Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story
Page 37
There would be no full-scale reunion, he insisted. “The worst thing I could ever do would be for Alice to go backwards.”
That was true, but the occasional glance in the rear view mirror was permissible. Neal Smith: “We reunited again for a big autograph signing at the Monster Mania Con on the official birthday of the band. March 15, Mike Bruce’s birthday, that was the first show we did under the name Alice Cooper.” And after that, things really began to pick up pace.
A new Alice Cooper box set was mooted, a disc and souvenir-packed deluxe edition titled Old School, jammed with rarities, live cuts (the old 1971 St Louis bootleg was faithfully repackaged within) and unreleased material. Alice later admitted he did not have the courage to listen to the entire thing – “because I’m afraid to listen to the rehearsal tapes from high school”. But it would turn out to be a godsend for fans, or at least those who had not already collected the large part of its contents on bootleg.
And even bigger dreams were on the horizon.
By mid-2010, plans for a new Alice album titled The Night Shift, for which he already had 10 new songs prepared, were abandoned in favour of a project that some people may have tired of hearing was about to be revisited, but that others had been gagging for for 35 years. It was time, finally, for Alice to have another nightmare.
Even in the planning stages, Alice’s enthusiasm was contagious. “This one, it really is all about the songwriting. If the songs weren’t flowing out the way they were, it wouldn’t have happened. But these songs were coming out really good, so I knew we had something going on. Music has not changed since 1970; I listen to bands, the Foo Fighters, great guys, great energy, and they’re playing early seventies hard rock. Same with Jack White. It’s Detroit garage rock and there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s the attitude, the personality and the lyrics that turn it into whatever it is. And that’s what makes the Nightmare work …
“It was going to be 35 years since the original Nightmare and I didn’t want to just do 12 new songs, there’s nothing special about that. So I said, ‘Why don’t we do something important and something that we do really well? Let’s do another concept. Let’s do another nightmare.’ Let’s give Alice a new nightmare. Who says he only gets one nightmare? Let’s give him another one!”
The original album was not held sacred; themes and melodies from 1975 were reworked and reshaped into new material, until the opening ‘I Am Made Of You’ and the closing ‘Underture’ became historical bookends as well as musical ones. It would, he told a French press conference, be “more bloody and more accomplished than the first. It sounds like the early years” – and if anybody doubted that, news that he was back in the studio with Dennis Dunaway, Neal Smith and Michael Bruce dispelled all doubts.
Alice explains, “[Bob and I] wrote the first song, then we wrote the disco song, because we decided Alice’s nightmare would be disco, so let’s write a really good disco song, and make it into a bloodbath.” It was an old idea, of course; both Goes To Hell and Lace And Whiskey had driven down that particular road. But ‘Disco Bloodbath Boogie’ was the one that he’d been wanting to write, an utterly unapologetic slaughterhouse set to the most pounding beat of the decade.
Alice continues: “Then we wrote two or three other songs, ‘Caffeine’ was one of them, and then what I decided was, I said, ‘Bob, why don’t we include the original band, Neil, Dennis and Mike, and have them play on the album? Why don’t we write with them?’”
He elaborates: “Neal had this song that had a little section that was the feel of the whole song and I said, ‘Let’s get Neal in and we will rewrite this whole song.’ The same with Mike on ‘Runaway Train’ and the same with Dennis on ‘When Hell Comes Home’. That’s the original band playing live in the studio and it does remind me of something that should be on Love It To Death or Killer.“
Even more exhilarating, he admits, was the realisation that the band knew exactly what he wanted. “It was one of those times where I didn’t have to go in and say, ‘OK guys, let’s get a live Alice seventies sound.’ I didn’t have to say that; they started playing that and Bob and I listened to the whole thing and at the end I said, ‘This is exactly what I’m looking for’. At the end of the song, I didn’t have to tell them to do that big ending where everything falls apart; that was just the way they would end, and it was very satisfying for me to hear that.”
Welcome 2 My Nightmare came together effortlessly, both conceptually and musically. “The whole thing is pretty diverse; it goes in a lot of directions in the way a nightmare goes in a lot of directions and I think what we did, when we got something going in a certain direction we didn’t try and change it. We let it have its own life. When we first listened to ‘Bite Your Face Off’, I thought, ‘Wow we’ve really got that 1964 Rolling Stones sound, so let’s keep that and make it that’. That’s a part of Alice’s background; that’s how we learned to play, listening to the Rolling Stones, so let’s make that a 1964 Rolling Stones song.”
