Chapter Eleven

It was heaven. It was bliss. It was only $250 a month. It was a white,
five-bedroom farmhouse in the lush green countryside of Michigan, and it was all
ours. Not even the state penal camp, which was across the road, or the roadie
who OD'd the day we moved in there could dampen our enthusiasm for our new home.
We had been on the road for eight months by the time we settled at the Pontiac
farm that August, and it was a miracle we were still together at all.
	The day before New Year's Eve in Phoenix, visions of suicide dancing in
my head, we got a job. New Year's Eve is the hardest time to book a band because
every two-bit club in the country wants live entertainment for New Year's. If a
club owner waits as long as Thanksgiving to book he'll be stuck with whatever's
left over. If you wait long enough, let's say until Christmas, you might even
have to hire the Alice Cooper group. Good old Ziggy came up with $2,700 worth of
plane tickets, and on New Year's Eve we flew off to Toronto for a job at a place
called the Rock Pile.
	Once we were back on the road we managed to keep rolling, first to
Detroit, where I was able to pick up Cindy. We spent January in a series of
flophouses, February in Canada, shivering under mounds of blankets and catching
a million colds, and March in the back seat of a '65 Chevy station wagon
zigzagging around the countyside, playing $500 jobs. In Cincinnati, at a club
called the Black Dome, we heard about a vacant fraternity house for rent from
the club's manager, Ronnie Volz. He introduced us to one of the fraternity
brothers, Buff, who rented us the top two floors of the building, including six
bedrooms and two dormitory-style bathrooms for $150 a month.
	We spent what seemed like all summer, painting, building and patching,
clearing out trash and old books. It wasn't the same as the John Phillip Law
house in LA but at least we had a permanent home. One night we were writing
music in the attic when a kid in cutoff Bermuda shorts and a Phi-Ep T-shirt came
stumbling into the room with two suitcases. He was so upset to find us living
there, in the redecorated house, we had to give him a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon and
a heat massage to calm him down.
	Like Jack Crow, Buff had no authority to rent us the house. But unlike
Jack, who kept the money for himself, Buff had been saving the rent for the
brotherhood. That didn't mean they were happy to have us there. As more of them
returned to the house from vacations we handed out more warm Pabst. 	
	At first the fraternity guys, God-fearing Republicans all of them, tried
to live amiably with us; they stayed downstairs and we hid in the attic. They
even admired our capacity for liquor, and they developed an air of determined
acceptance; they were going to prove they were too tough for us to freak them
out. It wasn't as easy for the jocks. Guys that depended on superficial proof of
masculinity like athletes were terrified of us. The jocks didn't think we were
gay - we had too many girls with us for that - but they were offended by our
makeup and clothes. It made them nervous. It was almost as if they were jealous,
and I didn't blame them. I ask you, what normal boy growing up in the sixties
didn't want to dress up a little and feel guilty about it. We moved out of there
quickly before one of them took a swing at us or we got raped in the shower. We
got a three-week gig at a small hotel in Ann Arbor for $500 a week plus room and
board. When we arrived at the door we found that Ashley Pandel managed the bar. 
	Ashley knew the editor of the local underground paper, the Ann Arbor
Argonaut, and although we didn't realize he was initiating a service that he
would perform several thousand times in the years to come, he set up an
interview. It was the first and only time I participated in an orgy, and the
only time I fucked a member of the press. There couldn't have been a less erotic
atmosphere than being locked in a stuffy hotel room with Neal, Glen and a fat,
puffy girl who asked us the most inane questions: "Why do you dress like that?"
"Is your name really Alice?" We knew right off that we weren't going to be
bothered with this idiocy, so we said, "Because we fucking please to, that's
why." We were incredibly rude. She wrote it 
all down and asked her next question, and Glen said, "You cunt, I'd like to fuck
you up the ass." And she wrote that down, too. Finally, we started doing all the
filthy things we were talking about. We each got millions of crabs. We should
have known better. We should have seen them running down her legs. And she
printed the interview, verbatim, in her newspaper. To this day that's the
funniest interview I ever did.
	We also got a new roadie, Zipper, who had a strange expression on his
face all the time, as if he had just thrown up. As a matter of fact, he often
did throw up. It was the heroin that made him sick. We never even knew he had a
habit until we found him dead from an OD the first day we moved into the farm in
Pontiac. Cindy found him in the downstairs bathroom slumped over the edge of the
bathtub like he was praying.
