Epic Records, to whom Alice was now signed, certainly thought so. Even before the new album was complete, word of its star studded gestation was spreading; how it was recorded in Woodstock and mixed in LA, how the guest musicians included Kip Winger, Kane Roberts, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Steve Tyler, Joe Perry, Joey Kramer, Tom Hamilton, Steve Lukather and Guy Mann-Dude; how the quality of songs was so strong that Alice only found space for one of three songs that Jon Bon Jovi wrote for him. Oh, and one more thing, from the ubiquitous management spokesperson. “Alice has picked the songs purely by how good they sounded. The direction is less gore, more MOR!”
A lot of ears turned away right there. But, strangely, even more tuned in.
Chapter Sixteen
Don’t Talk Old To Me
We gave the company exactly what they wanted, they got what they hoped. We’ve recorded three or four potential singles and we still didn’t have to sell out. The singles aren’t wimpy at all, they’re all tracks that I am really proud of, they are real Alice Cooper classics!”
Thus spake Alice as he looked back on 1989-1990, the years in which the clock rolled back to the days when he ruled the American chart. But he also admitted, “I’m not stupid. I know exactly what I have to do to get my music [more] airplay than I got during the Constrictor and Raise Your Fist … times. So I wrote the songs accordingly.”
Four singles spun off Trash, beginning with the summer 1989 ‘Poison’ – destined not only to become his most successful American hit in 18 years, but his joint biggest ever. Like ‘School’s Out’, it rose to number seven, while British fans sent it soaring even higher, all the way to number two, where only the then-mega-monstrosities of Jive Bunny and Black Box could keep it from emulating his biggest UK smash.
A UK only release of ‘Bed Of Nails’ made the Top 40; American singles ‘House Of Fire’ and ‘Only My Heart Talkin” charted too and while their eventual places (56 and 89) could be construed as disappointing, that was tradition talking, not the reality of the ever-fracturing singles market of the late eighties. Radio was shattering into a succession of formats, and each had its own chart. On the listings where Alice’s music was expected to do well, the hard rock and metal charts, and on the stations that his music was being marketed towards, both were solid smashes, while the rise of Trash itself was stupendous, his biggest album since Welcome To My Nightmare.
Dissenting voices would not be stilled, of course. Childs was still fresh from engineering Joan Jett’s comeback the previous year and more than one listener pointed out that, in sonic terms, the two albums dovetailed so exquisitely that an Alice Cooper version of ‘I Hate Myself For Loving You’ would have been no more out of place on Trash than a Jett take on ‘Poison’ would have felt wrong on her Up Your Alley. And while Alice was more than happy to shrug away the absence of his trademark gore, he did so with a signal lack of conviction.
He told journalist Edgar Klüsener, “There’ll be quite a few classic horror scenes built into the new show. However they won’t dominate the show. And why should they, after two albums and two tours, everything starts getting slightly boring and evolves into a stereotype for me as well as for the audience.”
Or, “I really wanted to do two full world tours that were totally blood lust, and it was fun. Now a lot of people have asked me: ‘Are you going to do that again?’ and the answer is no, we’re not, because I’m not going to turn into Slayer! Why should I keep on plagiarising myself?” he asked. “Alice Cooper has still got far too many other ideas than be forced to rely on clichés like that.”
Alice had the ideas? Or was it a tidy line of advisors that reached from Desmond Childs, to the suits at Epic, and onto the bean counters who could not believe their luck? In the same interview, Alice claimed that the new album “delves into the whole subject of sex a lot more than previously”. And somewhere on the back of a dusty record shelf, a few hundred thousand barely played copies of Muscle Of Love pricked up their ears and listened.
Alice continued to talk a convincing conversation. “Trash is the word I use for everything that excites me. Trash is the girl with an amazing body that walks past me on Sunset Boulevard, Trash is the fantastic feeling I get behind the steering wheel of a fast car while zooming down the highway, Trash is sensational and impressive, Trash is the best possible title for the album, and I think this LP is the best Alice Cooper [has] recorded in ages.”
