Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  He was right; it did. The tour, while scarcely opening any new windows into Alice’s fantasy world, nevertheless re-established him as a performer, at the same time as confirming him, once more, as the hip name to drop by young metal and shock rockers as they set about establishing their own credentials. And, once again, as the nameless beast whose horror could be invoked by any crackpot organisation looking to grab some news stories for itself. According to Alice, one out of every three concerts on the tour was visited by pickets from one group or another, many of them so left-field and crackpot that it was hard to believe they had not simply been formed for that very purpose. “Mothers Against Lutherans Against Alice,” he cracked. “Stuff like that.”

  Nowhere, however, was his return to form as the king of the bogeymen to be celebrated better than in the UK where, touring the following year’s Raise Your Fist And Yell album, Alice found himself butting heads once again with the powers of British government. Although the story began, of course, back at home.

  The new album’s birth was difficult, early sessions with the returning Beau Hill being scrapped when it became clear the producer and the band were never going to agree on a sound. Hill’s assistant, Michael Wagener, was pushed to the forefront instead, with a simple brief: to craft a sound that was at least as aggressive as the lyrics he was hearing. He succeeded, too, but nowhere was the furnace that burned beneath the album so pronounced as on ‘Freedom’, a song dedicated to the latest gang of scissor-happy censors to descend upon the American music industry, the Parents’ Music Resource Centre, or PMRC.

  The PMRC represented one of the periodic surges of righteous indignation that have stricken the American rock’n’roll music scene ever since television’s Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 showed Elvis from the waist up only, for fear that his pelvic gyrations would transform a nation of impressionable teens into sex maniacs. Where it differed from these past guardians of morality was in the methods by which it approached its foe.

  The group was founded in May 1985 when three women – Pam Howar, Susan Baker and Mary Elizabeth ‘Tipper’ Gore – quite independently caught themselves listening to the lyrics of songs that their children, their friends and, in Howar’s case, their aerobics instructors were playing. Rude lyrics, shocking lyrics, coarse lyrics.

  “We got together,” Mrs. Gore explained, “and said, ‘These things were happening to us in our homes’.” They drafted a letter to sundry friends and associates, in the spirit of outraged women’s groups the world over. The difference was, these women had some very powerful friends and associates. Gore was the wife of Tennessee Senator (and future Vice President) Al; Baker was married to President Reagan’s treasury secretary, James; Howar was wed to the owner of a major Washington construction company.

  “Some rock groups,” their diatribe declared, “advocate satanic rituals… others sing of killing babies”. And others recommended “open rebellion against parental… authority”. The PMRC grew from there.

  Lobbying the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the umbrella organisation that represented the nation’s major record labels, the PMRC demanded that all albums that could be considered ‘objectionable’ be prominently labelled according to the offence. An ‘X’ would indicate explicit sexual or violent content, an ‘0’ condemned occultist material, a ‘DIA’ warned of songs glorifying drugs and alcohol – and so on until Frank Zappa, one of the PMRC’s most vociferous critics, asked whether “the next bunch” would include “a large yellow J on material written or performed by Jews?”

  Its confidence boosted by the apparent willingness of several RIAA members to go along with a modified version of those demands, and campaigning now for this initial victory to become an industry standard, the still predominantly female PMRC brought its battle into its fast-swelling membership’s own backyard, the halls of government wherein many of their husbands worked. In mid-September 1985, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation sat to consider the PMRC’s requests, and specifically its insistence that a parent has a discretionary right over the music a child listens to and should be afforded some means of personally checking the record prior to purchase.

  This was never challenged, even by the PMRC’s opponents. Albums, cassettes and CDs are unique in the mass media in that they are seldom offered for sale unsealed; it was many years since record stores had afforded their customers the luxury of listening booths, in which to test drive potential purchases. “So why not reinstate them?” asked Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider when he was called to appear before the committee, but of course few parents would have either the patience or the willpower to listen to an entire album in search of a single reference to having smacked-out anal sex with the devil. It was the record company’s job to warn them about it,

  Although the Senate committee was granted no powers of legislation, by November, 20 RIAA member labels were agreeing to print warning labels to alert consumers to potentially controversial subject matter. One, A&M, reversed its decision shortly afterward. The remainder, however, stayed meekly in line.

