He consorted with the inmates; of course he did. They were the only thing that stood between him and absolute isolation. Nobody knew who he was; or if they did, the reasons, they were too bound up in their own problems and realities to care. And he was likewise so embalmed within his struggle that he didn’t even notice. For the first time in a decade, he was Vincent Furnier again, just another guy, just another loser, just another bum. And then one day, his therapist, a doctor whom he had rechristened Dr Bacharach because he looked just like the legendary songwriter, asked him how much Alice drank.
“On stage?”
“Yes. How much does Alice Cooper drink?”
Vince thought about it for a moment. “Nothing. I never drink on stage.”
He’d never thought about that before, and he’d never thought about the doctor’s next revelation, either. “Alice Cooper doesn’t drink. It is Vince Furnier who drinks.”
All of these years, Alice had convinced himself that it was the monster he became who insisted on sinking the booze. In fact, it was the monster who tried to stop it. The monster was the professional. It was Vince who was the loser, and Vince at whom the treatment was targeted. Once he understood that, one associate from this time reveals, he understood what he needed to do.
Vince was hospitalised, but Alice still had his liberty, grabbing a few days release to shoot a cameo role in the then-gestating movie version of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, before heading back to Cornell. And two weeks into the treatment, Vince was proclaimed alcohol free, and was asked if he wanted to leave the clinic. He turned the opportunity down, voluntarily committing himself to another fortnight of treatment. That was how determined he was to break the self-destructive cycle, he reasoned. That was how much he wanted to be cured. And that is how dedicated he was to the concept that he had decided would frame his next album.
He’d already made it through the hardest part of his own treatment. Now he wanted to watch everybody else as they went through theirs, and translate his observations into a new album. In 2011 he explained to Classic Rock magazine, “I was thinking of it as a diary of what goes on in a mental hospital. As a lyricist you’re always looking for subject matter. You can’t help it. So I always carried a little pen and paper.”
Random remarks from his fellow inmates would be noted down. The staff’s methods of dealing with difficult patients would be recorded. He hung with the criminally insane and the mentally unstable; one inmate, he heard, had hacked an uncle to pieces and stowed them in the trunk of his car. Another talked of nothing but his pet dog, Veronica, and Alice quickly immortalised him in the germ of a new song, ‘For Veronica’s Sake’.
He met Jackknife Johnny, a Vietnam vet who had found love while on duty, and brought his wife home, only to encounter the rampant racism that was so much a part of small town American life at that time. And he visited the Quiet Room, the padded cell where over-stimulated patients would be placed with just a shot of the psychiatric drug Thorazine for company. Alice himself sat in that same room a few times, although not because he was forced to. “It was just a nice quiet place to write lyrics.”
It would be November 1977 before Alice finally left Cornell, clean and resolving to stay that way, by keeping company with one of the few people he knew who had also beaten a drinking problem, his old Hollywood Vampire friend Bernie Taupin.
Taupin was, and remains, one of rock’s most inspired and inspirational lyricists. In tandem with Elton John, Taupin was the English lyricist who succeeded in selling Americana back to America, by taking his own cinematic obsessions with the culture and setting them to Elton’s extraordinary melodies. Indeed, many people simply assumed that Taupin was American, and were surprised to discover that he was born no place more romantic than Flatters Farmhouse, an isolated farm in southern Lincolnshire, England.
Leaving school aged 15 to work in the print room of the local newspaper The Lincolnshire Standard, Taupin’s sights were originally set on a career in journalism. But he also wrote poetry which he dreamed of seeing set to music, an ambition that was realised when he met Elton John – a remarkable tunesmith with precious little lyrical ability.
In 1967 Taupin answered an ad placed in New Musical Express by Ray Williams, an A&R man at Liberty Records. It called simply for talent, and both Taupin and John (or Reginald Dwight as he then was) were among the respondents. Williams introduced them and set in motion a partnership that, over the next decade, would be responsible for some of the most memorable hits, and best selling albums, of the era. By 1977, however, the partnership had apparently run its course. Three successive albums, Caribou, Rock Of The Westies and the sprawling double Blue Moves had barely flickered with the fire that once hallmarked the duo’s collaborations, and the distance between the pair had grown geographically too.
