Chapter 8

The parties, people, places, surrounding our lives and blurred days. Through all
this, this seamless madness, we were poor, but happy. Like all bad times, they
were good times because they had to be to survive it. Looking back on it, it was
frantic and forced. In reality, nothing was going right. Our first album,
Pretties For You, was nowhere in sight. There were technical delays, problems
with mixes, hassles about packaging, disputes over rights. We heard every
conceivable excuse not to release the album. By the time winter had passed the
$6,000 was gone and we had giggled every go-go bar fraternity house in Southern
California. Merry Cornwall dubbed us "Desperation Rock and Roll."
	The tour that Zappa promised never seemed to materialize. The only
halfway decent booking we got that winter was a package deal at the Shrine
Auditorium in December, where Zappa displayed us, The GTOs, and Captain
Beefheart for the press. The reviews brushed us aside as another burned-out
bunch of acid heads.
	The real problem was we were the antithesis of everything that was
happening in music at that time. Rock and roll was the pride of the nation's
young. Never before in history was music as important a social force. It unified
an entire generation, a very powerful and offbeat generation. It was the
journalism of the sixties, an electronic minstrel singing of peace, flowers and
LSD. And it was taken very seriously. So many rock musicians really believed
that they were the prophets. There was only one way to compete in the rock
industry then, and that was with quality music. Music we didn't have. We had an
abundance of weirdness and a lot of guts, but no listenable sound. There were
complex chord changes every few beats and monochromatic melody lines. We didn't
even know what a melody was. So we completed the only way we knew how -
theatrics.
	We used everything we could borrow or steal as a prop: fire extinguishers
and pillows, goggles, a toilet seat, an oar or a broom. We let out instruments
feed back an ear-shattering squeal and beat each other up on stage like the
inmates at Charington. Once we almost suffocated ourselves. We stole a large
container of CO2 gas for a Coca-Cola plant and at the end of the act, when we
did a big rave-up on a song called "I'm a man," I let a weather balloon slowly
fill up with the gas. On the last chord of the song I climbed up the amplifiers
and broke the balloon with a sword. The heavy gas dropped on us. Neal fell into
his drum kit and spawled on the floor and I passed out beside him. We got a
standing ovation when they carried us off the stage on stretchers with oxygen
masks. It was also around that time that Glen Buxton started to smear cigarette
ashes under his eyes. This quickly snowballed into mascara and eyeshadow, and
within a month we were all wearing makeup.
	The time had come for us to get out on the road. In New York, She and
Joey were frantically looking a booking agent to handle us before we bankrupted
them. They played the telephone game, trying to get through to people who had
just stepped away from their office or were in meeting. A million phone calls
trying to get past a million closed doors. Using the invisible album as an edge,
Shep finally got up the International Famous Agency, where we cajoled, begged
and befriended a man named Alan Strahl. At twenty-four, Strahl was one of the
most successful guys in the business. He was a short, sunshiny-faced man with a
remarkable sense of humor - probably the reason he took up on us as clients.
	Alan Strahl didn't exactly know what he was getting into. He heard
through the grapevine that we were a little weird, but that was all. Shep, after
all, was a nice boy from Long Island, like Alan, so what could be wrong? With
Strahl behind us we got a few dates.
	We played Salt Lake City for $700, The University of Boulder for $1,000,
The Black Dome in Cincinnati for $1,250, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in
March for $1,500, where we saw the first copy of Pretties For You with an Ed
Beardsley painting on the cover sealed in plastic.
	Pretties For You may have been declared a classic years later in Germany,
but in 1968 it was a dud. People hated it in droves. It was called a "tragic
waste of vinyl" by one critic although it had some of our best compositions on
it, like "10 Minutes Before the Worm" and "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio." Dennis had
written a masterpiece for that album called "B.B. On Mars." When Alan Strahl got
a copy of the record in New York, curious to hear what it sounded like, he was
only able to listen to twenty seconds of it before he had to shut off the record
player.
	We had our fans, however. The Hells Angels adored the album. The
president of the San Francisco chapter of the Angels was a longtime Zappa fan,
and when Pretties For You came out he was one of the few thousand people who
bought a copy. He told Zappa to tell us that we represented more of what the
Hells Angels stood for than the Grateful Dead, a supreme compliment. As word
spread on us, the Angels would show up backstage everywhere we played. It was a
frightening fan club, and we treated them gingerly and with respect.
	In April, only seven months after signing a recording contract, we were
$40,000 in the hole. There was literally no work left for us in LA. We had
played the town out. The only choice was to find another city or another
location where the Alice Cooper band would be better received.