  Throughout the first year of the PMRC’s existence, the group’s prime target was heavy metal, and its most vociferous opponents too. Most agreed, and posterity has proved, that Alice’s own withering assessment of the PMRC was correct; “Awww, it’s a lot of fart,” he groaned to Metal Hammer in 1987. “Their whole organisation is a joke. Just like Gore himself. He’s got about as much chance of being President as Donald Duck has…. or Alice Cooper!”

  At the time, however, in the heat of the PMRC furnace, the movement was a threat, and it did need to be spoken out against. Alice responded with ‘Freedom’, one of his finest anthems since ‘School’s Out’.

  He explained to Faces magazine, “When we started writing it, I said ‘Somebody ought to give the PMRC both barrels.’ Not just being subtle, let’s just give ’em a shot of Alice in this thing. Because there’s something real un-American about the PMRC. It starts out with the premise that every kid out there is so stupid that they don’t know what they’re listening to, that every kid that buys a record is too dumb to understand satire, or humour, or horror. That’s where these people are missing it. Not that I’m against the PMRC. The PMRC for some reason is one of the most necessary evils I’ve seen in my life.

  “They’ve really brought outlawism back to rock’n’roll, which I think is healthy. I can only criticise their philosophy, I don’t criticise the fact that they exist. I kinda enjoy them. They’re a burr under the saddle that gets you going.” And spurred by that burr, he tossed more ammunition back to the Washington Wives, declaring that onstage performances of ‘Freedom’, alongside another new number, ‘Prince Of Darkness’ (the theme to the latest John Carpenter movie), would give the Gores all the gore they could stomach, and then some.

  “[They are] the real theatre on the tour. The tracks are ideal to stage and are all about psycho-killers. It’ll be a kind of concept show that I’d like to turn into a video – guaranteed to be banned by MTV! The effects are really bloody!”

  Despite these highlights, the true key to the album, and to the controversies that were set to erupt around it, was the “kind of autobiographical” sequence of songs that made up side two of the original vinyl. At a time when movies and television, too, were coming under the microscope as a cause of anti-social behaviour, Alice conceived the ultimate doomsday scenario for both sides of the argument, a horror movie fan who spends so much time watching slasher movies that he is finally aroused to start living them out, without ever differentiating between film and reality. Is he really killing all these women? Or is he watching someone else do it?

  He is the killer, although he is selective. He only kills women named Gail. “And at the end, when he’s killed this girl in the song ‘Gail’, and he’s thinking about her bones in the ground and about how the bugs are inside her ribcage, and the dog is digging up the bones – he wonders how the dog remembers Gail. And he sees this wedding dress and it’s got blood-stains
on it everywhere – but he doesn’t see the blood-stains, he sees roses! This guy’s a romantic y’know? He’s so crazy, he looks at this blood and all he sees are roses. ‘Roses On White Lace’ is this whole thing about him not knowing that it’s really blood. For him, he’s painted these lovely roses on this white dress. So he’s really a psycho.

  “I don’t really know how we’re going to do it, we’re working on that now. But I can picture some great stuff with the wedding dress all splattered… and all the Gail creatures, they can come up on stage at different times – they can keep on coming up! All we have to do is train a dog …”

  Even by past standards, then, the latest tour had taken on a whole new realm of realism, a consequence of course of the availability of better quality props. The old intent was still there; and that had not changed. But the blood looked bloodier, the mannequins seemed more man-like, and if the dead babies didn’t quite scream when he stuck them, who was to say that wasn’t because the band was playing so loud?

