They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  What made all that even odder was that Vince came from a very conservative Christian household. His grandfather and father were ministers in the Church of Jesus Christ, an offshoot of Mormonism. As a kid, Vince divided his time between church, school, and watching TV, where he first saw and started imitating Elvis Presley and then Mick Jagger. The family moved around when Vince was a kid. He grew up in Detroit until he was ten, then in L.A., then in Phoenix.

  In L.A., Alice Cooper definitely stood out from the pack, but they still weren’t going over well at all with the hippies. The Chambers Brothers, some of the nicest people you could ever meet, took pity on them and let them stay in their basement in Watts while they struggled to get gigs.

  And now Lester and Willie found them “a manager.” To me Alice Cooper seemed like the perfect band to manage, because from what I could see they had absolutely no chance of ever making it, so I wouldn’t have to do any work.

  They stayed maybe half an hour that day. I took them into my bedroom and gave them a big handful of grass, not knowing then that despite their weird look they were all pretty straight kids who didn’t smoke pot or do other drugs . . . yet. We agreed that I was their manager. It was that simple. Vince later told an interviewer, “Shep and I met on a lie. I said I was a singer, he said he was a manager.”

  Then I saw them play. It was at Bob Gibson’s Cheetah Ballroom on a pier in Venice Beach. I thought they were awful, just dreadful. Vince remembers them starting the show with the corny theme song from The Patty Duke Show, instantly alienating their hip, hippie audience. Musically it was scattered rock and roll, not my style at all, and visually it was really strange. Vince wore a striped metallic shirt and had dyed blond streaks in his hair. They used theatrical stage props, which nobody else in rock did then. One was a free-standing door that Vince stood behind and stuck his head through the window to sing the whiny song “Nobody Likes Me.” He was right. He was really drunk and antagonistic to the audience, and they were shouting at him things like, “You suck, Alice Cooper!” He said, “Why don’t you all go home?” And they did. The place emptied out.

  One of the few people left by the end of the set was Frank Zappa. Zappa was revered among rock fans as the renegade genius who created the Mothers of Invention. His music mixed rock and jazz with avant-garde electronic and orchestral compositions, plus heavy doses of up-yours satire. With his business partners Herb Cohen and Neil Reshen he ran his own independent production company, and the Bizarre and Straight record labels. He was the king of the freaks, so naturally Alice Cooper worshipped him. Just before I met them they had gone up to Frank’s log cabin home in Laurel Canyon to audition for him. He’d told them to come at seven. They showed up at 7 A.M. and Miss Christine let them into the basement. They set up their equipment and started playing, loud enough to shake the walls. The way Vince remembers it, Zappa ran down the stairs, naked and sleepy-looking, and yelled at them to stop making all that noise so early in the morning.

  “You told us to be here at seven,” they replied.

  “I meant seven P.M.!”

  They agreed to stop, but only if he’d come see them play an actual show.

  When I went backstage after their set, not knowing what to say to the band because their music was so bad, Zappa was back there talking to them. When he left, I asked Vince what that was about.

  “He wants to sign us to his record company,” he said. “And he wants his manager to manage us. We said okay. We didn’t tell him that we found you. We’re supposed to go in this week and sign the contract.”

  I probably should have been angry with them, but this whole business was so new to me that I didn’t know that. So I just said, “No problem. I’ll go tell them.”

  One morning that week I called the office of Herb Cohen, Zappa’s manager and partner, and told the receptionist I’d be dropping by. Then I got in the limo and drove to my first meeting. And I do mean my first meeting. I had never been to a business meeting in my life and had no idea what was supposed to happen. I parked in the underground garage of a typical glass and steel L.A. office building on Wilshire Boulevard a few blocks west of Fairfax. I took an elevator up to the third floor. The door that had HERB COHEN MANAGEMENT on it also said Bizarre Records, Straight Records, and several other things. I walked into the reception area, which was like a dentist’s waiting room—a few chairs, a few magazines, no love or care put into it at all.

