They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  “Are they crazy? They don’t want a hit? What are we working so hard for?”

  “If you can just give me the money for four tracks,” I said, “somehow I’ll get Richardson to do them.”

  Clyde found the money—I believe it came from a Doobie Brothers’ recording budget. Which is funny, because I’m really good friends with Doobies Pat Simmons and Michael McDonald. It wasn’t a whole lot of money—I think it was thirty or forty thousand. The thought was if we could cut four good tracks and Clyde played them for Herbie, then Herbie would allow it. In other words, Clyde thought it was an artistic problem. I later decided that was not the problem, as I’ll explain.

  As it turned out, Richardson did not produce the tracks. Bob Ezrin did. He was excited about the band’s potential after seeing that show in New York. He met us at the gigantic RCA recording studio in Chicago. We had never been to anything like it. This was the big time. And the process with Bob was nothing like our previous experiences recording. The band worked with Bob for a month and a half before cutting the tracks, breaking each song down and building it back up, inspecting every detail, every line of the lyrics, and every lead solo. They constructed each song like you build a beautiful house.

  “I’m Eighteen” came out of this process. Bob had worked particularly hard with them on it. It started out a long, rambling jam. Bob got them to toss away the excess and hone it down to a tight three-minute anthem we all thought was a potential hit. I now thought that instead of just playing Herbie the tapes, wouldn’t it be more convincing to get “I’m Eighteen” some radio play? I was showing my ignorance about how the business worked. But I was trying to learn. I was reading Billboard voraciously, reading everything I could get my hands on to educate myself. One of the things I discovered was that there were certain “breakout” radio stations that led the way in putting songs on the air. If they played a record, others followed. The two biggest breakout stations in North America were WIXY in Cleveland and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. Working on the Toronto festival, I had met CKLW’s program director, Rosalie Trombley. Canada had just passed a content law stipulating that all Canadian TV and radio had to play a certain amount of Canadian product. Although we’d cut the tracks in Michigan, we had a Canadian producer, so we qualified. Alice’s road manager, Leo Fenn, engineered putting “I’m Eighteen” in Rosalie’s hands. (Leo was the father of the actress Sherilyn Fenn. We babysat her when she was little.) Leo knew Rosalie’s young son. I don’t remember if we had a test pressing made or just a tape or what, but anyway Leo met the kid after school one day and gave him the song to give to Rosalie.

  That’s how “I’m Eighteen” got put on rotation at CKLW. Score one for Alice. In my naïveté, though, it had not occurred to me that if a song got radio play, the record had to be in the stores so kids could buy it. The better the sales, the more radio play it would get. No sales, and radio would drop it. So when I called Clyde and told him “I’m Eighteen” was on CKLW, he said, “You can’t have it on CKLW. You don’t have a record yet. This is a disaster.”

  Showing a gigantic set of cojones, Clyde got “I’m Eighteen” pressed as a single on Warner Bros. Records, not on Straight, and rushed it out to stations and stores. Warner was Straight’s distributor, but Straight was an independent, separate label, so what Clyde did was not exactly legal. We were under contract to Straight. If Straight didn’t want to put our record out, technically it shouldn’t have been put out. Clyde did it anyway and let the chips fall where they may.

  Now that there was an actual record, we got on the phone twenty-four hours a day calling the request lines of every radio station in the country. I had my mother, my uncle, all my relatives calling radio stations. “Please play ‘I’m Eighteen’ by Alice Cooper.” Stations around North America started playing the single. And now Straight sued Warner Bros. over it. As a result, the second pressing of the single went out on the Straight label.

  I freaked. I did not want the song on the Straight label. They had treated us so shabbily before, I didn’t want them profiting from us now that we had a hit. More than that, our contract with Straight, which we had signed in our inexperience, gave them the song publishing rights to any of our music they put out. Publishing royalties for a hit song could be significant, and I didn’t want Zappa and Herb Cohen to get them.

