They Call Me Supermensch Page 10

  Some brilliant people in London helped me do that. One was Ian Ralfini, the new head of Warner Bros. Records for England. He was a wonderful man, a true gentleman. He always dressed very nicely and wore a tie. At the time we couldn’t get over a guy wearing a tie treating us so well and saying yes to our crazy ideas.

  Ian walked me into Derek Taylor’s office. Another amazing man, a huge legend in the music business, Derek had been the Beatles’ publicist in their early years and was chiefly responsible for whipping up worldwide Beatlemania. Derek was a beautiful character, very cool, always elegantly smoking a cigarette, a man of few words and many great ideas.

  Derek’s office was circular, furnished more like a living room than an office. When I walked in I was stunned by the assortment of music business legends hanging out there. George Harrison was there, in white robes. He had just come back from India. And a fellow named George Melly, an old-time jazz player who would have been in his early fifties then, a cult hero in England who never made it in the United States. He was a fantastic character, and a total alcoholic. He looked and dressed like a mafioso, with a wonderful face and style. To British musicians he was something like Arthur Lee was to the Landmark crowd, someone they all respected and looked to even though they had larger public profiles. When he played in London clubs the audience was all other musicians.

  Roy Silver, yet another legend, was there as well. He managed Bill Cosby, Tiny Tim, and a bunch of others, and he co-owned Tetragrammaton, the record company that had a huge hit with Deep Purple’s first LP, and later distributed John and Yoko’s Two Virgins in the States when Capitol refused to because of the nude cover photo. When you sat in the waiting area at Silver’s office in Los Angeles, they didn’t ask if you wanted a glass of water—they poured you a glass of delicious first-growth Bordeaux. He later opened a legendary Chinese restaurant, Roy’s, where the House of Blues is now. No one went there to eat, but everyone went in the bathroom and got high. At this point Roy was managing an all-girl group called Fanny, who looked like they were going to have a moment, and they were on Warner Bros., so he was meeting with Derek about how to make that work.

  At some point Carolyn Pfeiffer came in. Carolyn was an American who had a top-flight public relations firm in London. She was very, very good. As a young woman she had started out as an assistant to various luminaries in film, including Omar Sharif, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon. As a publicist her extraordinary client list included Liza Minnelli, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, and the Beatles’ company, Apple. I think she represented Cannes Film Festival winners ten or twelve years in a row. She was very powerful and very respected, and couldn’t have been nicer, the most refined, perfect lady. And now she was representing us.

  I had been hanging out a couple of hours, just soaking it all in, when Derek finally turned to me and asked me what my story was. It turned out he had not heard of Alice. We drank and talked until ten or eleven o’clock. I explained our theory that anything we could do to get parents to hate us was good public relations. We came up with this amazing stunt, guaranteed to piss off and disgust the maximum number of parents.

  First we hired one of those trucks that drive around with advertising billboards on them. Then we had to come up with the most shocking image for the billboards. Carolyn and I went through a lot of photos of Alice and hit on it: a Richard Avedon photo of Alice, naked on the floor, with a boa constrictor wrapped around him, just barely hiding his genitals. Richard Avedon was the leading fashion photographer in the world, so, using my guilt-by-association principle, I had arranged for him to shoot Alice. It was his idea to photograph Alice naked with the snake.

  We made the billboard—a huge image of Alice, naked, with the snake, under some copy about the Wembley show. Then we put Derek’s genius plan in motion. We had the driver of the truck go into Piccadilly Circus, the heart of London, the busiest, most densely trafficked and pedestrian-crowded spot in the city, at rush hour. He drove around the circle a few times—and then faked a breakdown. At rush hour. The traffic jam was a nightmare. For two hours black London cabs and big red double-decker buses were backed up as far as the eye could see in all directions, horns blaring, drivers shouting, a giant crowd of pedestrians just standing there staring. It was pandemonium. Bobbies surrounded the truck, trying to get the driver to move. I had told him, “No matter what they say, do not move the truck.”

