Chapter 5

	DIRECT FROM HOLLYWOOD - BACK IN THEIR HOME TOWN - THE NAZZ!!

Phoenix. Five-hundred-dollar-a-night gigs in high school and clubs. Home. My own
bed. Nickie, Mom and Dad. Instead of being comfortable in Phoenix I was
miserable. As long as we were in Los Angeles we were fighting, even if we were
destitute. Going home to Phoenix was admitting we were licked, not good enough
to make it in the majors. But there were more reasons than Money or Merry
Cornwall that we were back In Phoenix. One by one we were getting little
greetings from George Buckley and the draft board. The battle of Cortez was not
yet over! Dennis and I were even called for our physicals on the same day by
some miraculous coincidence considering we were a year apart in age and had
totally different birthdays. Neal Smith's physical was scheduled a week later,
and Mike Bruce was already fighting the draft out in court.
	When we went to deal with the army clowns at the induction center, Dennis
was a nervous wreck. I wasn't the least bit worried. How could they possibly
want to draft me? I only weighed ninety-eight pounds and I had bleach-blond
hair. I thought it was funny. The first time I went down there I even wore a
pair of my dad's baggy underwear. Dennis was finished in a few minutes, awarded
a 4F because of his slow heartbeat. They measured me, examined me, poked in my
ears and up my nose and ass. They classified me 1A. Me, 1A, I couldn't believe
it. No matter who I met after that, the first thing I said was "I'm 1A, you
know, I have to represent this country at war," and people would look at me and
laugh.
	The group was forced to stay in Phoenix while I had four more physicals.
I drank a bottle of whiskey at five in the morning before every physical and
every time they took my blood I passed out, but nothing seemed to satisfy them.
And if I appealed to the draft board I had to appeal to Mr. Buckley. After two
months of petitioning, I was finally allowed to see the psychiatrist.
	The shrink asked me what I did and I told him I was an entertainer. He
aksed me what I wanted to accomplish.
	I told him I wanted to put an audience in a concert hall, bolt and lock
the dorrs, shut the lights and shock them with electricity, lower the spiders on
them, surround the audience with speakers blasting my voice and plant
accomplices in the audience to have heart attacks and fits.
	Then, when everything was the most intense, you let monkey semen out of
the ventilation system. I told him that I had read somewhere that the smell of
monkey semen makes people horny.
	Then you blind everyone with the flash of quartz lamps. At that point you
suggest an action. For instance, "fuck" or "dance." Mass hypnotism.
	My eyes were wide and I had really gotten myself off on the fantasy. The
letter he wrote said I was a homocidal transvestite capable of mass murder. A
megalomaniac. He sent it to the draft board and Mr. Buckley. I have a copy
framed, hanging in my bathroom og my house in LA.
	Curing this Phoenix interlude we spent days trying to figure out a new
name for the band. The Nazz, it turned out, was already taken. This time we
wanted a distinctive name, something that would draw attention to us but not a
rock cliche. One boring January evening I said, "How about Alice Cooper?" and
everybody said, "No, that's ridiculous." About half an hour later Dick Christian
said, "What about that name, Alice Cooper?" But nobody even wanted to discuss
it. I thought it was perfect. It was so American and so eerie at the same time.
It had the same ring to it that Lizzy Borden did. I knew that if there was
really an Alice Cooper somewhere chances were she was an ax murderer.
	We forgot about it for a few days until Dick Christain dragged us all
over to Alice Paxton's house. Both Charlie Carnal and Dick were friendly with
Mrs. Paxton's daughter, who claimed her mother was a clairvoyant and could help
us solve our problems. Alice Paxton also had her Ouija board, which she hadn't
used in a few years, and we started asking it questions. I wasn't even working
the board when we asked if there was a spirit in the room. There was.
	The board spelled out the name Alice Cooper.
	For three hours everyone drilled the board on Alice Cooper, and we came
up with the following story (with a few additional details added by me over the
course of some five thousand interviews):
	In the early sixteen hundreds scientists and occultists became aware of a
celectrial disturbance which seemed to have a strange concentrated effect on the
British Isles. There was an odd feeling of unrest and suspicion in the
countryside. In the midst of this general feeling of alarm, on February 4 (my
birthday), 1623 (not my birthday), in Sussex, England, Alice Cooper was born.
