Chapter 12

Success happened almost brutally, with a suddenness that sucked me into it
without a moment of preparation. It was like somebody had grabbed me by the
shoulder and started shaking me, but the shaking wouldn't stop. Maybe there
isn't any kind of preparation, no way to brace yourself. Once it starts
happening everything goes so quickly you're too stunned to stop and think. Not
even the experience of four years on the road was any good with what happened
next. 
	I spent December of 1970 commuting between the RCA Mid-Recording Center
in Chicago, where Ezrin and the group were trying to piece together four songs
for Warner Brothers, and a little trailer on a Detroit street where Cindy was
selling Christmas trees so we could eat. Each night I found her sitting in` a
folding chair wrapped in blankets under a row of bar light bulbs, watching her
trees. We ate beans from a can half warmed over a Sterno stove inside the
unheated trailer. The farm in Pontiac had been quickly defeated by winter. The
pipes burst, the heat went and the toothpaste froze. Eventually the electricity
was turned off because Shep couldn't afford to pay the bill and each of us was
off on our own to scrape up whatever housing we could find. Cindy and I hoped we
could sleep in the trailer but it seemed colder in there than it did in Pontiac
and by the time Christmas Eve came we both had fever and the flu.
	It was the hardest the band ever worked. We did preproduction with Ezrin
for two months, rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day. The recording sessions
were painfully slow in the way that all growing experiences are. Ezrin really
had his hands full. He was completely inexperienced and there was lots of
pressure from Warner Brothers, who had finally agreed to pay for four songs but
nothing more. If they heard anything commercial on a single then maybe they
would spring for an album, and we all wanted a shot at another album badly. We
were so tight by the time we went into the studios we surprised everyone. Still,
we took it slow, recording only seconds of music at a time, literally piecing
together the very best, few notes. He pulled the melody out of the songs and
strengthened them. He invented riffs and bridges and hooks. He ironed the songs
out note by note, giving them coloring, personality. We never played so well or
sounded so good. Glen Buxton actually turned out to be a distinctive and
talented guitarist. With just a little bit of inspiration from Ezrin he
developed a style that would set him apart in his field. Michael Bruce, although
he resented Ezrin's broad creative power, wrote the first of some
million-selling records he was to compose. 
	Ezrin even directed me in my vocals, which opened a whole new world of
interpretation and styling for me. I was no longer just another rock and roll
singer, I was an actor, a song stylist developing a technique. We approached
each cut like it was a role in a play. "Sing this like you're Maggie the Cat in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and you're horny," he'd suggest; or, "Pretend you're
desperate for a drink. Sing like a sponge." 
	The song of ours that fascinated him the most was one he called "Edgy."
Ezrin never understood the lyric when he heard me rehearsing it. He thought I
was singing, "I'm edgy and I don't know what I want." The song was "Eighteen"
and without even realizing what we had created we picked it as our first
release. It took us six weeks to get four tunes ready: "Eighteen," "Is It My
Body?" "Sun Rise," and "Nervous." When Warner Brothers heard the cuts they
refused to believe it was the same group. They even suggested to Shep and Joey
that it was a hoax, that we had found another group to do it. The four cuts
turned them on so much they rush-released "Eighteen" without an album to back it
up. 
	In February the lights, gas and electricity were back on at Pontiac, and
we returned to find the place a little cleaner. Most of our pet animals had
either died or run away and the piles of rotting food we left in the house had
been cleaned up for us by wild animals. 
	Warners suggested that if "Eighteen" had any initial impact at all we
return immediately to the studio and lay down more cuts to fill up an album,
still not sure at the time whether it was worth it to spend the money recording
and pressing. We needed to make "Eighteen" into a hit, and that was Joey and
Shep's work in New York. 
	They had opened up a small office in a Greenwich Village brownstone on
West Thirteenth Street, a brownstone we would eventually buy along with several
others and an apartment building or two. At the time, though, it was a barren
office with five telephones and three desks, and Joey Greenberg sat there, on
the phones, selling the record.
	Everybody wants to know the scoop on the music industry with payola, and
I'll tell you the truth, it doesn't exist. Not anymore. You can't even take a
disc jockey out to lunch these days. In the old days, long before I was around,
I guess it happened all the time. But in the late 1970's you just can't buck the
system of play lists.