  “But I’ll get arrested,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

  He did get arrested, and I paid him very well for it. Not my proudest moment, but it turned out a win-win anyway: the money saved him from losing his house.

  Carolyn’s job was to get all the press there. There weren’t really paparazzi at the time, but there was Fleet Street, where there was a group of photographers who serviced all the magazines and tabloids everywhere. Fleet Street was where you went to find the photographers who could take the shot heard around the world. Unlike American photographers, Fleet Street photographers didn’t just go out and try to catch news when it happened. They’d work with you to create the news—and create history. It was good for you and good for them. It was a very different attitude and approach than in America. Carolyn had informed them all that if they were in Piccadilly at such-and-such an hour, they’d get great shots.

  It was a big success. We made all the papers, all the evening news shows. Everyone was shocked and outraged. A member of Parliament called for the show to be banned. There were headlines like “Ban Alice the Horror Rocker. He’s Absolutely Sick.” And the show sold out. The single “School’s Out” went to number one in England, and then around the world. That August, a woman named Mary Whitehouse, a famous, self-appointed moral watchdog who was always trying to get what she considered offensive songs, TV shows, and movies banned, wrote to the BBC to complain about their playing “School’s Out” on Top of the Pops. “Because of this millions of young people are now imbibing a philosophy of violence and anarchy,” she wrote. “It is our view that if there is increasing violence in the schools during the coming term, the BBC will not be able to evade their share of the blame.” That got us on the front page of the newspapers. Not back in the music section, but page one. There wasn’t enough money in the world to pay for press like that. I had a bouquet of flowers delivered to her every couple of hours for days, to thank her for the excellent publicity.

  After Wembley we came back to the States and began a massive tour that started in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium on July 11 and went all over North America, ending in October. By far the most fun was the extravaganza we threw at the Hollywood Bowl on July 23. The album and the single were getting played everywhere, and we sold the place out. I felt this was our moment. Everything I had done with Alice had already been so overproduced that I had to take this to an even higher level. So I had mariachi bands playing, and more people in gorilla suits wandering around, and bubble machines and balloons and fireworks and all sorts of ridiculous things going on. I was friendly with Wolfman Jack, one of the biggest disc jockeys in the country. He agreed to emcee the show and introduce the bands, and let me come up with spectacular, ridiculous productions just for the introductions. He was a great character and happy to play along. For one band’s intro I had him come out on a minibike with a Harley-Davidson crew, another time on horseback; another time he wore a wizard costume. To introduce Alice he would come out riding a camel, dressed like a sheik with an enormous golden turban, surrounded by a dozen harem girls.

  This was one of the first really big productions we put on where I had to use a union crew. Very, very, very difficult. The Hollywood Bowl is probably the toughest union house in the country. I was in way over my head to begin with, even if it wasn’t a union house, and I was way overaggressive in what I tried to pull off. It was a really tough day for me, and expensive. The union crew was killing me. By around five o’clock I knew we were losing money on the show. Then Joe Gannon came over to me and said, “We have a
problem. We have to hire two more union guys.”

  I lost it. One of the few times I remember really blowing my stack.

  “I ain’t hiring any more guys!” I yelled. “I’ve had enough. I’ll cancel the show. I can’t take it. Why do I have to hire these guys?”

  Joe brought the union steward to me. “If the camel shits,” he said, “and the shit steams, it’s a moving prop. I need two guys on it. Union rules.”

  “What if it doesn’t steam?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t steam you’re okay.”

  So I took Joe over to the corner.

  “Here’s what you’re doing,” I instructed him. “You’re standing next to that camel the entire time it’s onstage, with a towel, and if that camel shits you’re throwing that towel on that shit so fast it can’t steam.”

  The show starts, Wolfman rides out on the camel, and of course the camel shits on the stage. And Joe is standing there and throws the towel on it before it can steam. No moving prop, no union house rule violated, no extra two guys.

