Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  The Last Temptation, Alice explained, “is my first concept album in a long time, because I came up with a good story this time”. He told Metal Hammer, “I won’t do a concept without a beginning and an end, a hero and a villain, and a believable situation; this one was either going to be a movie or an album. The basic theme is temptation. We all experience temptation every day.”

  He outlined the tale; the arrival in a small American mid-western town of the mysterious Showman, owner of a weird looking theatre that most of the kids in town are too scared to enter. Finally one does… Steven, the slightly older hero of the original Welcome To My Nightmare production. This time, however, Steven is not caught in a dream.

  Inside the theatre, the Showman displays for him a wealth of wonderful things; and a series of performers, each one represented by a different song on the album. And slowly it dawns on his audience what really is on display in the theatre. Death.

  Where The Last Temptation stepped away from Welcome To My Nightmare, at the same time, ironically, as reawakening memories of a slightly earlier Alice-related concept, was in its overall presentation. As shades of Flash Fearless fall across the Alice fan’s eyes, sold separately but intrinsic to the story were three comic books depicting the album’s story. “I wanted people to really be able to see what I had in mind, and short of 10 expensive videos or an actual movie, this was the way to do it. You need to see the tempter, The Showman. He’s just like the old Alice, slick and glib and cool and funny.”

  The comic book medium slipped naturally into place. As a kid, Alice loved Tales From The Crypt. As a teen, he read the superhero comics, the Spidermans and Fantastic Fours that ushered in the so-called Marvel Age. Now, as an adult, he read adult-themed comic books, the work of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and the newly launched line of titles by already prodigious Vertigo. Comics which asked, as the new songs were asking, what had happened to all the old monsters? Who or what were they now?

  “The monsters aren’t the thing that live under your bed in your imagination,” he explained to Faces magazine. “The reality is much scarier than anything fantasy. The monsters are needles, heroin, gang warfare and guns – most of the things that are in your face everyday, especially for a Generation X-er.” The overall vision, he suggested, combined Ray Bradbury’s own tale of fiendish carnies, Something Wicked This Way Comes, with nothing less than the temptations of Christ, a vast palette that required vast talents to realise it.

  Fascinating indeed was Alice’s choice of collaborators. In the studio, he worked with latter-day greats like Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw, Don Fleming, Andy Wallace and the Duane Baron/John Purdell duo; on the comic book, he wrote with Neil Gaiman, the English born creator of some of the most inspired fantasy of the nineties, and artist Michael Zulli.

  Born in Britain but now living in Minneapolis, Gaiman’s speciality was the mining of childhood terrors, usually drawn from his own London upbringing: the vague dread conjured by the Punch & Judy puppet show; the saga of the Lancashire Witches; the wrinkly old guy who once paraded around the metropolis in his raincoat and cap, bearing a placard warning “less passion from less protein”. Childhood obsessions with a certain brand of candy, a comic book or TV show that rose above the usual realm of self-conscious “I was there”-isms to emerge nostalgic touchstones with which to ground the electricity of fantasy. To allow reality to get a look-in when all else was turning to madness.

  Now, Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book was already compulsory reading for an army of adult comic book fans; upcoming, too, were the first in what has since developed into one of the most engrossing sequences of novels in recent times.

  Although it was Bob Pfeifer who initiated contact with Gaiman, Alice explained his own introduction to the writer in the book Hanging Out With The Dream King, a collection of conversations with Gaiman and his collaborators. His son Damien was a keen collector of Star Wars memorabilia, and “every time you’re either in a comic book store or you’re at a sci-fi convention, I kept seeing Neil’s name pop up. I finally picked up a couple of the comic books and that’s when Bob Pfeifer came in and said, ‘I know this guy named Neil Gaiman,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I know who this is’.”

  “Neil did a spectacular job,” Alice continued to Metal Hammer. “He filled in all the holes in my storyline. I brought him in as soon as I had the basic ideas down, and he helped a great deal with the songs themselves by filling in the gaps before I actually wrote the songs.”

