They Call Me Supermensch Page 7

  I wanted us to generate the same hateful press for Alice. Then the kids would love him. No other rock band was working that angle at the time. They were all making hippie peace-and-love music. I thought that the more outrageous, obnoxious, and offensive Alice could be, the more we’d stand out.

  My first idea was a ridiculous stunt. There was a small club in a former storefront on Sunset Boulevard called Thee Experience, owned by a very sweet couple, Marshall and Marsha Brevitz. Marshall was the exact replica of Larry in the Three Stooges. The stage was on the right as you walked in, and the space only held twenty-five or thirty small tables. Although it was small, it had a lot of cachet. All the biggest rock acts liked to play and jam there. My relationship with the Brevitzes was that three or four nights a week before the club opened I’d go by and drop off fifty dollars in change for their cash registers. At the end of the night I’d swing by again and they’d give me back the fifty. So when I explained my stunt idea to Marshall and asked if we could stage it at the club, he agreed.

  The stunt involved the band wearing outrageous new outfits. The guys were used to wearing odd clothes onstage. The GTO’s had found a bunch of sparkly old Rockettes and Ice Capades type outfits at a thrift store in L.A. and gave them to the band to wear.

  Cindy, Neal Smith’s sister from the clothing store, was a seamstress. I had her cut and stitch up the new outfits for the stunt. We got to the club early, before it would usually open, and the band went into the bathroom to change into these outfits. They came out wearing pants and shirts of transparent plastic. Not thin plastic like Saran Wrap, but thick and heavy, like see-through tarpaulin. And they were completely naked underneath.

  They started to play a set. There weren’t more than ten or fifteen people in the audience, mostly friends we’d brought to help us with the stunt. I went to the pay phone to get phase two going. The phone was on the wall by the bathrooms, which were down a hallway, through the kitchen, and down another little hallway, so you couldn’t see the stage. I called the police and said, “My child is in this club and the band is onstage naked. This is horrible. How could they allow this to happen?” They said they were sending a squad car and that I should stay on the line until it arrived. I stood there a while. I could hear the band playing but not see them. Eventually I heard a siren outside, hung up, and made my way back out to the main room.

  My plan was that the band would get arrested for indecent exposure, which would get a lot of press, and parents would hate us. But there was one thing I hadn’t counted on. It was hot up there onstage under the lights, and those thick plastic outfits had completely fogged over. You couldn’t see the band was naked at all. The police came in, looked around, scratched their heads, and left.

  After the show I said to the band, “You know, we’ve just hit that classic moment where we can’t even get arrested in this town. It’s definitely time to leave Los Angeles.” We agreed that the band would stay on the road until the first city where they got a standing ovation, and that’s where we’d settle.

  That was the start of a long, hard road trip for Alice Cooper, into the spring of 1970. They played a lot of places in a lot of cities all around the Southwest and Midwest. They barely made enough money to put gas in the van. Forget food and lodging: they slept in the van and starved. As I remember it, Joe took them on the road. I didn’t meet up with them until about a month into the tour, in Cincinnati, where they got their first steady engagement, playing a place called the Black Dome for maybe six weeks. A guy named Ron Volz ran the shows. When I asked him if he knew a cheap or preferably free place for us to crash, he told us all the fraternity houses were empty for the summer. “I can show you one, but you have to get out when the frat boys come back.” We all lived in this frat house for weeks. Then one afternoon we looked out the windows and the frat boys, real jocks, had returned. We ran out, some of us jumping out windows, and got out of there quick. Ron was staying with us, so when we hit the road again he came along. He worked with us for the next thirty years. He’s in Hollywood now.

  From Cincinnati we drove to Detroit. Vince still had relatives there, so it seemed like a destination. For our first couple of weeks we bounced around from one fleabag motel to another, and I bounced a lot of rubber checks on them. I never felt good about that; I was doing it out of necessity. Later, when we started making money, I gave all those places good checks to cover the bad ones, with my apologies. Karma is important.

  Our standing ovation happened at a rock festival in Saginaw, Michigan, where Alice Cooper played last. The crowd got to their feet. We were stunned and delighted. Then a couple of the Hells Angels the festival had hired for security walked onto the stage while the band was playing and wanted them to stop. I remember one of them pointing some kind of weapon at Vince, Vince tossing him a pink toy bunny rabbit he used as a prop, and the Angel ripping and slicing it up. That was the cue to get off the stage. Still, we’d gotten the audience standing, so when we got to our cars we said, “This is it. We’re moving to Michigan.” It was only later that we learned the crowd had stood because there were more Angels in the back, using their bikes to get the crowd up and out.

  By then we’d already moved into a house in Pontiac, the Detroit suburb. This is when things really started to come together. We all lived together under the same roof, so they could rehearse whenever they wanted. When they did, people started gathering at the fence to listen. We noticed there was something a little odd about them, and realized we lived next door to an insane asylum. The funny thing was, they looked at us like we were the crazies. We figured it was a sign we were doing something right.