	Whatever you do, if you're new and haven't played around, you don't go to
New York. New York isn't considered a "breaking town" in the record business.
You have to be big already by the time you hit New York, and then you've got to
be good to stay big. If they don't like you in New York they put the word out on
you and you're crippled in the music business. They send you back to the
hinterlands without a second chance.
	I don't know if Shep knew how dangerous it was to take us to New York,
but I think he wanted to get it over, put us out of our misery, so to speak.
Alan Strahl and Shep wrangled a whole East Coast suicide spree for us. Strahl's
influence got us a booking fourth on the bill at the Felt Forum on June 6, 1968,
followed by two nights at Steve Paul's Scene. On June 13 we went to the Electric
Factory in Philadelphia for two days before returning to New York for three more
nights at the Scene.
	Memorial weekend we piled into a station wagon like lambs to a slaughter
and with a van full of lights and sound equipment following us we drove to New
York. We arrived on a hot, humid day, a city-broiler that makes the tar soft and
glistening and the air fetid and thick. We spent a good hour driving in circles
around Madison Square Garden, gawking at the building and counting winos asleep
on the sidewalk.
	Shep had a surprise waiting in New York, although I can tell you we
weren't happy about it. His name was Billy. Billy was another in a series of
road managers that Shep seemed to find for us under rocks, or in brothels, or in
Billy's case, fresh out of military prison. He was waiting for Shep in the busy
lobby of the Allison Hotel in Greenwich Village, grinning and sweating as he
pumped our arms up and down.
	Billy's job, by its very nature, was only for losers. Road managers were
unpaid, overworked dolts who got nothing out of the job except room and board.
There was always the promise of Easy Street when things got good, but who would
have put their future in our hands? S o we were mothered and corralled by an
astounding collection of ex-junkies, junkies, ex-prizefighters and loafers.
	Billy had been arrested in the marines for stealing a radio, I believe. I
don't remember the details except that Shep picked him up on his way out of
military prison on the occasion of his dishonourable discharge. Billy took the
job, in part, because he didn't think handling a rock group would be much
different than handling a bunch of guys in the marines. Boy, was he wrong.
	I made it up to the hotel room first and took choice of the beds, a
matter of great importance and dispute between us. When I saw the room, an
oilcloth and wallpapered cubicle, I knew I would get the crabs. I was waiting
for my roommates, Neal and Glen, when I met the first of the drag queens.	
	I had been courted by drag queens before in LA, but in New York they
latch on to us like we were the Welcome Wagon from Max Factor. It was almost as
if some sort of alarm system was set off in transvestite bars all over the city,
sending them swishing up to the Allison where they lined the hallways and
lobbies for three days.
	When I heard the knock I thought it was Glen and Neal. I never expected
to see a transvestite outside the door. I think I screamed a little, like aargh!
I even tried to slam the door in his face, but he stuck his foot in the doorjamb
and said, "Oh, baby, have I been waiting for you!"
	The elevator hall opened across the hall and Neal and Glen got out. Neal
had a girl with big tits on his arm.
	"Alice found a girlfriend already," he said.
	"Alice!" the drag queen repeated blissfully. "Alice. I love it, love it,
love it to death. Where'd you get a name like Alice?"
	We all walked into the room together and the drag queen started a
monologue about New York when Glen howled, "Where's my guitar? Where's my
guitar?" He tossed suitcases aside, looked under the bed and in the bathroom. He
ran out into the hallway banging on doors, screaming for Billy to come help him.
Billy ran out into the hall in his underwear with a girl in bra and panties
trailing him.
	"Where's my guitar?" Glen screamed. "My thousand-dollar Les Paul is
missing. My pink Les Paul! I gave it to you fifteen minutes ago!"
	"Well," Billy asked him, blinking, "was it on the elevator with the other
stuff?" There was no consoling Glen. He ran up and down all the floors of the
hotel knocking on doors and cursing. He ranted and screamed and fired Billy,
which Billy paid no attention to.
	The next day, in order to play the Felt Forum, Glen had to rent a guitar,
and he said it knocked his performance off. Not that anyone would have noticed.
The crowd at the Forum acted as if nobody was on the stage. They didn't seem to
mind us very much, and that was encouraging. I'd call it "silent fascination."
When it was over there was light applause, but at least no booing.
	The gig we really cared about in New York was at Steve Paul's Scene. Like
the Hullabaloo Club in Los Angeles, the Scene attracted a music business crowd,
and that was important to us, but more important than that, the Scene attracted
the media. Like Max's Kansas City after it, it was the headquarters for pop
culture and the avant-garde in New York. Steve Paul's own reputation as a
trend-setter had made the club into the enormous power it was, and Paul was
hardly twenty-three at the time.