	A station plays a record these days because the listening audience wants
to hear it. If they play enough records the public wants to hear, they get a
larger listening audience and more money. Before I release a single now I send
it to a listening laboratory and have it analyzed for public acceptance. Tod
Storz, some guy in Milwaukee, invented the play-list formula, which says to play
the least number of songs the most amount of times to build up an audience. His
father owned a brewery along with a radio station, and Storz collected beer
money from bars every day. He noticed the same records were playing in every
juke box, and that people played the song over and over. Using the same method
Storz turned his station into a huge success. So now almost every radio station
in the country is playing the same thirty or so hit songs. You can't get on the
play list unless you already have a hit and you can't get a hit unless you get
played. So how do you get on the list in the first place? 
	You beg. You promise. You lie. Especially lie. Joey Greenberg stayed on
the phone ten hours a day for the next three years. He got to the Alive offices
in New York City early in the morning and started calling program managers in
stations on the East Coast and worked his way west as it got later in the day.
	"Betty? (Syd? Dick?) This is Joey Greenberg from Alive in New York. How
ya doing? Alive? It's Alice Cooper's management company. No, no chicken killing.
Listen, Betty (Dick, Ira), all that chicken stuff is just publicity, honestly.
Did you hear the kid's new single? It's a smash, a monster. A real killer. Of
course they know how to play. Listen, Bob Richardson chased Alice all over the
midwest to get him to record this one number with him. Honest. Richardson says
he'll put his reputation on the line for 'Eighteen.' Have you heard it? It's an
anthem. Betsy, it's going to be the biggest song of the year. I know it's right
for your station. How? We listen to it when we're in the area. It's Alice's
favorite station in the midwest. I swear! Oh, yeah? But the song doesn't have
makeup on it. You wouldn't know the kid was wearing makeup if you listened to
the song. Mike (George, Peter), they're getting hundreds of requests every day
for it in Virginia. Just call Joe (Peter, Stan) at WHAR. People are adding it to
play lists by the dozens. I know you need this for your station, Ralph
(Jeffrey). It's gonna pull the kids in by the thousands and you're going to be
the last one to go on it. Don't embarrass yourself. It's got smash written all
over it." 
	Sometimes you have to go down to the station in person. Disc jockeys and
station managers are so touchy about payola and bribes they didn't want them
near them, but Shep and Joey kept on knocking on doors and forcing people to
listen to it. Just play it once. With a fistful of Ziggy plane tickets and a lot
of energy Shep scoured the country looking for stations to play "Eighteen." CKLW
went on it first. They broadcast on a powerful 50,000 watts from Windsor,
Canada, and were heavily influenced by the audience in Michigan, where we were
already well known from our stage act. Shep brought "Eighteen" to them and they
believed in it immediately.
	We were loading equipment in downtown Detroit when we heard it played for
the first time. It had been four years since I was washing my car in Phoenix
that I heard myself over the radio. But that was FM in Phoenix. It was AM in
Detroit. That was the boner right there. AM radio means everybody is listening.
We were right up there, with Simon and Garfunkel and the Carpenters. The time
had come for Alice Cooper. We rushed to the nearest phones and deluged the
stations with requests to play it again, but we didn't have to. Thousands of
requests were already coming into the station. By February "Eighteen" was
fifteen on the CKLW play list and hundreds of other stations picked up on it. It
was like Christmas and winning the World Series mixed together.
	We rushed back into the studios with Ezrin, determined to blend any new
music on the rest of the album with a concept for a new stage show. The black
Alice, the next Alice the public came to know, was developed during those
sessions. Before we went back to finish what turned out to be an album I was a
trashy-looking transvestite on stage. I made people feel uncomfortable because I
looked and acted strange, but I hadn't yet made them feel I was 
dangerous. Ezrin especially enjoyed the dangerous element in me and helped
nurture it. He and I both felt it urgent for Alice not only to be strange, but
this time to be scary. 
	Scary to me means crazy. The most frightening thing in the world to me
was insanity. The unpredictability of insanity frightened me. When I was a child
and I first watched the classic Dracula with Bela Lugosi, the most frightening
scene in the film was when they open a ship's hatch and find Renfield, the real
estatebroker, gone mad, eating insects and babbling wild-eyed up into the
camera. The actor's name was Dwight Frey, and Ezrin and I began to develope him
in to a character on "The Ballad of Dwight Frey." There was a lot of Dwight Frey
in the original Alice character. He started out fairly sane and wound up so nuts
it scared you half to death. 
