Chapter Nine

By July of 1968 - a short ten months after it all started - the band was
$100,000 in debt, most of it passed in bad checks for plane tickets and hotel
bills around the country. We had practically no money at all, not even the
twenty-dollar-a-week allowance that Shep and Joey had paid to us from their own
pockets. They were legally responsible for the $100,000 debt, and Shep was still
trying to keep us out on the road and pay for the rent on the John Phillip Law
house in Los Angeles. 
	We ran out of gas, dollars, and inspiration in tht midwest. We landed,
for want of a better place to land, on Jefferson Street in Detroit, where there
was an abundance of sleazy hotels to live in. We became experts at deceit and
pilferage to survive. We rifled groupis' handbags while Mike Bruce fucked them
and walked out on checks in restaurants. We could only stay in a hotel until
they asked us to pay our bill, then we had to skip out. I felt no guilt. It was
me or them.
	Sneaking out on hotels became our specialty, and that's not easy when you
look like a convention of half-drowned rats. We developed all sorts of
techniques, leaving the rooms, one by one every hour, moving luggage through
windows, dressing in layers and layers until we could undress in the van around
the corner. By the time the last person was sneaking out of a hotel the first
would have checked into our next one down the block. 
	Detroit was a hot little hole that summer. I had developed a chronic
cough, and I don't think I took two deep breaths that whole summer. I sweated
away July and August in a darkened hotel room with a bottle of scotch at my
side. My parents were sending me a five-dollar-a-week allowance - when they
could find me.
	The girl, groupies, and boys kept coming. I didn't think twice about
whether or not it was a strange way to be spending my twenty-first summer. After
I sat in the hotel for two weeks, day and night, Neal began to hassle me about
staying in so much. It was unlike me not to want to party, and he was right. He
said he had met two classy girls who were invited over - not for a drunken brawl
- but for conversation and drinks. I told him I wasn't interested in tea
luncheons, but Neal obviously wasn't going anywhere without the rest of us to
back him up, and after he complained and whined awhile he said, "Listen, one of
these chicks is a tap dancer. A topless tap dancer."
	He found my soft spot. I was dying to learn how to tap dance, and Neal
knew it. Ever since I realized that if Jesus Christ were human he'd walk like
Fred Astaire, I wanted to take dancing lessons. Besides, it would have looked
great on stage if in the middle of one of our songs I broke into a little tap
dance. But toplss? What was a topless tap dancer? I had to go and see.
	The topless tap dancer was Cindy Lang, a dreamy eighteen-year-old with
enormous brown eyes that blinked cowlike as she took in all ninety-eight pounds
of me. I took in all one hundred pounds of her, and I instantly felt goofy and
uncomfortable. She was so beautiful I was intimidated. It was lie getting a
blind date with Raquel Welch. Her hair, shiny and dark brown with the sheen of
fur, streamed down to her ass. She was tanned and velvety, her nose was delicate
aristocratic slope. She greeted us at the door of a tiny wooden house just south
of Detroit. Inside it was immaculate, decorated with antiques that instantly
gave me the horrors. I looked around at Neal and Glen and Dennis and wondered
which one of us would be the first to break something.
	The four of us carried on in our typical way. Neal bopped Glen over the
head and Glen punched Dennis in the ribs. It must have looked like the Three
Stooges came to tea. I couldn't bring myself to sit down, everything looked so
fluffed and orderly. We walked back and forth in front of each other stepping on
our toes. For the first fifteen minutes coversation consisted of "Excuse me,"
"Pardon me," "That's all right," "Don't mention it."
	Finally all of us sat down on an old sofa and it broke underneath us.
Nobody laughed. Cindy glared at us like we were a bunch of baboons. The only
time I spoke to Cindy Lang the entire evening I aksed her about topless tap
dancing and found out, much to her amusement, that she was nothing of the sort.
She was entering her freshman year in a local art school, a native Detroit girl
(like me) and the daughter of a police captain.