He felt, he insisted, “that the album is real ‘nineties’ Alice. I have people saying to me that they like the weirder stuff like Zipper Catches Skin and Dada, but most of my requests are for Love It To Death. People wanna hear that kind of rock’n’roll, so I wanted to capture that and push it into the nineties. When Desmond and I were writing, we were listening to Love It To Death and the Greatest Hits LP. Not because I wanted to throw back to that. Just to find that vibe and match it to the present era.”
Besides, no matter how cynically older fans and journalists regarded Trash and its success; no matter how commercially tainted they considered it to be; and no matter how many times another disbelieving critic rightfully compared ‘Bed Of Nails’ to Bon Jovi’s ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’, it served a purpose that, for Alice, might well have been the most crucial yet. He had long since grown weary with seeing all the baby Alices scampering over the landscape, all of them taking another piece of the old machine and letting it carry them to glory. And he had long since stopped complaining about it too.
He knew his value, he knew his worth, and he had always known what the answer was. An artist is not guaranteed success because he has always enjoyed it; and although a record can sometimes be a hit because its predecessor was, that cycle will always run out in the end. In order to sustain success, an artist needed to sustain his push for success. Alice had maybe forgotten that over the years; become so bound up in his own vision of the cult of Alice Cooper that he didn’t see how quickly the cult’s outside membership was shrinking. Desmond Childs reminded him of it.
“When I meet new bands who tell me, ‘I love your stuff, I own everything you’ve done, you’re the reason I’m here’, it’s great. But now I tell them to get ready, because I’m competing again. Y’know… if you think I showed you everything, wait until you see up my sleeve a bit more!”
“I don’t wanna be Chuck Berry,” he told Sounds. “I love Chuck Berry as an artist but I don’t wanna be that kinda golden oldie figure. I wanna be at the front of all the innovations whilst I’m still doing things. Alice should always be there. And unless I kill ’em every night, I won’t do it. I’ve never had mediocre reactions. If I did, then I’d stop. I’ll physically shake people if I have to, they’ll react to me!”
He meant it as well. Yet although Trash could not be considered a false dawn, it did mark the last time in which Alice Cooper, like so many others of his generation, could be considered a genuine competitor in the commercial stakes, as the nineties and emergent technologies and business models of that decade commenced sweeping so much of the traditional industry away.
It was a gradual process and one whose enactment is littered with so many exceptions that it was hard to perceive the creation of the rules that would eventually stifle the one thing that had always ensured rock’n’roll’s health – its status as art’s last great outsider.
The emergence of the PMRC had restated those battle lines just five years earlier, after all. But when history looks back and remarks on just how brief that organisation’s active lifespan seemed, it was not because the opposing forces swept Ms Gore and her allies back into the trenches. It was because the opposition crumbled. Parental guidance stickers were a fact of life now, and so many other of the censors’ demands, too, came to fruition as shareholders and accountants started to design record company policy, and the record companies themselves simply became one more facet of a multi-media conglomerate.
The creation and, more importantly, the promotion of music suffered accordingly. But there were other factors, too, at least for now. The drive for th
e absolute homogenisation of rock’n’roll still had one more drama to circumvent.
Alice followed Trash with Hey Stoopid in 1991. It was his 19th studio album, produced by Peter Collins of Queensrÿche and Gary Moore fame, and again laden with collaborators. In terms of radio friendliness, and media recognition, it should have been as big as its predecessor. Instead it was crushed by the same bad timing that demolished so many other artists’ hopes at that time, regardless of vintage or popularity. Hey Stoopid was released in June and was marching slowly up the chart all summer. Then September brought Nirvana’s Nevermind and everything else, it seemed, stopped selling.