‘Ghouls Gone Wild’ could have come screaming off the Ramones’ Rock And Roll High School movie soundtrack, and Alice delved into his own heritage too, with ‘Disco Bloodbath Boogie’ emerging the kind of stomp that Goes To Hell would have loved to travel with, while Alice snarls like Heat Miser, that most delightfully vaudevillian of American animation’s classic anti-heroes. ‘What Baby Wants’ even sounds like something that could have slipped out of Trash!
Alice: “‘The Last Man,’ it sounds like an old honky-tonk bum song so I said let’s make it that. I don’t want to put a square peg in a round hole, so let everything fit in the way it fits in and then we’ll start connecting it up with little passages from the first album, bits from ‘Steven’ and ‘Awakening’ and things like that, and that will connect things up.”
So did the announcement, on December 15, 2010, that Alice Cooper was to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. And not just Alice Cooper the man. Alice Cooper the band. The originals and the best.
Common sense shrugs and says, “What else did you expect? Of course it’s the band, it could be nothing else.” But as Neal Smith said when he first heard the news, common sense and the Hall Of Fame have not always marched hand in hand.
“It is the original band and not any of us on our own, and that’s another thing I’m excited about. Because it could have been Alice by himself, and he certainly at this point deserves a nomination by himself. But first steps first, and I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s right that they go back to the original concept of the artist… like Iggy & the Stooges…. But then there was Patti Smith, who was nominated alone, without the band, and because of that, I was never sure what would happen until it occurred.”
And afterwards? “We will play for the induction and we’re talking about doing some shows post-induction, as well. It’s all talk at this point, and we’ve been talking about it for the last 10 years, but this may be the boost that we’ve been needing. We all still have our solo careers, but I’m sure in some of the major cities, the fans will be able to come and see the original band play together again.”
That prophecy has still to be realised. But in the meantime there was an unforgettable night when Alice Cooper took the national stage once again, the singer resplendent in blooded shirt and albino boa, his bandmates still like something that stepped out of West Side Story, and their sound a furious fire that not only rolled the years back, it kept them rolled back.
Rob Zombie introduced them, recalling a hypothetical night at the Cheetah Club when Frank Zappa signed the group on the spot, “and they went on to become the most rock star destroying band of all time, the most murderous gang of drag queens… in a good way. [And] all they wanted was Ferraris, switchblades and blondes. Before Alice Cooper there were no rock shows. Alice Cooper invented the rock show.”
He recalled a photograph that impressed him as a kid growing up, Alice leaning on a bar in a jacket that spat out “Remember the Coop”. “Forty years later, we fucking remember t
he Coop, all right.” And it was only when the big screen scrolled through a bunch of vintage live footage that you realised just how much the American music industry had tried to forget him, because the best of the clips were all European: ‘I’m Eighteen’ from Germany’s Beat Club, ‘Under My Wheels’ from the Old Grey Whistle Test, ‘School’s Out’ from Top Of The Pops.
“The most disgusting, parent-terrorising band of all time,” glowed Zombie, and there they were, Alice, Dennis, Neal and Mike… thanking Shep Gordon, remembering Glen Buxton, and taking us back exactly 40 years, to the single that shook through radio in March 1971, a still thumping, still thunderous and, most of all, still resonant ‘I’m Eighteen’.
Zombie and a cosmetically enhanced kid’s choir joined them for ‘School’s Out’, but the point had already been made. The musicians were older, bulkier, greyer. But if any band truly represented everything that it meant to be young, loud, snotty and rebellious, and still represents those same qualities today (for they are qualities, no matter how big your mortgage or loud the grandkids), then this was it.
Because that, more than anything, is what Alice has always aspired to, and Alice Cooper always assumed would be true. Yes there would be missteps, yes there would be off nights and odd sideswipes and albums that didn’t quite make the grade.
But on a good night, which is most nights, when everything falls into place, the passage of time does not mean a thing.