	The next day, suffering from a terminal case of "shys," I sent Michael
Bruce to Cindy's house dressed in a bathing suit to ask Cindy if she wanted to
take a swim at our hotel. Michael in a bathing suit was always good bait. When
Cindy got to our hotel she was furious that we didn't have a pool; I thought it
was incidental. She agreed to have lunch with me anyway.
	I had received my $5 from Phoenix that morning and felt flushed until,
Cindy ordered a fish dinner that came to $3.50. I ordered a Coke. I didn't want
to tell her how poor I was. I wanted her to think I was a famous rock star.
	Two restless days went by after our aborted swim and lunch date. I didn't
dare call her because I couldn't suggest doing anything except sitting in a dark
hotel room with five other people watching mosquitoes. Finally the hall phone
rang at my hotel and it was Cindy. She was calling to invite me to an all-night
motorcycle movie, and before I could even tell her I couldn't afford the
admission, she said she would pay for it because she knew I was broke.
	What a romantic time! We told each other our astrological signs (neither
one of us believed in them) and spent the night in a dark theater that smelled
of urine, pretending to watch the motorcycle movies, and drank two pints of
Southern Comfort. At two in the morning an old man rang a little hand bell and
asked that everybody move to one side of the thaeter so he could mop the urine
off the floors.
	I didn't want to spend the night in the theater, but taking Cindy to bed
was a major problem. Cindy, as it turned out, didn't live in the house filled
with antiques where we met her, but at home with her mother and policeman
father. There were at least five of us in my hotel room, and it took me a full
day of making deals and cajoling (I paid Neal one dollar to get out) to arrange
to have my room empty at eleven o'clock the next night. 
	Getting Cindy there without making it look like we were on a time
schedule took real finesse. When we arrived there were still some stragglers
laying around on the beds and I had to round them all up and get them out while
Cindy stood in the hallway and watched.
	It took me half an hour to get up the courage to kiss her, and by the
time we laid down on the bed people started barging back into the room. Cindy
lay there looking at the ceiling, choking back laughter as I begged Glen and
Dennis "Not yet! Not yet! Five more minutes!" I hadn't even taken my shoes off
in two hours.
	Our early romance was pure Shakespearean tragedy. Cindy and I had been
dating for three weeks, and she had never seen me perform. We had a gig coming
up in the beginning of August and I wanted to be terrific for her. I had a pair
of pink suede high-heeled shoes, with a broken strap that needed fixing, that I
wore with a pink velvet suit that my mother had made for me and shipped to
Detroit. I wore a white ruffled shirt underneath it and I looked like a wafer.
The night before the show Cindy took my shoes home to have them fixed, and I
gave her my favorite necklace, a combination of rhinestone and big orange balls,
to wear to the show.
	Cindy thought the necklace was hideous, and hid it in the toe of my pink
shoe on her way out of her parents' house going to the club to see the show. She
gave the pink shoes to a roadie who brought them backstage to me. When I put
them on I found the necklace. I thought she jilted me. I thought she was
returning the necklace and never wanted to see me again. I was insanely
heartbroken. When the time came to go on stage I did the wildest, most
frustrated show I ever put on. I weaved and drooled around the stage like a
madman and actually wept when I sang "Nobody Likes Me." Out in the audience
Cindy was having some second thoughts about me. Who was this animal on the
stage? she thought. Which was the real Alice? We had been together three weeks
and I still undressed under the sheets with the lights off; the Alice on stage
was a brash maniac.
	Yet she understood me, this strange skinny singer in makeup who kep a
coffee can next to the bed to throw up into during the night. Cindy stuck. She
stuck through that summer when we shared a can of tuna fish between us as our
daily food, and she stuck for a good long time after.
	Cindy said she wasn't much impressed that I'm a rock musician. It never
mattered, rich or poor, who I was or what I did. She says I make her laugh.