	She was the daughter of well-to-do parents and a very strange child. She
seemed always to be listening to voices that no one else could hear, often
smiling secretly as if she knew the answer to some cosmic joke. 
	Much of Alice's time was taken up with her sister Christine, who was
three years older than she. Christine taught her magic, including the use of
strange plants that grew in abunance in the forest, and the techniques of
speaking ancient words of old that could make thunder roll and fire burn. On
Alice's twelfth birthday her parents died in a mysterious fire, their charred
bobies never recovered from the blazing house. One year later little Alice was
to witness the death of her sister, Christine, who was accused of being a witch
and burned at the stake by the villagers.
	A week later little Alice herself was dead, poisoned perhaps by her own
hand so she could join her sister Christine in the other world. She was only
thirteen years old. Pretty good, huh? Well, it really worked at the time.
	I was thrilled with the name, but Neal Smith was disgusted. He finally
thought he had gotten into a group that was going to go somewhere, do something
important, get him a Rolls-Royce and a mansion in the country and now we were
changing our name to something stupid like Alice Cooper!
	I couldn't blame Neal for worrying. He was in a terrible spot. He was
broke, his family had moved out of Phoenix, and the draft board was after him.
All the rest of us had the draft board under control at the time, but Neal was a
perfect specimen. He couldn't even get drunk enough to pass out at his physical.
	The same night we got the information from the Ouija board, Neal and I
drove out to the desert in a borrowed car. There were two .22-caliber rifles in
the trunk, and we were going to shoot jackrabbits. We would drive around the
desert, blind them with the car headlights, and pick them off.
	Neal took a shot at one from the hood of the car, thought he had hit it
and swung his long legs around just as I pulled off my own shot. There was a
thumping sound, and he fell on the ground. He scrambled around in front of the
headlights and pulled off his boots. I had shot him in the ankle.
	He was deliriously happy. We went straight to a hospital where they
examined him, and he filled out all sorts of reports for the doctors and police
and told everyone that he had shot himself in the foot. The police told him,
"The next time you shoot yourself, shoot yourself in the fucking head." He was
classified 4F and didn't even complain much about the cast he had to wear for
two months. The bullet is lodged in his right anklebone, and, contrary to rumor,
it never improved his playing. We spent two months in Phoenix scraping together
enough money to last us another stretch in Los Angeles. My hair and my stage
costumes weren't as popular with Arizonians as they were in LA. I began to stop
in Salvation Army stores, and because I was so skinny and narrow-shouldered I
found that little girls' dresses fitted me best around the top. I started to
wear them over a pair of jeans like a tunic. Dick decided it was time to get my
blond lock permanented so my image would fit my new name, and I agreed. By the
time Dick was finished giving me a home permanent I looked like a concentration
camp version of a white Jimi Hendrix.
	My mother had gone to Tennessee during all this for her father's funeral,
and when she returned home to Phoenix, Dick and I were sitting in the house. I
was in a pink suit with my hair blond and frizzed out and when I said," Mom! I
changed my name to Alice!" I thought she would faint. She blamed everything on
Dick. She still does, including Watergate and Vietnam.
	By March of 1968 we were getting morose staying in Phoenix, and we knew
we had to make it back to Los Angeles and work out the new image. We were going
to have a new sound too, out of necessity. Neal Smith might have sounded great
on his snare drum, but when it came to playing English blues, he was awful. All
that he could do was try to rearrange the sound somehow and begin to play
original music.
	We bought a small van for two hundred dollars, loaded the equipmnet on
the Thursday night before Good Friday, and set out for LA. Mike Allen drove,
Dick sat in the middle, and I fell asleep on the passenger side while the rest
of the group, including Neal with a cast on his leg from his gun wound, rode in
the back on top of a pile of equipment.
	By seven in the morning we had reached the LA freeways and rush hour.