  “The new stage show is even more horrible than I thought it would be,” Alice cackled to Metal Edge magazine. “We’re doing ‘Dead Babies’ again, we’ve got a big black widow spider, we’re taking the old classic stuff and bringing them up to date.”

  The guillotine had been replaced by the gallows, but confidence in both Raise Your Fist And Yell and Alice’s own in-concert drawing power saw five songs from the new album built into the set, “gut level rock’n’roll” that he wrote with Roberts while they toured Constrictor, and then recorded with the same band once the touring was over.

  He made no secret that the songs were basic. “Let’s face it, politics and religion are boring. They’re dead subjects. Most people don’t really care about them. The only things that matter to people are death, sex and money. So we write songs mostly concerning those subjects.” You would not, he laughed, find any socio-political commentary on his new album.

  So socio-political commentary came looking for him, the moment the tour touched down in England.

  This time around, it was a Labour MP who raised his fists and yelled; David Blunkett, the Member of Parliament for Sheffield, attended one of the performances and instantly called for the remainder of the tour to be cancelled.

  “I’m horrified by his behaviour. It goes beyond the bounds of entertainment,” the morally incorruptible Blunkett raged. Indeed, the Alice Cooper show was “an indication of the sick society we’re moving into and something drastic should be done to protect young people from paying for this sort of obscenity.”

  The press detailed the kind of sequences that so outraged the avuncular family man. A hanging sequence. The dismemberment of a baby. “A mother [is] sliced down the middle, and a beautiful girl has her throat cut. [And] at the climax of the one-and-a-half hour performance young fans in the front rows are soaked by gallons of theatrical blood.”

  Yet what exactly did Blunkett see?

  Very little. He is blind.

  Four years later, an astonished Alice was still exclaiming, “Two guys… came to see one of our ‘88 The Nightmare Returns gigs. And believe it or not, and this is the God’s honest truth: one of the two guys was blind, so the other one kept having to tell him throughout the show what was going on. And the other one was stone-deaf – no kidding!”

  Alice might have taken further grim satisfaction a few years later when Blunkett, having risen further up the ranks of British politics, was then himself held up for similar inspection when his private life turned out to be no less controversial than Alice’s public persona. For now, however, he continued amazed as the controversy spread.

  Alice told Metal Hammer, “The result were some wild press releases in England which some German politician happened to dig up. He was going to stop me from ripping a teddy bear apart on stage. I think in view of all that stuff that’s going off [in Germany] with regard to attacks on political refugees and skinheads, my teddy bear should be the least of their problems …” And later, “It’s hard for an American to imagine anything as too violent for Germany.”

  For all the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded the last two albums, however, restlessness was not far behind. Both albums, as Alice had declared, were basic; hard-hitting metal with riffs the size of dinosaurs lumbering across the landscape. No matter how gratefully Alice accepted the Godfatherhood of the eighties metal scene, however, he also knew that he was one of the least likely musicians to be granted such an honour.

  At no prior point in his musical career, not even in the hard rocking days of Killer, had Alice Cooper been considered even peripheral to the heavy metal scene; that was the preserve of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, the Blue Öyster Cult and Blue Cheer; and all those other groups that the old Cooper outfit used to relish blowing off stage. No matter how grateful he was for the accolade now, Alice knew that his dalliance with the musical form was at best a passing fancy and, at worst, a helping hand, a hitch-hiked ride back to mass popularity. And now it was time to get out of the car.

  Kane Roberts had a solo career now, and it was time for him to pursue it. Kip Winger, too, was launching a new band, an eponymous outfit who would soon be riding high on the chart with their peculiar brand of melodic hair metal, and how sad (but fitting, because they were a gutless noise) it was that Kerrang! would soon be labelling them “the wussiest band of the eighties” and reminding people that “the only person who wears a Winger T-shirt… is Stuart… in Beavis And Butt-head!” Neither musician would truly sever ties with Alice, but they had their own music to worry about now, and Alice was casting around for new playmates.