	The Scene was ominous physically, a murky little club where instead of
suntans and surfers, like we were used to in LA, we found greenish complexions
and ageing hipsters hiding behind sunglasses. The audience at the Scene was like
the audience at the Felt Forum grown up. They were immovably blase. The ice
melting in their glasses was the only indication they had body temperature.
	We got on stage and made our noise and beat each other up and turned on a
fire extinguisher and they didn't raise an eyebrow. These people had lived
through Warhol and Lou Reed and Theater of the Ridiculous for centuries. Alice
Cooper? Thirteenth-century witch? Go home, little boys.
	We didn't even know we had bombed at first. We were so excited about
being in New York we didn't know what hit us. All we cared about for the first
two days was getting laid and finding Glen's guitar. Glen had a lead. Two
junkies in the lobby of the hotel told him the Puerto Rican elevator operator
was clipping and selling it in Harlem. Glen called Shep and Shep decided it was
more likely we could get the guitar back if we confronted the guy ourselves
instead of calling the police.
	The next afternoon Shep, Glen, Billy and I got into the elevator in the
lobby and asked for our floor. When we stopped at our landing Billy put his hand
over the grating and asked the guy to wait a minute. It was hot and sticky in
there as the four of us stared at the man in the corner. We had a prearranged
plan, and I didn't know what I was doing there except maybe to add some moral
support. We just stared at the guy. I figured maybe we were psyching him out.
	After an uncomfortable minute there was a soft whssst sound and I looked
down and saw the elevator operator holding a very pointy switchblade. Shep
looked around, pulled on a lock of hair and said, "Isn't this our floor,
gentlemen?"
	The elevator operator pulled back the grating yanked down the crossbar
and let us into the hallway. We scurried down the hall, looking over our
shoulder as the man stepped into the hallway to watch us file into my room,
still holding the switchblade by his side.
	We checked out of the Allison an hour later and moved into the Hotel
Edgar around the corner for safety. But at the Hotel Edgar there were just as
perilous dangers: lice and rats. I spent my entire allowance on Pyrinate A-200
that week. I bathed with it two or three times a day, as did we all. At night,
when we got sweaty in the clubs, the place reeked of it. I don't know how humans
could bear to come near us let alone those little crabs.
	The rats at the Edgar were as big as dogs. I dreamed nightly they were
eating me in my sleep. I walked into the room one day and found a rat dragging a
half of a cream cheese and bagel sandwich across the room. Jesus, they were
strong! There was also the most incredible faggot camped out in front of my room
for two days. Whenever I came back to the hotel he would be lying on the floor
of the hallway downed out of his mind on pills, "Come on, Alice, you can be guy
for one night."
	It was so obnoxious to find him unconscious in front of my door that Neal
and I went berserk one night. We dragged him into the room, tossed him in the
tub filled with Pyrinate and cockroaches and turned on the shower. He began
pulling off his wet clothes which we helped him tear to shreds. He was crying,
"Oh, you're so mean!" the whole time, but he had a tremendous hard-on. We tossed
him out the door and poured a bottle of ketchup over him.
	The next day Shep hired two limousines to take us to Philadelphia. Two
sisters with silicon tits turned out to see Neal and Mike off and I had an
entourage of drag queens on the sidewalk which looked like a meeting of the New
York Mah-Jongg association. We left our luggage in the lobby of the Edgar,
joking about lightning striking twice, and took our fans to the corner for egg
creams. When we got back to the hotel, Glen's suitcase of clothes had been
stolen.
	
	Our time in Philadelphia was spent worrying about the Scene. What could
we do in New York to get their attention? Should we offend them? Maybe go out
there and slap them around a little to bring them to?
	The next night in the middle of my first number I broke a glass. I walked
out into the audience and knocked it off a table. Most people thought it was an
accident, but when a second and third broke a few minutes later they knew it was
no joke. I began to smash bottles and glasses all over the room. Table of people
burst up all over the place as I attacked their drinks. They called Steve Paul
in from the front steps where he sat all night and he stopped the show. He
refused to let us go back on until I swore I wouldn't break any more glasses,
but I lied. The second show I turned over an entire table. Steve Paul was
furious but that's why the place was called the Scene. Anybody who had ever been
there talked about it, and even Steve Paul couldn't stop telling his friends.
