Off the road in October 1980, the band reconvened in the new year to begin work on Alice’s next album. Special Forces was conceived around the singer’s uniformed dreams of the previous year; guerrilla chic, he determined, was the look he wanted the band to adopt, and it was the sound he required as well.
Mike Pinera explains, “Alice would listen here locally to a station called KROQ that was playing really progressive punk, speed punk, heavy metal rap, completely different to any other station. So he would say to the guys in the band, ‘This is the kind of stuff I want you to write, really cutting edge, out there, different, never before heard type stuff.’ And that’s what he told me, he said, ‘Mike, I wanna do this but I want to do it better. When everybody’s normal I’m weird, and when everybody’s weird I’m weirder.’
“So I said OK, and I started writing stuff like ‘Vicious Rumours’ and things like that, in different time changes, a real throbbing type of punk edge guitar, and so the album started to manifest itself.”
An underground LA vibe percolated to the surface as Alice dug back into the closet and unearthed his old Love and Doors albums. For a time, a new concept presented itself, a virtual history of Los Angeles rock, from the garage blast of the mid-sixties, full circle to the punk noise of the eighties. Pinera: “Alice really liked Arthur Lee and he liked a lot of those guys from that era, and there were a lot of songs we were looking at doing from that era. Then he changed his mind and said he didn’t want to do too many covers. But he definitely wanted to do Love’s ‘Seven And Seven Is’.”
The key to the album’s eventual direction lay in a song that Duane Hitchings contributed to the proceedings, the snarling discombobulation of ‘Who Do You Think We Are’, riding in on Francis Ford Coppola-shaped chopper blades and scything down the gooks with a guitar as sharp as a switchblade. Another element, however, resonated. Alice explained, “The early Alice was a victim and a lot of that had to do with the alcohol. I always was the whipping boy, the world was against Alice, he was an outcast, a real odd man out and that was my attitude as well.” By the time of Special Forces, however, he had “a whole different attitude. Alice was not a whipping boy any more, Alice had now become this arrogant villain and he had transformed himself into this total control freak and I liked that, it was really important to me.”
Special Forces continued on. Into the studio, there was a welcome reunion awaiting Pinera as he walked in to shake hands for the first time in a long time with producer Richard Podolor, a veteran whose track record included hits for Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly, Three Dog Night and Mike Pinera’s old band, Blues Image. It was Podolor, the guitarist laughs, who spent the entire session for that band’s second album demanding, “Make it more commercial.”
“Well, we got to the end of the sessions, we only had another day left in the studio, and the producer took me aside, looked at me and sadly said, ‘I’ve got to be honest here, you guys haven’t come up with a hit single, or anything that has the potential to be one, and this is your last day to record. I don’t know if you can pull out a miracle, but do you think you might have anything with hit potential you can play me?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I think I remember something’, so I went and told the rest of the band what he had just said and our keyboard player, Skip, said he had this little chorus idea he’d been playing with that went, ‘Ride captain ride upon your mystery ship be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip’ and not much else.
“But that little bit inspired me and so I went into a back room, I locked myself in, cleared my mind and meditated a bit and all of a sudden the words and the melody started flowing all at the same time. I ran out and went to the piano, wrote the rest of the song, then went and got the producer and said, ‘OK, you have to hear this!’
“Skip and I started playing ‘Ride Captain Ride’ to him and he said, ‘Oh my God, this is it, this is the one we’ve been waiting for.’ It was written in about 15 minutes. We cut it right that day.”
A similar sense of invention overhung the Special Forces sessions; invention and intensity that finally coalesced into an album poised effortlessly between the energies of punk rock and the traditions of hard rock, metallic in sheen but antagonistic too. A new album for an era.
‘Prettiest Cop On The Block’ merged guitars like sirens and prison-break rhythms over a lyric that flirted with the same gender bending defiance that flavoured ‘The King Of The Silver Screen’; ‘Don’t Talk Old To Me’ drove discordant drum patterns beneath a vocal that verged on the robotic; and when ‘You Want It, You Got It’ pouted over handclap and purr, it left you feeling like you’d just walked three blocks with every hooker on the strip sniffing the air.
