Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  “Alice would lock himself up in a room because he wanted to work on his lyrics and he didn’t want to be distracted and Richard didn’t really have access to him, until Alice would come out and say, ‘OK here’s the words to a new song’ and we’d do it.”

  The end result was inevitable. “We started rehearsing the album there,” says Pinera, “but went to record at another studio, with Alice and Erik [bassist Scott] producing.” Unfortunately, even their best efforts simply weren’t good enough. Scott and guitarist John Nitzinger were Alice’s favoured writing partners, but either their melodies did not draw the best from his pen, or nobody cared what they came up with.

  Ideas seemed half-formed if not half-baked. ‘I Better Be Good’, ‘Zorro’s Ascent’ and ‘No Baloney Homosapiens’ all felt unfinished in the same way, oddly, as recent albums by Alice’s old Detroit sparring partner Iggy Pop felt unfinished; and sadly, nobody has ever written a good song titled ‘I Like Girls’, though many (Sparks and, again, Iggy Pop among them) have tried. ‘I’m Alive’ intrigued with a truly inventive subtitle, ‘That Was The Day My Dead Pet Returned To Save My Life’, but once again the song simply didn’t live up to the promise. When the best original was ‘Make That Money (Scrooge’s Song)’, a Dick Wagner co-write that effectively detuned ‘Black Widow’, and the finest melody was the Lalo Schifrin-penned theme to the movie Class Of 1984, it was clear the album was struggling.

  Worse was to come. Blessed with a peculiarly Zappa-esque title (shades of Weasel Ripped My Flesh), Zipper Catches Skin was completed and everybody waited anxiously, if still trepidatiously, for the call to tour. Exhaustion was still dominating their lives, but like Warren Zevon liked to say, they could sleep when they were dead. For now, they had a record to promote.

  Didn’t they?

  No, they didn’t.

  Pinera: “We didn’t know there would not be a tour. It just came down as total exhaustion and I could dig it, I know I was exhausted; a lot of guys in the band were exhausted; and I could only imagine how Alice felt, because he was constantly doing interviews and working on other things and flying to the White House to play golf, so we were exhausted and it didn’t surprise me when they said, ‘Guys, we’re not going to tour right now’.”

  What was more of a shock was the rest of the sentence. “In fact we’re going to go into a holding pattern now, so if there’s anything you guys want to do to make money, you should go and do it. So I kinda got the vibe that that was it, and Alice wasn’t much for a lot of words, he just came and said, ‘OK well I hope to see you guys in a bit, down the road,’ and that was it.”

  The pervading notion that Alice was somehow out of touch with both his core constituency and the music scene in general was confirmed by the fate of Zipper Catches Skin. Not only was there no accompanying tour, there was no chart action either – Alice Cooper was, as a commercial prospect, a thing of the past.

  One final album was demanded by Alice’s Warner Brothers contract; Dada brought a reunion with Bob Ezrin for the first time in the studio since Lace And Whiskey, and a wholesale embracing of the much vaunted “new technology” in the shape of a CMJ Fairlight computer. But again there was no tour, and again there was no appetite for one. Staring a return to the sonics of Pretties For You in the face, and a clutch of 10 songs that bore little semblance to anything that Alice could have convincingly wrought on stage, Dada was left to languish, unheard by all but his staunchest supporters.

  Which was sad because once expectations have been checked at the door, Dada stands at a stylistic crossroads that Alice had not visited in a decade; since that moment when the band stood poised between Easy Action and Love It To Death, or maybe Killer and School’s Out. ‘I Love America’ even sounds like a Billion Dollar Babies out-take.

  The opening title track is nothing less than a visit to the psychiatrist, set to an eerie electronic rumble, and the relentless cry of a talking baby doll; and if ‘Enough’s Enough’ is a direct descendent of the last couple of albums, Ezrin’s return grants it an epic frame that simply tastes like classic Cooper.

  The mysteriously titled ‘Formerly Lee Warmer’ borrows its melody from the Bee Gees’ ‘Holiday’, but is a labyrinthine examination of insanity regardless; while the BDSM-battered ‘Scarlet And Sheba’ is sheer grandiosity, so cinematic in its soundscapes that when Alice’s vocal finally kicks in, everything has to rise up a few notches simply to make it count.