  At the high point of the show we unleashed my pièce de résistance: a helicopter hovered over the Hollywood Bowl and rained panties of different colors onto the crowd. The place went wild. A sea of arms reaching up for those panties, people fighting over them. Elton John was in the crowd that night and fought to get a pair of those panties along with everyone else. He says that night inspired him to make his own shows more spectacular.

  Just like the truck driver in London, the helicopter pilot was arrested, and his license was suspended. But he knew that was going to happen. We discussed it all beforehand. And I paid him very well for it. It was his choice. Luckily, he was the last person in Alice’s career we had to pay for getting arrested. Thank you, thank you!

  Life on the road was an exciting sensory bombardment, but it was also grueling. For the band it was hours and hours of doing nothing, then two hours of hard work onstage, then more doing nothing until the next night’s show. Alice had more work than the other guys, because he was the media point man, and there were always press conferences and interviews for him to do.

  For me, though, it was constant, all-consuming work. However hard they worked, I worked ten times harder. In the early days, when we didn’t have a lot of money for crews, a lot of times Joey and I drove the truck, loaded and unloaded equipment, then took a shower and were the management collecting the money. Even when we started to have more money, there were never enough hours, and I never got enough sleep. Every day there was another mountain to climb. At one point when we were touring there was a big national gasoline strike. All the gas stations shut down. We had to organize people with ten-gallon drums to meet us along the highway to fill up the tank. Then there was the ASPCA, who had people at every one of our shows after the Canada chicken thing.

  Meanwhile there was everything else a manager had to do, including dealing with the record company, coordinating with the producer of the next album, working with the agents and the publicity people, dealing with the press in every city, and, as we managed to make Alice more and more an infamous character, having to meet with and mollify city councils and other committees of concerned adults. This was all before cell phones, emails, and faxes. We fed rivers of coins into pay phones and spent a small fortune on telegrams.

  This left me no time at all for relationships. But I did finally become sexually very active. I was in my twenties and finally having sex—a lot of sex—which was really exciting. But how I was getting it soon made me uncomfortable. It was all sex with groupies, which at best meant one-night stands, and often not even that. Groupies were a constant presence on the road. They were in every city you went to, not just where you might expect them, in L.A. and New York, but even in places like Salt Lake City. Girls were always hanging around, wanting to get backstage, wanting to get to the guitar player or the lead singer. I’d give them access to backstage, and when they couldn’t get to the singer or guitarist, they’d settle for the manager. I’d tell them I loved them, get them undressed, and tell them I loved them again after sex. Then I either tried to get them out of the room before I went to sleep, or tiptoed out in the morning when the bus was leaving.

  It was all a lie on top of a lie. We were lying to each other. They wanted to be with the singer. Nobody wanted the manager. But they’d go with me in hopes of getting through me to the one they really wanted. And I would be saying “I love you,” even though I didn’t care at all about them. It wasn’t even that most of these girls needed to hear it. It was just how the game was played in those days.

  All that lying made me really unhappy. I’m not a good seducer. Not my thing. So I came up with the most direct solution I could think of. I got a T-shirt made that said, NO HEAD, NO BACKSTAGE PASS. If a girl came up to me, I pointed to those words on my chest and said I really meant it. If she wanted a backstage pass, she had to give me some head. Then I’d be fine for the night, and she could go on and try to score the guitar player. It was as honest as I could make it. I didn’t want to be lying to some girl, schmoozing her and saying “I love you.” I just wanted some head. You see me wearing that T-shirt in Supermensch and I probably look like some kind of sexist schmuck, but that was my reasoning behind it: Let’s cut the bullshit. It worked, and it was great.

  I applied the same principle to hiring an assistant to help handle all the paperwork and phones and logistics. I was very honest about it: I’m hiring you to be my assistant, and to give me head. She said okay, and she turned out to be great at both jobs. I know how that sounds, but it worked out perfectly for both of us.

  By 1973, Alive Enterprises had grown to the point where Joe and I kept two offices, one in New York and one in Los Angeles, and I was renting a place in each city. The one in Manhattan was a two-bedroom apartment near Max’s Kansas City.