  The rock scene in Detroit was much wilder and more vibrant than on the West Coast. Detroit bands like the MC5 (“Kick Out the Jams”) and the Stooges rocked hard, they played loud and fast and angry and don’t-give-a-fuck, and the Motor City kids loved it that way. They were some wild shows. People responded much better to Alice Cooper than the folks had in laid-back L.A.

  It was at this point that I said to Vince and Dennis, “We have to develop this Alice character. Let’s do something new that nobody’s ever seen before, and let’s stick with it.” We got very innovative about putting on theatrical performances that didn’t cost a lot—because we didn’t have a lot to spend. We still wanted that standing ovation, and started thinking up ways to get it. One simple strategy worked every time. Alice skewered a bunch of dollar bills on a sword and waved it over the audience. The people in the front would start jumping up and reaching for it, so everybody behind them got up, too. It had nothing particular to do with the song, but it had the desired effect of getting everyone up and cheering and having fun. Looking for a way to close the show, I started bringing feather pillows. We slit them open, and Alice waved them over the crowd, filling the place with feathers. Whenever we could we used CO2 tanks to blow the feathers all over the hall. It looked fantastic in the stage lights. A good friend, the New York promoter Ron Delsener, told me that for years after we played at Town Hall in Manhattan, feathers continued to drift down from the ceiling during other acts’ performances there. Sorry about that.

  I took the feathers idea to a whole new level at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. The bill featured Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley, Junior Walker, the Doors—and John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band, John’s first live performance since the Beatles broke up. It was televised in prime time. I had gotten a call from the festival organizer, who said he’d pay me 30 percent of the proceeds to help them organize it. I said I wouldn’t charge them a fee, but they had to put Alice on the bill between John Lennon and the Doors in prime time. It was a fantastic opportunity for our little-known band to share the stage with all those greats in front of a festival audience of sixty thousand, on TV. It was an early foray into the tactic I call “guilt by association.” If you want to be famous, get next to somebody who already is famous. Millions of kids would be watching this show to see the Doors and John Lennon.
In between, they’d see Alice Cooper, and just assume they were famous, too. I would play that card successfully many times over the years.

  We went all out to make an impression at the festival. Alice kicked a football into the crowd, chopped a watermelon with a hatchet, and tossed feathers everywhere. In the midst of all that, he remembers, he looked down and an actual chicken was strutting across the stage. He knew nobody in the audience had come to a rock festival with their chicken. It could only have been me. And it was. It was a feral chicken that happened to be roaming around backstage. I just thought, We’ve been doing the feathers, why not a whole chicken? So I let it loose on the stage. Alice bent down, grabbed it, and tossed it out over the heads of the audience. He didn’t know chickens can’t fly. It dropped like a meteor into the crowd. For a second they seemed stunned. And they went wild. It was astounding. This was the height of the peace-love hippie era. But Alice had gotten them so worked up into a frenzy that they ripped that chicken apart, just tore it to pieces, and threw it back at him—wings, legs, the head, all bloody. I had to turn my head. I faint when I see blood.

  The press we got for that was phenomenal. Stories ran in all the newspapers about this bizarre new act, Alice Cooper, who ripped the head off a chicken and drank its blood. You can’t buy that kind of publicity for a million bucks. One day Alice Cooper was unknown. The next they were sitting for press conferences, fielding questions about why they killed the chicken. Alice’s answer gave perspective to the issue. “On the way in from the airport,” he said, “I drove by four Colonel Sanders fried chicken places. Is anyone asking him about killing all those chickens? I’m sorry. I thought it could fly. All I did was throw it.”

  It was the same for me. I thought chickens could fly. Oops. I can say that we never threw another chicken. We didn’t need to. That incident ignited the booster rocket we needed to blast off toward notoriety and success.

  It was around that time that a very good publicist, Pat Kingsley, suggested to me that having the whole band identified as Alice Cooper and doing press conferences together wasn’t going to work. It was confusing. She said we should pick one spokesman. I met with the band, and we decided it should be Vince. He was a natural with the press, friendly, funny, easygoing. He always had a smile and a good quip for them. The rest of the guys were musicians. They wanted to talk musical theory. Vince instinctively knew what the press wanted to hear and fed them their lines.

  From then on Vince began to be identified as Alice Cooper, and the rest of the guys were Alice Cooper’s band. Over the next few years, as Alice grew into one of the biggest rock stars in the world, the rest of the guys fell increasingly into his shadow, and it rankled them more and more. Understandably so. But we all went into it with our eyes wide open. We were very, very clear about it and shook hands on it. I told them all, “We agree that we’re going to do this thing until each of us has a million dollars in the bank. We’re going to stick with it and either fall on our faces or come out millionaires.” And to do that we had to make Vince Alice. We were still just kids. The idea of us all becoming millionaires was the wildest fantasy. But we all agreed to try, and we all agreed that turning Vince into Alice was a key piece of the puzzle.