Elton still lived in England, refusing to leave the land of his birth simply to avoid the taxes that were then levied on his income. Taupin, however, was living in Los Angeles now; it was there that he first encountered Alice, and so vivaciously did he enter into the spirit of the Hollywood Vampires that he soon joined Keith Moon as the resident English drunk.
He told author Philip Norman, “I used to wake up in the morning in my house on North Doheny Drive, the rock star’s empty house, and the first thing I’d do would be to reach over to the refrigerator by my bed. I’d take out a beer, empty half of it away then fill it up with vodka. I’d drink that every morning before I got up. When I went anywhere in a limo, I’d take a gallon jug full of vodka and orange juice. People were starting to say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem.’ But I wouldn’t believe them. I said, ‘No, I’m just having a good time.’”
He and Alice were soon palling around regularly, not only to the bars and clubs but also to shows. One night, according to Alice, they went to see Frank Sinatra, and were astonished when one of old Blue Eyes’ handlers walked over to their seats and told them, “Mr. Sinatra would like to see ya in his dressing room.”
Astounded, they followed him. The offer, Alice joked later, did not feel like one they could easily refuse, and so they waited nervously to be summonsed into the Great Man’s presence, both turning over in their minds the range of fates that might be awaiting them for some unintended slight to Sinatra’s alleged Mob connections.
Instead, they were greeted effusively and with thanks as well. Sinatra was intending to perform a song apiece by Alice (Goes To Hell’s ‘You And Me’) and Taupin in his set that night, and just wanted to thank them for writing them. “So we told him it was a great honour to have him sing our songs,” concluded Alice, “and he said: ‘That’s OK, you keep writing ’em and I’ll keep singin’ ’em!’ Ha!”
On another occasion, the pair read and fell in love with Interview With The Vampire, author Ann Rice’s newly published reinvention of the vampire myth. The idea hit them simultaneously – they should become movie producers, and this would be their first project. They were even working out the casting as they figured out how much money they should offer for the rights; Peter O’Toole, they decided, would make the perfect Lestat, and $500,000 should be enough to buy the movie rights.
They were too late. Somebody else had already purchased them for little more than half of that.
But that was the relationship that Alice and Taupin had, “always sparking one another’s creativity”, as Dee Murray, bassist in Elton John’s band through his years of greatest chart success, put it. “Every time I saw them together they were cooking up something else, so it was no surprise when they started writing together. They probably should have done it years before.”
Taupin entered his own style of rehab shortly before Alice was admitted to Cornell, renting a house in Acapulco and drying himself out. Then, he called Alice to ask whether he was interested in making an album about their shared experiences, a cautionary saga of the demon alcohol.
Alice agreed, and together the pair embarked upon one of the most rewarding songwriting sessions that Alice had ever bee
n a part of, and one that would take on even greater resonance the following September, following the overdose death of fellow Vampire Keith Moon. If the irrepressible, indestructible Moon could be blanked out, what hope did anybody else have?
No matter that both men were primarily lyricists. Alice would pull a lyric from his notebook and Taupin would promptly answer it, and that was how they worked, bouncing ideas and notions off one another, and doing so with such productivity that “in the end, we came up with a really great album”.
They were still writing when Alice found himself back in the headlines, as one of the stars of the long-awaited and much anticipated Sergeant Pepper movie. Produced by Robert Stigwood, whose last movie, Saturday Night Fever, had proved such a massive success, Sergeant Pepper threatened to be even bigger. Like Flash Fearless in the past, it called upon a host of different singers and performers. Unlike Flash Fearless, it mopped up the superstars of the age. Alice was just one in a galaxy that flickered with brilliance.