	In April we played the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada to an
audience of 300,000 people. We did our usual act, but this time I lugged three
big watermelons on stage and went after them with a hammer. Someone in the
audience tossed a crutch on stage and I put the hammer aside and started hacking
at the watermelons with the crutch. They burst open with a dull thud and I
chopped and mashed at them until there were hundreds of mushy pieces all over
the stage. Then I tossed it out all over the audience. I had already tossed
watermelons and feathers and beer at audiences dozens of times and they all did
the same thing, they moved back. But this group of dummies just sat there,
wiping the pits out of their eyes with their hands. I unleashed two pillows of
goose feathers on them, too, and soon the people in the first five rows were
tarred and feathered with watermelon. Lots of people were shouting for me to
stop, and the more they yelled the crazier I got onstage. 
	You wouldn't believe the headlines the next day: ALICE COOPER DRENCHES
CRIPPLES WITH WATERMELONS - HELPLESS AUDIENCE ABUSED BY ROCK STAR. I felt awful!
Talk about embarrassing experiences! So help me, when I got handed that crutch I
had no idea the front five rows were all paraplegics and amputees. But here's
how fucked-up everybody is after the chicken killing, the promoters turned their
backs on us, but with the added press of abusing cripples so many people were
curious about us that we started getting bookings. Not many, of course, but at
least one $1,500 gig a month, which was enough to feed us and keep us on the
road. Coincidentally, our popularity centered around Detroit where the
hard-assed Michigan kids were into driving, high energy rock and roll, and Shep
gave us the go-ahead to find us a house. That's how we wound up in Pontiac, with
one job a month and plenty of time to spend on the farm rehearsing. 
	The house was a gangling amoeba of rooms and anterooms and closets inside
of closets. There was a screened-in porch the width of the house and a staircase
with a banister made from a white picket fence. And there were two - count 'em -
two bathrooms with showers that trickled drops of water on you when you were
lucky enough to find them unoccupied or the well hadn't run dry. 
	Neal, who always had an emergency cash fund, begrudgingly loaned me fifty
dollars so Cindy and I could go to the Salvation Army and buy a bedroom ensemble
of a stained mattress and three yellow sheets. Glen moved into the living room
and painted the windows black. Within a month there was a stack of dirty dishes
and rotting food in the kitchen, which remained that way for eighteen months. In
the dining room where we ate and socialized around an old oak table we kept a
pet monkey in a cage. The poor little monkey was constantly horny and whenever
it got loose it went after Neal's sister, Cindy Smith, with a hot vengeance,
latched onto her hair, bit her head and humped the hell out of her back. I'd
hear screams for help from the dining room, but all we did was yell back at her,
"Cindy's got a monkey on her backl" as she rushed around begging us to help her.
Just to make the household complete, we kept a pet raccoon named Rocky, who we
unanimously disliked, who unanimously disliked us. He'd prove it, too, by
bringing his shit into the house to throw at us.
	Shep and Joey had taken a leave of absence from the group. They were off
hustling ideas to make some cash to pay off our tremendous debt and keep us on
the road. In the interim we were being supervised by Leo Fenn, who was Shep and
Joey's temporary partner. We felt abandoned, but we couldn't blame them for
wanting to be involved with other projects that promised to be more profitable
than the band. Frank Zappa seemed to feel the same way about us. Our
relationship with him had completely disintegrated. On top of that he sold his
record company to its distributor, Warner Brothers, and they weren't thrilled
about having us on their label at the time. They said there was a slim
possibility they would back us in recording a single if we could find the right
producer.
	We had been looking for the right producer all along. It was clear that a
hit song was the only way we'd ever make it. David Briggs, who did Easy Action,
was an excellent producer for a group who knew what they were doing in the first
place. We needed a producer who would teach us how to make an album, someone who
was talented and perceptive enough to make our sound commercial. It was no easy
job to be sure. The stage show, we agreed, could stay as crazy as we wanted, as
long as the music sold. 
	In late September of 1970 Shep was wandering through the streets of
Yorkville in Toronto when he came across the Nimbus 9 Studios, Jack Richardson's
production house and a well-known Canadian hit factory. Richardson had produced
several smash albums, including a national number one single by the Guess Who,
"American Woman." Shep walked in and asked for an audience with Richardson, but
it was impossible to see him. In order to reach Richardson you had to work your
way up a long line of assistants, foils and flunkies. Shep told Leo Fenn to get
in touch with Richardson, no matter what. It wasn't that Richardson was the only
producer in the world, he was the last producer who hadn't turned us down. So
Leo Fenn started on the obstacle course to get to Richardson, beginning with his
lowliest assistant, a nineteen-year-old Jewish hippie named Bob Ezrin. Ezrin was
the opposite of everything we were. He wore blue work shirts and love beads and
had shoulder-length brown hair. Leo Fenn sent Ezrin a copy of Easy Action and he
hated it. This bright, sensitive boy with a classical music background played
twenty seconds of each cut and told Richardson we were rank amateurs and the
albums wasn't worth the ten cents of vinyl it was cut on. Leo Fenn had heard all
that before. He begged Ezrin to see us in person. It was the key - supposedly -
to 
understanding our music. After literally hundreds of phone calls Leo wore Ezrin
down, and he finally agreed to at least meet the members of the group at the
Skyline Hotel, where we stayed the night after I dumped watermelon on the
cripples. 