Hey Stoopid stands now as the last gasp of the good ship glam metal. Slash, the top-hatted guitarist of Guns ‘N Roses, Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars, songwriter Jack Ponti, guitarist Steve Vai, living legends Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford and Joe Satriani, all piled into the sessions as they switched from Bearsville, New York, to Los Angeles; and, once again, the formula was as flash as its creators. The opening ‘Hey Stoopid’, an anti-suicide anthem from a man who’d been accused of encouraging more than his fair share of such tragedies, became another big hit single, and the remainder of the album was as slick and polished an addition to the canon as anybody could have hoped… any fan of that sound, at any rate.
But glam metal had already been on the wane for a while now; had been visibly flagging since the new decade was born. In adhering to much the same musical signposts as its predecessor, Hey Stoopid adhered to the same death wish that would cripple new releases by the rest of the pack. All Nirvana did in that instance was give a bored audience something new to get excited about, in exactly the same way as punk had revitalised the late seventies, and Alice had reinvented the dawn of that same decade.
But there was something so all-consuming about Nirvana’s success, and that of the grunge bands who slavered in their footsteps; something so vast and unprecedented, that the industry itself did not know how to contend with it. Lessons learned by punk rock, which music historians always credit with having changed the face of the late seventies industry, were not applicable here. Yes Nirvana portrayed themselves as outsiders, and yes there were aspects of the attendant circus that were less than palatable from a mainstream perspective.
In the past, however, the music industry’s excesses were policed by the music press, with the tabloids and the entertainment media really only dirtying their feet in the sink of rock’n’roll when an artist had truly risen to the status of the genuine superstars of Vegas, Hollywood and prime time TV.
Now Kurt Cobain’s wife was on the cover of Vanity Fair; and that was only the most egregious of the manifold examples of the mainstream’s co-opting of that old teen spirit. Rock’n’roll had weathered numerous crises in the past, of its own invention and from outsiders too. And it had danced around respectability for decades, as well.
Alice had played a role in that, with his superstar schmoozing, regular appearances on the TV quiz show Celebrity Squares and invitation golf matches. But Alice had been just one monster, and there were always more to fill his place, the bad boys of rock whose only brush with the tabloids would be a disapproving headline for their latest drug bust, arrest or the public evacuation of unwanted bodily substances.
Now, it was as though every artist’s “struggle with drugs” (or booze or sex or any of the myriad other addictions and afflictions that seemed to be granted a medical or psychological basis) was as open to debate in the mainstream press as it had once been in the corridors of scurrilous rock’n’roll rumour; and those artists who had taken a cure of some sort and come through on the other side found themselves the willing or otherwise paragons of virtue to which all would-be recoverers were expected to pray.
The bad boys were good. And, once that one ticking bomb of public opprobrium had been defused, they were safe.
They were no longer rock stars, they were celebrities.
They were no longer dangerous, they were national treasures.
And they were no long competing, they were veterans.
Alice recalled the first time he heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for Metal Hammer. “It was different than anything else. It’s just a cracker. It’s one that you turn up. It was just all out…. It wasn’t grunge, it was a big, ragged rhythm guitar. It was just relentless all the way through. Very cool. It reminded me of very early seventies rock.”
Yet it also posited a musical future that he knew he could not be a part of; a fact that a lot of his contemporaries would eventually come to understand, but which few turned to their advantage as swiftly as Alice.
The family was living in Phoenix now, in a Paradise Valley house that Alice had purchased as an investment back in 1973. Completely remodelled in the first years after they arrived there in 1985, it was the base from which he found himself becoming a true cause celebre in local circles.
He spoke light-heartedly of moving into local politics, but when real politics hit a long-time fan in the form of the imminent loss of his home, Alice arranged a fundraising benefit to beat out the forces of foreclosure.
The birth of his third child and second daughter in January 1993 was celebrated in the local Phoenix press, and three decades after Vince Furnier was threatened with expulsion from the local school system for the crime of not cutting his hair, his son Damien was preparing to enter it.
And Phoenix, the city he had called home longer, and with more passion, than any place else he had lived, was where he retired to as he considered how he was going to approach the latest challenge not simply to his commercial comeback, but to the musical landscape that was all he had ever known.
By changing the landscape himself.