	When we got back to new York from our gig in Philadelphia we moved into
the Chelsea hotel, which is just a New York version of the Landmark. The
Landmark was Disneyland compared to the Chelsea. I met more leather and strap
freaks in four days at the Chelsea than I did in my entire career of wearing
black leather. Sex at the Chelsea involved giving enemas and fist fucking. I
didn't care for it much. The rooms at the Chelsea were even guaranteed
soundproofed. Now why would anyone want a soundproofed hotel room? Heavy
sleeping?
	I rode up in the elevator with a Puerto Rican girl in a big white hat.
She got off on my floor and watched me go to my room from the other end of the
hall. Three minutes later she knocked on the door to my room. She sat down on
the bed, unbuttoned her pants, opened her purse and took out a picture of Mick
Jagger and a vibrator. Then she pulled her pants down to her knees, laid back
and masturbated. I called Mike and Dennis into the room to watch with me.
	Glen was never at the Chelsea. He was sick of wearing the clothes he had
on his back when his suitcase was stolen and he was determined to find his
belongings before we left New York. People separated in waves around him as he
strode down the hot streets in his smelly lame outfit, positive he would find
some Puerto Rican hanging out in a doorway dressed in Glen's purple pedal
pushers and black beads.
	Our last night at the Scene Shep asked Alan Strahl to come see us, and he
in turn brought some of his own friends. They all arrived between shows and Shep
waved me over to their table. Alan Strahl's friends were some tough-looking guys
from Brooklyn, and when he was introduced to me, his mouth fell open. I could
tell he was embarrassed.
	"Shep, Shep," he stammered, "I thought they were a little strange, but. .
. ."
	Our last night in New York Shep called a meeting. We were leaving the
next morning on an early plane for Buffalo, and after the last show was the only
time left to talk. By the time we wrapped the equipment it must have been three
in the morning. I went straight to the bar and doubled up on my drinks.
	When we got outside it was pouring with rain. I stood by the curb
throwing up phlegm while Mike and Dennis went to the corner to hail a cab. A few
minutes passed, and I was soaked through to the bone. Finally I walked to the
corner to look for them and they were gone. I went back to the Scene, but
everyone had left and Steve Paul was locking the place. He said Shep had just
called looking for me. Mike and Dennis had forgot to tell the cabdriver to go
back and pick me up. Steve Paul loaned me two bucks to get downtown to the
Chelsea, and I went back out into the rain.
	It was impossible to get a cab. It was just before dawn, I was alone,
which was rare, and in New York, which was rarer. I did the only sensible thing.
I started walking downtown. Ten minutes later I was a shivering wet mess and
when I spotted an empty cab I almost fell over myself trying to hail it. When
the driver saw how wet I was he made me sit on an opened newspaper. I closed my
eyes and sat back when suddenly the cab stopped short.
	Just up ahead of us a husky black man was standing in the middle of the
street, as wet as I was, waving us down like we were a locomotive.
	"Hey, I need a lift, man! You got a lift?" he shouted to us. The driver
backed up and started to drive around him when the black guy grabbed one of the
driver's door handles and held fast. We dragged him a good five feet.
	"Where the fuck are you going? I said I needed help!" The driver, an old
man in a golf cap, spun around an locked all the doors as he began a chant of
what I thought were New York cabdriver words.
	"Crazy, foking nigger! Getoutahere!"
	The black man took a knife out of his pocket and banged on the window
with the handle. The driver put on the emergence brakes, reached under his seat
and pulled out a bayonet. I thought, "Holy shit! These guys are crazy!"
	I sat up in the back seat, fascinated and terrified as the driver got out
of the cab and squared off with the black guy in the street. I figured that if
the black guy got the driver first, I would be next, so I opened the passenger
door and tried, drunkenly, to get across the street. I was sloshing around on
the wet pavement when somebody took hold of my arms and helped me stand up. It
was the black guys.
	"He owes me ninety-five cents," the driver yelled from the other side of
the cab. "Leave him alone."
	"Watch the knife! Watch the knife!" I begged him. "You want a lift, I'll
be glad to give you a lift. You can have a lift, all right! Just put away the
knife."
	We all calmly got back into the cab as if nothing had happened, and the
driver turned around and said, "Where to?" The black guy gave him an address and
I just sat there numb and wet, drunk and petrified. The driver kept mumbling.
"What a job. What a craziness."
	"What's this stuff, man?" the new passenger asked, fingering my clothes.
"What's all this stuff you got on? What's your scene?"
	I told him I was a singer in a rock and roll band.
	"No shit, man! You're not a faggot?"
	"Not really. I'm a singer in a band."
	"What's it called? What's your name? Do I know you?"
	I told him my name was Jim Morrison but that didn't seem to impress him.