  Gaiman himself was a longtime fan, which probably shouldn’t surprise anybody, given the nature of his own remarkable talents. “I liked Alice Cooper,” he wrote in the forward to the collected edition of the comic. “I liked ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ and ‘Teenage Lament 74’. I thought Welcome To My Nightmare was one of the great rock’n’roll records. I thought Trash was a remarkable comeback album.” As he spoke with Bob Pfeifer the first time he called, Gaiman admitted, “My head swam with snakes and swords, top hats and black-rimmed eyes.”

  He recalled, “We sat in the hotel room and I listened to the tapes of the first few songs he’d written, and I watched Alice and his collaborators write another three songs while I sat on the bed, occasionally making suggestions for lyrics and song titles.”

  It was not Alice’s first brush with comic book immortality; 1979 saw Marvel’s Stan Lee produce an Alice edition in its Marvel Premiere series, and ask the readers the pertinent question, “Should Alice be awarded his own Marvel title? Should we send him blasting through the Marvel Universe?” The answer, presumably, was no; or at least so undecided that no series emerged. But Marvel Premier 50 earned the star’s full stamp of approval, even as he used it as another barb with which to jab his then arch-rivals Kiss. They too had a comic book and had requested a drop of each band members’ blood be mixed into the printing ink. Alice went one further. He also requested that Kiss’ blood be used, but that the printers should not confine themselves to a drop.

  With Marvel again the publisher, the tie-in this time was seamless, although the marketing did experience a handful of hiccups as hopes to tie in a third strand, a virtual reality computer game, were finally abandoned when it became clear that it simply could not be completed. The album had already been delayed for four months as the designers worked to get the game up and running; finally, all had to concede defeat.

  Yet the paraphernalia was never more than that. The Last Temptation, first and foremost, was a rock album, and one that touched upon some of the most primal sounds Alice had ever employed. One track, ‘Lost In America’, he even described as “bare bones Stooges”, although it might also have been compared to Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’, with its circular catalogue of juvenile deficiencies – I got no girl cos I got no car, I got no car cos I got no job, I got no job cos I got no car …

  Dig deeper, however, and the theology would emerge; the belief that so nihilistic had the rock world become as it searched for ever darker, deeper, demons to dance with, in order to keep the accountants smiling, that the country had lost touch with its soul. Words like redemption and temptation, so much a part of Alice’s own Biblical upbringing, were lost now to the common vernacular; either that, or wholly hijacked by a religious right wing whose sole purpose in life seemed to be the besmirching of religious belief in the eyes and hearts of anybody who didn’t follow their own creed of righteous intolerance.

  “It’s very hard for Alice to be about shock rock any more, because I can’t compete with CNN,” Alice told the Toronto Star. “CNN is much more shocking than anything Alice Cooper could do. I don’t think anybody is shocking any more. I don’t think Madonna going on David Letterman and swearing is very shocking. So what? Everybody uses those words every day anyway.”

  For him, the greatest shocks were the things that the media now seemed to be accepting as simply everyday perils – guns, drugs, AIDS and violence. It was no coincidence that, as the album came together, Alice would be a witness to a restaurant shoot-out in Los Angel
es, seated at his table eating as 15 bullets flew around the room (“They could have killed me, and they didn’t even know who I was”); nor that the music industry itself would be stunned as Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April 1994, shortly before The Last Temptation‘s completion. Events such as those, while he never referenced them directly in the music, shaped the course of the songwriting all the same, and the direction of the story too.

  Even as he tried to avoid the circus, Alice realised, it had a way of drawing him back inside.

  There would be no tour for The Last Temptation, just an endless routine of promotional appearances, and one off guest spots. In February 1994, he appeared alongside Roger Daltrey at Carnegie Hall’s Celebration: The Music Of Pete Townshend And The Who spectacular, performing ‘I’m A Boy’ – a wry choice, of course, given the old gender confusion that he once provoked. He guest-hosted a week’s worth of radio shows for Z-Rock, Alice’s Attic, shot a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo in the movie Maverick and joined Neil Gaiman for an autograph session at London’s Forbidden Planet sci-fi bookstore.