Alice: “When you’re in front of an audience and you start one of those [old] songs, and I always tell the band when we’re learning those songs, we’re not going to do a new version of those songs. I hate to go see the Rolling Stones and see them do a reggae version of ‘Brown Sugar’. I want to hear the song the way the record is, so that is how we do it, we absolutely do it like the record, and when you have an audience screaming for more and they hear the opening chords to this song or that song and they go crazy, it’s impossible to get tired of it. You just can’t.
“It’s annoying to rehearse it, and I do have a hard time rehearsing. But to get it on stage in front of an audience, you just can’t be tired with it.”
So many gigs, so many great nights. On stage at the Rainbow in London in November 1971. The Kings of LA in 1973 and alone in that same city in 1975. Las Vegas in 1977, Philly in 1978. Manchester and Glasgow in 1982, and Manchester again in 1986. Pittsburgh in 1990. The Christmas Pudding in 2006. Alexandra Palace for Halloween 2011. There’s a shelf of DVDs of a lifetime of shows, and another one of live performances, dating back to days when reel-to-reels were considered portable. And if you switch on your computer and dial up the virtual world of Second Life, you’ll find an Alice Cooper tribute act there. Alice gets hanged by the neck until not-dead there as well.
Pick your own poison because the list could last forever. But one thing remains the same. On a night when everything falls into place, it’s impossible to imagine that any time at all has passed since the first time you stood, sat or ran and hid behind the sofa while a hook nosed, black eyed, scraggly-haired half-man, half-Muppet arose from a pit of your own foulest nightmares to tell you what had happened to your school.
It is. “out”.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the small phone book full of people for contributing to this story, some anonymously, some accidentally, but all very valuably. At the heart of the story, of course, lie my own interviews, conversations and encounters with Alice, Neal Smith, Glen Buxton, Shep Gordon, Mike Pinera, Marcus Blake, Ray Manzarek, Hilly Michaels, Russell Mael, Harley Feinstein, Howard Kayman, Mark Volman, Tony Visconti, Harry Nilsson, Dee Murray, Jack Curtis, Dave Vanian, Stiv Bators, Cheetah Chrome, Kip Winger, Peter Frampton, Keith Boyce, Gary Holton, Suzi Quatro, Gaye Advert, Jim McCarty, Arthur Brown, John Donovan. But I am also indebted to the friends and associates who spoke to me off the record, and whose observations gave so much to the back story.
And to everybody else who threw something into the stew – Amy Hanson, Jo-Ann Greene, Toby, Oliver, Trevor, Jen, Gaye & Tim, Bateerz and family, Geoff Monmouth, Barb East, Karen and Todd, Linda and Larry, Deb and Roger, Dave and Sue, Mike Sharman, Chrissie Bentley, my agent Brandi Bowles, and all at Omnibus Press.
Discography
SINGLES
PRE-ALICE RELEASES
THE SPIDERS
Why Don’t You Love Me/Hitch Hike
Mascot 112 (USA), 1965
THE SPIDERS
Don’t Blow Your Mind/No Price Tag
Santa Cruz SCR 10.003 (USA), 1966
THE NAZZ
Wonder Who’s Loving Her Now/Lay Down And Die, Goodbye
Very 001 (USA), 1967
THE SPIDERS
Why Don’t You Love Me/Hitch Hike/Don’t Blow Your Mind/Why Don’t
You Love Me
Sundazed SEP 141 (USA), 1998
UK SINGLES DISCOGRAPHY
Unless otherwise noted, the discography notes UK vinyl releases only.
