Mötley Crüe were in disarray; Hanoi Rocks too. Elektra Records pulled its funding from Alice’s venture, and fate was still not finished with The Magnificent Seven Of Rock’n’Roll. Just three weeks after Neil’s accident, on New Year’s Eve 1984, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen was involved in a highway smash in England. He lost his arm, and Alice lost all appetite for a project that was already so ill-starred.
Seven months of work and planning were scrapped, and so was Alice’s deal with Warner Brothers, a severance announced to the world in a tersely worded corporate press release that stated, simply, “He has fulfilled his contractual obligations to the company and is now negotiating a new deal which should be announced within the next few weeks.”
But a few weeks quickly became a few years. Right now he was more interested in Vince.
Journalist Bob Greene, one of the reporters who had followed the Billion Dollar Babies tour around a decade earlier, and who had grown closer than most to Alice in the process, caught up with him shortly after the reconciled Furniers moved to Chicago in 1984.
Sheryl was already pregnant with their second child; the following June, daughter Calico would have a brother, named Damien from his father’s middle name – and also because that particular name had only one connotation in the mid-eighties, the demonic hero of the ongoing movie series The Omen. What better name could there be for the son of Alice Cooper?
But Alice, as Greene’s Esquire article was appropriately titled, did not live there any more.
“We were living in Beverly Hills, but we just decided that is no environment to bring up children. It’s crazy in Los Angeles – the drugs, the fast life. There are too many negative temptations. I just couldn’t see risking bringing my children up in that kind of atmosphere.” Now they were close to Sheryl’s parents, and living the life of any suburban couple. Occasionally he would show three-year-old Calico one of his old videos, so she knew what her daddy did for a living. But she also knew that daddy took her to Sunday School every week, and was there in the house for the rest of the week.
For now, anyway. But restlessness was never far away, especially now that he did not have the booze to cushion the boredom of inactivity.
“Alice took three years off in the early eighties,” the singer explained to writer John Burnes, “because it sounded good at the time. After a while, though, I discovered that I was retiring way too soon. I was looking at a magazine one day, seeing which bands were hot at the time, and they were all doing Alice. They were imitating the act I had done for so long.” And that, he said, was all the urging he needed.
He had long since grown accustomed to seeing elements of his act lifted and filtered by other performers; the rise of Kiss was proof enough of that. By 1984, however, an entire generation had arisen who not only grew up aping Alice in their bedroom mirror, just as he had grown up aping Elvis, but they were still doing it now.
Twisted Sister, for example.
Yes, Dee Snider was as great a showman in his own way as Alice ever had been. And yes, his band of ultra-glammed New Yorkers kicked out an unholy racket that at least matched the classic Coopers in terms of decibel damage. That was why he had recruited them to the Magnificent Seven.
But there is such a fine line between inspiration and imitation and, though Twisted Sister walked that line with dazzling finesse, the media had no hesitation in trying to shove them over it.
So both sides of the mirror, Twisted Sister on one side and Alice on the other, decided to nail the nastiness for good. A new Twisted Sister song, the anthemic ‘Be Chrool To Your Scuel’, had drawn comparisons with ‘School’s Out’ before it even left the rehearsal room. How great would it be to have Alice Cooper guest on it, conferring his approval on the antics of his offspring, at the same time as reminding the world what made Alice so great in the first place?
Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats, Billy Joel, the Uptown Horns and Clarence Clemons piled into the sessions too; in the age of Live Aid and Band Aid and so-many-superstars singing together, ‘Be Chrool To Your Scuel’ wasn’t simply a great rock song, it was also a reminder that rock’n’roll had an import far beyond fund raising for African disasters. To some people, at least, it still represented rebellion and maybe Twisted Sister’s call for contributors was less well-heeded (and certainly less fashionable) than Bob Geldof’s. It was a clarion call regardless.
