Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  It was inevitable that Alice and Zombie would meet and probably inevitable that they would become close friends – in 2011, it was Zombie who inducted the old Alice Cooper band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while the intervening years had seen Alice and Zombie alone collaborate on a variety of musical projects and tours.

  “We both have an appreciation for the absurd,” Alice explained to Metal Edge. “We both like horror movies but only the bad ones, the really stupid ones. We don’t like the good ones. There’s a certain common chord to what we do, we both see the comedy in horror and we both realise that it’s a carnival ride and shouldn’t be taken more seriously than that, a good comedy.

  “When we work together it’s very easy, there’s a common respect. He does something totally different musically than I do, he creates a wall of sound and writes lyrics on top of that. I try to write more of a conventional song and my twists and turns come in the story line, whereas his come in what’s going on in the sound, [whereas] Rob’s whole thing is built on what the groove of the song is. I like Rob because he’s in on his own joke. That’s something a lot of people are afraid of. He knows that you have a certain amount of popularity for a certain length of time. He always makes fun of himself, his band, what he writes, he has the healthiest attitude in the world, he loves what he’s doing. When you talk to him he’s so self-effacing. I like that.”

  Initially, the pair cut just one song together, ‘Hands Of Death (Burn Baby Burn)’ for the Songs In The Key Of X album that tied into the X Files TV series. Soon, however, they were writing towards Alice’s own new studio album. If it ever came.

  But there was one artist with whom Alice would never see eye-to-eye. Speaking in 1996, he essentially predicted his own revival when he prophesied the arrival of a new metal superstar, “movie star-ish and over the top with cool music”. He reflected on his own favourite bands – Soul Asylum, Collective Soul, White Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, and Soundgarden, but he also acknowledged “there’s no-one out there who’s really shocking”. Back in the day, “We were the cutting edge, the scourge of rock’n’roll. We were scary because the seventies were pretty innocent. Now I’m not nearly as shocking as CNN.”

  Alice dreamed of rock receiving a new messiah. Instead, it got Marilyn Manson. “Hmmm. Where have I seen that before? Marilyn Manson. Even the names – Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson – are pretty similar,” Cooper told writer Mark Brown. “I don’t agree with their whole satanic thing, this whole ‘Antichrist Superstar’ sort of thing. I know that’s meant to irritate people, but I certainly don’t want people to associate me with that. Alice was always more fun than that. Religion was much too personal, and politics was much too boring. Our three targets were sex, death and money.”

  Kerrang! probed deeper, but Alice remained coy. “Marilyn Manson and I have this agreement, I don’t talk about him, and he doesn’t talk about me!” And he then proceeded to talk about him. “I was reading an article about Marilyn the other day. He was disclaiming all these rumours, which I totally understand. I was reading the list of things he is supposed to have done, and you know what? He’s living my life.

  “Ninety per cent of what you hear about Marilyn Manson isn’t true. Ninety per cent of what you heard about Alice Cooper wasn’t true. I was called everything from a witch to a vampire. There’s something sexy about being a vampire,” he smiles, “but the occult? Alice Cooper was about as occult as Porky Pig!”

  Which made his own next controversy all the more ironic, as Alice took it upon himself to land Pat Boone in trouble with the Christian Right. Boone had recently engineered a musical comeback of sorts by cutting a metal album, suitably titled In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy. The antidote to the fifties rock’n’roll hell-raisers, Boone took it on himself to record bland versions of some of rock’s greatest early hits, softening them for the mainstream market and, of course, siphoning off sales that belonged to rock’s true originators. A smooth, clean cut all-American figurehead for everything that is good and holy and mom’s apple pie about Uncle Sam, Boone also had a massive following on Christian television. His weekly Gospel America show was one of the shining stars of the Trinity Broadcast Network, not only at home but around the world. And many of his loyal audience would have tuned in to see their idol at the American Music Awards on January 27, 1997.

  Minutes later, the Trinity switchboards lit up like an electric chair.