  ‘Fresh Blood’ isn’t as evocative as its title, although it does pack one of Alice’s most picturesque lyrics, “we’re like a couplet out of ‘Desolation Row’,” and the song’s serial killer protagonist was, of course, one to whom he would frequently return in the future. And then there’s ‘Pass The Gun Around’, which is almost Dylanesque in its portrait of the last legs of a loser, and might well have been the most electrifyingly personal song on this most remarkable of albums.

  But no matter how entertaining Dada emerged, just one thing was clear. Alice’s life was falling apart, and with the Warners contract now discharged, and his career at apparently rock bottom, all agreed that it was time to stop.

  “Those two albums are kinda avant-garde stuff,” Alice mused to Kerrang! a decade after Zipper Catches Skin and Dada. “It was a time when I was doing exactly what I wanted to.” On other occasions, however, he was more reflective. “I made six albums that no one ever heard of. That started to kill me.”

  The fact that Dada in particular can be ranked alongside any of the records that are habitually termed his greatest was no consolation.

  He had just one source of solace. His family. Daughter Calico was born in Beverly Hills at the height of Special Forces, in 1981, and no matter what else befell Alice, she and Sheryl were always there. Until the day they weren’t.

  On September 30, 1983, her life shattered and inverted by her husband’s drinking, Sheryl moved out of the family home, scooping up two-year-old daughter Calico and returning to her parents’ home in Oak Park, Illinois. Six weeks later, on November 15, she filed for the dissolution of their marriage, asking $5,000 a month in temporary spousal maintenance and $2,240 a month in temporary child support. An affidavit filed listed her monthly expenses as $1,200 for a housekeeper; $1,300 for food and supplies; $1,200 for car repairs, maintenance and gas; $1,000 for entertainment; $400 for clothing for herself and her baby and $400 for beauty shop bills. She also requested temporary custody of Calico. The marriage, her petition contended, was irretrievably broken with no prospect for reconciliation.

  Now Alice was back in the headlines. When he and girlfriend Cindy parted back in 1975, and an ugly palimony suit seemed imminent, attorney Marvin Mitchelson estimated the singer’s worth at $10 million. Maybe Alice’s earning powers had declined since then, but he was an astute investor. His value must have been several times that amount, and lawyers and tabloid journalists alike licked their lips at the prospect of what the courts might award.

  There was just one cloud on the vultures’ horizon. The fact that Alice and Sheryl really didn’t want to divorce. Not really. All it would take for the whole thing to go away would be for Alice to say the words that Sheryl needed him to speak, and this time, to mean them. He needed to promise to give up drinking, and this time, he needed to say it himself and not wait for somebody else to force his arm.

  He said it. They were actually in the court house, awaiting their appearance and the granting of the dissolution, when Alice finally pledged to stop drinking, without prompting, without nudging, without an arm being twisted behind his back.

  He was true to his word, too, although he didn’t only have Sheryl and Calico by his side.

  Throughout his career, Alice had steadfastly avoided any onstage antics that he knew might embarrass either his father or his father’s Church; had often spoken, too, of his belief that his version of entertainment was, ultimately, as harmless as any other actor or performer’s. It was a matter of familial pride for him, of course, but it also came from deeper-seated convictions, impressed upon hi
m as a child and forever percolating at the back of his mind.

  He laughed, for example, when the firebrand evangelists Dan and Steve Peters began publicising their Truth About Rock Ministry in 1979, dedicated to alerting responsible Americans to the evils embodied in their children’s favourite music; as they gathered support for their message across the same televisual spectrum as had once publicised Alice Cooper; and as they published their hit list of the rockers most likely to burn in Hell.

  There was Kiss – their name, it was now proclaimed, an acronym for Kids In Satan’s Service. There was Ozzy Osbourne, of course, and Mick Jagger too. Any man who sang of giving sympathy to the Devil had to be a bad one. And there was Alice, who would not have argued with the Peters’ suggestion that “his ominous lyrics and music are designed specifically to create a frightening atmosphere”.

  It was laughable; as ridiculous as the older insistence that if you played certain rock records backwards, subliminal messages would reach out to snare you, to drive you to suicide or into the arms of a waiting Lucifer. But that belief was still current in the early eighties, and the Peters’ mission, too, swiftly found fertile soil, wildfiring across the American heartland, appealing to an increasingly vast cross-section of so-called Christians who based their faith not on the tolerant tenets of the religion itself, but on their intolerance of any life or lifestyle that did not fit their own narrow view of righteousness. Rock did not fit, and so the Peters’ Ministry was born – ironically around the same time as one of its earliest targets, Bob Dylan, announced his own conversion to Christianity.