Mike was changing lanes when the equipment began to shift inside the van,
dipping it over the right side. I woke up when I heard the breaks screeching,
but before any of us could move we began to tumble, head-on, as if the van had
tripped over something. The glass in the windshield splattered, and I remember
seeing the cement of the freeway come hurtling through the window and the sound
of metal scraping across concrete and the van tunmbling, and Mike Allen falling
out of the glassless windshiled. There was a blast of horns honking and then I
passed out.
	When I woke up two police cars and an ambulance were by the side of the
road, and a policeman was holding up the back of my head asking me what my name
was. I told him I was Alice Cooper.
	We were all unconscious for about fifteen minutes, then one by one we
began to come to shivering and vomiting from shock. None of us was badly hurt
(Neal's cast had actually saved his foot from getting crushed, and Dick had a
gash across his forehead that took eighteen stitches to close up) but the van
and most of the equipment were wrecked. Later that night lying in the darkness
on the floor in some cheap motel in Hollywood, Dick made a confession. "I know
this sounds crazy, but I think I died," he whispered.
	"What the hell are you talking about?" Neal yelled from the other side of
the room. "Is this another one of your crazy faggot ideas for the Alice Cooper
band?"
	"No, I'm serious," Dick insisted. "When I passed out in the van I had a
strange sensation, like my spirit leaving my body."
	Glen was making "woooo" noises of ghosts, but Dick went right on,
insisting that his spirit rose above the freeway, and he could see the van
laying on its side and other spirits rising up from the cement. He hovered at a
certain height, waiting for them to join him, knowing they were friends, when
something started to push him back down. He didn't want to go back down though.
He felt free, movable, released. But there was pressure, something literally
pushing. Then he woke up.
	Although I didn't tell the other guys until later, when it came out in an
interview, I had experienced the same thing. I was sure that we had all died,
and that this life was really a reincarnation. I actually had become Alice
Cooper.
	It took all the cash we had earned in Phoenix to buy another van and rent
a place to live, this time a little crooked house that was sliding down the side
of a hill, thirty miles outside of LA in Topanga Canyon. Topanga was the easiest
place to find a house. While Laurel Canyon attracted nouveau riche rock stars
and Beverly Hills the ones who already had been around for a few years, Topanga
was filled with hippies and people on the way up. The house we rented was so
slanted that people got dizzy inside. We rearranged all the furniture (a few
sticks of chairs and a rotting sofa) so they, too, tilted down the mountain,
like in a fun house. We hung a five-foot poster of Lawrence Welk that we found
in a store room at the Cheetah above the fireplace and stuck rhinestone earrings
in his eyes.
	We almost had our own rooms in the Topanga house. Mike, Dennis, Neal,
Mike Allen and Dick shared rooms. Glen slept in the basement, where we also
rehearsed, but in order to get to the basement you had to out side the house and
enter from a rear door. So we just cut a large round hole in the floor of my
bedroom and lowered ourselves into the basement from there.
	When the people in the neighborhood heard that a strange rock and roll
band had moved into the house we were treated to the hippie welcome wagon of
free drugs. Most of our visitors were from nearby communes who came by to say
hello and share a joint. I used to sit in front of the house in an old dirty
slip pulled over a pair of jeans and hold court. I had a passion for old dirty
slips cut off like T-shirts. They still look terrific. When I first started
wearing them they just hinted at femininity, but it was enough to make people
think I was a transvestite.
	One day I was polishing off a bottle on the front steps when a big white
Cadillac with a white Russian wolfhound in the back pulled up. At first I
thought the driver was Troy Donahue. It was Troy Donahue. He had heard there was
a bunch of weirdos in the neighborhood and wanted to see what was up. What
attraction I offered for Troy Donahue I'm not sure, but he came by to see me
practically every day. He was generally as drunk as the rest of us and he loved
to listen to us rehearse, which was odd, because most people couldn't stand to
hear us play when they paid for the privilege. Troy would get ripped out of his
skull on Ripple, hook his feet in my bedroom closet door and hang upside down
through the hole in the floor for hours, like a bat. A few times he slipped
right through, wrecking Neal's drum kit in the process.
