Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Omnibus Press

  This edition © 2012 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

  EISBN: 978-0-85712-781-5

  The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  CONTENTS

  Information Page

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One – Starry Starry Night

  Chapter Two – See My Lonely Life Unfold

  Chapter Three – Fresh Out Of Phoenix

  Chapter Four – She Gave Her Mama Forty Whacks

  Chapter Five – Pretties For Frank

  Chapter Six – They Kill Chickens (Don’t They?)

  Chapter Seven – Loving It… To Death

  Chapter Eight – School’s Out For Killers

  Chapter Nine – Have You Ever Had Gas Before?

  Chapter Ten – Can’t Think Of A Word That Rhymes

  Chapter Eleven – Welcoming The Nightmare

  Chapter Twelve – Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

  Chapter Thirteen – Whiskey Please, And Hold The Lace

  Chapter Fourteen – Special Forces

  Chapter Fifteen – The Day My Dead Pet Returned

  Chapter Sixteen – Don’t Talk Old To Me

  Chapter Seventeen – Candy Canes For Diabetics

  Chapter Eighteen – Redemption For The Coop

  Acknowledgements

  Discography

  Introduction

  Back in 1997, shortly before the death of his former Alice Cooper bandmate Glen Buxton that October, drummer Neal Smith was shooting the breeze with his old friend when the subject of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came up.

  The Alice Cooper band had only recently become eligible for induction; the 25th anniversary of their late sixties formation was celebrated in 1994, and there were precious few bands of that vintage that deserved induction more than the Coopers. Maybe it did take them two years to really pick up steam, but still the run of hit singles (and LPs) that blasted Alice Cooper through the early seventies not only remains peerless, it also includes some of the seminal rock anthems of all time.

  ‘I’m Eighteen’, ‘School’s Out’, ‘Elected’, ‘Hello Hooray’, ‘Under My Wheels’, ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’, ‘Generation Landslide’, ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, ‘Be My Lover’ – you could stuff a greatest hits CD with the songs for which Alice Cooper are most renowned, and then you could stuff another with the songs for which they’re best remembered: ‘Dead Babies’, ‘I Love The Dead’, ‘Black Juju’, ‘Killer’, ‘Sick Things’, ‘Halo Of Flies’, ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’.

  Alice Cooper may not have been the heaviest band on earth but they still made everyone else look like lightweights, and the fact that the sainted heads of the Hall of Fame had not dragged the Coopers kicking and screaming into their marbled halls the moment that the group became eligible was… well, it wasn’t even inexplicable. It was contemptible.

  “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” laughed Buxton, “can kiss my Rock and Roll Ass.”

  “That comment stuck with me all these years,” Smith smiled 13 years later. “So, about a year ago, I wrote a song about it …” and, as he worked towards the second album by his current Killsmith project, there seemed no reason on earth why he shouldn’t include it.

  Except one.

  The day the telephone rang and it was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Coopers were in, and Smith was astonished. “I never dreamed in a million years that we would ever be inducted.” And, as for ‘The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Can Kiss My Rock And Roll Ass’… “Well, it was a good idea at the time but we’ll see what happens. Nostradamus I’m not.”

  Killsmith is one of the most enthralling of all the myriad bands to have emerged over the past three decades-plus from the wreckage of the original Alice Cooper band. Sexual Savior, the band’s debut album, was released back in 2008 and proved one of the most challengingly perverse records of Smith’s career, a litany of thrilling riffs, thunderous chords, monster percussion and the kind of lyrics that could make an Anglo-Saxon blush.

  This time around, things were a little more level-headed. Killsmith 2, Smith laughed, was “a lot more radio friendly than the first one. I got that off my chest, got all the x-rated words out. Killsmith 2 is a lot more radio friendly but with the power of the first one. Just the way songs are written… catchier choruses. Twelve songs and they’re all brand new, although I guess ‘Kiss My Ass, Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame’… I guess I can’t put that one on.”

  He continued, “I’m the most excited for the fans who have stuck with us for such a long time. Within the last 10 years, there’s been petitions circulating and these people just can’t understand why we weren’t in there. I’m still amazed that, in 1973, we had the number one LP with Billion Dollar Babies and, to me, that was the peak of our career in terms of things happening out of the blue that we weren’t even expecting. I didn’t think it would ever get any better than that, and with the hesitation about us even getting a nomination to the Hall of Fame….

  “I know Alice has wonderful fans, but the original band has wonderful fans as well. Their support has been strong and non-wavering over these many years, and I’m most excited for them. I think this is a great day for the fans, a great time for them.” And the fact that the nomination itself was so overdue, in a way, only made it that little bit sweeter.

  “The only time I actually got excited about the nomination was when I realised… I was very pessimistic that anything positive could come out of it, because it took 16 years to be nominated. And all the bands that are in there, I love, but I think there’s been a handful of bands that have no place in there. You put them up against the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, the real monsters of rock and you wonder why they’re there. So I was a little disillusioned with that.

