of America’s most popular television shows would not do. Alice wound up performing the song alone.
Other corners were cut. The cover photo of Alice, distinctively green-fleshed, was actually cropped from the inner sleeve of Billion Dollar Babies. In the past, Alice Cooper had been a byword for extravagance. This time around, the whole thing reeked of cost cutting, and as he looked at proofs of the cover itself, Alice could only have sighed and remembered a night in Las Vegas, a year or so before. Elvis was there and they had gone up to his hotel suite – where the King of Rock handed the Lord of Evil a handgun, and told him to point it at him.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 24