It was not the first time they’d met. “I got to know him and consider him a friend of mine,” Alice told Get Rhythm magazine in 2001. “He invited me over one night and we talked for a real long time. That would be back in about ‘72 when he looked real good, he was like the Elvis we all like to remember.”
Now, however, Alice was less certain. But you don’t argue with Elvis, so he took the gun, aimed it… and his world turned upside down as the karate-mad Presley threw him over one shoulder, then planted his foot on Alice’s throat. The gun was out of reach, Elvis was laughing down at him, and all Alice could think was, “Wow, what a great album cover this would make”.
Better than this one, anyway.
Billboard‘s review of spring 1976’s Goes To Hell was encouraging. “Very similar in overall concept to [Welcome To My Nightmare], even down to the sequencing of hard rock and ballad cuts. Hell is at least the equal of its predecessor, with an even more ambitious storyline. Alice keeps moving towards becoming the James Joyce of commercial rock surrealism.”
Privately, Alice would have argued that he was on top of the world. A little over a year after the couple first met, he and dancer Sheryl Goddard were getting married; in March 1976, the pair were wed in a ceremony presided over by the fathers of both the bride and groom. Both were ordained ministers.
But the album and, indeed, the accompanying tour, was doomed. According to one former label staffer, Warner Brothers had yet to forgive Alice for taking Welcome To My Nightmare elsewhere and, in a show of corporate vengeance, had quietly decided to allow the new album to sink or swim on its own merits. That may or may not have been true. But the promotional outlay certainly seemed less lavish than in the past, and when Alice lined up a summer tour to promote the record, two dozen dates spread between late June and early September 1976 scarcely hinted at the kind of workload he normally accepted. Further evidence of straitened circumstances was revealed when he talked of holding the theatrics back, of presenting a straightforward rock’n’roll show and eschewing even the one sequence in the album that could have matched any past excess, a boxing match with the devil.
There were other tensions too, pressures that had less to do with Warners and more to do with Alice himself. The drinking that he had always treated as such a joke, just one more factor in the creation of the All-American Boy, was worsening, nobody doubted that. But in the past, it had not affected his professionalism. Now, that seemed less guaranteed, and while Suzi Quatro laughingly recalls him as “a functioning drunk”, she also acknowledges, “I was definitely aware that he drank all the time. The good thing was, though, he was not an aggressive drunk.”
No, he was a depressive one, and there was more than one occasion on the Welcome To My Nightmare tour when bandmates and entourage alike suspected Alice was simply going through the motions.
Part of this was simple boredom with the sheer weight of choreography, timing and organisation that the tour demanded, and a growing impulse to simply kick the set to one side and put on a blistering rock’n’roll show. But another part, a bigger part, was his sense that performing simply got in the way of more important pursuits. Like drinking.
His appearance changed with his personality. No longer gaunt and hook-nosed, Alice was suddenly pale and puffy. More than one cruel observer suggested that the reason for digging out an old picture for the Hell album cover was because a recent one would have been too horrific. There was not quite an embargo placed on photographing the star, but the opportunities to do so were certainly being limited.
He stopped eating and started vomiting blood instead. And it really didn’t matter to him if Warner Brothers set up any interviews or not, because he wasn’t doing them. “I was like Howard Hughes,” Alice told Creem in 1979. “I didn’t want to see anyone. I just locked all the doors and tore the phones off the wall.”
And now he was being sent back out on the road.
A band called the Hollywood Vampire Orchestra was finalised from Alice’s now regular field of musicians, and rehearsals were set to get under way. And then on June 10 1976, just two days before he was due to kickstart his first rehearsals with the band (and 20 days before the opening concert, in Halifax, Nova Scotia), Alice collapsed.
Rushed to the UCLA hospital, he was held overnight, but the diagnosis was simple. He was suffering from anaemia. Two weeks of rest was the minimum he required. Two months would be preferable.