	When Merry Cornwall saw my new hair and pseudo-drag costume she was no
longer interested in managing us. "Now," she said, "you look as bas as you
sound." Yet out of loyalty she continued to book us in the Cheetah just the
same. The audience as the Cheetah despised our new image and couldn't stand our
new sound. The first time I actually got booed on stage was at the Cheetah that
May. I booed right back at them. Every time I heard somebody yell "faggot" at me
from the audience I swished more and gave them a limp wrist. That drove them
even crazier. I got the feeling they wanted to hurt me, punish me somehow for
being so outrageous. Still, this was the most audience reaction we got in a
year.
	People began to remember us, even if only to say they didn't like us. We
were no longer another faceless band opening at the Cheetah. Overnight we had
found inverse fame. We were the band it was hip to hate. I hated right back. I
was so drunk most of the time I didn't even know what I was doing. I ran around
the stage with a toilet seat and sang a song through an open window called
"Nobody Likes Me." Our biggest problem was the music. To say that it was atonal
was a compliment. There was no melody line, no pattern to the notes we played.
By our sound you would have thought we were spaced out on acid when we played.
Yeet that was it. Either we played English blues and somebody else's tunes, or
we played our own stuff, which sounded, well, experimental.
	During the show somebody yelled at me, "You suck!" I said, "That's
right," and lay down on the stage and chanted, "suck, suck, suck," until I
thought the crowd would rip me apart. They called me a fag rock star. Rock Star!
Who cared it they thought I was a fag., if they hated me. Everybody noticed me.
	I finally lost my virginity in the house in Topanga Canyon. One day Troy
Donahue brought a stack of unused lumber over in the back seat of his car, and
Mike Allen helped me build a massive coffin with all the accessories you'd find
in a Cadillac. It was painted black enamel, and there was a glass window in the
lid so I could see up. I padded and lined the insides in an old satin ball dress
and wired the top with two car speakers for stereo music. There was even a tiny
light that went on whenever you opened the lid, just like a refrigerator.
Curiously, although I can close my eyes and see every nail-head in that coffin,
I don't remember the name of the girl I bedded there. That's probably because
our lovemaking session fell far short of the expectations I had come to have
from my pillow and right hand. It was, however, not much different than balling
a jelly doughnut. 
	I appeared at the Whiskey A-Go-Go that fateful night, opening third on a
bill to Led Zeppelin their first time around in America. I came prancing out on
stage in pink pajamas and a garbage can. When the show was over there was a rush
of groupies, one of whom, a strawberry blonde with pert tits and wide ass, kept
tellingme, "You're so adorable," squealing out the word adorable with a little
pelvic thrust. This was not the age of glitter groupies, mind you, but the
prehistoric era of California hippies. Not that this girl was from California.
She was from Denver, actually, and had to leave early the next morning to drive
back there. But everyone seemed to look the same then in California: beads, long
natural hair, sandals and jeans or short dresses that were no more than wide
belts.
	I don't know what made the girl different from all other girls, but I
drove back to the house in Topanga Canyon with her and threw her into the
coffin. Both of us tld each other massive fabrications about our sexual
histories, and I let her believe this was just another tumble in the casket for
me. Not only were we terrible liars, but we were wretched lovers, too. I'm sure
it was her first time, also, because if she had an inkling of what she was
doing, she didn't let me in on it. My ass kept on slapping against the top of
the coffin, our foreplay lasted about four minutes, and getting my broken thing
into that hole nestled in a thatch of hair four inches below her navel was so
much trouble it was more like a wrestling match. Edward Satrinao had been right!
	As soon as she left in the morning I became convinced I had the clap. I
didn't even know what the sysmptoms were, and I was too embarrassed to ask any
of the other guys. I went to the free clinic in Hollywood for a checkup because
I didn't have any money. The place was filled with dirty, sypilitic hippies and
everybody stared at me because I brought the coffin with me. I thought th doctor
needed the coffin for some reason.
	As the house band at the Cheetah we opened for the Doors a half a dozen
times. "Light My Fire" had turned them into a supergroup that year, and as we
got to be buddies I got the impression that Jim Morrison didn't exactly know how
to handle what was happening to him.