	I'll never marry. There are three things I have absolutely no use for:
marriage, funerals and underwear. Marriage is an insult. Does getting that
official piece of paper mean you love somebody more? Why does anybody need the
state or government involved in their love life? It's almost as stupid as
funerals. Why would you want to see somebody you loved dead? So Cindy and I set
up our own rules and ethics, and our relationship lasted and weathered six years
of stress and travel that would have easily destroyed a relationship bound by
document.
	She and Joey were involved in all sorts of crazy schemes to get the bills
paid, but their greatest coup was Ziggy. Ziggy was a Toronto travel agent Shep
had met while trying to establish a community of artists and writers in Canada.
Ziggy was a wizened Jewish man who didn't know or care much about rock and roll
except that rock bands made a lot of money. Shep had convinced Ziggy he could be
partner to the millions that would start pouring in any day in return for
airline tickets. Ziggy became our angel, and on his wings and tickets we were
able to fly all over the U.S. If we were offered a gig in Seattle for $1,000 we
would use $2,000 worth of airline tickets from Ziggy and keep the grand to live
on. We were picking up a following in Detroit, however, and we always went back
to the Franklin Avenue hotels like they were home.
	We moved slowly down the street, stiffing more and more hotels. We laid
in the hotels for a week or two and then flew out to do a gig somewhere. Eugene,
Oregon, $1,400, Vancouver, B.C., $2,500, Flint, Michigan. We shuttled back and
forth between places, blindly using the Zorro system of gigging, slashing
aimlessly through the country wherever there was a stage for us to play. Shep
was working with two booking agents now, juggling us and hiding the existence of
one agent from the other. Leo Fenn, who booked out of the DMA Agency in Detroit,
got us a bunch of little jobs around the midwest. Alan Strahl in New York was
handling the bigger gigs
	As the days went by we got drunker and drunker, more exhausted from being
in airplanes and cars. The more we played the worse our reputation got. If we
were liked in one city the concert promoter in that state wouldn't want to book
us because the word was out we were berserk fags.
	I got to see America and all the little towns that cover its backside
like hair. I sat shoulder to shoulder with Dennis, Mike, Neal, Glen, Charlie
Carnal and Mike Allen for months. I knew who chewed the loudest, who farted the
worst, and who snored. Who got to eat the last half of a tuna fish sandwich
became a matter of life and death.
	By the end of the summer the Hotel Owners Association called a meeting
about us, and one morning in August they chained our van full of equipment to a
streetlamp. Shep got the van back by settling our bills for ten percent of our
next imaginary album and $10,000 in bad checks. Things couldn't have looked more
bleak. We covered every outdoor festival in the nation, and with winter coming
rock was moving in-doors, and it didn't look like we could hang on much longer.
Shep went to California on a Ziggy plane ticket and tried to convince Frank
Zappa to begin work on our second album, but Zappa wasn't too excited about it.
There was a bad break between us and Zappa. Growing animosity and
disappointment. There was no support at all from his record company and no
distribution from Warner Brothers. Alice Cooper was a joke to Zappa. We had
always been Alice Cookies to him, and the joke wasn't funny anymore.
	We stuck it out till mid-September when we were going up to Toronto to
play one last outdoor festival before returning to Los Angeles either to record
another album or disband. Cindy wanted to go to Toronto with me as a farewell
trip. She was going back to school in the fall, and we'd be separated for
whatever time fate had in store for us.
Cindy, by the way, had been dating a guy named Steven Hollander for the past two
years and was having her share of problems with him. Steven had been in and out
of psychiatric hospitals since he was fourteen years old. The last
hospitalization had been for drug abuse, which translated into real language
means he ate two dozen psylocybin mushrooms for a snack one day and flipped out.
Cindy introduced me to him and, although he wasn't aware I was seeing her, he
was hostile and tense, the kind of person you know is potentially dangerous.