  I went right to the top this time: Mo Ostin, president of Warner Bros. Records. Mo was an industry legend. He had started out at Verve, working with all the great names in jazz, then moved on to Reprise and now Warners. He had signed everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Beach Boys to the Kinks and Jimi, whom he signed after seeing his famous Monterey Pop performance in 1967. I had tremendous respect for him, and felt that if anyone at Warner Bros. would do the right thing by us, it was Mo.

  He didn’t disappoint. When I aired my complaint to him, he said, “Shep, I got you covered. But you got to do me a favor. Don’t press the issue. I will get you publishing. You have my word on it, one hundred percent.”

  So we were back on Warner Bros. And then it went back to Straight. I called Mo, and Mo said, “I got you covered.” We were back on Warners. Then we were on Straight again. It was ridiculous. But every time I spoke to Mo, Mo said, “Shep, I got you covered.” And I believed him. The more I dealt with him, the more he became, in my head at least, one of those mentor figures I sought out. I trusted that eventually we would see those publishing royalties.

  All this time, “I’m Eighteen” was climbing the charts. Kids loved it. Alice, who wasn’t much older than eighteen himself, was speaking directly to the confusion and dissatisfaction a lot of young Americans were feeling in that era of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. Lines form on my face and my hands, / Lines form on the left and right, / I’m in the middle, the middle of life, / I’m a boy and I’m a man. It wasn’t specifically an antiwar or antidraft song, but a lot of people, adults and kids, heard that in it.

  Warner Bros. executives still weren’t behind us, though. They seemed to think “I’m Eighteen” was a fluke. I had to fight to get the money to finish the album, with both Richardson and Ezrin producing.

  Love It to Death came out in March 1971 and was the band’s breakthrough LP, their first gold record. Along with “I’m Eighteen” it included another track destined to be one of Alice’s signature songs, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Bob Ezrin worked a lot with Alice to develop his character so it wasn’t just part of the stage act, but integral to the songs. For instance, this is when Alice started singing “Dwight Fry” in a straitjacket. Bob had him do it in the studio when they recorded the song, so that when he sang “I gotta get out of here,” he really sounded like he meant it.

  Warner Bros. was finally behind us. They told me they would pay for a big press party for it in L.A. if I organized it. For the first time, after years of scrambling, I had real resources, power, and some semblance of control. I knew it at the time—and it felt good.

  “Absolutely I’ll organize a party,” I said to them. We had been to some record company parties. They were terrible bores. Some executive would give a speech about the record to a roomful of other record execs, publicity people, and press.

  I said, “But it’s got to be an Alice Cooper party.” They asked me what that meant. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll figure it out.”

  Somehow we found out that July, the time for our party, was the point in the year when the debutantes all had their coming-out parties. If Alice Cooper was a good, clean, all-American girl, she’d have her coming out then, too. Where do coming-out parties happen? In hotels.

  So that’s what we planned, a coming-out party for Alice Cooper. On acid. We took out ads in the society pages of the L.A. papers, announcing the coming out of Alice Cooper along with all the real debutante’s announcements. We rented the elegant, mirror-paneled Venetian Room in what we thought was the most appropriate hotel in L.A., the giant old Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard. It had a lot of history, some of it glittering and some of it grim. In the 1920s and
1930s it was the home of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where every movie star and celebrity of the time hung out. In 1968 it was the site of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In the three years since then the hotel had not been able to revive its once-glittering reputation. Still, management did not want to rent rooms for record company parties, so Bob Regehr, a hip publicist at Warners, and I told them we really were booking a coming-out party for a debutante from Pasadena named Alice Cooper. They were delighted. They didn’t find out we’d tricked them until guests started arriving on the night of the party and it was clear they weren’t there for any debutante. They were really angry but it was too late.

