Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

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Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 26

by Dave Thompson


  Alice would have argued the point; would have pinpointed so many aspects to the show that equalled and even surpassed the notions he had pushed forward before, and in terms of spectacle he was correct. The difference was, in the past, his shows had been continuous, building the sense of menace and magnificence from the moment he set foot on the stage, to the climax that would inevitably dispatch him from it.

  It was the tension that had gone, that and his once infallible sense of pacing. The first third of the set dispensed with the early seventies favourites; the mid-riff looked back at Welcome To My Nightmare and Goes To Hell; which meant the new material, the unfamiliar material, fell at the end of the show, baffling the audience with songs they didn’t know, when they should have been up on their feet for the hits.

  True, the set-closing ‘King Of The Silver Screen’ was a spectacle, the battle hymn howling out over fireworks, pyrotechnics and enough noise to deafen the most doubting heart. But still you could not escape the impression that it was just one more in a series of stock rock statements, well-rehearsed vignettes that flowed from one to the other, but which were more or less interchangeable with one another. There was no drama now, no mounting fear or anticipation. Just a string of clever moments, and Alice knew it. He just did not know what to do about it.

  Turning the crystalline concision of ‘School’s Out’ into a 20-minute showcase for the musicians’ virtuosity wasn’t his sharpest move ever, either.

  Off the road at the end of The King Of The Silver Screen outing, Alice knew he was tapped out. Exhausted. A wreck. But where could he turn? The doctor had left the building. One dispute too many with Shep Gordon ended with the manager attacking the quack with a baseball bat – because Landy was a quack, a fraud and a charlatan who would wind up being forced to surrender his licence to practise psychology in 1989, before a court barred him from having any contact whatsoever with even his most famous client, Brian Wilson.

  Alice escaped Landy’s clutches a lot earlier, and with a lot less expense, than the Beach Boy. But he was also no nearer an end to his own struggles, and the worst part of that was, he just could not bring himself to admit it to himself. Which made Shep Gordon’s insistence that he pull himself back onto the horse for a string of dates in Las Vegas all the more galling. In his autobiography, Alice recalls saying “no” to Shep Gordon for the first time in their relationship. Then he hung up the phone.

  Gordon rang back minutes later. This was not just a regular show, he explained. This was the proverbial Offer You Cannot Refuse, courtesy of the Mafia hoods that allegedly then controlled great swathes of Las Vegas. Still Cooper refused. Back and forth they went but of course, showman Alice was always going to trump sad, battered, beaten down Vince. Warner Brothers was owed another album, and once again it was threatening legal action if it wasn’t delivered on schedule.

  Two nights at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas gave the label what it wanted – a live album titled, unimaginatively, The Alice Cooper Show, and which wandered fairly haphazardly through the repertoire with no more pizzaz than its birth pangs suggest.

  The album remained a sore point more than a decade later. Alice told Kerrang!, “When I did that album, I was so out of it, so sick. I’d been touring for five years solid. I was at my alcoholic peak! After a binge that had lasted for three years, I couldn’t possibly get any more in my body to get myself up. The stage show never suffered, but when it was all over I just asked ‘Where am I?’

  “I’ve got those dancing chickens, machine guns, this and that and… ha-ha-ha, how did I get here? It was like closing your eyes and driving somewhere, then opening them and not knowing where you are.”

  And two decades after that interview, he remained unhappy. “The band plays great on it,” Alice mused sadly, reflecting on the stellar line-up of Steve Hunter, Dick Wagner, Prakash John, Fred Mandel and Whitey Glan. “The live album we did in Vegas, some of the guitar work on that goes crazy, it goes on for eight hours of them playing against each other going back and forth and you listen to it and you go geez, this stuff is amazing.”

  He, on the other hand, was “fine… I suppose”. Later he claimed he was unable to recall recording Lace And Whiskey. This time around, reflecting on The Alice Cooper Show, the recordings were all too painful to recollect.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Whiskey Please, And Hold The Lace

  Alice charts his decline by the amount of money he spent on alcohol, the number of memories that deteriorated into a grey haze, and the number of so-called friends who seemed to flock to his table at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard and milk him for every ounce of reflected glory that they could.