	When he found out I was dating Cindy I began to get threatening phone
calls. All his messages were on the order of, "If you see Cindy one more time
it's death!" Instead of getting hardened to them I got more frightened all the
time. As summer went on stories about Steven kept filtering back to me that
developed a little ball of fear in my beer belly, a ball that grew to the size
of a football by the end of the summer. Steven had burned down a building with
two people in it and they were looking for him everywhere. Steven's dog had
puppies and Steven had mutilated them. Steven took too much LSD and was in the
state mental hospital again where he knifed an aide.
	One night I said to Cindy, "I can't believe you went out with this guy.
What a weirdo!" and she laughed for an hour. I guess Alice Cooper didn't seem
like a much better bargain on the surface.
	Just as Cindy and I were leaving for Toronto she called him from my hotel
and told him she was in love with me and was going off with me to Toronto and
never wanted to see him again. It was all very dramatic and final and we were
asking for trouble. Steven went beserk. He said he'd kill me and Cindy and both
our families and we'd never make it out of Detroit alive.
 	With a Ziggy plane ticket gripped tightly in our hands we rushed out to
the airport with the rest of the group and landed safely in Toronto two hours
later. We checked into a hotel (Cindy and I shared a room with Glen) and forgot
all about Steven, probably because the hotel had a television, a rare and
beautiful luxury in those days.
	The next night at the festival the problem with the chickens started. To
this day I still have observers from the ASPCA turn up at my concerts to shake
fingers at me because of the myth that's been perpetrated about that night. I
want to say right here and now that I've never killed a chicken on stage. Well,
not purposely anyway.
	A lot of the legendary chicken killing has to do with feathers. Feathers
were a very helpful and cheap prop. If I broke open a pillow on stage it looked
big and explosive, something the audience could see all over the theater. Mike
Bruce would spray the feathers all over the audience with a stolen fire
extinguisher, and when the feathers covered the audience they actually become
part of the show. I felt that kind of audience contact was important, and I had
already been using feathers and fire extinguishers for a year when the chicken
scandal started.
	At that Toronto concert somebody handed me a chicken from the audience. I
thought chickens could fly. Really. It had wings, and birds fly. Now I ask you,
how many chickens do you think I came across growing up in trailers in Detroit
and Phoenix? The only chickens I ever saw were on a plate. So when this chicken
was handed to me at the finale of the show, I held it tightly so it wouldn't fly
away. The pillow was broken and feathers were already flying out over the
audience. I held the chicken out to the audience and threw it up in the air,
expecting it to soar off above the stadium and fly away like a dove. Instead it
screamed and squawked and did a nose dive into the audience. Twenty or thirty
hands went up to catch it.
	Some kid grabbed a wing and another person got a leg and suddenly the
kids were pulling it apart, much to the bird's dismay. One wing ripped off and
blood began to spray all over everyone, then another wing and the head went
sailing up in the air. A thousand flashbulbs went off in the audience.
	The next day word spread throughout the rock business that I had killed a
chicken on stage and drank the blood for an encore. Alan Strahl, who had booked
the date, got a dozen calls in New York. Everybody wanted to know if it was
true. Alan called Shep and begged him to say it wasn't so, that I wasn't killing
chickens now, that we weren't only fags but chicken-killing fags on top of it.
	That night after the show I was exhausted. I went back to the room with
Cindy and Glen and the phone rang. Cindy picked it up, screamed like Bette
Davis, and slammed it down. She said Steven was in the lobby. Or something like
that. She was too shocked to remember the exact words, but Steven was here in
Toronto and he said he was coming up to kill us.
	I panicked. The first thing I did was send Glen out to get two bottles of
gin. A half hour later we were good and drunk. We pooled our money, about
fourteen dollars, and decided to buy a gun.
	Glen knew the name of a motorcycle bar, and we locked Cindy in the hotel
room, got the address of the bar from a phone book, and ran down the streets
trying to hitch a ride. Nobody was about to pick us up looking the way we did so
we had to run halfway until we were out of breath and took a taxi the rest of
the way which left us with $12.
