Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  Sheryl Cooper’s choreography was astonishing, and the appearance of dancers disguised as bottles of alcohol and a dancing pink poodle led exquisitely into what remains one of Alice’s most theatrically moving death scenes yet, the suicide attempt in the Quiet Room. And he was fighting his own corner, too.

  “I’m back in rock’n’roll now,” he told Creem. “I’ve got my desire back. These young bands like Kiss, they’re great, but what can they do for an encore? I’m gonna burn them all, blow them off the stage. I hope the kids think Kiss is the ultimate show. That way when they see me, we’ll look that much better. I can work it out. They’ll think I had four lungs put in. You see, it’s a whole different audience. I’m playing to kids who’ve never seen Alice before. And I can’t wait to shock ’em.”

  For all its musical failings, then, From The Inside was an album of triumph, and the live show likewise. The neo-funk groove with which flared the opening ‘From The Inside’ was an electrifying overture long before the song itself got going, and learning from the mistakes made on the 1977 tour, this time the new songs were largely corralled at the beginning of the show. But while the remainder of the set adhered to the hits routine, it packed its own surprises; the effortless manner in which ‘Go To Hell’ medleyed with ‘It’s Hot Tonight’ was a highlight that few Alice performances have matched, and closing the main set with ‘How You Gonna See Me Now’ was an act of boldness that, again, he has never returned to.

  Behind the scenes, however, Alice – or Vince – had not come as far as he thought. Unthinkingly taking a sip of wine while he sat eating dinner with Sheryl one evening, he relapsed so hard into alcoholism that the next three years barely even register in his memory today; and the three albums that he produced during that span are likewise all-but-forgotten.

  It’s called self-defence.

  Three albums had now crashed and more-or-less burned in the years since Welcome To My Nightmare, four if one counted the live record, and while Alice was scarcely the first or only seventies idol to be cast adrift as one decade moved towards another, the heights from which he had fallen, and the speed with which he had done so, were alarming. How to arrest that fall, though; that was the question. For Alice, the alcohol helped deaden the daily impact of another year off the top. For his friends and associates, it was a tougher call.

  “The first we knew about a new album was when we got the call to go back to Cherokee to meet with Roy Thomas Baker,” Dee Murray recalled a decade later. “And I think it was Roy who impressed upon us what this was, ie less of an album and more of a rescue mission.” Murray would not, ultimately, appear on the album, as he opted instead to return to England to live. But his impressions were not that far removed from the truth.

  Best known at the time as the producer of Queen during their pomp, but more recently thrust into renewed fashion as the man behind the debut album by Boston power-poppers the Cars, Roy Thomas Baker was an intriguing choice to produce Alice Cooper and not necessarily a successful one. He and Alice had been friends since they met at Bernie Taupin’s birthday party three years earlier, but he was scarcely unaware of the fact that it was his track record, as opposed to musical compatibility, that recommended him for the gig. For his own part, however, the success or failure of Flush The Fashion as an artistic venture was secondary to its humanitarian goals.

  At the same time as Baker entered the studio with Alice, he was also producing Hilly Michaels, a former member of Alice Cooper’s old sparring partners Sparks, but more recently the engine room behind Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson’s eponymous band. Michaels was striking out now on what would become a very successful solo career, and while he does not recollect too many conversations about Baker’s other projects, one thing was clear.

  “Roy was trying to save Alice’s entire life, career. He had heard that Alice was going on these week-at-a-time binges, spending at least $5,000.00 a week. In a nut shell, Alice was killing himself, Roy tried helping him every way he possibly could but all in all, there was a vibe in the air, ‘save Alice, save Alice’. Roy looked like he had seen a ghost the first time he came back from talking with Alice. He was so on the verge of slipping, letting go…..very very ill.”

  It has since become routine to describe Flush The Fashion, recorded back at Cherokee Studios in 1980, as Alice’s riposte to the growing swirl of keyboard and synth driven bands moving into view on the shirt tails of the New Wave, with the Cars just one of the touchstones. Hanging over the sessions, too, was the recent success of English synth maven Gary Numan, whose stripped back rhythms and icy key lines seemed, for a few moments there, to posit an entire new direction for rock’n’roll to explore. In fact, it is unlikely whether Alice even gave it that much thought at the time, although he has since come to acknowledge a certain slavishness.