The tour was cancelled. Ticket sales, which in any case had scarcely been dramatic, were halted and refunds were issued. And the same doomsayers who had picked up on the rumours about Warner Brothers’ reluctance to push the new album now had another piece of scuttlebutt to chew upon, the possibility that Alice was simply retaliating against his label’s bitterness. And Goes To Hell could go to hell.
There were a few bright spots. Plucked from the album as Alice’s next single, in the hope that its sonic similarities to ‘Only Women Bleed’ might strike gold once again, a single of ‘I Never Cry’ reached number 12 in the US. A Midnight Special TV performance was shot and broadcast in August 1976, and that helped inch the album into the American Top 30. And the following month, Alice was a guest host at the televised Rock Music Awards, where he faked a breakdown midway through the performance, declared he could not “do this any more” and then grabbed a girl, seemingly at random from the front row of the audience, and ripped her clothes off.
Beneath, she wore a black leather cat suit; and behind them, the stage erupted into the raw roar of ‘Go To Hell’. Staged and hokey it might seem in retrospect (all the more so after both U2 at Live Aid, and Bruce Springsteen on his ‘Dancing In The Dark’ video, reduced the surprise to mere mundanity once the eighties rolled around), but at the time it was stellar television. At the time, it proved that Alice was still on top.
But without a tour and a concerted media campaign, and compared with past excesses and successes, 1976 had come and gone and left Alice Cooper essentially running on the spot.
Running, and drinking, and mourning the loss not of his status at the top of the American rock tree, but of the inflatable shark that lived in his swimming pool. Fire, which had already consumed his home in Connecticut, had erupted at his new home, the mansion he and Sheryl owned in Hollywood. According to news reports, it was neighbour Ringo Starr who alerted the fire brigade, but when Alice returned home, it was to discover that he had not only lost a portion of his home. Someone had also stolen the prop from the movie Jaws that he’d been gifted by director Steven Spielberg.
He needed help. And, for a moment, he thought he had found it.
At 42 years of age, Doctor Eugene Landy was the shrink to the stars. His much-publicised relationship with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys saw to that, and when Alice first engaged him, it was in the belief that if the doctor was good enough for the man who wrote ‘Good Vibrations’, he was good enough for Alice.
A clinical psychologist, Landy specialised, he said, in what he called the dysfunctional lifestyles of the rich and famous, the urges that intense fame and dazzling spotlights seemed to bring out in them. “For some reason, I seem to be able to relate to them,” Landy told Rolling Stone’s David Felton. “I think I have a nice reputation that says I’m unorthodox by orthodox standards, but basically unique by unorthodox standards.”
He was also, by his own admission, “outrageously expensive”, $90 an hour when that was more than double the going rate of the average shrink. But Landy was not average; and he did not measure treatment time in hours. Years were more his style; he admitted to Rolling Stone that he saw Brian Wilson’s treatment requiring at least that long.
His background was certainly unconventional. A High School dropout, Landy nevertheless graduated Los Angeles State College with a degree in psychology in 1964, before collecting a Masters and a PhF from the University of Oklahoma. Back in LA, he published the first authoritative lexicon of hippy slang, The Underground Dictionary, and then set up his psychiatric practice in the early seventies, using word of m
outh and a growing reputation to lure the first stars into his orbit. Actor Richard Harris and television host Rod Serling were both numbered among his satisfied clients, he said, and now Alice Cooper was about to join them.
Landy did not work alone. His team of seven also included a psychiatrist, Sol Samuels, physician David Gans, and a nutritionist named Nancy, all of whom worked in concert to address a patient’s ills. Drugs and alcohol were deemed off limits, diet was regulated and a healthy workload, built in Alice’s case (like Wilson’s) around songwriting and recording, was decreed.
But while Alice placed his trust in Landy, others in his circle – beginning with wife Sheryl and manager Shep Gordon – were less impressed, a situation that grew increasingly tense as Landy’s treatment continued and Alice not only showed no signs of recovery, but offered little to suggest that he was even aware of the treatment. His social life continued as before; so did his alcohol consumption; and so did his decline.