  It would be September 1995 before he returned to the road, as he clambered aboard the Monster of Rock touring festival wagon, scouring South America alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Megadeth, and Faith No More. Yet things continued changing around him. The on-going “crisis” that the music industry complained was undermining it through the nineties was in full swing now. Of course, it was nothing compared to the even greater disasters it would inflict upon itself once downloading became a part of daily life, but cost cutting and belt tightening were the order of the day, as a gradual decline in overall CD sales first began to manifest itself.

  Epic Records was no exception. Autumn 1994 saw the bean counters commence a slash through the company catalogue, taking out any number of lesser-regarded acts (Arcade, Infectious Grooves and Suicidal Tendencies all felt the axe), but some larger ones too as Alice was also released from his deal. They bade farewell with the distinctly mistitled Classicks compilation.

  Hollywood Records, a relative upstart newcomer that was nevertheless sweeping up great swathes of the classic rock catalogue, was rumored to be his next port of call; Bob Pfeifer, the man who signed Alice to Epic in the first place, was the company’s President, and his loyalty was never in doubt. Still rumour had it that the move was very dependent upon one condition – that Alice reform the old Alice Cooper group for the occasion.

  Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith were both said to be onboard already; Michael Bruce was considering the offer, and Dick Wagner had agreed to step in for Glen Buxton, whose health problems rendered his participation improbable. But rumour can rarely be believed and this one fizzled out as Alice simply continued to ride the celebrity-go-round. He was a presenter at the 1995 Grammy awards, guested in actor Gene Wilder’s Something Wilder TV series… another year of frenetic activity could be rendered simply as a list of bullet points, and the musical rebirth of The Last Temptation was in danger of being lost beneath the poor reviews that reached up from the South American shows.

  Steffan Chirazi from Kerrang! caught the Sao Paulo show, and shrugged, “Alice Cooper was, frankly, boring. Without being too callous, the stage schtick came across as dated, the songs uninspired and Alice’s pink plastic pants quite fucking frightening… much more so than the whipping of the blow-up doll and the ol’ West Side Story rucking routine. Once highly entertaining, nowadays Coop simply shows those laurels got a little too comfortable.”

  His uncertainty scarred his first album for Hollywood. Demoing in Phoenix with guitarist Stef Burns and drummer Jimmy DeGrasso, fresh from those South American dates, Spirit Rebellious was the working title of an album Alice began writing in 1996, a conceptual effort that he summed up as “a gang warfare thing, on three different levels, socially, spiritually and there’s a romance in it”. And he grasped his own changed role in the music industry by explaining, “I want to make Alice Cooper albums like Stephen King does books, not just a collection of songs. It should really say something.”

  “I’ve actually written two full albums lyrically,” he told Metal Edge. “I just haven’t put the music to them yet”; the other, Alice’s Deadly Seven, paired him with Disney composer Alan Menken. “It’s fun to work on, because this guy sits down at the piano and everything he plays is a hit. And all it really needs is for Alice to take it and warp it a little bit. I wrote all the lyrics; I took lust and sloth and all of that and wrote songs concerning those, and it really came out great. It’ll be a rock’n’roll album – these seven different little stories all entwined with one guy telling the entire tale. It could be an album, a Broadway play, a cartoon, a movie. It’s very visual, and it’s full of hits, and when you have that, you can go in any direction with it.”

  Yet neither project would come off.

  It was time to regroup. Alice would not return to the studio for six long years, instead allowing his back catalogue and his fame to keep the name alive. He reacted to Epic’s release of Classicks by hitting back with a Greatest Hits Live set, A Fistful of Alice, recorded in Mexico and positively laden with guest superstars as Slash (Gun N’ Roses), Sammy Hagar (ex-Van Halen Mark II) and Rob Zombie (White Zombie) filed onto the stage.

  He turned down the chance to go out on the road with Kiss, a double header that both act’s fans insisted would sort out who was the best once and for all; he went out instead with the Scorpions, alternating the headline spot nightly, and dumping the Germans in his dust, even after he left the theatrics at home. “I’ve known [the Scorpions] forever. I told them I’d do the tour as long as they didn’t do the song with the whistling in it [‘Winds Of Change’]. Ever time I hear that song, I want to go and build the Berlin Wall back again,” he cracked.