	Morrsion was always drunk. There was a great, otherworldly mysteriousness
about him. We talked for hours on the pier behind the Cheetah in between gigs,
sipping scotch from a bottle, occasionally both throwing up into the ocean. I
passed out in Morrison's house a hundred times. I woke up in the morning
smelling of stale beer. Morrison would be asleep on the couch a few feet away
from me in his black leather pants and black T-shirt. I would stumble to my
feet, walk the twenty-eight miles home to Toganga Canyon.
	One day on my way up the hill I heard someone calling: "Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!
Excuse me!"
	A woman about forty years old, I guess, had just pulled up in front of
the house in a Chevy convertible. I strolled towards her, and as I got closer
she said excitedly, "It is! It is!"
	When I got close to her she was beaming. "You're Tiny Tim, aren't you?" I
just smiled back, not answering.
	"Do you live around here, Mr. Tim?"
	"Sure, I live up the hill. How did you know I was Tiny Tim?"
	"Well, I recognized you. From your nose." She gave me the once-over, her
eyes widening at my torn dungarees and the cheerleader's skirt I had on
backward. She spotted my perpetual beer can, now crushed and empty. "Would you
like another beer?" she asked hesitantly. "I didn't think you drank or smoked."
	"That's just publicity," I told her, and followed her into the house. She
poured beer after beer into me, getting me nice and high so early in the day. I
was very grateful. After an hour I had her whole story. She was from Seattle,
divorced, and had moved to LA a few months before to teach music in a high
school. She loved my (Tiny Tim's) music and wanted to know if I wanted to learn
how to play piano. I didn't, but I thought maybe Tiny Tim would, and there was
free-flowing beer in her refrigerator, so I told her I'd be delighted to take
piano lessons.
	I got to meet her three little girls, who I called the Ball sisters:
Matzoh, Camphor and Screw. They acted very strange, these prepubescent little
girls, and at first I figured their mother was putting Valium in their Pablum.
The three of them would walk around all day drinking grape juice. I thought it
was grape juice until I took a sip myself and found out it was Ripple. Three
infant alcoholics! Gee, were those kids smashed!
	Every day when she got home from school I'd plink on the piano with her
for an hour, and then she would take me into the kitchen and fill me with beer
and sandwiches. After a month of this I got up enough nerve to ask her if I
could take some sandwiches home with me for dinner, and I eventually would up
feeding the whole group. It probably would have gone on forever except that she
began to talk to the other neighbors and told them she was giving Tiny Tim piano
lessons. They all told her they knew positively that Tiny Tim didn't live in
Topanga Canyon.
	One day Troy Donahue came by to hang through the hole, and he told us
that he had been driving up the hill when a lady in a white Chevy flagged him
over and asked if he was really Troy Donahue. She told him that she gave piano
lessons to Tiny Tim and would he like piano lessons, too. He told her that Tiny
Tim lived in New York, but she insisted he lived on the hill and pointed out our
house.
	Troy had confused her enough to make her come up to the house later that
night where she found the house full of people in a drunken stupor. We kept up
the Tiny Tim ruse for a while, but Russ Tamblyn, who lived nearby and visited
often, slipped and called me Alice. At that point my piano teacher who was so
confused and so disappointed that I wasn't Tiny Tim but Alice Somebody that she
started to weep and ran out the door. I showed up for my piano lesson the next
day at my regular time, guilt stricken and wanting to make amends, but she
refused to give me another lesson if I wasn't Tiny Tim. She did give me a beer,
however, and continued to feed the group a couple of times a week.
	We had another sponsor in Topanga Canyon named Norma Bloom, a huge
Valkyrian blonde who was secretly bald under her long blond wig. Well, at least
she thought it was a secret. Norma turned up at the house one day, uninvited
saying she had heard that a rock band lived there, and she just loved rock and
roll, and could we teach her about it. We all explained it wasn't a teachable
thing, that it was intangible, and all she could do was listen to it, but what
was it she really wanted to learn?
	"I heard that musicians do it differently," she said.
	"That depends if you're plugged into an amplifier," I told her. Dennis
couldn't believe what he was hearing and danced around behind her back, picking
at her wig like a mosquito.