  “I think when I worked with Roy, we went in a really crazy direction because Roy did the Cars and he did Queen, and we were sitting there going, ‘I have no problem doing a New Wave album as long as it has Alice’s attitude and as long it has some teeth.’ I kind of liked doing songs like ‘Leather Boots’, because they were weird little songs, [because] I think as long as Alice is singing them, they are still Alice songs.” Where matters went off the boil was in the fast growing awareness that Alice probably wouldn’t have recognised an Alice song if it was transplanted into his brain.

  Flush The Fashion emerged a desperate album. “Roy, Alice, and the record company were all crossing their fingers that Roy could deliver a number one smash hit…. get Alice in the limelight again,” says Hilly Michaels. But neither the album’s key cut, ‘Clones (We’re All)’, introduced to the proceedings by Davey Johnstone, a friend of its composer David Carron, nor its most successful inclusion, an edgy grind through the Music Machine’s ‘Talk Talk’, were Cooper originals, but they were the strongest tracks on what swiftly proved a very one dimensional disc, an album that attempted to mask its deficiencies behind the production, and failed almost every time. Alice Cooper was a lot of things, but he was not the new Gary Numan.

  The failure of ‘Clones’ in particular hurt Baker. The most potently Numanesque of the album’s futuristic contents, and matched by a video that spelled the debt even louder, Michaels recalls, “Roy wasn’t too excited about the single, Alice’s voice was way off the mark, and the track came out below par for an Alice Cooper/Roy Thomas Baker record. But Roy seemed distraught at not being able to wave his magic wand over Alice and give him his desperately needed hit single.”

  In fact there were several better choices for singles on board, beginning with the melodramatic sturm-und-drang of ‘Pain’ and the brooding guitar storm of ‘Grim Facts’, while producer Baker did his best to paper over the record’s deficiencies. “Alice is bright, astute and really nice and we decided to put together an album,” he explained. “He said to me, ‘It’s just as much your album as mine, so get on with it.’ So I did.”

  Yet although it was a collaborative effort, it was not a meeting of equals.

  Alice was scarcely in the room. As usual he took his best titles from the tabloids, and there was indeed something exquisitely National Enquirer-esque about such songs as the metal growling ‘Nuclear Infected’, the electropunch of ‘Aspirin Damage’ and the Stonesy ‘Start Me Up’-isms of ‘Dance Yourself To Death’. Unfortunately, the inspiration ran out there in a lot of cases, as Howard Kaylan, recalled once more to the studio, quickly realised.

  “The eighties blur because, very often, the artists themselves weren’t even in the studio, they had it done for them by their producers… or, the artists had become so corporate minded that a lot of the personality had left the arena. It used to be, if you were gonna have somebody come in and sing your backgrounds with you, you want to know those people, you want to include them as part of your album, you’d have a little family going.

  “But in these later days, there wasn’t any input from anywhere else – it might as well have been a Pepsi commercial. And if the personality is gone from the thing and the en
tertainment value of doing it is gone, then the only reason you have to do it is for the very small cheque you get from doing that sort of thing, or the satisfaction of saying ‘I’m on that record’.”

  Roy Thomas Baker agreed. “[Alice] said he didn’t care about the studio end of things, and that it was my job and just to tell him when to put the vocal on. So I’d call him when I needed him, he’d come down and sing, and then go away again and that was all we saw of him. His overall attitude was that he was paying me a lot of money to do it, so why did he need to be there all the time?”

  Because it was his record? Apparently not. According to Baker, Alice never heard the finished LP in its entirety until the press playback, a few weeks before its April release.