But it was classic Alice, too. ‘Skeletons In The Closet’ rode in on the sound of Duane Hitchings’ tinkling keys and could have been plucked bodily from Welcome To My Nightmare, while the staccato guitars of ‘You Look Good In Rags’ only updated a melody that felt as old as ‘Love It To Death’. ‘You’re A Movie’ was stentorian braggadocio, a hysterical call and response ring-mastered by a starch-shirted Anglophile luvvie; and absent from the album but a touchstone for the rest of the sessions, the immortally titled ‘Look At You Over There, Ripping The Sawdust From My Teddy Bear’ took the best ballad instincts from the past three or four LPs and transformed them into a whole new lyric for ‘Go To Hell’.
On the road, however, it proved a hard sell. Pinera: “We’d go on stage and whenever we’d do the hits it was all great, and the minute we’d do one of these obscure songs from Special Forces, all the people would look at one another and go ‘Huh? What’s that?’ But Alice didn’t care. He was enjoying himself.”
And doing so for the first time, it seemed, in a long time.
Just two of the new album’s 10 songs made it into the live show – Hitchings’ ‘Who Do You Think We Are’, which had in any case been worked up for the previous outing; and a rambunctious ‘Seven And Seven Is’ which was added to the repertoire once the tour hit Europe in 1982. There it was joined by the old Billion Dollar Babies standby ‘Generation Landslide’, rerecorded live in the studio for inclusion on Special Forces, and suddenly seeing strangely prescient as the eighties reflected back on the punk explosion that was their birthright.
Oldies heavy it may have been, then, but it was a memorable outing. Smoke choked the stage as a pair of camouflaged figures emerged into view, shining flashlights out into the audience like troops on a midnight reconnaissance mission. Trashed cars, buildings and bodies littered the surroundings, spotlights flashed like dying big rigs; even the amplifiers looked like something out of an urban cataclysm. The beams searched and then settled upon Apocalypse Alice, gaunt and leather clad, a whip in one hand, his hair tugged so tightly back that it looked as though he had cut it all off. A futuristic urban jungle unfolded, musically and visually, jangling and furious, the sound of a well drilled rock band letting its hair down in the bush, terrorising the foe with rock’n’roll.
“Special Forces are Alice’s band these days, and an unlikely-looking crew of desperadoes they are,” gasped Kerrang!. “They all sport combat gear, apt enough as they are obviously musical mercenaries – the very best, hardest and tightest rock players money can buy.”
On form, as he seemed every night, Alice was priceless. His stage make-up had undergone a total revision. No longer something stepping out of a horror movie, now he was a horror full stop, a chicken liver sculpture disguised as an addled, aged prostitute, his make-up a mess, his hair tugged back and tattered, his eyes mascara’d slits. There was no beauty, no elegance, no class. The man who had once hung on the end of a rope now looked a man at the end of his rope. And he played the part to perfection, even bringing out a crutch for ‘I’m Eighteen’, as if to emphasise that he no longer was, before the requisite boa took her serpentine bow. Later, ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ caught him French kissing a disembodied doll’s head, while ‘School’s Out’ dropped him into a classroom, zombie pupils and all.
Pinera recalls
, “We did the Tom Snyder TV show, we played real well and then it went into the break and Tom says, ‘OK, when we come back we’ll be talking to Alice Cooper,’ and we knew the show, the way it worked, so we all said, ‘Be careful, this guy’s going to try and embarrass you or say something stupid,’ and Alice goes, ‘I got it, I got it.’ So he goes over there and sits down, still out of breath, sweating, the paint is melting off his head, and Tom turns to him and says, ‘So Alice, is it true you kill chickens on stage?’ That was the opening question, and Alice looks at him real serious and goes, ‘Oh no, no, no. That’s Colonel Sanders. Colonel Sanders kills chickens.’”