  5

  SINCE MOVING TO CALIFORNIA I hadn’t been in touch much with my parents. I had written to them occasionally—remember, no email yet—telling them that I was managing a rock band named Alice Cooper, a guy, not a girl. I don’t think it did much to change their expectations that I was going to be a complete failure. Now I swung us a gig in New York—and not just in New York, but at Madison Square Garden. It was in the Felt Forum, the smaller space next to the arena, but still. I had gotten us on a bill with an all-girl group called Enchanted Forest, because their agent, Bob Ringe, was a guy I knew from high school. I was so proud to have a group at the Garden that I asked my parents to come. They drove up from Florida for this big night. Well, I walked into the Felt Forum, and there were fewer than a hundred people in the audience, two of them being my parents. They were civilized about it and polite when they met Alice, but I could see it in their eyes: I was still a failure. It was not a great moment.

  Onward and upward.

  While I was in Toronto working on the festival, I had gone to dinner with David Briggs, a record producer who lived there. I told him about the failure of Alice’s first album, and he said, “I’m in the middle of producing one now with Neil Young. We’ve been at it about two months.”

  I said, “Two months? We did ours in a day.”

  “Come on.”

  “No, really.” I told him about our one day in the studio.

  “You’re out of your minds!” he cried. “That’s not how you make albums. They take months.”

  I brought Alice up to Toronto to meet David. It was a real education for both of us. We asked David if he’d produce Alice’s next album and he agreed. Somehow we convinced Zappa and Herb Cohen to let us do it with him—but they put him on an extremely limited budget. Still, it covered more than a month in the studio. Now the band really experienced the process of making a record the right way, how a producer helps to construct songs, take them apart, and put them back together correctly—all the things Zappa did not do. It didn’t really work on this second LP, Easy Action. David didn’t much like the music—he called it “psychedelic shit”—and the band hadn’t really gotten their songwriting down. When it came out in 1969 the critics were harsh again; Rolling Stone summed it up as “nothing that interesting here. The freaky music is sort of freaky, but the pretty stuff sounds like something Walt Disney had the good sense to leave in the can.”

  Still, the process of making it was a good education for the band and me. We realized that in terms of commercial success a producer can be almost more important than the artist. A good producer figures out how to frame a song to make it work. This was a giant revelation to us. We knew we needed to find a producer like that. This is when my management skills started to develop, I think.

  “Let’s not reinvent the wheel,” I said. “Who makes the best records?”

  “The Beatles.”

  “Forget that. Who else makes great-sounding records?”

  We all hit on the Guess Who, the Canadian band whose “American Woman” was just then topping the charts. They also had big hits with “No Time” and “These Eyes.” They were a band without a giant following, yet making amazing hit records. That seemed like a good model for us.

  It was a huge realization for us that you could go to a producer like you went to a dentist and get him to fix your music. This Guess Who producer sounded like the best dentist around. He was Jack Richardson, at a Toronto studio called Nimbus 9. We tried to get to him, but he didn’t return our calls or answer our letters. So we went to Nimbus 9 and hung around in the lobby. We still didn’t meet Richardson, but a young guy named Bob Ezrin, who worked with Richardson, agreed to come to New York and hear the band. We had a gig at Steve Paul’s The Scene on West Forty-Sixth Street, one of the hottest rock clubs in New York at the time. Hendrix, the Doors, the Chambers Brothers, Traffic, Johnny Winter, everybody played there, and when they weren’t playing a gig they hung out and put together late-night jams. All the media in the city went there, the Warhol crowd, everyone who was anyone hip or cool. It was a very big opportunity for a struggling band with two failed records to its name. The only reason we got it was that a good friend of mine in the city was a mobster who ran a protection racket. The Scene was one of the clubs they “protected.” He got us the gig.

  Bob Ezrin came. We found out later that Richardson had hired him the very day that we met him; that he had never produced an album; and that Richardson had sent him out to the Nimbus 9 lobby that day saying, “There’s no way in the world I’m going to produce this band. They’re horrible. Go out there and get rid of them.” Instead, he caught a great show at the Scene. The hip New York audience loved everything about Alice Cooper that the Los Angeles audiences had hated. Bob went back to Toronto determined to convince
Richardson to produce the next album.

  I flew to L.A. to tell Herb Cohen and Zappa about it.

  “Absolutely not,” they said. “Wrong guy. He makes pop music. We don’t do pop music. We don’t want a hit record.”

  “What do you mean you don’t want a hit record? Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  “Not at Straight,” they said. “That’s not what we do.” It would ruin the label’s edgy, rebellious, noncommercial image.

  I explained the situation to the band. “We can’t continue without a hit record,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

  They wanted a hit. They wanted Richardson. It was my job to strategize how to make that happen despite Cohen and Zappa’s opposition.

  I had by then formed a couple of relationships with executives at Warner Bros. Records, Straight’s distributor. One of them was Clyde Bakemo. I told Clyde we had gotten Jack Richardson to produce the next LP, but Herb wouldn’t give us the money because he and Zappa didn’t want us to have a hit.