	He walked into our hotel room and I saw panic on his face, as if he had
just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots. Not only was it
bad enough we were lousy musicians, but we were gay too! I was wearing skintight
pants with seductive splits up the side and when I saw Ezrin look away in
disgust I goaded him by asking him if he liked the belt I was wearing, a
three-year-old painted leather strap, curled over from rain and perspiration. I
thought he would vomit. Talk about bad first impressions, wait until he told
Richardson what we were really like!
	It really didn't matter to Leo Fenn what Ezrin told Richardson. Leo
wouldn't let him alone. He just wouldn't take no for an answer. Not for a
minute. The phone calls continued to come into Nimbus 9 by the hundreds.
	Ezrin: "No. Jack Richardson is not interested. No body is interested. I
told you yesterday, Leo. Please stop calling here. It's no dice."
	Leo: "But just come and see them in person. See them do one live show.
That's all I'm asking you. One live show. What can you tell from meeting them in
a hotel room? If you see them live you'll understand what they re getting at." 
	Ezrin: "I heard all about the chickens and watermelon and it's just not
good enough. Chickens and watermelon can't be put on an album. They just don't
have the sound or talent."
	It went on that way right through the rest of the summer and fall of
1970. We played twelve dates in the midwest in September, which included the
last of the outdoor festivals, before the season was over. In October Shep
booked us into Max's Kansas City in New York to see if there was a producer or a
record company - anybody at all - who was interested in us. 	Max's Kansas City
is gone now. And it's good and it's a shame. In its last few years it turned
into a depressing glitter groupie hangout, filled with everybody who had the
carfare from Brooklyn. But years ago, in the late sixties and early seventies,
it was a haven of decadence, of the unreal, theater of the absurd becoming life
of the absurd. At the time the infamous back room at Max's was restricted:
freaks only. Mickey Ruskin, who owned Max's, didn't care if the place was empty.
If you weren't hip enough to belong there, you had to sit up front with the
tourists. It was the Algonquin of its day. 
	This was a topsy-turvy world where drag queens and leather boys were held
in esteem. There was no other single place that you could be accepted, even
lauded, for being different. To the people in Max's being different was a
creative effort all in itself. Bob Ezrin, who was trying to give Leo Fenn the
slip every day, was in New York on business the night we played Max's. He
dropped in there on his way home from Hair (which Ezrin thought was progressive
theater at the time). I looked very rodentlike that night. My hair was unwashed
and stringy. I wore enormous high heels and thick black mascara. I carried on no
end. I shredded newspaper and spit at the audience and rubbed my crotch and
smelled my hands. Fifteen minutes into the set a policeman rushed into the club.
That was unheard of at Max's. The police coming in! With all the strange things
that had happened there nobody ever got the police there! He had received a
complaint about the noise and had come by, politely enough, to ask us to turn
down the volume. When he got there and saw me sashaying around the stage
spitting at people and rubbing myself he thought the show ought to be stopped.
The cop pushed his way down the middle of the room, asking people to stand up so
he could get by. Leo followed him shouting, "You have no right to stop this
show! This show is not obscene! Stay off the stage!" 
	Nothing more perfect could have happened. Not even if the cop had been
hired. Maybe he was. 
	Ezrin was vibrating in the audience. He didn't know what he felt. He saw
us as a walking identity crisis. All the sexual ambiguity that was beginning to
peak in the seventies, all the confusion and pain. We were powerful and we were
weak. He was frightened and attracted. It was dangerous, and it was
exhilarating. We were all the mixed-up, terrible things that this bright,
middle-class boy was feeling himself, what millions of teenagers were feeling, a
confusion that had been summed up in a million eloquent words before but never
presented in one frightening performance.
	Jack Richardson couldn't believe Ezrin's turnabout after he saw the show.
There was no way after all the negative feedback Ezrin had been giving him that
Richardson would touch the project. But if Ezrin was suddenly so excited about
us Richardson would let him produce us.
	With Richardson's blessings Ezrin moved into the farm in Pontiac with us.
He arrived at three one afternoon, walked through the kitchen where empty
tuna-noodle casserole dishes had sprouted mold and through the dining room with
the monkey that had turned a slimy green color. He wandered all through the
house and found it unbelievable that we were still fast asleep in mid-afternoon.
But as he wandered from room to room, watching us in drunken slumber, he was
filled with joy. All of us were sleeping with girls!