He kept that aspect private, of course, throwing himself into every opportunity to work that arose, as if he realised that the more he kept moving, the less his detractors would be able to pin him down. There would be no descent into a booze-soaked silence for Alice; he took a role as a singing waitress in Sextette, an oddball comedy that co-starred Mae West and fellow Hollywood Vampires Keith Moon and Ringo Starr, and he was working towards a new album as well, a rapprochement with Warner Brothers of course, but also one that would – as per Landy’s instructions – focus his energies away from the self-destructive tendencies that had delineated his stage persona in the past, and present a whole new face to the world.
And on paper, it appeared to be his most solid characterisation since the days of Killer, a hard drinking (of course), harder boiled private detective named Maurice Escargot, a direct descendent of the Mickey Spillane type PIs who once dominated detective fiction, or the sea of sleuths whose adventures filled the B-movie theatres and serialised radio shows of the forties and fifties.
It was an intriguing proposition, even if the concept itself was never to be fully embraced. Lace And Whiskey, as the album was titled, took its name from the (fictional) paperback novel that was photographed on its cover, the self-styled “outstanding murder mystery of the decade”. But once inside the disc itself, Lace And Whiskey was less about the detective and more about his lifestyle, a swaggering hard man bent on living life to its alcoholic full – an autobiographical twist that Cooper would tease into even sharper focus with the declamatory ‘I Never Wrote Those Songs’, distancing himself even further from the Alice of old; and ‘My God’.
“It’s a concept… that has nothing really to do with the music,” Alice agreed to Circus. “The whole concept is in the packaging of this one – a sort of Farewell My Lovely type of look.” And as for Maurice Escargot, he was as real to Alice as the arch fiend of old, and just as unreal too. “It’s just another character. You write the music, and all of a sudden you say ‘Who do I have doing this song?’ And a character is always a sort of whim in your mind anyway – somebody that you kind of want to be. The thing with Maurice is that he’s a real Clouseau character. And that has always been somebody I’ve wanted to be kind of.”
Working as usual with the Ezrin/Wagner/Hunter team, with Ezrin and Wagner his collaborators on every song, Lace And Whiskey seemed determined to eschew the formula laid down by its two predecessors. True, Lace And Whiskey was once again debuted with a ballad single, this time the genuinely affecting ‘You And Me’; but elsewhere, ‘Ubangi Stomp’ allowed everybody to rock out with an absolute lack of self-consciousness, while the smirking ‘Road Rats’, a paean to the road crew that had helped keep things rolling for almost a decade now (ever since the Spiders first earned enough money to hire someone else to haul their gear for them), would gain fresh impetus when it became the basis for the movie Roadie.
There was one song, however, whose inclusion Alice would forever regret, to the extent of personally demanding its removal from the proposed track listing of the Life And Crimes box set more than 20 years later. ‘(No More) Love At Your Convenience’, he condemned, was “our attempt to make fun of disco. That song was really, directly, a satire. He lines all the people up in the disco and mows them all down like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, and they keep coming out of the grave. They won’t die, and at the very end you have that guitar coming in, the rock guitar overwhelms the disco part
“So, ‘Love At Your Convenience’ was a satire. We wrote it as a satire. Unfortunately, we weren’t clever enough to let the audience know it was a satire. It was like Kiss doing ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’, it was a total disco song and once in a while I think it’s OK for an established band like Alice or Ozzy to do something that is totally away from what they do, but still do it in their style. It’s a very end-of-disco bloodbath; there’s a whole Broadway thing that comes in there, it was almost something out of West Side Story, almost something out of Guys & Dolls.“
Today, Alice readily admits that the schmaltz is simply a part of his DNA; “Bob [Ezrin] and I can’t get away from that. It’s there, so I say bring it out. The overlapping vocals that are so Broadway but it makes sense, and I think it’s a signature of Alice. I don’t try to change that; I say ‘There, let it be what it is’.” But it did not work on the album, as ears instead simply flipped the satire on its head and accused Alice of going deliberately disco; of selling out; of losing the rock.