Peter Frampton was still riding the record-breaking success of Frampton Comes Alice. The Bee Gees were the unstoppable soundtrack to both Saturday Night Fever and the world disco scene in general. At the same time as the movie came out, the brothers Gibb were about to launch into an unprecedented run of five solid months at the top of the American singles chart, as performers, composers or simply undeniable influences on no less than six separate singles. Aerosmith were one of America’s hottest rock bands; Earth Wind and Fire likewise in the R&B stakes. Top ranking comedians from both sides of the Atlantic filed in, and so did George Martin, the man who produced the original album. And while Alice’s role was brief, it was also significant. He played Father Sun, a Machiavellian fiend devoted to brainwashing the kids and turning them onto something called the Future Villain Band (played with swaggering aplomb by Aerosmith). The role also gave him the opportunity to voice a Beatles song for the first time since the days of the Spiders, and he wrapped a decidedly sinister throat around the Fab Four’s hitherto charming ‘Because’.
It was difficult to imagine any way the movie could fail.
But it did, and Peter Frampton speaks for most involved parties when he shudders, “I’ve watched it [and] every time I put a new record out, Robert Stigwood puts it out on TV somewhere. ‘You want to try a new record? Hold on while we put this out. We’ll destroy you again.’
“I’m hearing now that it’s becoming almost a cult movie, and it’s nowhere near as bad as it was made out to be at the time. It’s just… you had the Bee Gees in it, and Saturday Night Fever was zooming up the chart at the time we were making it; you had me, who was at the top of the chart; we had the cover of Time, Newsweek, everyone going, ‘Oh this is going to be a blockbuster movie,’ and it was useless! It was a piece of crap, it was horrible. The only thing the director had ever directed before was Car Wash, and I don’t think he’d ever heard of the Beatles!
“We were up the creek without a paddle, definitely. I always said it wasn’t that bad; Steve McQueen was in The Blob, and it didn’t hurt him. But, I’ve made many albums and I’ve made some stinkers, and people bring them up with the good ones. I only made one movie, and people jump on it, and rightly so, because I don’t like it either. I think I took the rap for everybody. No-one ever mentions it to the Bee Gees!”
Or to Alice Cooper. Well, not very often, anyway.
In 1999, he explained to Wall Of Sound magazine, “You know, when you were asked to do the Beatles, and George Martin was going to produce it, what could you say? ‘And I get to beat up the Bee Gees in this movie?’ It was perfect. When I heard what the whole deal was, and Aerosmith was gonna be in it, and Steve Martin was gonna be in it, I said, ‘What’s not to do?’ Right there, that was enough for me to do it. Nobody knew it was going to be the stinker that it was.”
For now, Alice was happy to simply close his eyes and pretend the movie hadn’t happened. Booking themselves into Cherokee studios in Hollywood, Alice and Bernie Taupin were pulling together the band that would bring their songwriting efforts to fruition. They chose players with whom they had worked most successfully in the past: Taupin called in Dee Murray, and another Elton John Band veteran, guitarist Davey Johnstone. Singer Kiki Dee, another Elton associate, followed. Alice called in Dick Wagner, and then extended invitations to Steve Lukather of Toto, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick and his old buddies Flo & Eddie. Other session players were rounded up by producer David Foster.
For Flo & Eddie, the offer to reunite came as a surprise. But not as big of a shock as they’d experience once they actually arrived in the studio.
Alice in 1978 was a somewhat different character to the man they had known in the past, a lot less driven and a lot less secure. In the studio, he had taken to building himself a tent out of mike stands and baffle blankets, and staying inside while everything else was recorded. “Then,” Howard Kaylan recalls, “when it came time for him to begrudgingly leave, step outside of it for the two or three minutes it would take for him to lay down the vocals, he wasn’t very happy about it. So Shep and the people involved with the production knew what we were capable of in the studio and how Alice liked us being around, and they called us in.
“First we’d do our background parts, then we’d sing leads along with Alice, to guide him along, help him get to notes he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Then, they’d take us out of the final mix and leave Alice’s voice in on its own. Of course, that meant we had to learn the entire song, but we didn’t mind – this was Alice, he was our buddy and it made the record sound OK. Now he’s back on the other side, I’m sure he looks back on those records in horror. For me, though, it was just like helping out a pal.”