  It was presenter Dick Clark who came up with the idea, for Boone to appear on camera dressed as a hardcore rocker – bare chest festooned in temporary tattoos, leather and be-shaded, stud collar and wristbands; while Alice emerged with short hair and a cardigan, sensible slacks and white buckskin shoes.

  Unfortunately, Boone explained, “He must have taken one look at those buckskin shoes and gotten sick to his stomach. He backed out at the last second. I walked onstage dressed like a heavy metal rocker and was fully expecting to see him dressed like Pat Boone. Instead, he was dressed like – well, Alice Cooper!”

  Boone’s loyal viewers flipped, bombarding the TBN switchboard with so many complaints that, incredibly, Gospel America was cancelled. Boone, however, refused to apologise. “It was all done as a joke. And as for my album, it has taken a major jump on the charts. It’s the first time in 30 years I’ve been on the charts! I’ve been one of the biggest squares of all time. Now suddenly some people see a picture of me and think I look like a Kiss reject. I realise I’m now being judged like I used to judge these rockers. But God loves rockers too!”

  That autumn, He had one more to love. On October 19, 1997, guitarist Glen Buxton died from pneumonia at his home in Clarion, Iowa, where he had lived since 1990.

  Like Alice a born again Christian, Buxton had lived as far from his past as he could, a farmer whose place in rock history was known only to his friends and family; not only his years with Alice, but also with the clutch of later acts he led for shorter periods of time – Shrapnel, the New York act that toyed with the last ebbing of the city’s late seventies punk scene, were the most fondly remembered; Virgin, a Phoenix covers band whose act mixed old Alice hits with more recent eighties fodder, the least.

  Obituaries spoke of the last time he and Alice spent time together, after Alice’s show in St Paul, Minnesota in August. Afterwards the pair spent an hour together talking and, in early October, Buxton reunited with Michael Bruce and drummer Neal Smith for a series of autograph shows and live performances in Houston. (Dennis Dunaway was ill and couldn’t make it.) It was there that Buxton mentioned that he’d been suffering from a pain in his chest, and Smith joined the long line of friends and relations who asked him to visit his doctor and get it checked out. Which Buxton did, finally, do. But it was already too late.

  Alice delivered his own tribute.

  “I grew up with Glen, started the band with him and he was one of my best friends. I think I laughed more with him than anyone else. He was an underrated and influential guitarist, a genuine rock’n’roll rebel. Wherever he is now, I’m sure that there’s a guitar, a cigarette and a switchblade nearby.”

  And it was Buxton’s death, probably more than any other consideration, that finally reunited Alice with the remainder of the old band. It was a reunion that started on the telephone and though it would never become a full fledged return to past glories, somewhere in between those extremes, it found a comfortable place to live.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Candy Canes for Diabetics

  Now a pillar of the community, Alice opened his own sports bar in Phoenix. Cooperstown, he insisted, was set to become the “Taj Mahal of sports bars”. Of course his was simply the name over the door – like so many other celebrity endorsed venues around America, BB King’s in New York for example, the artist had minimal involvement in the day-to-day running of the bar and a minimal investment too; in Alice’s case, a reported $5,000, and the life-size cardboard cut-out that greeted visitors at the door.

  He performed there too, opening the doors on December 19, 1998 b
y calling Neal Smith and Michael Bruce into town, and looking as though they all had just stepped in off the street, punching through a loose, laughing ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’, the first time they had played together in 24 years – and it showed. “Rehearsal at your house tomorrow night,” Alice quipped to Bruce as they slipped into a scrappy ‘Muscle Of Love’. Then, with time for one more, ‘Is It My Body’ seemed to take Alice as much by surprise as the crowd, but the grins on his old bandmates’ faces eased away any consternation. The whole thing was over in barely 10 minutes.

  So it wasn’t strictly his club but nevertheless the triumphs (and, sadly, the tribulations) of the bar would be gifted to Alice, just one more brick in the wall of solid local citizenship that he and Sheryl were constructing in Phoenix.