  Soon, the brothers were overseeing public record burnings, inspired by the Biblical destruction of sundry occult books at Ephesus, as recounted in Acts 19. The media pricked up its ears, and the brothers were soon a nationwide phenomenon; in their first major television interview, they confronted the head of Elektra Records on the evils that his artists fed their guileless followers; by 1983, they were head to head with Gene Simmons, and publishing books that are, in fact, masterpieces of misconstrued research, pinpointing practically every topic in rock as another step down the road to damnation. Alice, “[a] monster rock ribald [who] sings an anthem of necrophilia” – “sexual intercourse with a dead person”, they helpfully interject – was a natural target.

  Other preachers took up the Peters’ battle flag. Even more vehement an anti-rock crusader, Louisiana-based Jacob Aranza, publicly declared “[the] hellish and sexual overtones that Alice uses don’t make it very hard to believe that he is going to hell, and leading many [of his fans] there with him.” And that is where Alice drew the line. Although he believed it was nobody’s business but his own, Alice himself was as fervent a Christian as any of his zealous foes, and probably more honest in his understanding of what that faith portended, as well. “I started thinking about Christianity,” he told writer Danny Scott in 2001, around the same time as he dried out.

  “The doctors told me that if I had been drunk another week, I would have joined the guys upstairs. When you get that close to dying, you come back looking for something more than limos and mansions. I guess it’s not too surprising I turned to Christianity. My father was a pastor.”

  Alice does not preach and he does not proselytise. He does not lace his lyrics with religious imagery, or deck his artwork in symbols and iconography. In fact, the only time he really mentions his faith is when he feels the needs to defend himself against another knee-jerk rock assassin, accusing him of Satanism and of leading the children astray. To a man of his beliefs and faith, that is one of the cruellest insults of all.

  “You could call me untalented and boring,” he said. “OK, I can live with that. But call me Satanic and you’re stepping on what I really believe in.

  “I spent a lot of time in my lyrics warning against Satanism, because I don’t believe in the concept of Satan, I believe in the being of Satan. I believe in the being of God. And I think that we’re in the middle. We’re being pulled this way, and we’re being pulled this way… Satan offers us everything we want, God is offering us everything we need. So when people start playing around with the 666 and the upside down crosses and all the blasphemy – I’m at a point in my life where I can go, ‘Be careful, you’re inviting something in and you don’t know what you’re playing with.’

  “So I do lyrics that say, ‘Be careful.’ He’s here, he’s right here and he’s going for your throat, and it doesn’t look like it but in the end he wants to own you. And that’s pretty horrific, that’s real horror when you think of it. If you believe in a real Satan, then you believe in a real character that’s trying to destroy your eternity. What’s more horrific than that?”

  ALICE AND HIS PERSONALISED BASEBALL BAT. JOHN LIVEY/REDFERNS

  ALICE WITH TV PRESENTER/QUIZMASTER NICHOLAS PARSONS ON THE All NEW ALPHABETGAME 1987. ITV/REX FEATURE

  ALICE lN DRAG 1991. EUGENE VDEBARI/REX FEATURES

  ALICE APPEARING AS FREDDY’S FATHER IN NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 6 FREDDY’S DEAD 1991. SNAP/REX FEATURE

  ALICE IN CONCERT NOT LONG AFTER HE GAVE UP ALCOHOL DECEMBER 2001. ANNAMARIA DISANTO/WIREIMAGE

  ALICE COOPER AND HIS BAND RECEIVING A STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME LOS ANGELES DECEMBER 2003. PETER BROOKER/REX FEATURE

  ALICE AND SHERYL ON THE WALK OF FAME. PRESS ASSOCIATION

  ALICE AND DAUGHTER CALICO TAPING THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH CRAIG FERGUSON SEPTEMBER 2003 AT THE CBS TELEVISION STUDIOS IN LOS ANGELES. VINCE BUCCI/GETTYIMAGE

  PRODUCER BOB EZRIN IS INDUCTED INTO THE CANADIAN MUSIC HALL OF FAME BY ALICE COOPER DURING THE JUNO GALA DINNER AND AWARDS CEREMONY IN EDMONTON CANADA APRIL 2004. DONALD WEBER/GETTYIMAGE

  ROB ZOMBIE AND ALICE COOPER DURING THE 2007 SPIKE TV SCREAM AWARDS AT THE GREEK THEATER IN LOS ANGELES OCTOBER 2007. JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC

  ALICE AND MANAGER SHEP GORDON ATTEND THE TASTE OF WAILEA DURING THE 2008 MAUI FILM FESTIVAL IN HAWAII JUNE 2008. MICHAEL BUCKNER/GETTYIMAGE

  ALICE AND BERNIE TAUPIN DURING THE 4Th ANNUAL MUSICARES MAP FUND BENEFIT CONCERT AT THE MUSIC BOX IN HOLLYWOOD MAY 2008. LESTERCOHEN/WIREIMAGE

  ALICE PERFORMS AT THE SONISPHERE FESTIVAL IN KNEBWORTH ON JULY 30 2010. PHOTO BY SAMIR HUSSEIN/GETTYIMAGES

  LOHNNY DEPP AND ALICE PERFORM TOGETHER ON STAGE AT THE 100 CLUB ON IN LONDON JUNE 2011. CHRISTIE GOODWIN/SETTYIMAGES

  THE ALICE COOPER BAND ARRIVE AT THE THIRD ANNUAL REVOLVER GOLDEN GOD AWARDS AT THE CLUB NOKIA IN LOS ANGELES APRIl 2011. FRAZER HARRISON/GETTYIMAGE

  ORIANTHl ALICE AND TOMMY HENRIKSEN ON STAGE DURING THE NO MORE MR NICE GUY 2 TOUR IN ATLANTA GEORGIA JANUARY 2012. ADMEDIA/SIPA/REX FEATURES

  ALICE ON HIS NO MIRE MISTER NICE BUY 2 TOUR. DAN HAR/ADMEDIA

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Day My Dead Pet Returned

  While Vince took the cure, and this time kicked the booze, Alice slept.

  Occasionally word would seep out of a new project. Alongside the towering presence of Grace Jones, he co-presented the Grammys in February 1984, and barely batted an eyelid when The Nightmare, his latest video concert release, was passed over by the judging committee.

  He spent some time with guitarist Joe Perry, working towards what might have been a new album at a time, he told Metal Hammer, “when we were [both] on the verge of giving up drink and drugs, so we had bad withdrawal symptoms, and that was reflected in our attempts to get a song together. We were still shaking all over, and had wobbly knees all the time. It was just impossible to play music or anything. We couldn’t have written a tune to save our lives, and in the end I had to say to Joe, ‘OK, come on man, forget it. We just can’t do it’.”

  In fact, the pair were six songs into the process when Alice was called to Spain in March, to shoot the leading role in a new movie, Monster Dog. By the time he returned to the US three months later, Perry had reconciled with his former bandmates in Aerosmith, and was fired up about a whole new project. His work with Alice stalled, but was not completely wasted. Two of the songs they worked on together would appear on the Monster Dog soundt
rack.

  Destined to go straight to video, Monster Dog was, quite simply, the tale of a man, a rock star, who is transformed into what else but a monster dog. He’d been on a binge of watching Dario Argento splatter movies when he was offered the part, and that combined with three months in Spain rendered the whole thing irresistible. Neither was he under any illusions as to the kind of movie it was. He’d grown up watching B-movies, and he knew that Monster Dog wasn’t even that proficient. Never mind, Alice shrugged. “I love C-movies.”

  That was finished, and now he started talking about a new project. The Magnificent Seven Of Rock’n’Roll, a loosely conceived video collection that would allow Alice to strut his stuff alongside an unspecified half dozen other artists, hand-picked metal bands who grew up on Alice Cooper. He would be playing the Yul Brynner role.

  Hanoi Rocks, the super flash Finnish outfit fronted by the platinum beauty of Mike Monroe, came on board and Monroe, in London that summer, was effusive. “It’s a total fantasy, the wild west meets Alice, Westworld meets Freddie Kruger. We’re going to be working on a bunch of the songs with him and it’s going to kick everything into a whole new gear.” Bandmate Andy McCoy was already penning material with Alice, and Monroe was adamant. “You think you’ve heard Hanoi Rocks in the past? You don’t even know what you’re listening to.”

  Mötley Crüe were recruited and, with them, the financial clout of Elektra Records. Def Leppard were involved and so were Twisted Sister. And then disaster struck. By early December 1984, some 20 songs had been written and were ready to record. And then Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil and Hanoi Rocks’ drummer Razzle decided to make a run to the liquor store to replenish the mid-tour party they were celebrating. Drunk, Neil lost control of the vehicle, and Razzle lost his life.