‘Be Chrool To Your Scuel’ would not be a hit; indeed, MTV took one look at the accompanying video and proclaimed the Sister’s chosen cast of decaying zombies, casual cannibalism and a wryly Cooper-esque near-decapitation as “too graphic” for broadcast. Presumably the living dead could only be screened if they were dancing through a Michael Jackson video, and Twisted Sister were horrified at the decision.
But Alice celebrated the censorship. “I thought it was great. I figured it this way: If the only video I’d ever done ended up getting banned, then I must have done something right. I kind of like the idea.”
After all, ‘Be Chrool To Your Scuel’ had another purpose, beyond simply paying off Twisted Sister’s debt to the old shockmeister. It allowed Alice to make the pronouncement that Vince Furnier and all his real life problems had kept him from speaking for too long. He was back. And he was nastier than ever.
He needed to be.
The early eighties were the golden age of slasher horror movies. Of course they’d existed since long before that, and of course there have been better ones made since then. But if any genre that has essentially remained unchanged since it was first formulated can be said to have enjoyed a purple patch, it was that half-decade that yawned between John Carpenter’s first Halloween movie and the debut Nightmare On Elm Street in 1984, and which essentially broke down every last gore taboo that mainstream Hollywood had ever held sacred.
No longer confined to the B-movie backlots that stuck two fingers up at the biggest studios; no longer sent out on the midnight mania circuit to play to insomniacs, sickos and the homeless alone. The movies that swamped the theatres of the eighties were big business and whether it was Alice who drew the first parallel, or somebody in his entourage, prophesies that he had been making since the early seventies were finally being proved true.
“We did the hanging when we first came out,” he told Music Express. “It was done as morality play. Alice always had to pay for what he did onstage, then he’d come back out with the message that ‘Everything’s O.K., it didn’t really happen.’ Then I saw Halloween and the character Michael Myers, and Jason, who couldn’t be killed. I thought, ‘That’s vaguely familiar.’ There was a rock ‘n’ roll aura to those guys; people looked as them the same way they looked at Alice.
“They were villains, but somehow heroes, because their victims were such despicable characters, like the kids in school you hated. I think there was a lot of influence in A Clockwork Orange. His name was Alex, he had make-up under one eye, and a boa constrictor in his drawer. I kept going, ‘Wait a minute! Where have I seen this before?’
Alice Cooper had always insisted that he soundtracked exactly what America really wanted. And right now, it seemed, America wanted gore. Or, as he put it, “putting music to Nightmare On Elm Street“. Yes, it did rankle to have to look at it like that, when it was far more accurate to say that many of these movies were simply putting visuals to Love It To Death. But the symbiosis had been pinpointed and all Alice needed now was to place his music where his mouth was. And dream up a stage show to match.
“I didn’t waste the three years I took off,” he told Kerrang! in 1986. He devoted it to research, devouring the horror shelves at his local movie rental store three movies at a time, and returning them the following morning to pick up another three. He wasn’t even bothered by the fact that a lot of the movies were rubbish; that the special effects might have improved since the creature features of the fifties, but the dialogue, scripting and acting had not. It was, he insisted when anybody asked, research work. “In the last three years I’ve actually gotten more knowledge of wha
t Alice should be doing on stage.
“I’m convinced that there’s a connection between the popularity of splatter movies and that of heavy metal music. The trick is being able to get away with stage-splatter. It’s very hard to put over something like Night Of The Living Dead – if I cut off somebody’s head, you can only get the point across live if it’s a 15-foot monster and the head is three feet in diameter! That’s the only problem I’m coming across when projecting this thing… it just takes some technical stuff to get it to work.”
But he also knew that visual technology had improved manifold in the decade since he last seriously investigated it, back in the planning stages of Welcome To My Nightmare, and though audiences had certainly grown more sophisticated across that last decade, they had contrarily become more susceptible too, more willing to suspend credulity and belief as the battle lines drawn by the likes of Truth Against Rock hardened not into the theological battle that the Peters were prepared for, but a simple war of wills, and the unexpectedly unstoppable force of sheer bloody-mindedness.