With so much else percolating around it, it was ironic that the key to the album, and indeed to much of Alice’s own personal musical iconography, lay in a song that wasn’t even listed on the original LP sleeve.
A magnificent lyric and a fabulous melody, both bolstered by the inclusion of America’s most stirring anthem, ‘The Battle Hymn Of The Republic’, ‘King Of The Silver Screen’ was another paean to the golden age of Hollywood starlets and, again, Broadway musicals. Only this time, they are seen through the eyes of an overweight construction site worker who dresses as a starlet in the privacy of his own home, while plucking up the courage to let his workmates know the truth.
Which is something that Alice may not have physically done, but which he agrees is something he identifies heavily with. “It was something that was always there. I never stepped out and intentionally said ‘I must listen to old Broadway songs’, but I may be the only straight guy in the world that knows all those old Broadway tunes. I listen to A Chorus Line and musically and lyrically I go, ‘This is so good.’ And of course I know it sounds gay, but musically I have to admire it and there are parts in there that I would love to have written on an Alice level.
“I can move into that world and dissect those parts and bring them out, and the great thing is that Bob Ezrin is the other guy who is straight and knows those tunes and he’ll say, ‘Yes, we can do that, somehow inject that in here and make it work.’ We do a lot of hard rock but every once in a while, we’ll drift into a song that only I would do.”
‘King Of The Silver Screen’ meets that qualification head on. At its core, it is a straight comedy piece; over-think it, and it could be a reflection on the glam era that was now a historical artefact. But more than that, it is a statement of intent; of one man’s need to shake off the personal and emotional straitjacket into which society and his peers have tied him, and admit who he really is beneath the bluster. Alice was exhausted; but more than that, he was tired of being Alice. ‘The King Of The Silver Screen’ was his way of laying his deepest emotions bare.
The old beast was not dead, of course. Take the new album out of its sleeve and a sheet of paper falls with it, an invitation to enrol in the Alice Cooper Fan Club, emblazoned with the words Join Or Die. “I’m only asking,” the accompanying message assured readers. “But you’d better listen because you might not like the alternative.”
He began planning the new tour, talking up a three-act performance that commenced with a solid burst of oldies, led into a sequence based around the last two albums, then hit the finishing line with the new materi
al. And in June 1977, with Doctor Landy now an intrinsic part of the tour entourage, the show hit the road in America. It was Alice’s first US outing in two years and ticket sales were as brisk as they ought to have been. But once-loyal supporters were unconvinced. The name on the ticket was Alice Cooper’s. But the show was something else entirely.
A dynamic set had been put together, of course. With Alice terming himself (and the tour itself) The King Of The Silver Screen, a giant television set was positioned in front of the band, while a host of costumed props ran riot around it; giant spiders, machine-gun toting roosters, a vampire and cannibals. Short, specially shot movies were projected onto the television KAKA TV commercials for ear-odour remedies, movie previews for The Family That Ate Their Dog, and “coming soon” trailers for Police Gynaecologist and Celebrity Neurosurgery – fantasy television shows that would not be out of place on a 21st century schedule, but which seemed the height of gauche tastelessness in 1977.
But New York Times critic Robert Palmer caught the show at Nassau Coliseum on July 21, a little short of the midway point through the tour, and declared it “a case of the tail wagging the dog. The theatrical elements that Mr. Cooper introduced into arena rock – and theatrical means the full panoply of Hollywood and Las Vegas show business, from the lights to choreography to elaborate costuming – have swallowed up his music.”
The opening ‘Under My Wheels’, with Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner locked seamlessly together, was a phenomenal way to start the show, that was undeniable. But “it provided a high point that the show did not reach again. Cooper’s brand of Detroit hard rock has taken a back seat to his contrived theatrical gestures. Once the early hits had been dispensed with, the band settles into playing anonymously behind the huge television screen. There were no more musical sparks, and the show seemed dead; Mr. Cooper could have been walking through it in his sleep.”
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 25