  Sometimes it felt that the pair were as active in the local community as Alice had ever been on stage. They wrote and produced the annual Hopi Variety Show for a nearby school; and they oversaw, too, the Solid Rock Foundation, a charitable organisation he launched in 1995 to financially aid Christian organisations and ministries that work with youths.

  Annual Alice Cooper Celebrity Golf Tournaments were a feature of the landscape too, and he was as likely to be overheard discussing his treasured collection of vintage wristwatches as he was his musical ambitions. Specialising in the wonderfully sci-fi-like creations that adorned fashionable wrists during the fifties, Alice looked forward to touring as much for the chance to visit yard sales and junk stores, in search of new treasures, as he did any more traditional on-the-road pursuits.

  By 2002, he was fronting another soon-to-be-annual event, the Christmas Pudding, taking over the Celebrity Theater (longtime supporters of the Solid Rock Foundation) and staging a full scale charity show that December 13. Peter Frampton, comedian John O’Hurley, Sam Moore and Nils Lofgren all slipped onto the bill, and Alice enthused, “It’s a mix of stuff, like a Christmas pudding, so that’s why we’re calling it Pudding. And we’re actually going to have pudding! [Restaurateur] Mark Tarbell is going to make pudding for 2,500 people. This is our first one,” he said at the time. “But I think this is the kind of thing that’s going to grow every year and get bigger and bigger and better and better.”

  And so was he.

  For three or four years now, the grapevine had been rustling to rumours of an impending Alice Cooper box set, a sprawling beast whose fight for existence was fast becoming a legend in its own right, as the different labels that owned Alice’s catalogue raised objections and obstacles in the path of the compilers, while all of them swore that they supported the project. Yet it would be late 1999 before they finally lived up to those pledges, and The Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper was finally unveiled.

  It was a joy to behold, a four-disc box set that lived up to its title, not only by rounding up the hits and bits that everybody expected, but also by digging deep for the odd little one-offs and surprises that were buried away on B-sides or deeper. Single mixes of the classic 45s, unheard since their day on the radio, were restored to life. The two Flash Fearless cuts were gloriously resurrected, alongside those early, pre-Alice sides that all but the most rabid collector had despaired of ever owning. There was even room for that Special Forces era jewel, ‘Look At You Over There, Ripping The Sawdust From My Teddy Bear’, omitted from the original album because it didn’t fit in with the rest of the tunes, but now revealed as one of the eighties Alice’s most beautifully realised visions.

  Disc by disc, the journey from the Spiders to Rob Zombie was undertaken with more shocks and surprises than even the most expectant fan could have imagined. But what was perhaps most important was the way in which the manifold delays ultimately worked in the box set’s favour. Alice Cooper had soundtracked the last three decades of the 20th century as uniquely, and astonishingly, as any other artist of his generation. What better time could there have been to unleash the box than in the last months of the last year of the century?

  And what better time could there be to follow it up than in the first weeks of the 21st, with the announcement that Brutal Planet was poised for release, a full fledged return to in-yer-face horror rock, shot through with a vision of an apocalyptic future shaped indeed by the brutality of the modern world itself: the continued growth of the political far right, with its own savage disregard for life and liberty; the emergence on the American home front of both domestic and imported terrorism; the expansion of banks into corporate megaliths with a scavenging claw in everybody’s life; greed, rage, tragedy and death.

  “There were some songs that I just didn’t want to write,” he told Live Daily in spring 2000. “But I couldn’t let some of these things go by without writing about them. They’re part of our society, and to me, they’re part of Brutal Planet.”

  But so were a lot of other things; with a wit that surprised even Alice’s most loyal supporters, when the Brutal Planet road show hit the tour circuit, pop singer Britney Spears (exquisitely portrayed by Alice’s daughter, Calico), would be executed nightly for perpetrating “everything that my audience hates – the softening of rock’n’roll… the sweetness of it all.”