Bob Ezrin laughed. Back when he was first approached to produce Kiss, it was not their music that swayed him, nor even the popularity. It was a conversation that he had with a high school kid. “Kiss? Oh man, they’re great. The kids at school love them. The only problem is, their records are so shitty. But we buy them anyway, simply cos they look good.”
That was Kiss’ secret. Musically they were little more than another stultifying heavy metal band, singing about sex, sex and more sex and partying all night. Nothing special there. But visually they were the tops… they were Over The Tops. And that remained the key to great rock’n’roll. It wasn’t enough to put on a show. You needed to put on an unforgettable show, and throw in everything you could possibly find.
The most obvious move for Alice, all agreed, was for him to be relaunched with something that everybody would recognise. A decade had now passed since the original Welcome To My Nightmare and, in strict commercial terms, he still hadn’t followed it up. Not one, or even all, of the albums he’d released since then had made even a fraction of the impact that Welcome To My Nightmare had, and yes there were any number of extenuating circumstances. But the fact was… well, he’d already said it. He’d made six albums that nobody had even heard of, and that showed how bad things had got, because there were actually seven, and one can only wonder which one even he had forgotten: Goes To Hell, Lace And Whiskey, From The Inside, Flush The Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin… or Dada? Poor unloved, unheard, Dada.
If Alice Cooper was going to come back, then, he needed to come back big. Bigger than he was in the seventies, and bigger than the reputation he had garnered back then. Bigger than the movies that now placed on screen the vicarious viciousness that was once his world alone, bigger than all the alternative Alices that haunted the world he had left behind.
He started making calls. Dick Wagner, his co-writer across so much of his past, came back on board. So did Joe Perry, fresh from the Aerosmith reunion album, Done With Mirrors. Alice dug into his closet and pulled out all the old props that had made the original Nightmare so enchanting, and when he talked of his plans for the immediate future, he was hopeful that he’d be able to begin his comeback in Britain.
The key to his musical resurrection, however, would turn out to be somebody none of his admirers had even heard of, a walking brick shithouse who seemed more muscle than man, whose custom guitar was the shape of an M60 machine gun, and who looked like he could eat Rambo for breakfast. His name was Kane Roberts and when Kerrang! asked him what the deal was, Roberts didn’t even pause before answering. “I just became a flesh and blood version of what I feel about rock’n’roll. I kinda look like a power chord!”
Roberts was playing in a band called Criminal Justice when he met Alice, but it wasn’t the band that caught the singer’s eye first. Bob Ezrin had told him of Roberts’ prowess and he wanted to check him out, only to walk into the club in the midst of a bar fight, with Roberts the star of the show. “As soon as I saw that,” he told journalist Jon Sutherland, “I said ‘I don’t care if this guy can play, I want him.’ Turns out he can play.”
Days later, Roberts and Alice were writing their first song together; suitably, it was titled ‘Step On You’. And the longer they hung out together, the more new songs they found themselves writing. From doing nothing but dreaming a few months before, Alice now had two whole new albums gestating, the Nightmare revision and the Roberts-fired rebirth, and the only question was, which one would he follow?
Sessions in New York in January with Roberts, bassist Kip Winger and producer Beau Hill solved that dilemma. Hill was best known for his work with Ratt, a metal band of such preposterous imagery that it was easy to forget they even made records or gigged; you could simply show your devotion by collecting the merchandise. And that seemed somehow appropriate for an act that itself would demand an image that devoured all in its path.
With a new deal with MCA in place, Alice started looking towards a whole new LP. It would be called Constrictor and if anybody doubted Alice’s commitment to the new musical/slasher movie hybrid, the latest instalment in the Friday The 13th saga, Part VI: Jason Lives, resolved the dilemma. The first single from the new album, ‘He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)’, doubled as the theme song for the flick.