  He kept his own associates tight around him, the Hollywood Vampire set that shared both his fame and his demons, and he relied on his instinctive professionalism to keep him going, even when every fibre of his being was rebelling against the discipline.

  In the past he had jokingly referred to himself as a Jekyll and Hyde character; Killer Alice by night, mild-mannered Vince Furnier by day. Now his friends were discovering just how true that analogy was, but it was not the difference between his on and offstage personas that brought it to life. It was the fact that on stage, he was on autopilot, and off it, he was a mess. And the only person who didn’t realise that was Alice himself, as he continued to convince himself that his drinking was not a problem, and kidded himself that nobody would have noticed if it were.

  He prided himself on appearing normal even when he was completely gone; even today, he can honestly say “you’d never imagine I was a drunk. Those closest to me didn’t realise how much I was drinking.”

  “When I was 16 and dreaming about being a big rock star,” he told Classic Rock in 1999, “getting money and cars, I never included being an alcoholic. It sneaked up on me. I liked drinking and hanging out with the guys who were drinking. We’d have these long drives in the States, so I’d have a beer or three and some more after the show. Pretty soon I was having a beer in the morning, too. But I didn’t feel like an alcoholic. Then I found that the beer was gone and I was drinking whisky in the morning and more whisky in the afternoon. And more before the show, and then more after the show – it wasn’t fun anymore – it was like medicine.

  “It didn’t change my personality drastically. If you’d met me at the time you wouldn’t have known I had a problem. I never missed a show or even a lyric.” Echoing Suzi Quatro’s description of the man she toured with two years before, he concluded, “I was what I called a ‘functional alcoholic’.”

  Yet how functional was he really? He was no longer enjoying the performance. He was no longer enjoying the tours. Writing new songs was a chore, rehearsing was a pain. Backstage before a show, even the sight of the outfit he would soon be changing into made him feel physically sick, and so he’d reach for the whisky once again, down half a bottle and then he’d get dressed.

  And still he insisted that nobody knew.

  But of course, people did know. It is hard to live with somebody and not be aware that they are throwing up blood every morning when they wake; nor that the whisky bottles that were on the table in the morning were in the trash by mid-afternoon. Daily, Sheryl and Shep would compare notes. The empty cases of beer that piled up in the garbage, the fact that every performance seemed a little less spontaneous as the autopilot kicked in earlier and earlier. And daily, Alice would blithely carry on destroying himself. “You hear about the dangers of heroin and cocaine,” he cautioned Kerrang! in 1982. “But alcohol is the perfect killer. It’s the worst drug in the world and I took it too far. It reached the stage where I was convinced that there was no way I could live without a drink.”

  He allowed alcohol to dictate his friends; he allowed it to flavour his career, too. It may have come to naught in the end, battered down by record company politics, but Alice and Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler were close friends, and often talked about recording something together. “I’ve wanted to work with [him] for so long,” Alice reflected to Ke
rrang! in 1989. “[But] Steve and I were so out of it we could never get it together. It’d be a situation where we’d meet up, say we have to do it, and a year’d pass by because we were so out there.

  “The last time I saw Steve, we were driving around Beverly Hills in my Rolls. I had a bottle of whiskey and he had a gun…. I don’t remember what happened. When I saw him recently I reminded him about it, and he couldn’t remember a thing either. What did we do, rob a grocery store or something?”

  Like Sheryl, Shep Gordon was under no illusions of what Alice was going through, although for him, the situation was more difficult, attempting to balance the star’s career demands with his concern for his best friend’s health, and being shot down by Alice himself every time he suggested maybe taking things easy. Warner Brothers had a contract that it demanded be fulfilled. There were promoters and backers, all as insistent as one another. Gordon wanted more than anything to give Alice a break, but Alice refused to take one.