  “But then I started looking at the first time nominees, the bands that got in on the first nomination, and man, that was when I got excited. I thought if we were ever going to be nominated, and we ever got in, it would be amazing to get in on the first nomination. And that’s what we did. In reality, it is a great thing and I am excited about it.”

  Especially pleasing, for Smith and for the band’s fans, is the fact that it is the original band that is being inducted, and not Alice Cooper alone. That, after all, would not have been a shock – even at the peak of the band’s success in 1972-1973, people were more likely than not to refer to Alice Cooper as the individual singer, the lanky, face-painted, snake-wielding freak whom his parents had named Vince Furnier, and allow the remainder of the band to lapse into anonymity.

  No matter that Smith, guitarists Michael Bruce and Glen Buxton, and bassist Dennis Dunaway were as much a p
art of the act as their frontman; nor that the vast majority of the band’s greatest numbers were at least co-written by one or other of them. To the public at large, Alice Cooper was Alice Cooper, and it’s a misconception that history has clung tenaciously onto ever since.

  Or maybe it isn’t a misconception. For every band and every performer of note has that one transcendent moment upon which the remainder of their career hinges, and for Alice Cooper the man, and Alice Cooper the performer, that moment took place precisely 39 years before the Hall of Fame induction, at a time when both were more likely to be immortalised in a House of Horrors or Wall of Shame, than proclaimed an integral part of rock’s DNA.

  Hindsight and history’s habit of creating neatly delineated eras from the tangled mass of rock’n’roll’s chronology does not always agree but, as of spring 1972, what we now know of as glam rock was still an explosion awaiting ignition.

  T Rex, Slade and the Sweet were all up and running, and the latter’s recently acquired penchant for make-up and costume certainly placed them into a visual ballpark they shared with the other two. But three bands do not a movement make, no matter how successful they might be, a point that is pushed home even harder when one considers just how vastly different were the musical fields in which they operated.

  The all-electric The Slider album was imminent but, until it was delivered, T Rex was still a rootsy folkadelic band with an eye for jamming Eddie Cochran riffs. Slade were a yobbish but well-disciplined hard rock band prone to covering Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin in and around their own foot-stamping material. And the Sweet were generally regarded as undiluted bubblegum, eternally beholden to the saccharine penmanship of the Chinnichap songwriting duo.

  Yes, something was happening. Hindsight insists on it.

  For the average 11, 12 or 13 year old, though; the generation that was just beginning to read the weekly rock papers, but whose world was largely still built around Top Of The Pops; who looked to rock’n’roll music as a means of delineating their adolescent obsessions, and maybe drop a clue or two about what being a teenager actually meant, 1972 really wasn’t offering much more than 1971 before it. And scanning the upcoming release sheets for the next few months, it would require an astonishingly fine-tuned crystal ball to pinpoint the half a dozen forthcoming 45s that would convert a vague feeling of musical resolution into a full-fledged pop revolution.

  There was another stab in the dark from a one-hit wonder named David Bowie; a no-hits veteran trying it on again as Gary Glitter; a long-running Ladbroke Grove hippy saga called Hawkwind; a new arty outfit called Roxy Music; perennial commercial no-hopers Mott The Hoople; a bunch of Mancunian sessionmen called 10cc; and what appeared to be the latest in a long line of American singer-songstresses, Carly Simon’s kid sister or Melanie’s mum, a chick named Alice Cooper.

  Radio North Sea International, the offshore alternative to Radio One that crackled through the static of a late-night transistor radio, was championing the novelty charms of Edwina Biglet and the Miglets, but Radio One itself was still stuck on Nilsson’s ‘Without You’. And with the big three (again, T Rex, Slade and the Sweet) between singles, the summer yawned ahead like an anchorite’s pyjama party.

  But suddenly, things started to change. Bowie’s ‘Starman’ was a sweet little song, half ‘Over The Rainbow’, half leftover hippy whimsy (“Let the children boogie” indeed), but it struck a chord regardless, especially after the already weird-looking Bowie appeared on Top Of The Pops and draped one arm across his guitarist’s shoulders. Glitter’s ‘Rock And Roll’ was a primeval stomp, all heys and yeahs and pounding percussion, an avalanche of sound that could not help but make you smile. Roxy were James Dean in space alien drag. Hawkwind whooshed and bubbled with a riff that tasted like acid felt – and so on and so forth till you reached Mott The Hoople, whose hit was written by David Bowie and the whole thing felt so circular that the future was inevitable. All the young dudes were carrying the news.

  But it took Alice Cooper to tell us what that news really was; raven-haired Alice with her stage full of pets and her Barbie doll playthings, an all-American insert into an otherwise Anglo-based battlefield, her mascara so thick that her eyes looked like spiders, her long nose so hooked that pirates grew jealous, and her gender so bent by the weight of her name that it took an extra moment or two for all the pieces to fall into place.

  Alice was a band, Alice was a man, and what was the news that she hastened to deliver?