  Instead, he contented himself with their nightly destruction, courtesy of a 12 song set that blazed with old masters. His band felt more anonymous than any past outfit, but still guitarists Reb Beach (ex-Kip Winger’s Winger) and Ryan Roxie, keyboard player Paul Taylor, Y&T drummer Jimmy DeGrasso and the reformed Rainbow’s bassist Greg Smith could do little wrong in a live set that positively ached glorious history.

  In and around these activities, he dove, too, into a string of collaborations, cherry-picking his disciples with a sharp eye for their own ability to increase his audience, and perhaps to rub off some of their own reputations on him.

  Insane Clown Posse, for example. Insane Clown Posse was a Detroit band who had been around since the early nineties, rap metal’s self-styled most excessive, and long-running prank originating, they claimed, from a chance encounter with the sinister Carnival Spirit.

  Like Alice two decades earlier, Insane Clown Posse knew how to rile up the locals and, after three albums, their notoriety had spread sufficiently for Hollywood Records to step in for their signature. Backed by a million dollar press campaign, Insane Clown Posse cut The Great Milenko with Alice a much-heralded guest on one song; and on the day of release, the Disney-owned Hollywood withdrew it. Instant notoriety was, of course, followed by instant acclaim. Island stepped in and released the album, and Insane Clown Posse were finally thrust onto the major stage. At least for a short time.

  It is sad but true, however, that few rock stars ever see their musical progeny live to maturity. A Xerox is always a Xerox, of course, but even the finest reproductions seldom last for longer than they need to, because the originator is always still around. David Bowie has buried more cavorting little Ziggies than Ziggy himself spent days on this earth; Lou Reed and Iggy Pop can probably set their watches by the funerals of their legion imitators and spawn; and Alice had given up counting the number of performers to whom he’d been compared. “Call me in 20 years,” he might have responded. “See if they’re still comparable then.”

  Rob Zombie was different. Another acolyte, another horror buff, another name for the legions of decency to chastise from the soap box, Zombie could have been simply another nine day wonder, rising up in the early nineties with what the music press called the Industri
al Revolution, and then sinking back down again the moment it became apparent that harsh, grinding vocals scraped out over the sound of haywire machinery was never going to displace melody from the top of the charts.

  Unlike so many of the artists who floundered in the forthcoming wipeout, however, Zombie had never placed all of his heads in one basket. Rather, alongside the musical reputation of his band, White Zombie, he simultaneously cultivated a persona that superficially may have owed much to Alice, but which was also capable of standing alone – a Frankenstein, perhaps, to Alice’s Dracula, built on the visual imagery that he drew from the same wellspring of horror flick fodder that Alice was already so identified with.

  Happily, Zombie acknowledged that influence. The first record he ever owned was ‘School’s Out’, he said, and Alice returned the compliment when he described Zombie, in 1997, as the only artist who actually seemed to be having fun with his image. Because that, at the end of the day, was what being a performer was all about. Having fun, and drawing your audience into the circus alongside you.

  He told Pulse magazine, “[Rob is]… the only person out there who’s having any fun with this…. And it’s clear when you listen to his albums, and when you see his show, that he’s having a great time…. the other people look like they’re just tortured souls up there, and you go, you know, ‘Guys! Lighten up! The image is heavy and everything, but you don’t have to really be that.’ These guys are trying to live their lives the way their image is, and I’m going… The idea behind rock’n’roll is joy. It’s joyful music. It’s not a depressing thing.

  “You know, the big difference between an Alice Cooper show and a lot of the shows you’re talking about – I won’t specifically say anyone – is that I always left the audience on an upper. I left them inspired rather than… They walk away going, ‘Wow, I’ve got confetti in my hair and Alice has got a white tuxedo on, and he just did ‘School’s Out’, and balloons are popping.’ And then they remember back, and they go, ‘Wow, he did a thing with a baby carriage, and he did this, and then he got his head cut off. What a great night!’ They always walked out with big smiles on their faces. Whereas I know a lot of people walk out [of shows now], and they go, ‘Wow, my life is over’.”