  Socially, I still had no serious attachments, and wasn’t looking for any, either. I was dating gorgeous, sexy women, the kind of women I used to only dream about. But I knew something was missing. Then Fat Frankie Scinlaro, Alice’s road manager, set me up on a blind date.

  He said, “I know this beautiful girl, Winona Williams. You should meet her. You’d really like her.” I set the date for the Hippopotamus, a chic disco on the Upper East Side run by a Frenchman, Olivier Coquelin. All the celebrities were going there then, from Jagger to Sinatra. I knew I could get us in.

  I went to her place in a cab, and when she got in I saw that Frankie was right. Winona was a stunning African-American girl, a Wilhelmina model from Jersey. Beautiful smile, beautiful face, beautiful figure, beautiful manner. We talked a lot that night at the club and really hit it off. She was my age, twenty-seven, and we had a lot of other things in common. She was sweet, classy, intelligent, and funny.

  Around three thirty in the morning we grabbed a cab to head back downtown. The driver fell asleep and smashed into a Daily News delivery truck. Winona and I both banged our heads and gashed our eyebrows in the same place, blood flowing. When I told the cabbie to take us to an emergency room, he said, “No! Get out! You are bleeding all over my cab!” That was New York City in the 1970s. We caught another cab and went to the hospital, where each of us got about a dozen stitches.

  By now it was five in the morning. We went to my place. We were both exhausted, banged up, stitched up, and on painkillers. I told her it made no sense for her to leave at that hour. She stayed the night. In fact, she basically moved in. With her stitches over her eye, which I felt sort of responsible for, she wouldn’t be modeling for a while, and I was happy to have her hang out with me. I felt there was something special here, something I hadn’t felt dating anyone before. Looking back from a great distance now, I’m not sure that it was love, but I think I wanted it to be.

  The next day, Winona told me she had an eight-year-old daughter, Mia. Winona’s mother, Ruth, was babysitting her in Newark. She asked if Mia could come over and I said of course. Mia was a beautiful little angel, warm, happy, a very calm presence. A week went by, then a month, and it
felt very comfortable. It was the first time I’d been that comfortable with a woman. And I really enjoyed Mia’s presence, her innocence, her laughter. I’d buy her a little dress and she would be thrilled. I loved her childish exuberance. Sometimes I’d take her out with me at night, just me and Mia, to music clubs I was checking out. I remember her falling asleep in my lap one night at the Bottom Line. This was all new to me, too. Even when I was a kid myself, I didn’t spend a lot of time with other kids.

  We moved into a fantastic brownstone on West Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue. I had the whole house. Down a few steps from the sidewalk was a semi-basement level with a pool table and a sauna. There was a private movie theater on the next floor up, then a kitchen and dining area on the next floor, then three bedrooms above that. I didn’t cook yet in those days and I don’t think I ever turned the oven on, but the great food market Balducci’s was right on the corner and I could bring prepared meals home.

  It wasn’t like we became a traditional family unit. Winona was a model; I was a rock manager. We both lived in the fast lane. In my house on a given night would be Salvador Dali or Alice Cooper or Ronnie Wood. There were always a lot of high-profile people around the pool table and in the sauna. Having a child in the house, I’m sorry to say now, didn’t put much of a damper on the drinking, drugs, and sex that went on.

  When I got another significant check from Warner Bros., Winona and I took a limo north from Manhattan about a hundred miles to Copake Lake, a wealthy vacation and retirement area not far from the Massachusetts line. Late in the afternoon the limo turned up a long driveway to this unbelievable brick mansion. I had never seen anything like it in my life, except maybe in a movie. Joe Perry of Aerosmith later said it looked like the Addams Family house. It had ten or twelve bedrooms, an amazing dining room with blown-glass chandeliers, a gigantic den with a fireplace you could stand in. From the back of the house you looked down a huge lawn to the lake, with other mansions around it.