  School’s Out.

  That was what we’d been waiting for; that is what we needed to hear. All those other records were jigsaw pieces. Bowie waving behind-the-bike-shed explorations in our faces while pointing out that the opposite sex was only one of the role models available. Roxy declaring that clothes maketh man, but only if man makes the right noises first. Hawkwind brought the recreational chemicals, Glitter brought the liberation of spirit.

  But it was Alice who kicked down the last of the obstacles, who tore down the strictures of establishment structure, who spoke of freedom and showed us how to grasp it. Other acts handed us the best bits of adulthood and told us to make of them what we could. But Alice formed the Department of Youth, and then handed out membership to everyone who wanted it.

  What better start could there be to the long summer holiday?

  Forty years later, it seems strange to still be harping on about that record, or even that era. Rock has moved on, Alice has moved on. But the challenge that the summer of 1972 set out remains as potent today as it did at the time, and all the more so if you ask yourself this. Has any six-to-eight week span in rock and pop history ever introduced an entire generation to so many bands, beliefs and cultural touchstones that remain, decades later, the iconic idols of so many people?

  Not just a favourite band. We’re talking something so far beyond mere favouritism that it borders on obsession. David Bowie, Hawkwind, Roxy Music, 10cc, Mott The Hoople – the kids who discovered them the first-hit-around have remained true to them ever since, and have been repaid by careers that are still relevant, if not resonant, today. And then, once again, there is Alice, who isn’t only relevant and resonant, he is also still performing at the same peak of perfection that he ever was back then; still staging stunning shows that leave audiences wide-eyed with open-mouthed amazement; and he is still the ultimate childhood sweetheart, the schooldays ghoul-friend that you never forgot. And never really got over.

  Oh, and still proclaiming that school is out because… well it is, isn’t it? How could it be anything else?

  Dave Thompson

  Delaware, December 2011

  Author’s Note

  Alice Cooper. Is it a man, is it a band, is it a brand name? Or is it all three? Writing this book, and then editing it afterwards, it became clear that some form of consistency was required. Therefore, the simple name Alice refers to the singer who first led the group that gave him his name, and then went out on a solo career. Alice Cooper, and variations of that (the Coopers, the Cooper band etc) refer, indeed, to the band.

  And Vince Furnier is the guy who joins the two together, but whose own life and story only ever play out in the background of the world he co-created for the rest of the world’s entertainment. For that reason, this book is not a biography of Vince Furnier. His life events play a role in it, of course; his background, his demons and his fascinations inevitably influence Alice and the Coopers. But Vince Furnier tells that story in his Alice Cooper, Golf Monster biography, and he tells it well, because that book was about the life he lived.

  Welcome To My Nightmare is concerned with the life that he created.

  Chapter One

  Starry Starry Night

  Walk the streets of suburban Detroit today and it’s difficult to believe they ever bred a monster.

  No, we should rephrase that. If modern America has any cottage industry at all, it is its penchant for turning out bogeymen, and that is a line of descent that reaches back into colonial times, when the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Ho
llow haunted the nightmares of the god-fearing Puritans, and the wicked witches of Salem, Massachusetts, danced with the devil and cursed their neighbours’ cows.

  A line drawn from there bisects some beastly horrors, and American culture has always raced to give them faces. Lizzy Borden with her axe may not have been the country’s first serial killer (she was acquitted of the crimes, after all), but the rhyme that danced through the American psyche back when the Fall River slaughter was first uncovered…

  Lizzie Borden took an axe

  Gave her mother forty whacks

  When she saw what she had done

  She gave her father forty-one

  … is as familiar today as it was back then, and has become the unspoken soundtrack to so many Hollywood blockbusters (not to mention B- and C-movie turkeys) that it’s almost miraculous that there aren’t Lizzie action figures to line up alongside your Freddies, Jasons and Leatherfaces.

  The blaze of great horror movies that dominated the Depression-whipped thirties, those that followed in their footsteps through the Cold War fifties and those that erupted again during Reagan’s eighties all bred their own singular terrors with which a nation of parents could either scare their kids to bed at night (“Go to sleep, or Michael Myers will get you”), or else rise up to screen the innocents from. The great comics scare of the mid-fifties, in which an entire industry was savaged by the powers of Right and Decency grew exclusively from the horrific scribblings of the EC Comics house and its manifold contributors, and we see just how far American values had shifted if we compare the fate of the fifties Crypt Keeper, lambasted in government and exiled from print, with that of his nineties equivalent – who was handed his own television series.

  So yes, America has always bred bogeymen, but it is only in recent years that they have truly stepped out of fiction and the mass imagination, to literally clear the streets at night, and offer paranoia-struck citizens a reason to stockpile handguns. In the past, America’s true bogeymen were cartoon characters and movie stars. Today, they are paedophiles, drug fiends and all-purpose serial killers. And few people scare their kids to sleep with them because they are just too real for comfort.