  Briefly, Alice reunited with Bob Ezrin and Dick Wagner to cut a new single, ‘I Got A Line On You’. But behind the scenes, it was the musical present, not the glorious past that was exercising his advisors and that could only mean one thing. It was time to change record labels.

  Alice and Sheryl were vacationing in Hawaii at the end of the Raise Your Fist tour, when an intriguing request came to his attention. It was delivered by Bob Pfeifer, an A&R man at Epic Records and the gist of it was, “If you ever think you need to look for a new record company, call me.”

  Alice raised his eyebrows. He had, in fact, been tiring of MCA; grateful for what it had done to encourage his comeback, but aware also that the label was a lessening force on the music scene as the era of the multinational conglomerate loomed ever larger and the old traditional powerbases were either swamped or subsumed. Even more damaging in Alice’s eyes was the knowledge that even though MCA had some areas in which it was still a commercial force to be reckoned with, hard rock was not among them. That was the remit of other labels – Geffen, with its deft handling of the Guns ‘N Roses soap opera; Mercury, home to Bon Jovi; Atlantic, where Kip Winger’s band Winger was now just breaking through. And Epic.

  While Shep Gordon worked to forge an amicable break with MCA (an accomplishment of which he remains justifiably proud), Alice asked what Epic could offer, and he was astonished at its response. “Whatever it may cost,” he was told, “don’t ever worry. Always do what you think needs doing. Don’t worry, we’ll pay! The only thing you have to do in return, is bring us the songs, bring us a finished album!” He could, he was told, have anything he wanted. And anyone.

  Alice shrugged. Anyone? He asked

  Anyone, Epic responded.

  OK then. Get me Desmond Child.

  In 1988, Desmond Child was one of the biggest songwriting names around. Indeed, he had been enjoying that role for most of the past decade, ever since he made his debut in the Kiss camp by co-writing the band’s descent into disco-dom, ‘I Was Made For Loving You’. Since then, he had worked alongside some of the hottest names in American rock. Bon Jovi had Child to thank for their first ever chart-topping single,’ You Give Love A Bad Name’ (he also co-wrote ‘Living On A Prayer’ and ‘Bad Medicine’), and when Aerosmith launched their 1987 revival, Child was in on ‘Dude (Looks Like A Lady)’.

  “The guy’s a fucking genius,” Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler
exclaimed. “The first time we met, we wrote ‘Angel’ in about an hour and 45 minutes – and I’m not bullshitting.”

  Most recently, Child had been working with Joan Jett, as she bounced back from a couple of years in the commercial doldrums, and ‘I Hate Myself For Loving You’ became one of Jett’s biggest selling records ever. So what could Child give Alice?

  How about a hit single, for starters?

  “The way I judge a record,” Alice told Raw magazine, “is this: when I’m driving my Corvette, if I hear something that makes me want to turn up the radio – to me that’s a great record. ‘Beds Are Burning’ by Midnight Oil. ‘Dude (Looks Like A Lady)’ by Aerosmith, and all the Bon Jovi singles were great – ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’ was unbelievable. ‘Heaven’s On Fire’ by Kiss, ‘I Hate Myself For Loving You’ by Joan Jett. Eight out of 10 records I found myself turning up were co-written by Desmond Child. So I said, ‘I’ve got to get in touch with this guy because he’s writing the kind of music I would like to hear Alice doing on the radio’.”

  Forty songs were stockpiled for the album. A few were Kane Roberts co-writes. Joan Jett weighed in with ‘House Of Fire’. ‘Trash’ was a gift from two acquaintances of Child’s and slipped so neatly into the old Cooper ballad bag that it not only became the new project’s title track, it also inspired him to call in a co-singer, Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler.

  Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora handed over some new compositions, and Childs was simply a writing machine. It didn’t even seem to matter that most of them sounded very much like one another, or that you could sit through all 40 of the songs on the tape and, after the first two or three, really have problems telling them apart. Childs’ production made every single one of them sound like a major event, a fanfare of fabulousness, and besides – a hit’s a hit, right?