	"I know how to do it like Chuck Berry," I told her.
	"Was he a rock musician?" Norma asked.
	Norma was filled with handy little tricks of survival. She could cook up
a meal from wild plants growing in the canyon, and knew several techniques for
shoplifting when things got really desperate. She even gave us a recipe for rock
soup, which, as it s name implies, was soup made from a rock boiled in water and
vegatables. The odd thing about rock soup was that it was delicious.
	There were probably two or three girls in between my first and Norma
Bloom, but I had never seen a naked girl who was as big as Norma. Everything
about her was giant, her bones, her tits, even the wide pink nipples that each
had a long blond hair growing out of them. I was fascinated with her cunt, which
like her head (although I never saw her head) was hairless.
	This barren state made it easy for me to get involved in a physiological
examination that I never quite gotten into before. I spent an hour on the floor
with her legs looped over the side of the coffin - practically giving her an
internal examination. I'm sure it couldn't have been too exciting, not that I
was trying to be, but Norma kept squealing in delight. When I finally got around
to fucking her she was near delirious from all the attention she was getting and
probably didn't realize that I was rather disconcerted because she was so big
inside, too. I sloshed around in there for another hour, getting sore and bored,
and I finally stopped to get some newspaper to line the coffin in because it was
getting sopping wet when she called it quits. Norma came around almost every day
for a month or so, and under strict orders from the group she always brought
food, mostly pies that she had baked herself. Norma and I continued to have one
of those lazy afternoon romances, where I would adventure into teh dark inner
cavern of her loins and lose myself for an hour or two.
	Norma was convinced our house was haunted and thought it would be a great
idea to contact one of the ghosts. I mentioned this to Merry Cornwell at the
Cheetah, who said that Jim Morrison and David Crosby had been talking about
having a seance for a longtime. I promised to find the medium if Merry arranged
everything else, and asked Norma if she thought she could raise the dead for
some rock stars.
        	The only reason we went to all this trouble, by the way, was to
get to meet Morrison's record producer, Paul Rothchild, who was one of the
hottest names in the music industry. We would do anything to get a producer over
to the house, and I always felt like Gale Storm on My Little Margie when I got
involved in these schemes.
        	The night of the seance Norma came by, and we helped her spray
paint a pentacle on the floor of the basement. Jim Morrison had already been
told that the circle was inlaid marble in the basement and that the house had a
national reputation for being haunted. Near midnight Morrison showed up with his
producer, Paul Rothschild, David Crosby and Arther Lee, one of my favorite
musicans.
        	For the next two hours Norma put on a fascinating show of
summoning up a spirit and pretending to be possessed. It ran a little thin after
a couple of hours, and Mike Bruce and I started giving each other peace signals
in the candlelight breaking everybody up. Finally Morrison started scraping the
paint off the floor with his boots and stopped the whole thing. 
        	"This is painted! This pentacle is painted!" he started shouting.
        	"You guys shouldn't have done this," Crosby said to us
gravely."This isn't the type of thing mortal people should fool around with."
	"But I'm not mortal," I told him. "I'm actually a 14th century witch. I
died just last Good Friday again on the freeway..." But Crosby wasn't listening,
and Morrison had climbed out of the hole in the ceiling, past my coffin and
outside, where he took off his boots covered with paint from the pentacle and
threw them down the hill in a fit of anger. 
        	I saw Morrison the next day on Sunset Boulevard talking to the
hippies. He was still barefoot, and when he saw me I rushed over to him and
explained about the night before. When he heard we went through all that
craziness just to get to meet him and Rothschild he loved it. He called me
"Lucy" (from "I Love...") the rest of the day. He put his arm around me and we
walked into a shoe store where he bought another pair of boots. After that we
became much closer. When he was in LA, and I didn't have a job, I'd go over to
his house where there was plenty of food. We'd drink until we passed out, and
I'd crawl under a sofa and sleep until morning. I remember waking up there one
day and hearing somebody say, "Who's the skinny guy in the beaded top under the
couch?" Morrison said, "Oh, that's just Alice Cooper."