The sessions were not plain sailing. While Alice and Roberts swiftly bonded with Michael Wagener, in his role of Beau Hill’s assistant, Hill proved less pliable. “Everything that Beau did or wanted to do was completely the opposite of what I wanted to do,” Alice would complain to Metal Hammer later. “He’s one of these guys who’ll use up every track on the tape to get a big fat sound. [But] that kind of production really messes up what a band really sounds like, it gives a false impression.”
It was Hill, too, who insisted on the Simmons drum sound that today cements Constrictor firmly into the mid-eighties, a sound that was just so cutting edge in 1986 that today it sounds horrifically dated. But the album was completed, a Dreadnought packed with dramatic loud riffery, and Alice would not say a word against it at the time. For now, it was enough simply to revel in all the attention it was receiving. The eminently singable ‘Teenage Frankenstein’ followed as a second single; Constrictor itself scratched the US Top 60, Alice’s first chart entry since Flush The Fashion. And the old Welcome To My Nightmare theme was revisited after all, in a tour that was so fittingly billed The Nightmare Returns.
It was, Alice knew, at least partially a shameless nostalgia trip. “This current show has got to get everyone back into the Alice Cooper thing,” he admitted to Kerrang! that autumn. “That’s why it has to rely a lot on the older songs; it’s gotta be like a refresher course.”
He pointed to the return of the guillotine, itself as iconic as any of the songs in the set, and he was adamant. “Before I go on to the next thing, I want everybody to understand the basic idea behind Alice Cooper, especially the kids who haven’t seen it, because then they’ll have a reference point. The object is to do the definitive show! It seems to me that everybody’s been hitting all around it, Ozzy Osbourne and all those people, but no-one’s produced the definitive show… but that’s what the new Alice Cooper show will be.”
But there was a timelessness to the unfolding concept, a sense of expectation that rose from the audience, to be coupled with a sense of the familiar. Alice Cooper, he reasoned, was like the old King Kong and Dracula movies; it didn’t matter how many times you saw them, or how many years had passed since the last time, the same chills and thrills would always be there, and each time you would spot something different. “This show is like Nightmare 2,” he enthused, in true horror-movie jargon. “This show is a lot more grotesque. We’re using a lot more blood in this show. There’s no dancers or distractions like that. The band are all street guy.”
He admitted, of course, that the prospect of returning to the road made him nervous. The opening show on The Nightmare Returns, in Santa Barbara at the end
of October 1986, would be his first full concert since the end of the Special Forces outing in early 1982 and he was very aware that a lot had changed in that time.
But they had changed, he believed, for the better. When he toured in 1982, the charts were still filled with that second wave of British Invaders who hit American shores in the wake of the synthesizer boom, so-called New Romantics named Duran Duran, Soft Cell and Culture Club.
Today they had all been pushed aside, and the heroes of 1986 were cut from a far harsher cloth: Beau Hills’ Ratt; Guns ‘N Roses, an LA band that had scarcely made a move out of the city, but had already been snapped up by Geffen, and were everyone’s tip for the new year top; Mötley Crüe, recovering from that awful accident to find that the notoriety had just made them even more popular; a British band called the Cult; a reborn Aerosmith; thrashers Megadeth and Metallica; and the English trio Motörhead. And what did they all have in common?
They were all Alice Cooper fans, and spat out his influence in everything they did. Now it was time for the teacher to show them some new tricks.
Two months of rehearsal led up to the first dates; time spent both perfecting the musical side of things and working out the special effects too. Plans were put in place to film the Detroit homecoming for what would become the Nightmare Returns home video, and in and around all those preparations, Vince was working out his own effects as well. How he would again become Alice Cooper.
Back to the video machine. “Kane Roberts and I… all we did was watch every splatter movie there was,” he laughed to Rue Morgue. “And our stage show was so bloody that people in the first two rows were literally soaked. But I think people got the idea of it. It was like Evil Dead. You know how the beginning of Evil Dead was so scary? Then it got so bloody that it got funny. You couldn’t believe there could be any more blood, and then the pipes break and it covers everything.”
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 31