  I’d been sitting there maybe five minutes when this guy came out a door. He was a bearded, burly man, maybe five ten, 220 pounds of solid muscle, really tough-looking. He looked more like a bouncer than a manager, but it was him, Herb Cohen.

  “Come in here,” he growled.

  I followed him into his office, he closed the door, and with no preamble, no layup of any kind, Herb Cohen started verbally lashing into me, raging, playing the heavy, nasty in a way no one had ever been to me in my life.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he shouted. “I fuckin’ manage this group. The fuckin’ balls on you. I’ll ruin them. I’ll ruin you!” And so on.

  I told him I was sorry about the mix-up, that I was excited for them to have this opportunity, things like that. It didn’t calm him down at all. In fact, he actually picked up a chair, lifted it over his head, and started coming at me with it, screaming at the top of his lungs. “YOU FUCKIN FUCK FUCK . . .”

  At that moment the door burst open and the GTO’s rushed in. They had heard him screaming and come to save me. It was like a miracle. I didn’t know at the time that he managed them. They formed a circle around me and walked me out of the office.

  I drove back to the Landmark and thought, What the fuck just happened? That’s when Lester explained to me that I’d had a pretty standard business meeting with Herbie Cohen. He was a tough New York Jew, a horrible guy, an intimidator. He acted like that with everybody and I shouldn’t take it seriously.

  I had nothing to lose. Managing the band wasn’t my livelihood, it was my cover. So I wasn’t intimidated as much as I was angry. Who the hell did this guy think he was?

  Eventually Herb moved on to other acts and I guess forgot about us because our earnings were so insignificant. Joe and I remained the band’s managers, and Straight Records still wanted to put out their album. One good thing that came out of it was that Cohen’s number two, Joe Gannon, started working with us as production manager. Joe Gannon was the real deal, with a lot of experience from being on the road with acts that ranged from the Kingston Trio to Bill Cosby. He became an integral member of our organization and a very good friend.

  Joe Greenberg and I started trying to book the band some shows. I knew nothing about booking shows. The first one we got them, I think, was at Fort Huachuca, an army base in Arizona. The guy who booked us was a real Sergeant Bilko type who ran the entertainment side of the PX. He promoted the show as “Alice Cooper, Stripper-Singer.” He hired sexy girls in hot pants to sell tickets to the soldiers on their payday. When Vince and his band of long-haired weirdos took the stage, this crowd of red-blooded American GIs who were expecting a strip act were very disappointed. They booed and threw bottles and food at them until they drove them off the stage.

  Still, as so often happens in my life, something really good came out of this. Joel Siegel, later the movie reviewer on ABC, was the PR man at the base. When he came to New York he contacted me and we began a great friendship. For many years we met at a Jewish deli once a week for breakfast. In the 2000s, when he knew he was dying of colon cancer, he wrote a book for his son, Lessons for Dylan. It’s one of the proudest things in my life that in this book he gave Dylan my grandmother’s recipe for chicken soup. So thank you, thank you, Fort Huachuca.

  We asked Lester if he could help get us some real shows. The Chambers Brothers were scheduled to play the first Newport Pop Festival, at the Orange County Fair Grounds on the first weekend in August 1968. The bill included Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sonny & Cher, the Byrds, the Animals, Tiny Tim, Steppenwolf, Canned Heat, and
several other top acts. Somehow Lester got us on there. But when we drove up to the main gate and told the guard “Alice Cooper,” he didn’t see us on his list and wouldn’t let us in. Fuck. In the age before cell phones, we had no way to reach anyone. As we drove away I looked at the bands listed on the fairgrounds’ sign and saw the James Cotton Blues Band. It gave me an idea. We drove around to another gate and I said to the guard, “Joseph Cotton Blues Band.” I meant to say James Cotton, but it came out wrong. Luckily the guard must have never heard of Joseph Cotton, and he didn’t know that James Cotton was black, either, so he waved us in. The festival drew an immense crowd of 140,000, the largest pop concert ever at that point. It was great exposure.