	I cared little about food. I had no appetite when I was sober  and what
little money I had was too precious to spend on solids. By midevening though I'd
get to dizzy from hunger and usually scrape together fifty cents to go to
Canter's delicatessen for a bowl of matzoh ball soup.
	I met the GTOs at Cander's for the first time. The GTOs were the first
organized groupies and GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously,
Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Only, and Girls Together Often. The
five or six of them, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Suzi Cream Cheese, and Miss
Lucy had started a rock band, but they were more of a mixed-media event than
musicians. People just got off on them. They were a trip to be with. At the time
we met, one of them was testing how far she could abuse her body with drugs.
There was also a boyfriend who took so much amphetamine his bones had disolved,
and he slumped in chairs like a rolled sock. Miss Pamela was a smiling
open-faced girl who looked just like Ginger Rogers. I met Miss Christine, the
GTO I was to fall madly in love with, across a bowl of shared matzoh ball soup.
She was one of the skinniest girls I ever met, and she made me look muscular.
When she teased out her frizzy, mousy-brown hair, she looked like a used Q-Tip.
	The GTOs were close friends with Frank Zappa. In 1969 Frank Zappa was
still a teen hero. He was my teen hero at least, and Zappa really just about
supported the GTOs. There wasn't a zanier entourage in existance. Miss Christine
was practically his social secretary, and after much begging and cojoling she
promised me an audience with Frank. One night Miss Christine took me to a party
and Zappa was there sitting on a sofa drinking wine, his mustache bigger than
life. The moment we met we hit it off. Zappa had never been a huge commercial
success himself. He was regarded unofficially as a drug freak, a nut, but that
wasn't the case at all. Zany, maybe, but he never touched drugs and he was the
straighest, strictest businessman I ever dealt with. He told me that he was
starting his own record company and looking for acts to sign, especially comedy
and psychedelic acts that nobody else would take a chance on. I asked if he
would come hear us at the Cheetah, but he put me off saying he was too busy, but
I didn't take no for an answer. As the party went on and he got drunker, I got
more insistent. Finally he said, "All right. Come by in the morning and I'll
listen."
	I suppose he meant we should bring a tape, or maybe he forgot the next
day was Sunday. Miss Christine let us into his house at the break of dawn, and
we set up our equipment and lights in his basement and started playing. Zappa
came rushing downstairs, naked, holding his ears.
	"All right, all right," he shouted, his cock swinging back and forth as
he shook his head, "I'll sign you! I'll sign you! Just stop playing!"
	Zappa wasn't kidding. Just like that, out of the clear blue sky, he told
us to come to his office on Monday and talk to his business manager, Herbie
Cohen. Cohen offered us a six-thousand-dollar advance for our first three record
albums to be released on Zappa's newly formed Straight-Bizarre label distributed
by Warner Brothers. Zappa had already signed Captain Beefheart and the GTOs.
	Six thousand dollars! I couldn't believe it! All the struggling and
starving was over!
	We told Merry Cornwall about it that night, but she was reserved in her
celebrations with us. We talked Merry and Norma Bloom into buying us a couple of
bottles of booze and some pizza, and Merry warned us not to get our hopes up. A
kiss is not a fuck, she pointed out, and a promise i not a signed contract. That
kind of verbal offer happened all the time in the music business and most often
nothing would come of it. Merry saw a lot of pitfalls in signing with Zappa,
especially because we didn't have a manager to protect our interests. Zappa
wanted Herbie Cohen to manage us, but Merry thought it was a conflict of
interest. In the entire time we were in LA nobody showed any interest in
managing us except for Merry. There was Dick of course, but he wouldn't cut much
ice with Zappa and Herbie Cohen. We were losing Dick in any event. He became
distracted and invloved in a new life in LA, and as the next year went by we
lost him somewhere in the confusion of our lives.
	We were stumped. We had to find a manager before signing the deal, and we
had to sign the deal while Zappa still wanted us. There had to be somebody,
somewhere, who wanted a piece of the Alice Cooper group. After all, we were
getting six thousand dollars. I thought it was all the money in the world. Think
of it! In four more years I would be making ten thousand dollars a minute!