  In the event, Creem’s Jeffrey Morgan found a lot to love about an album that, he said, was “gonna stick to the roof of your skull like a web gob of Double-Bubble.” The sleeve kicked it off, “a brilliant work hailing from the ‘who-gives-a-shit’ school of design… etched in fury with a rusty nail by old Salvadork A. C. himself.” ‘Clones’, the first single, “out-replicas Gary Numan by adding a sense of humour tempered with a streak of masculinity… ‘Leather Boots’ sounds like epileptic Warriors on speedballs… ‘Pain’ contains some of Alice’s best lines since ‘Second Coming’ [and] when he snarls ‘I’m the burnin’ sensation when the convict fries,’ he sounds just exactly like you’d want him to sound. It’s 1980. Do you know where your heroes are?”

  It was a question that Alice, as one of those heroes, desperately needed to answer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Special Forces

  For a time at the dawn of the seventies, it rather looked as though Blues Image were destined for the top. No longer the house band at Thee Experience in Los Angeles, where their frontman hung out with the unknown Alice Cooper group, an under-achieving debut album had been followed by a smash hit single. ‘Ride Captain Ride’ was written in about 15 minutes, guitarist Mike Pinera laughingly admits, yet it rose to number four on the Billboard chart, and number one in several regional markets. Quite simply, it became one of the defining smashes of the year, and Blues Image were set to soar.

  Instead….

  “In retrospect, we probably would still be together had we said no to the managers who had us touring non-stop, so the guys who had families could have time to be with them, and also so I could have had a little more time to write new songs. We would come home from months of touring and our managers would put us right into the recording studio, so they could hurry and have the label release a new album. The new songs I was writing were rushed onto tape, and before we knew it, we were back on the road.

  “Our music suffered a great deal due to the managers’ belief that a rock band had a life expectancy of a couple of years, so they were going to milk us for all we were worth.” Battered and bruised by their sudden exposure to the true demands of the music industry, tension and fatigue contributing to the band members not getting along, Pinera quit. His bandmates continued on for a while, so Blues Image did not strictly break up. But their main muse was gone, and now it was management stablemates Iron Butterfly, one of the solid superstars of the previous few years, who welcomed Pinera on board in summer 1970.

  A decade later, Pinera was still in demand. His career since then had taken him through a succession of fresh bands; Ramatan, with former Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell; the New Cactus revision of Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice’s post-Vanilla Fudge behemoth; a step back towards his own nomenclatural past with Thee Image, the first American band to be signed to ELP’s Manticore label; and now a solo career with the Capricorn label. One album, Isla, had already come and gone and now Pinera was getting ready for his follow-up, Forever. “And that’s when Alice called me and asked me to join his band.

  “He called me up and said, ‘Let’s do a band, I want to put together a new band’. And I’ll never forget this, but he said, ‘I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve actually done quite well since the last time you saw me….’

  “Anyway, it sounded good for me except for one thing. Forever had just been released, and I couldn’t really not promote it. It was part of my contract that I would go out and support Forever, so I said, ‘Alice, if we can work out the tours when you tour and I have to tour, we can definitely put this together.’ And he said, ‘I have an even better idea. Why don’t you open the shows with your band, and then come back on and play with me? And that’s what happened. I would play my show, promote my album, then come back on with him.” Alice even thought up a name for his new guitarist. “He called me ‘the Mr Rogers of rock’n’roll’.”

  A three month tour loomed, but Pinera was not daunted. He was joined in the new-look Cooper band by Duane Hitchings, his bandmate since the New Cactus days and a key player on the Forever tour too, and he explains, “We were not on the Flush The Fashion album, but learning the songs was OK because the songs were very easy to play, things like ‘Clones’, and we had a great time. It was a good band, everybody was friends….”

  The musicians had all the freedom they could desire. “We had complete free will. Alice said, ‘Play whatever you want on this stuff. Keep the integrity of the arrangement of the verse and chorus when I’m singing, but when it comes to your solo don’t think you have to play the solo that’s on the record, you can play what you want.’ So, knowing what the fans like, they like to hear certain lines from different solos, there are bits you have to play for them, the signature lines, so I would do that, on ‘School’s Out’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’ I would do those double string bends and then go into my own things.”