  In this early period Joe was more aggressive and successful at booking gigs than I was. It was Joe who got us booked at Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco, which was the premier venue for rock bands at the time. All the top acts played there. If a smaller band like us did well at the Fillmore, venues all around the country would start booking you, and you were on your way up the ladder to being a top act yourself.

  “I’m going to get us in there,” Joe said. I didn’t think that was possible, but Joey was determined. He hitchhiked up to San Francisco, took some acid, and sat in the waiting room for days before getting an audience with Graham. Graham had never heard of Alice Cooper, of course, and apparently assumed that she was one of the hippie folksingers who went over well in San Francisco. We made no effort to disabuse him of this notion. Miraculously, we got on a bill opening for Ike & Tina Turner and It’s a Beautiful Day. When Alice Cooper arrived on the night of the show it was like a band of freaks from outer space invaded Graham’s holy temple of rock. Alice wore a jacket of dead rats; the rest of the band was in glitter spandex and high-heeled boots. Nobody in San Francisco had ever seen anything like them—nobody in the world had. Joe said the band was into their second song, I think, when Graham stuck his head out of his office, saw them onstage, and flew into a rage. Bill had a history of that. He was the epitome of the tough Jew, who’d come to America without a penny and worked his way up. He had a really short fuse and a tendency to get physical when provoked.

  When it came time to do the album with Zappa, neither the band nor I knew a thing about that process. I was in way over my head. At eight on the appointed morning we showed up at the Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale. We were amazed by the place, very impressive, home of a famous pipe organ. Frank’s younger brother Bobby met us. At nine Frank walked in and said, “Bobby’s going to record you. I’ll come back at five and pick up the tapes.”

  The band ran through their songs a few times that day. We all thought it was a rehearsal for the actual recording. Frank showed up at the end of the day, picked up the tapes, and said, “That’s it. The album’s done.”

  We all said, “Really? Wow. Okay.” We had an entirely different idea of how you made an album, but since we had no clue we just figured this must be how it was normally done. The GTO’s told us that was how they did it. Wild Man Fischer, another act on the label, did it that way, too. What did we know?

  When the album, Pretties for You, came out in 1969, the rock critics killed it. Lester Bangs called it “totally disposable” and a waste of vinyl. I was quickly learning a mantra of show business: “Every rejection brings you closer to acceptance.” We must have been getting close!

  In 1969 I added another act to our roster—briefly.

  One afternoon I was hanging around the pool with Lester, Willie, and Jimi. They said they might have another group for me to manage.

  “Got a card?” Lester asked.

  I said, “A card?”

  “A business card. You got to have a second act to be a real business. You need some cards to help get you some acts. It’s important for clients to know you got a real business. What are you going to call your company?”

  “No idea.”

  In those days, when they closed their shows with “Time Has Come Today,” the Chambers Brothers always flashed the peace-sign V. Besides being the bass player, Willie was a good artist. So Lester said, “Willie, you think you can draw the peace sign for Shep’s business cards?” Willie drew a hand with two fingers making the V.

  The business still needed a name. I went to the front desk and asked Mr. Latour if he had a dictionary. I don’t know why I expected him to, but he reached under the desk and pulled out a big Webster’s. I opened it to the A’s and went down the list to the first word with a v in it—alive. And that’s how we became Alive Enterprises. We got cards printed up with Willie’s V-sign drawing in the middle of the word Alive.

  Then they introduced me to this band—Pink Floyd. They were mildly successful but nowhere near the giant act they’d later be. They had toured their way across the country and were now in effect stranded in L.A. They were usually second on the bill, maybe headlining once in a while, getting maybe $2,500 a night. They were getting ready to go back to London and wanted one more show before they left.