Dee Murray, too, recalled the sessions as fraught. “Bernie was the motivating force. Alice had stopped drinking, they both had, but he was still weak. He wasn’t the old Alice, he just didn’t have the confidence, not even when he was singing.”
Matters did improve as the sessions progressed, and all concerned are adamant that the album emerged sounding a lot better than perhaps they expected it to. But Alice’s own subsequent rehabilitation of songs and characters from this most harrowing of all his records perhaps testifies to the emotional depths that he needed to sink to in order to create the record he would call From The Inside. Understandably aware that the album was very much a solid swerve in direction, Alice prepared for its release with a tour designed, with almost callous calculation, to reminding people exactly who he was. 1978’s School’s Out Summer Tour was little short of a greatest hits outing, more or less restating the previous year’s King Of The Silver Screen misadventure in terms of musicians and material, but playing down any song that the audience would not instantly greet with a roar. Thus, it would be February 1979 before Alice would go out with the stage show he had schemed around the new album, by which time the record’s fate had already been determined.
From The Inside was released shortly before Christmas 1978 and it proved instantly divisive. Its cover, recapturing the ghoulish Cooper of old, had little in common with its contents, as producer Foster pushed the proceedings into a slick, almost AOR vein; a commercial brainwave in an age when the US charts were being overtaken by the soulless flab of Lukather’s Toto, Foreigner, Journey, Styx and so many more, but a betrayal too of all that Alice had represented in the days when he stood as an antidote to the kind of slush that generally filled the airwaves.
Lyrically, the album was as strong as it needed to be, and if its confessional edge grew wearing after a time, then that was the listener’s problem, not the songs’. Sonic flashes that sounded like Queen add quirk, spray-painting the album’s ambition over pastures that Alice did not habitually fly, at the same time as fears of rampant Elton Johnisms were largely confined to just the brief piano-led ‘In The Quiet Room’ and ‘Jackknife Johnny’, and even there, there was an edge of menace. Two years later, Peter Gabriel’s ‘Lead A Normal Life’ would segue so effortlessly from ‘In The Quiet Room’ that they could almost have been twi
ns.
Elsewhere, however, ‘Millie And Billie’ was a gruelling duet with former Eric Clapton vocalist Marcy Levy, but too many of the album’s heavier numbers (‘Serious’, ‘For Veronica’s Sake’) were simply riff-by-numbers rockers that sounded more like latterday Sweet than anything else.
Billboard seemed impressed despite all such misgivings. “This concept album… chronicl[ing] Cooper’s self-imposed stay in a rehabilitation centre… is without a doubt his most ambitious statement to date. The subject is not an easy thing to publicise, yet Cooper… has come up with a moving, often emotional autobiographical rock record with more lyrical sting than anything he’s ever done.”
Indeed, the album’s first single, the ballad ‘How You Gonna See Me Now’, surely ranks among the most naked songs any performer has confessed to, a dedication to wife Sheryl that wonders how she would respond, or even relate, to the suddenly sober man she now found herself married to. In the three years the couple had spent together, Alice wondered whether she had once seem him stone cold sober. In terms of catharsis and, perhaps, the slaying of personal demons, From The Inside could be regarded as a triumph. But it was not an especially well-starred move commercially.
‘How You Gonna See Me Now’ received some airplay but little more than that; From The Inside itself barely bothered the chart. But the old trouper was not discouraged. With a band that saw Davey Johnstone stepping in for Dick Wagner alongside the ever present Steve Hunter, plus fellow Ezrin alumni Prakash John and Whitey Glan, the three-month Madhouse Rock tour was swiftly revealed as Alice’s most visually extravagant since Welcome To My Nightmare, a plaudit that was only amplified when the San Diego show on April 9 was filmed for the Strange Case Of Alice Cooper home video release.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 27