	From the outside the place looked more like a brightly lit greasy spoon
diner than a sleazy rnotorcycle bar, but there were plenty of tough bikers there
all right. I could see dozens of them and their girls in the window as the taxi
pulled up. The curb was crowded with a row of choppels, and it looked as good a
bet as any that we'd find a gun there.
	Our entrance caused quite a commotion. The second we walked in a buzz
started that grew to a roar until it was louder than the jukebox. Everybody was
staring at us, huge hulking leather bikers who whistled and cat-called. Somebody
yelled, "Take it off, faggot!"
	We sat down in a corner and I stared at the floor.
	"You can't just sit there, man. You have to ask somebody," Glen
whispered.
	"Ask somebody!" I choked back. "Do you think I'm nuts? We're not going to
get out of here alive! You want me to ask for a gun on top of it?"
	I looked around the room at all the motorcycle jackets and the girls with
teased hairdos left over from the fifties and I shuddered. I figured my chances
for survival were better if I picked a really big guy to talk to. Anybody near
my size would have taken a swat at me immediately.
	I felt a sharp pain in my ribs and across the table from me Glen turned
white. A huge, filthy bearded biker was shoving his knuckles into my layer of
skin and bones.
	"I know you," he said. "You're that weirdo rock group. You're the rock
group of the Hells Angels in San Francisco."
	"I killed a chicken tonight and drank its blood onstage," I offered.
	Well, we were in. I knew we'd get out of there with our hides intact and
maybe a gun, too. Glen suggested asking some of those guys back to the hotel
with us for protection, but I couldn't think of anything more horrible than
having to play a minor celebrity with four smelly bikers. When I asked about a
gun they thought it was a terrifically cool idea. They loved the idea that we
were looking for a gun. "No wonder the Angels like you," one of them said. "You
guys really are weird! You going to hold up a bank or what?"
	I told him I needed it as part of the show, which he readily accepted. He
talked with some buddies for a few minutes and informed us we could buy a
revolver for two hundred dollars. Glen looked at me. "This sucks." he said. "You
and your stupid murder threats. I'm leaving."
	"Murder threats," the biker asked. "Somebody coming down on you guys? If
you need protection we'll be glad to stick the guy's head up his ass."
	I said we wanted the satisfaction of taking care of it ourselves, but
that our financial situation was rather poor. Would it be possible to get a gun
for twelve dollars? There was a lot of discussion among the bikers while Glen
sat there glaring at me. He kept punching me in the arm and every time the
bikers weren't looking I'd slug him back.
	Finally they said we could have a gun for ten dollars, only it didn't
work. I didn't really want to shoot anybody so I said it was all right with me
and they asked us to step to the back of the bar. Glen suddenly got very brave
and said he would handle it and left me sitting out front with all the people
staring and nodding at me like a freak in a sideshow. I smiled back at them for
twenty minutes while Glen was gone.
	Walking back to the hotel Glen told me that before he paid for the gun,
the biker offered to shoot him up with LSD. When Glen declined the biker
insisted that Glen help tie off a vein for him. Glen waited while the guy
diluted the acid in a cold drop of water. Then he tied the biker's biceps with
his belt until the veins bulged and he watched the guy shoot LSD straight into
his veins.
	When we got back to the hotel we found we had bought only half a gun and
got plastered drunk telling Cindy the story. We even fell asleep with the door
unlocked. The next morning we woke to find Steven himself, his pockets filled
with hundreds of Seconal, sleeping on the floor beside us, a loaded gun in his
hand.
	That day while the rest of the group flew to Buffalo for a gig at the
State University Cindy and I drove Steven back to Detroit in his car. He was
unconscious for the rest of the day, and we stuck another Seconal in his mouth
every time he opened it. We only left him alone once, to eat dinner at a diner
just outside of Detroit. When we got back to the car he was asleep on the hood,
stark raving naked. We left him lying there, like a hood ornament, and hitched
the rest of the way to Detroit. It was the last time either of us saw him.