Most of 1981 was spent on the road, but it was the tour’s climax that remains most fondly remembered. Pinera: “We got to France in December, and they wanted us to do a one-hour special for French TV. It was so funny how it happened, because the French government brought out a director and a whole TV crew and put them at our disposal, and Alice said, ‘OK, I’ll come up with the stuff, the bits and pieces that we will do,’ and it was so far out that the director said, ‘You know what? Why don’t you go ahead and produce it? You keep the crew and I’ll exit.’ So it ended up that Alice was the producer and director, with a little help from me, and wow what a trip.”
The team, he explains, “had all of France at our disposal and this whole production crew, and Alice would come up with some pretty far out stuff. An old junkyard, an abandoned subway station where they had all these cars with graffiti on them, Alice would find these places,” and shooting would commence.
The band in full urban guerrilla chic, striking menacing poses and pouting snarls, Alice in his own take on zombiefied mutant militaria, the hour-long presentation delved back as far as Love It To Death in search of material, the soundtrack a brittle mash of the original recording and latter-day overdubs, and always taking the best advantage of the surroundings.
‘Under My Wheels’ in a scrapyard; ‘Seven and Seven Is’ in a vandalised Metro carriage, with “boom bam bam” martial art strokes for emphasis; ‘Prettiest Cop On The Block’ on a deserted midnight street; and ‘Cold Ethyl’, of course, in a meat refrigerator, Alice and his tattered dolly date grinding among the carved open carcases, before transforming into an aching ‘Only Women Bleed’, which might well have been taking the song’s title just a little too much to heart.
“But the heaviest part of this whole situation,” laughs Pinera, “was when Alice came and sat down with me and said, ‘Listen, tell me if you like this idea. We’re going to do the song ‘Go To Hell’, and we’re going to dress the band up as nuns and put the black make-up under their eyes, and I’ll dress up in leather with my riding crop, and we’ll go to the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral at night time on the full moon, and I wanna bring a smoke machine and strobe light.’ We’d set up on the stairs and we’d play ‘Go To Hell’.
“I said, ‘I love the idea, but I don’t know if the people going in and out of church will like it,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ll worry about that when the time comes.’ So there we were, full moon, smoke machine, doing these steps in unison, looking like ghouls and the priest came out and said, ‘Look, I know I gave my permission for this, but I want to know what exactly are you singing? What are the words to this song?’
“And Alice said, ‘Father, I’m saying the same things that you say every Sunday in church. I’m saying if you’re bad, if you treat people badly, you might go to Hell. And he said, ‘OK good, continue’.”
In truth, the finished footage utilised those august and evocative surroundings a lot less than they might have. But still ‘Go To Hell’ emerged one more triumph in a television special that was overflowing with them, as the European tour turned into the kind of victory Alice had not enjoyed in over half a decade.
With the country having been deprived of Alice for so many years, the UK dates in particular proved so successful, and so well-subscribed, that Alice rewarded his British audience with a new single, suitably titled ‘For Britain Only’. Rumour swirled that he was also about to go into the studio to rerecord ‘School’s Out’ with Adam Ant, the latest of the pop heroes to have emerged with a taste for old Alice in his valise (famously Ant gives a brief impersonation of the classic seventies Alice at the tail end of his ‘Stand And Deliver’ video), and fresh British dates seemed to be added daily, as the prearranged gigs sold out.
Yet, despite such successes, and despite the fact that Alice Cooper was still selling out any venue he cast his eyes over, 1981 and 1982 remain among the most misunderstood and, for the most part, poorly documented years of Alice’s entire career, at least in terms of media interest.
In some ways, that is understandable. A new decade had ignited new concerns; the synthesized future that Alice had played with on Flush The Fashion had taken hold now, together with the whole new wave of musical nuances that formed the staple diet of the fledgling MTV video network. Today’s heroes were the likes of Duran Duran and Culture Club, Joan Jett and Tommy Tutone.