  The affair went off on July 14, 1971, Bastille Day, and it was wild. Rolling Stone called it “the party of the year.” We had mailed out formal invitations, and five hundred guests showed up. Mo was there with his wife, a really nice lady who was celebrating her birthday. Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun was there. Celebrities included Richard Chamberlain, Donovan, Rod McKuen, Randy Newman, some of the Beach Boys, and John Kay of Steppenwolf. Reporters for the society pages came, thinking it was a real debutante affair. At the entrance to the Venetian room, they were greeted by old-fashioned cigarette girls. Only they weren’t girls, they were the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe, wearing glitter in their mustaches and beards. They offered cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. When you entered the room, the card with your table number was handed to you by a person in a gorilla suit, wearing a bra and panties. The hotel, thinking it was a real society affair, had provided their resident four-piece band, who looked confused as they played standards like “Somewhere My Love.”

  When everyone settled at their tables the festivities began. “You could tell right off,” Mo later said, “even from the preliminary entertainment, that either the world was just about to come to an end, or good taste had simply been thrown to the wind.” A six-foot-tall cake with Happy Bastille Day Alice Cooper written on it was wheeled out. Miss Mercy of the GTO’s burst out of it and threw handfuls of cake and icing at the people at the front tables. We’d hired an enormously fat black stripper named TV Mama and her husband. I asked him if there was any way I could pay her to take her top off and show her gigantic breasts. “She may be TV Mama to you, but to me she’s TV dinner,” he said. “That’ll be five hundred dollars.” I paid. She slapped the people up front, including Ahmet Ertegun, with her tits. The band played a short set, including “I’m Eighteen” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Alice wore a silver lamé bodysuit, and put on the straitjacket for “Dwight Fry.” As people left, the Cockette cigarette girls offered dildos.

  It was a great success. Everybody had fun and it got tons of press. It was the start of a grand tradition. Over the years Alice Cooper became famous for the great parties we threw.

  There’s still the question of why Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa were so adamantly against having a hit record in the first place. I don’t think it was really to maintain Straight Records’ edgy, rebellious integrity. I think it was a strategy right out of The Producers. I’m not one hundred percent certain about some of this, and neither Zappa nor Cohen is around anymore to ask. Not that I’m so sure they’d give a “straight” answer. But this is what I think was going on, and it’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

  We found out later that Warner Bros. gave Straight a large advance to deliver four artists (four albums). Out of that advance, they had to pay the cost of producing the albums. A typical album in those days cost $150,000 to produce. The artist earned about a dollar in royalties for every record sold, but the record sales had to earn back the initial recording costs before the artist saw any of those royalties.

  So Straight got $150,000 from Warner Bros. to make Alice Cooper’s album. They spent $10,000 making it, and banked the other $140,000. The only way they’d have to pay Alice Cooper any of that would be if the album really sold. For instance, if Alice Cooper sold 100,000 records, Straight would owe the band $90,000 ($100,000 minus the $10,000 production costs). So, of that $140,000 Straight put in the bank, they would be left with only $40,000.

  Obviously, then, the fewer records Alice Cooper sold, the better for Straight. That’s why the very last thing Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa wanted was for Alice Cooper or any Straight artists to have a hit record. I think that’s why Herb went ballistic and tried to scare me away at our very first meeting, and it’s why they wouldn’t let us record with Richardson.

  6

  WITH THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT CHECKS coming from Warner Bros. in 1971, Joe Greenberg and I moved back to New York together, to a really nice rented brownstone on West Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Greenwich Village. Our landlord was a dentist. It was a real New York street, lined with trees, most of the block brownstones, with a couple of nightclubs and a couple of restaurants. We ate almost every day in a classic old-school Italian restaurant across the street, Felix’s. Felix and his son were really nice to us and let us build up credit for as much as forty-five days.

  Our living room was our first real office. Alice’s first fan mail was starting to come in. That was exciting. If I was there I’d get up in the morning and start opening it. One morning I opened an envelope and shook out a little baggy filled with some pale, sticky-looking liquid. Dear Alice, the letter read, You bring out the best in me. I’ve never been able to tell anyone about my desire for men. I masturbated today thinking of you, and here’s the cum.