Hey Stoopid was the last album Alice Cooper Rock Star would ever make. From hereon in, he would simply be Alice Cooper, and he didn’t give a damn what the job description was. Because he would be changing it every time.
Alice had never mounted a conventional tour, even in the days when Alice Cooper plied the same circuit as a thousand other bands, all convinced that they were just one hit single away from grasping the golden ring. Now, however, he was determined to take it one step further. “The Alice show is an event, not just a rock concert,” he bragged to Hot Metal. “It’s like ‘Alice is coming in four months!’ – and so’s Christmas! I want people to look forward to the fact that we’re coming into town, not like ‘Who we gonna see this week? OK, let’s go and see Alice….’ I want them to go, ‘Wow, Alice is here! Boy, what’s going to happen in the new show?!’”
He landed the role of Freddie Kruger’s stepfather in the sixth Nightmare On Elm Street movie, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, and nobody batted an eyelid. Pop stars playing at movie actors was never a comfortable fit, but those rules did not apply to Alice. Like he’d been saying way back at the beginning, he’d been a movie star all along, who just happened to do something other than make movies.
Wayne’s World, the movie length spin-off from what had been a mildly amusing skit on television’s Saturday Night Live came calling, and Alice stepped into that as well, turning out a ferocious ‘Feed My Frankenstein’ for the occasion, and then looking on as the movie’s main characters Wayne and Garth, kneel and bow before him chanting “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” For the next few years, Alice laughed, he was getting that everywhere he went, although it was an improvement, he said, on what he’d been putting up with before that. “[My] last album was titled Hey Stoopid. So for a year I had to hear, ‘Hey, stupid!’ This is better.”
For a year, too, he was looking again at Welcome To My Nightmare and the possibility of crafting a sequel. It seemed impossible to believe that 20 years had now elapsed since he first formed the visions that would become that record, but that was the anniversary that was looming, and just as 1974 had seen him surround himself with the best, and most relevant musicians he could find, so two decades later he would scheme the same dream.
Soundgarden were one of the myriad bands that rose up in the
slipstream of Nirvana although, like Cobain and co, they had been around their hometown Seattle scene for a few years before the rest of America noticed them.
They were not necessarily the most inspirational of the grunge pack; muddy introspection was their most obvious calling card, cast over the even muddier soundtrack that, even in the age of digital sound, seemed to have been sucked bodily off the banks of the Puget Sound. One prominent music journalist recalled catching an early Soundgarden video on MTV a few weeks before she and her own family moved to the city. “I almost cancelled the movers on the spot.”
Since that time, Soundgarden had proved adroit at confounding expectations. They were tarred with the grunge brush by geographical circumstance, but when Kerrang! went looking for “the future of metal” in 1992, Soundgarden graced the issue’s cover. When Spin sought out “the metal band for people who hate metal”, they picked up on Soundgarden. And when Almost Live, Seattle’s infinitely funnier alternative to Saturday Night Live wanted somebody to represent America’s head-banging community for its semi-regular “lame list” feature, they turned to Soundgarden too. So why shouldn’t Alice?
With Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell travelling out to Phoenix, he and Alice co-wrote two songs; ‘Unholy War’ and ‘Stolen Prayer’ were both scheduled for an album that Alice now intended journeying to Los Angeles to record. Other Seattle-ites Alice In Chains and the Screaming Trees were called in to the sessions, as Alice worked towards what was surely destined to be at least a contemporary-sounding record. But he had no intention of delivering one.
“Let’s face it, Alice Cooper can’t speak for the 15-year-old grunge kids,” he told HM magazine. “Guys like Steve Tyler and Ozzy and myself are out of touch with those kids. Violence has become much more acceptable, and everyone’s getting very dour.” And it was that dourness, and the hopelessness that clung to it like the rain clouds that haunt the Seattle skyline, that he wanted to investigate. The result would be one of the most evocative albums of his career… even if its promise was mildly rebuked by the UK news report that described it as “his first concept album since DaDa.“
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 33