  Their road manager, Steve O’Rourke, said to me, “Okay, man. If you can get us a decent gig on the way back to England, we’ll let you represent us over here.”

  I asked Lester, “What’s a gig?” Shows you how new I still was at this managing thing.

  He said, “It’s a job. I’ll help you out.” Pink Floyd had played once the previous year at a club in Chicago, the Kinetic Playground. Anybody who played the Fillmore in San Francisco also played the Kinetic Playground. It was in a former dance hall and roller rink on Clark Street, with state-of-the-art psychedelic light shows, very counterculture, perfect for Pink Floyd. When I called the owner, Aaron Russo, he immediately agreed to book the band. This was on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and he wanted them for that Friday. He’d pay seventy-five hundred dollars, which was a huge amount back then.

  When I told O’Rourke he was stunned. “This Friday? Seventy-five hundred dollars? We’ve never made seventy-five hundred. You’re our U.S. manager!”

  If I had known anything about the business I’d have known there was something fishy here, but I didn’t know anything about the business. I asked Lester about the gig and he told me, “Make sure you get half the money wired up front.” I didn’t know how to go about that, so Pink Floyd went to Chicago without anything up front. When they got there, they called and left me a message that there’d been a fire in the club. Russo had shut it down, canceled their gig, and wasn’t paying the fee. Everybody but me seemed to know that Russo had his own place torched for the insurance money. But he couldn’t afford to burn good relationships with artists’ agents by booking too many acts and not paying them all. So he had booked only four acts for that week: Iron Butterfly, King Crimson, Poco, and Pink Floyd. The fire happened after Iron Butterfly’s first show, the remaining dates were canceled, and Russo was refusing to pay the other bands’ fees.

  So Russo wouldn’t pay Steve and Steve wouldn’t pay me, and Steve fired me to boot. I’d worked with Pink Floyd for maybe nine days. And I could really have used the money Steve was refusing to pay me, so I was pissed. But I learned a very important lesson. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, a brilliant man who became a dear friend, would later put it to me this way:

  “The three most important things a manager does are, number one, get the money. Number two, always remember to get the money. Number three, never forget to always remember to get the money.”

  4

  BY 1969 THE COPS WERE MAKING MORE AND MORE DRUG BUSTS at the Landmark. It was time to get out of that business. We’d had a good run, made good money and great friends. Quitting that meant this music business would be my only business.

  I sat Alice and the band down and said, “If you want to do this seriously, let’s do it. And not quit until we’re all millionaires.”

  We shook hands, and I’ve been Alice’s manager ever since. Just on that handshake, never a written contract between us from that day to this.

  We were getting gigs, but not enough to live on. I realized that we had to do somethi
ng radical. It seemed to me that part of the appeal of the big rock acts, the ones who were on the level that we wanted to get to, was that parents hated them. Elvis in his day, the Stones in ours—because parents hated them, the kids loved them. Alice was already pretty good at making rock audiences hate him, but that wasn’t enough. I had to think of ways to make their parents hate him. Elvis had ridden the hatred and revulsion of his audience’s parents to the top of the world. I was convinced that his legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had done everything in his power to fan that hatred, because it made for fantastic global publicity. For instance, one of the best-known stories in rock-and-roll history was about how the cameramen for Ed Sullivan’s TV show were ordered not to show “Elvis the Pelvis” below the waist, because his gyrating hips were too sexy for family audiences. Everybody I knew thought that this censorship was a terrible violation of Elvis’s rights as a performer, and that Colonel Parker should have refused to let him go on under those restrictions. I thought that was dead wrong. I would have bet you any amount of money that the Colonel insisted that Elvis not be shown below the waist. The week after the show, every newspaper in the country ran stories about Elvis’s invisible pelvis. No one in America could not think about Elvis’s pelvis. It was brilliant publicity—and look where it got him.