  Sometime Black Sabbath overseer Bob Marlette produced, Bob Ezrin was billed as Executive Producer, and even before the sessions began in earnest, Alice’s intentions were clear, as he rounded up Marcus Blake and Jim Wilson, bassist and guitarist with the Rollins Band, to work with him on the demos.

  Blake recalls, “It was Bob Ezrin who introduced us; originally he was going to be working with Billy Idol, and called us up for that, and then one day he called and said that project was off, but he had somebody else he wanted us to meet.”

  Linking up at Marlett’s home studio, the pair ran through the tunes while Alice sat on a sofa with a notebook, sketching lyrics that very often became his final draft. “It was incredible watching him write,” Blake enthuses, “because what he was coming up with was usually the final lyric.” The pair also found themselves writing with him, as a piece of music that they conjured in the studio was grasped and transformed into the immortally titled ‘Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me’ – a title Alice heard on The Simpsons TV show one night, and had been wanting to borrow ever since. “I saw it as a Kinksy-sounding thing,” Blake says of the leviathan riff that powers the song, “and Alice saw that right away.”

  Blake and Wilson would not be recalled for the actual sessions; their own commitments with Rollins ensured that. Instead, Alice and Ezrin rounded up a new crew, former Kiss drummer Eric Singer and guitarists Ryan Roxie, China and Phil X, all slammed together for four months spent cutting basic tracks at A&M Studios in Los Angeles before shifting to Marlett’s digital home studio.

  The end result, Alice celebrated, was “the heaviest album I’ve ever done. It’s loud, tough, big! Sonically it’s a monster. It’s an absolutely Godless world, a place where it’s just desolate and horrific. I wanna throw a scare into [people]. It’s not going to be like I used to in the seventies, because the audience is shock-proof now. It’s impossible to shock the audience now. Unless you go on stage, cut your arm off and eat it, you’re not going to really shock an audience.” But Brutal Planet would come close.

  Neither did he expect everybody to understand. “The first review I read of Brutal Planet called it ‘a tragic waste of plastic’. I have to laugh because 30 years ago, most of the press were saying, ‘They’ll last about three minutes’, and here we are 24 albums later, still doing it.”

  Alice had never strayed this close to what could be described as overt social comment before; had never strived for anything more than what he called political incoherence. Even ‘Elected’, the single that had once been shunted to one side for fear that it might unfairly influence an election, had offered no solutions or suggestions for its listener’s ills. And neither did Brutal Planet.

  “[Alice] doesn’t belong in politics,” Alice explained to Braveradio Plus. “He doesn’t belong in social events at all.” But Brutal Planet demanded its existence, songs forcing themselves into his consc
iousness not necessarily so that Alice might condemn their subjects, but in order to make other people think about them. For that, Alice believed, was what was missing from this brave new world in which Alice found himself. People acting without thought.

  “A song like ‘Blow Me A Kiss’, I’m talking about senseless killings. It’s not like I could understand any killing at all, but if somebody is going out and saying, ‘I’m going to go kill 20 abortion doctors’ or something, then he has an agenda. People that just go into school and say, ‘I’m going to kill you ’cause you’re black, gay, you’re afraid, because I saw you in biology class,’ that song was hard to write for me because there’s no rhyme or reason for these murders. You can’t let that go by.”

  His own listening habits shifted with his method of writing. Bands like Rage Against The Machine, Limp Bizkit and Korn were the musical powers that fuelled his imagination; then there was Bob Ezrin’s own solid grasp on what the overall vision should feel like. It was its own innate melodicism that saw ‘Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me’ omitted from the final album; it simply wasn’t brutal enough (the song would appear as a bonus track on the Japanese edition). In its place lined up the heaviest artillery that Ezrin could coax from the players; all still recall how he thought nothing of simply halting the proceedings and telling the musicians outright, “Those chords are too gentle, that tune is too nice. It’s not Brutal Planet.” Then, with everybody suitably chastened, the mood would climb up another notch or four, and the next take would blaze with all the fury he demanded.