  I didn’t open up a lot of fan mail after that.

  The money coming in also let us rent the band a new place where they could all hang together and rehearse, only now they could do it in a style that suited rock stars. It was the Galesi mansion and estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. You entered through a twelve-foot-high iron gate and drove up to the house. It was fifteen thousand square feet, with I think forty rooms, thirteen of them bedrooms, plus a chapel, a beautiful library, frescoes on the ceilings, huge chandeliers, a pipe organ, and a grand ballroom so high and wide that we could set up the entire touring stage and do complete dress rehearsals. We converted the dining room into a recording studio. Alice and his girlfriend Cindy took the vast master bedroom, and the other guys spread out to others.

  I knew of the Galesi family from my time in Buffalo, where they were very powerful and prominent. The patriarch, Francesco Galesi, was the son of Italian immigrants. He started out dealing in real estate in and around Buffalo in the 1960s. He was also a pioneer in telecommunications and would later be one of the directors of WorldCom, the second-largest long-distance telephone company in America. He was worth hundreds of millions, married a Russian princess, and had several enormous homes spread around, including a ten-thousand-square-foot Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan.

  All the guys started living the way they thought rock stars should. They drove up to the mansion in Rolls-Royces and Jaguars. They bought all the liquor and drugs they wanted. Alice was becoming a drunk. It should have worried us more than it did at the time, but to us the drinking, the drugs, the sex were all perks of the rock star life, and we were only just starting to learn that the lifestyle had consequences. To us, drinking was cool, drugs were cool, sex was cool, and none of them had any serious consequences. You might get hungover, but no one we knew had liver failure. You might get herpes, but there was no AIDS. Jimi and Janis overdosed in 1970, Jim Morrison died in 1971, but we were still pretty slow to realize how dangerous the rock lifestyle could be.

  Besides, Alice was a manageable drunk. He had started out drinking whiskey all the time, and that he couldn’t manage. So he switched to Budweiser in the daytime. From when he woke up he always had a can of Bud, but he sipped it slowly, not to get falling-down drunk, just to relax and help him through the day. It was his way of coping as life got steadily busier and crazier. At night, when his work was done, he’d switch to V.O. and Coke.

  To me, the drunk was Alice, not Vince. They were still definitely two distinct personalities at that point. Vince was a sweet, funny, grown-up kid who
was so gentle he wouldn’t swat a fly. His favorite activities were watching old movies and corny TV shows, and, after Joe Gannon introduced him to it around 1973, playing golf. His favorite music was Burt Bacharach. Although he drank, he did not, at that point, do any drugs, not even pot. He even forbade anyone from smoking pot around him on tour. On the road, when everybody else was partying, he was in his hotel room, watching the Marx Brothers on TV and practicing putts.

  Basically, Vince and Alice were black-and-white opposites. For a while, he only became Alice when he put on the outfits and makeup and hit the stage. But slowly, Alice was taking over offstage as well. I admit I pushed hard for that to happen, because Vince wasn’t really a rock star—Alice was. And we needed the rock star not only onstage, but also offstage, hanging out with other stars, talking to the press, drinking, having a great time.

  Of all the band members, rock stardom had the worst impact on Glen. He became such a horrible alcoholic he almost died from it, then switched to drugs. He was the band’s Brian Jones, an integral founding member who lost his way and was barely part of the band anymore. He showed up for rehearsals and recording sessions erratically. We had to hire a session guitarist to play his parts for him. It angered some of the other guys in the band, who wanted to fire him, but Alice loved Glen and couldn’t do that to him.

  Alice took some of his first real money from Warners and bought himself a nice house in Benedict Canyon, north of Beverly Hills. He bought it from H. R. Haldeman, of Nixon White House and Watergate break-in fame. Cary Grant lived next door, and Elton John had a house just up the road. I woke up the day after escrow, turned on the news, and saw on my TV screen the house burning down. Right to the ground. Apparently Elton John saw flames in the windows and called the fire department.