  Because he was in demand. Even with sinking record sales, Alice had transcended the mere rock stardom he once laid claim to, and had moved to the next level of being a celebrity; a character whose larger than life persona shunted even his music and art into a corner, and allowed him to glory in simply being Alice Cooper.

  It was a role that precious few people from the rock milieu had ever achieved. Elvis Presley, were he not so reclusive, was certainly among them, and the near-universal mourning that greeted his death in August 1977 showed just how deeply the old pelvis had engrained itself in American culture.

  Paul McCartney and John Lennon were there; and so were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who even wrote a song about their new-found status, the rocking ‘Respectable’ on 1978’s Some Girls album. No longer the demons that once shocked and mortified middle America, rock’n’rollers were now being accepted into the heart of showbiz society and who should be at the door to greet them, to welcome them into this new plateau of achievement? Alice Cooper.

  He gloried in his reputation. Across the Atlantic, a new musical movement had arisen that declared Alice Cooper among its founding fathers. Punk rock may have had no time for the more overt theatrics of its idol, but the moods that percolated across the best Alice Cooper albums packed a sense of drama that the punks could effortlessly identify with.

  Johnny Rotten, frontman with the Sex Pistols, auditioned for that band by miming to ‘School’s Out’, one of the myriad Alice Cooper singles stuffed inside the jukebox at Malcolm McLaren’s Let It Rock store – the same Let It Rock that Alice had visited on his first visit to London. And when Alice met his green-toothed acolyte, “[Johnny] actually told me that before the Sex Pistols took off he and Sid Vicious used to go down the London Tube station with an old violin and guitar and busk my song ‘I Love The Dead’, even though they couldn’t play,” Alice told the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper. “I think I came along at the time when a lot of the newer breed of rock performers were looking for some inspiration. I could say the same nice things about my prime influences and gush for hours about acts like the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Salvador Dali, the Who and T-Rex.”

  Dave Vanian, singer with the Damned, had a vocal technique that was so obviously modelled on ‘I Love The Dead’ that, when his band recorded their own ‘Feel The Pain’ on their debut album, it was hard to believe you were not listening to a hitherto unknown Billion Dollar Babies out-take.

  A schoolboy band called Eater let their Alice worship out in a stage routine that included the ritual destruction of a severed pig’s head, purchased from a local butcher’s store before the show.

  Gaye Advert, bassist with the Adverts, captures Alice’s appeal for their generation – kids who had grown up listening to Alice Cooper, and were now making music of their own. “Hearing Alice Cooper for the first time was really exciting, I can remember buying two copies of ‘School’s Out’, one for me and one for my friend’s birthday present. They had the power to shock back then, yet were accessible enough to get on Top Of The Pops.“

  That was the dichotomy that the punks sought to replicate, to horrify one side of society, while enthralling another, and it was one that the Adverts in particular pursued. The tale of an eye transplant going horribly wrong, their first hit single ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ was easily as macabre as any Cooper classic, and not only did they perform it on Top Of The Pops, they also became the first punk band to appear on Alice Cooper’s old stomping ground, the Old Grey Whistle Test. The four foot high, whip-flicking Alice cut-out that once adorned the teenaged Gaye’s bedroom would have been so proud.

  The action was not confined to the UK either. From New York out of Cleveland, Stiv Bators & the Dead Boys pursued their own teenaged love of Alice by befriending Glen Buxton, and pulling him on stage to jam with them at CBGBs.

  In general Alice kept his admirers at arm’s length, particularly when the panegyrics grew so loud that he started hearing himself proclaimed a prototype punk rocker. Even if there was truth in such comments, which he doubted, those honours, he insisted, belonged to the acts who had inspired him in the first place – the Rolling Stones, the Who, Them and the Pretty Things. But he did concede, talking with Circus in late 1977, “What’s similar about me and the punks is that the whole thing is McLuhanism. Shock value. Like me in the old days, the punk rockers want to have the most erratic, difficult behaviour to attract your attention. These guys might slash themselves on stage but when they go home they listen to the Archies.