But it was not so vast a sea change that the old guard had been exterminated. In 1982, David Bowie was less than a year from releasing the biggest-selling album of his career so far, Let’s Dance. Michael Jackson, whose hit-making career was two years older than Alice’s, was still on top. Bruce Springsteen was still making monsters, as The River spent a month at number one; Bob Dylan was still making headlines, as he toured his Born Again gospel show. Even Kiss, whose unmasking the previous year had revealed they looked even more grotesque sans make-up than they ever did while they were wearing it… even Kiss were still selling records.
So why wasn’t Alice?
With hindsight, he took some of the blame upon himself. “We went through some changes in the early eighties, where we took it in different directions, and I think that confused people. We did the Special Forces thing and that was without the make-up – well, the heavy make-up – and without a lot of props, but it was still about the music.”
But there were more pointed reasons too. Five years after the Welcome To My Nightmare debacle, when he outraged his record label by giving the soundtrack to another company, he had done it again. Mike Pinera explains, “Alice produced and financed the movie Roadie and Warner Brothers automatically assumed that he was going to give the rights to them for distribution. But he did not, he gave them to another company and Warners literally came up to him and said if we don’t have this, we’re going to stop all promotion and block your albums from ever getting any kind of exposure.’ Alice said, ‘Well hit me with your best shot,’ and they did.
“A lot of the big shots at Warners said, ‘OK let’s put him in the black book,’ and sure enough, there was no co-operation from the label whatsoever.”
Special Forces peaked in America at number 125, Alice’s first studio album to fail to make the Top 60 (at the least) since Pretties For You in 1969. Only the makeweight live album five years earlier sold less copies than Special Forces; and panic hit Shep Gordon’s offices like a tsunami. Yes, they could keep Alice on the road forever, and garner their income that way. But at the same time as Warners was refusing to promote the singer, it continued to demand new product.
It was as if the music industry had finally tired of artists complaining that record companies did nothing for them, and decided to show an artist what might happen if that really were the case. Special Forces arguably climbed as high up the chart as it did on the back of the momentum left behind by Flush The Fashion – which, for all its failings, at least reached number 44. Now it was time to see what would happen if a new album was following a flop.
Pinera sighs. “The moment we got back from the Special Forces tour, management told us, ‘You need to go back into the studio, we need to get another album out there, we need to get some radio airplay.’ Just the whole showbiz hoopla. We didn’t have time to come down from the tour, we just found ourselves sitting there, Alice with a blank notepad and the rest of us with no idea of what we should do. And that is the way it began.”
Last time out,
he recalled, the album grew of its own volition. “Alice liked to take his time writing. He would get a lot of his ideas from reading newspaper ads and articles, the Enquirer ‘boy born with alien head’ sort of story. That’s where he got a lot of his lyrical ideas, and as far as the music went, he would rely on the band to bring musical changes, chord changes and feels. We would rehearse at my house a lot in the Hollywood Hills, I had a studio and he would come over and different people from the band would come over and we would work everything out. So when we recorded Special Forces, we were already rehearsed and when we went into the studio we pretty much had the arrangements marked out.
“Whereas for this new album, a lot of that stuff was being written and completed in the studio, and it’s no good to do that because you feel the pressure all the time, an enormous amount of money per hour, and I just kept saying, ‘Man, I wish we could have more time to prepare and go over this stuff.’
“But we just did it the best we could and I think all that was a trickle down from Warners putting up that red flag for Special Forces, not letting the album be promoted.”
Encouraged by the productivity of the Special Forces sessions, the band originally intended returning to producer Richard Podolar. He and they would, however, be waiting a long time for similar inspiration to strike this time. “In hindsight, I don’t think Richard was the right producer for this job,” Pinera acknowledges. “I think management made this call very predictably because Alice needed a hit single and Richard was known for finding hit singles and producing hit singles. But his forte was to go out and find songs from outside writers like ‘Born To Be Wild’ and ‘Joy To The World’. He was trying to produce it like he would a pop session, and boy was he surprised.
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 29