Reflected/Living
Straight ST 101 (USA), March 1969
Shoe Salesman/Return Of The Spiders
Warner Bros. 7398 (USA promo), 1970
I’m Eighteen/Is It My Body
Straight STR S 7209, August 1971
Under My Wheels/Desperado
Warner Bros K 16127, November 1971
Be My Lover/You Drive Me Nervous
Warner Bros. K 16154, March 1972
School’s Out/Gutter Cat
Warner Bros. K 16188, June 1972
Elected/Luney Tune
Warner Bros. K 16214, September 1972
Hello Hurray/Generation Landslide
Warner Bros. K 16248, February 1973
Slick Black Limousine/Unfinished Sweet (Extract)/Elected (Extract)/No More Mister Nice Guy (Extract)/Billion Dollar Babies (Extract)/I Love The Dead (Extract)
Lyntone LYN 2585 (flexidisc), February 1973
No More Mr. Nice Guy/Raped And Freezin’
Warner Bros. K 16262, April 1973
School’s Out/No More Mr. Nice Guy/Elected/Billion Dollar Babies
Warner Bros. K16409, 1974
Teenage Lament ‘74/Hard Hearted Alice
Warner Bros. K 16345, January 1974
Department Of Youth/Cold Ethyl
Anchor ANC 1012, February 1975
Only Women Bleed/Devil’s Food
Anchor ANC 1018, June 1975
Welcome To My Nightmare/Black Widow
Anchor ANC 1025, November 1975
Welcome To My Nightmare/Department Of Youth/Black Widow/Only Women Bleed
Anchor ANE 7001 (12-inch), 1976
I Never Cry/Go To Hell
Warner Bros. K 16792, July 1976
School’s Out/Elected
Warner Bros. K 16287, November 1976
Love At Your Convenience/You And Me
Warner Bros. K 16914, March 1977 (withdrawn)
(No More) Love At Your Convenience/It’s Hot Tonight
Warner Bros. K 16935, April 1977
You And Me/My God
Warner Bros. K 16984, July 1977
How You Gonna See Me Now/No Tricks
Warner Bros. K 17270, November 1978
Clones (We’re All)/Model Citizen
Warner Bros. K 17598, May 1980
(No More) Love At Your Convenience/Generation Landslide
Warner Bros. K 17914, February 1982
Seven And Seven Is (Live)/Generation Landslide ‘81
Warner Bros. K 17924, February 1982
For Britain Only/Under My Wheels (Live)
Warner Bros. K 17940, May 1982
For Britain Only/Under My Wheels (Live)
Warner Bros. K 17940M (12-inch), May 1982
I Am The Future (Remix)/Zorro’s Ascent
Warner Bros. K 15004, March 1983
School’s Out/Elected
Old Gold OG 9519, September 1985
He’s Back (The Man Behind The Mask)/Billion Dollar Babies
MCA MCA 1090, October 1986
Teenage Frankenstein/School’s Out (Live)<
br />
MCA MCA 1113, April 1987
Freedom/Time To Kill
MCA MCA 1241, March 1988
Poison/Trash
Epic 655061 7, July 1989
Bed Of Nails/I’m Your Gun
Epic ALICE 3, September 1989
Bed Of Nails/I’m Your Gun
Epic ALICEB 3 (blue vinyl), September 1989
Bed Of Nails/I’m Your Gun
Epic ALICEG 3 (green vinyl), September 1989
Bed Of Nails/I’m Your Gun
Epic ALICER 3 (red vinyl), September 1989
House Of Fire/This Maniac’s In Love With You
Epic ALICE 4, December 1989
House Of Fire/This Maniac’s In Love With You
Epic ALICEP 4 (shaped picture disc), December 1989
Hey Stoopid/Wind Up Toy
Epic 656 983 7, June 1991
Love’s A Loaded Gun/Fire
Epic 657438 7, September 1991
Feed My Frankenstein/Burning Our Bed
Epic 658092 7, June 1992
Lost In America/Hey Stoopid (live)/Billion Dollar Babies (live)/No More Mr Nice Guy (B2)
Epic 660347-6 (12-inch), May 1994
It’s Me/Bad Place Alone/Poison (live)/Sick Things (live)
Epic 660563-6 (12-inch), July 1994
UK LPs
(except where noted)
Alice Cooper At The Whisky A Go Go
No Longer Umpire (live)/Today Mueller (live)/Ten Minutes Before The Worm (live)/Levity Ball (live)/Nobody Likes Me (live)/BB On Mars (live)/ Sing Low, Sweet Cheerio (live)/Changing Arranging (live)
Straight R2 70369, 1969 (1992 – USA)
The Toronto Rock’n’Roll Festival 1969
No Longer Umpire (live)/Lay Down and Die, Goodbye (live)/Don’t Blow Your Mind (live)/Nobody Likes Me (live)/Fields Of Regret (live)
(Alice Cooper performances only)
Accord SN 7162, 1982 (USA)
Pretties For You
Titanic Overture/Ten Minutes Before The Worm/Sing Low Sweet Cheerio/Today Mueller/Living/Fields Of Regret/No Longer Empire/Levity Ball (live)/B.B. On Mars/Reflected/Apple Bush/Earwigs To Eternity/Changing Arranging