"Listen, I got some girls I manage, you know? Really foxy ladies. They got
voices like angels. You think I can get them to be stars? You know, like the
Supremes?"
	For five uncomfortable minutes I tried to explain that I didn't know
anything about the music business. I told him I was drunk and would be glad to
drop him off wherever he was going if he just took it easy. The driver seemed
very calm until we stopped in front of a closed bar and the black guy paid him
some money, then he came hurtling around the passenger door and threw me out
into the street. "Hey, no! No!" I yelled. "Take me to the Chelsea!" But he got
back into the cab yelling, "Foo! Faggots and niggers!"
	The black guy stood on the street and laughed at me as the cab pulled
off. "You better come in and have yourself a drink to warm up," he said.
	"No thanks. I've got a meeting to go to."
	He laughed again and hooked his arm tightly under mine and led me into
the dark bar. Although it looked pitch black from the outside the jukebox was
still going, and there must have been a dozen people at the bar. When we walked
in everybody turned to look at us. The place reeked of stale cologne and body
odor. My new friend, who said his name was Norm, introduced me to the bartender
and said I could order anything I wanted on his tab. Norm talked to people and
spit on the floor. I spit on the floor with him and sipped my VO and Coke,
waiting to make a dash for the door, amazed that I had allowed myself to be
thrown out of the cab and went inside. I couldn't wait to tell the guys.
	"She is ugly!" a woman screamed in the darkness. "You found the ugliest
fish of them all, Norm. Where'd you find that fish?"
	She was talking about me. A black girl in a short skirt came over to me
and ran her hand up my leg. When she brushed against my cock I made a feeble
"oh, oh, oh" sound at her and shook my finger.
	"This is Melissa," Norm told me, "I think she likes you."
	I felt like I was going to be sick and told Norm, who walked with me and
Melissa to the back of the bar and sat me down in the phone booth. When I was
ready to throw up Norm led me into the bathroom, still tightly gripping my arm
(his fingers reached all the way around my tiny bicep), and stood there unmoved
while I threw my brains up into the toilet bowl. When I sat back down in the
phone booth, exhausted, the girl said, "I bet that boy's no bigger than my
pinky."
	"Why don't you leave him alone?" Norm said protectively. "Can't you see
he's sick?"
	"Sick. That's just a junky drag queen throwing up her shit. Why you
takin' up with drags?" she asked Norm.
	"He ain't no drag. He's a singer in a rock band, you know?"
	"I still bet he's no bigger than a pinky. He's a fag, man. I telling you
. . . look at the way he's dressed up."
	Norm looked at me with what I was afraid was a dubious expression on his
face. Finally he said, "You want to get laid?"
	"I want to get to my meeting," I told him.
	"I told ya. I spotted that a mile away," the girl said. "Lemmee see.
C'mon, honey. You want to get laid?"
	I shook my head no but the girl was in front of me in the phone booth
fiddling with the top of my pants. I tried to push her head away but I couldn't
get a grip of her tightly curled hair. Norm was laughing and people in the bar
were whooping and cheering. I looked down and all I could see were two huge
black lips painted with thick lipstick closing over my pale asparagus stalk. I
pretended to pass out.
	I can remember being thrown in the back seat of another taxi and Billy
shouting at me with a towel wrapped around his waist, "That's AWOL, man. You get
two years in prison for that kind of shit, man!"
	He shoved me through the door to my room and in the early morning light I
could see Glen and a girl with matted hair asleep in my bed. I crawled into the
bathtub and conked out.
	I would say by the time we left New York, except for the thieves, pimps
and rip-off artists, only twenty people remembered we were even there. One of
them was Bill Graham who said, "I'll never let those faggots on one of my
stages." The other nineteen were the high kings and queens of cult taste and pop
culture. We had paid them some dues in New York, and they would remember us the
next time around.
	The morning we left New York Billy overslept. It was a Sunday, and we had
to catch the eight o'clock flight. Shep had given Billy strict orders for us not
to miss that plane, otherwise we'd have to drive all the way. I was still half
asleep, throwing up my morning phlegm, when we piled into a station wagon and
rushed to the airport. Even as we ran through the airlines terminal to the gate
we could see the plane pulling off to taxi down the runway. Billy ran after it,
pushing people aside, screaming through the window, "You goddamn son-of-a-bitch
fucking plane! You eat shit!" He beat on the glass doors and almost cried out of
frustration.
	Two of New York City's men in blue pointed out that it was Sunday
morning, and arrested us for creating a riot and using foul language in public.
They held us for five hours in a Queens station house until Shep came down and
got us.
	Billy, thank God, was fired.