  “Punk is a fad. I’ll say it. But at the same time anybody who doesn’t have fun with it is crazy, because fads are neat. And it’s the American way of life to cash in on a fad. I want to start a punk rock band called The Anita Bryant.”

  Throughout 1977-1978, as he stared his own most private nightmare in the face, Alice seemed to be in constant demand. Of course he repaid the favour by giving his all. He appeared on The Gong Show and guested on Dinah Shore’s chat show. Soon, he would be on The Muppet Show. He completed the King Of The Silver Screen US tour and he looked forward to introducing Maurice Escargot to Europe. He was planning a new album, and when he threw up in the mornings (or later in the day as well, now), he was always very careful to wipe away even the tiniest drop of blood, so that Sheryl would not suspect that he might not survive long enough to do any of those things.

  Which was when, in the midst of all this, she and Shep scooped him up and deposited him, almost literally kicking and screaming, in a sanatorium, the Cornell Medical Centre in White Plains, New York. The night before his admission, he went out and got royally pissed.

  The Arizona Republic broke the news to his old friends and family. “Alice Cooper, lead singer in the rock band of the same name, is in a New York sanatorium recovering from a bout of alcoholism, a spokeswoman for the entertainer said Monday. Barbara Pepe, the Cooper spokeswoman, said that after failing to overcome his drinking problem through private, out-patient treatment, Cooper decided to take advantage of a break in his schedule to undergo a hospital program of treatment. She said she was not told where he was getting treatment.”

  Celebrity rehab was an unknown beast at that time. As far back as 1970, Congress passed the “Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention Treatment and Rehabilitation Act” which in turn established the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). But to most people, alcoholism was a problem that affected the elderly poor, and the homeless – the popular image of the drunken bum panhandling for small change that he would spend on methylated spirits was a pernicious one.

  It would be another year before Betty Ford, wife of the former President Gerald, acknowledged her alcoholism after her family staged an intervention of their own, and forced to face up to her problems, and several years more before she opened the first of the treatment centres that bear her name. The idea that going into rehab could become a badge of pride (and a neat marketing tool) to be worn by the nineties generation of self-confessional rockers was one that even the most fevered campaigner could never ima
gine.

  In 1977, the only “rehab” most people had heard of was the persistent legend of Keith Richards flying to Switzerland every year to have his blood changed, and the idea that anybody, least of all one of the most famous faces in America, should need to seek treatment because he liked the odd drink was one that even hardened addicts and alcoholics apparently had trouble getting their heads around. Alcoholism elicited little more concern than a confirmed smoker might receive; the notion that it could be as real a disease as cancer or the common cold was one that even drinkers scoffed at. It certainly wasn’t like the drugs that bedevilled so many other members of Alice’s trade.

  Only to those who were close to the alcoholic, who could see the torment that the drink was inflicting (and who then experienced that torment themselves) were truly aware of just how crippling alcoholism could be; them and the staff at the handful of clinics that were actually equipped to deal with alcoholics.

  And that equipment, as Alice later shuddered, was primitive, at least by modern standards. The centre itself was well-appointed, a vast structure whose campus on Bloomingdale Road was one of the most familiar landmarks in the city. Inside, however, Alice experienced first hand the kind of icy deprivation that he had toyed with only on his own musical path, wrapping himself in the straitjacket every night to ham out the decline of poor Dwight Fry. “I was in a cold and severe lockdown ward for drug addicts, alcoholics and people with severe mental disorders,” he wrote in his Golf Monster autobiography.

  He awoke and slept to the clinic’s own schedule, a harsh routine that saw him eating breakfast at the same time as he had once gone to bed. Neither (again by today’s standards) was there much psychological or psychiatric finesse to the treatment. “Drying out” meant exactly that, a regimen that snatched away even the smell of alcohol, and replaced it with exercise and food, and sufficient drugs to dull the inevitable comedown. The only advantage was, it seemed quick. After just three days of enforced sobriety, he realised that he was feeling better than he had in years. “And that was a big deal.”

 

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