  The tour kicked off in El Paso on June 4, 1980, with Alice in a very militaristic frame of mind. Shortly before the outing began, he heard that the White House was preparing to sell off a set of uniforms worn by the presidential security guards. The idea of kitting his band out in something similar was one that haunted him even after the uniforms were ultimately donated to a California marching band, an idea that clung in his mind throughout the tour and would ultimately do much to flavour his next LP.

  For now, he contented himself with tormenting Mike Pinera. “Alice liked to ad lib and be very spontaneous and one night we were doing ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ and someone gave him some ice picks, or he found them somewhere. So he had three or four ice picks in one hand and three or four in the other and one night as I’m doing my solo, he comes up to me and says, ‘I want to see you dance, Mike,’ right over the microphone. So I said ‘OK’ and started jumping up and down and he goes, ‘No, I want to see you really dance.’ And he starts throwing these ice picks at my feet, and he was throwing them hard and fast. Thank God I was in good shape, so I started dancing faster and when he was done, there they all were, stuck in the stage. And he liked it so much that he started doing it every night.”

  Pinera, however, was not going to remain Alice’s straight guy for long. “It became the new bit in ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, so one night I said, ‘I’m going to play a little joke on him,’ so I went to a joke shop and got a fake knife, one of those ones where the rubber blade goes into the sheath when you press it against your body, and I got a bottle of fake blood. I had the blood in my hand and the knife in my hand, so when he started throwing the ice picks at me, I said, ‘is that all you got?’”

  Alice looked at him in wonder. “Alice is like, ‘Wow what’s this, this isn’t part of the show,’ so I repeat, ‘Is that all you got?’ Then I took the knife out and started stabbing myself in the head and neck and my throat, and you’re seeing the blade going in and out and there’s blood going everywhere, and the people in the front row actually gasped and Alice lost it. He just stared, his jaw dropped, he didn’t know what to do. He told me later that was the first time in his career that he had ever gone out of character onstage.”

  What Pinera is adamant that he did not witness was alcohol abuse, and that despite Alice subsequently admitting that this entire period of his life was spent blotted out by the bo
ttle. “Alcohol… no. I never saw it. And Valerie my wife was doing his make-up before the shows and no, no alcohol. He must have been a master magician because we were in a tour bus all through the summer, riding together and he was in the back room, the state room, but the door was always open. He never locked it and anyone could go in and sit down to talk… and I never saw anything.”

  Road manager Damien Bragdon, too, insisted that Alice kept a clean ship, even after the band’s August 19 appearance at the Canadian Rock festival in Toronto was cancelled because of the star’s “ill health” – an explanation that promptly ignited a slew of rumours regarding Alice’s old alcoholism. His relapse was not public, not yet. But a star falling off the wagon will always be a welcome story for some segments of the media, and Bragdon battled to disprove them. The singer was suffering from bronchial asthma, he explained, and missed two flights from New York to Toronto as he fought for a swift recovery.

  But when he did arrive “he looked awful and he was burning up from fever. I would not put such a human being on stage. He was so sick he could hardly stand up.”

  A doctor was called to the band’s downtown Holiday Inn and confirmed Alice’s ailment. And Bragdon could only reiterate, “There was absolutely no drugs, no booze and no heroin involved. He’s just a very sick man.”

  Back at the venue, however, the news of the cancellation, delivered just an hour before show time, was not taken so calmly. The Toronto Star reported, “Thousands of rioting rock fans tried to wreck the Grandstand last night. They bombarded 268 policemen with bottles, chains and other missiles during a 30-minute rampage that will cost at least $175,000 to repair… they tore out 200 seats welded to steel posts and bolted to concrete. They heaved scores of metal chairs on stage. They didn’t brain anybody, but they ruined a public address system and an expensive set of drums. They ripped out steel turnstiles, smashed windows in ticket booths and the Grandstand restaurant, and damaged several cars outside the stadium.” Twelve fans, five policemen and a security officer were injured, 31 fans were arrested and the following day’s festival events were cancelled as the damage was repaired.