	The lyrics I had originally written for "Frey" was about a man whose wife
blows herself up by swallowing a stick of dynamite: "See my only wife explode
right before my eyes." With Ezrin's encouragement I changed it to "See my lonely
life explode right before my eyes." The song went on about a man in a mental
hospital who had been there for days and hadn't eaten a thing. The plan was for
me to do the entire song in a straightjacket and break out of it in the end as I
screamed, "I gotta get outahere! I gotta get outahere, I gotta get out!" It
actually made the audiences grit their teeth out of tension. If you weren't
crazy ahead of time, Frey could drive you crazy. Very few people experienced the
feeling of having a straightjacket on. Everybody should strap themselves into
one once in their life. Anyway, we called the completed album Love It To Death
and it-shot right up the record charts and hung in there for months. 
	As soon as we moved to the farm in Pontiac, Charlie Carnal and Mike Allen
began to build a death machine. Our first idea was called the "Cage of Fire,"
which looked like I was being burned to death, and I very nearly was. The cage
was made from a bent shower curtain rod. On it we hung forty or fifty tightly
rolled, long plastic bags, like you get at the cleaners. At the finale of our
show we rolled the cage on stage and I got inside. The rest of the group
surrounded me with matches like pixies at a ritual and lit the plastic from the
bottom. As the long plastic burned all around me it coagulated into fiery balls
and fell to the ground with an incredibly loud whssst sound. When it all got
going I looked like I was standing in the middle of a fiery rainstorm,
imprisoned in burning bars. It was a great effect for $15, and we billed it as
"Can Alice Cooper Escape the CAGE OF FIRE?!!" We used the cage only a few times,
fortunately. Club owners and promoters didn't like it because of the fire laws,
and the few times we did sneak it on stage we wound up paying for damages we did
to the stage floor and it nearly roasted me like Bavarian shish kabob.
	The Cage of Fire was gripping enough, but the problem was, I didn't
actually die. The next plateau was an electric chair. The half-finished hot seat
was actually standing in the corner of the room when Ezrin first came to visit
us, but it wasn't ready for use until the time "Eighteen" broke. The chair was
cruel in its simplicity. A rough, over sized chair with thick leather straps and
ominous wiring. My head was fitted into a metal skull plate and my arms clamped
down to electrodes. When they threw the switch the whole thing lit up. I
screamed in agony, the imaginary current surging through me, clamping my jaws
shut tight, a seizure arching my body stiff, my eyeballs rolling backwards into
my skull as I fried and smoked. The kids adored it. We got a terrific response
to the electric chair. I didn't know if they were just happy to see me get it or
if they really understood the implications of what they were seeing.
	In April of 1971 "Eighteen" broke nationally. It only reached number
eighteen on the national record charts, but it was a healthy hit, selling long
and hard, over 350,000 copies. It captured the imagination of every young,
confused kid in the country - "I'm eighteen and I don't know what I want." There
were stations who wouldn't play it because they thought it had a drug reference,
"The lines form on my face and hands, the lines form from the ups and downs." If
they had spent one week with me on the road they would have known what those
lyrics were really about.
	The kids did, obviously. Three months after Cindy had sold Christmas
trees and we had shivered under piles of blankets together, I was making $15,000
a night.
	We were booked into Town Hall in New York on May 3 and sold out the
place. In June Bill Graham put us into the Fillmore East just two weeks before
it closed for good. Within a month the national press picked up on me. Shep
called Ann Arbor, where Ashley Pandel was still managing a club, and asked him
to help handle publicity at Alive. In early July, almost twenty months after we
had moved into the farm in Pontiac, each member of the band received his first
check of record royalties on "Eighteen" of $8,000 apiece. I went to a bank in
downtown Detroit, got a fifty-dollar bill and wrapped it around a rock. Cindy
and I went to the side of the farm house and threw the rock through Neal Smith's
closed window. When the glass stopped falling he put his head through the hole
and said, "What the hell is that for?" "That's the money you loaned me for a
mattress," I said.
	He threw the rock back at me and yelled, ' There's interest on that, you
bastard!"
	We spent three months on the road working the single. The jobs came
floating into us and if by magic. "Eighteen" seemed to open every door in the
country. At $15,000 a night we suddenly had so much money we didn't know what to
do with it. Ziggy stepped into the picture and retrieved some of the $50,000 he
laid out in airplane tickets. We visited Franklin Avenue in Detroit in a
limousine and had the car stop in front of every hotel and motel we had stiffed.
All of us would go inside and the managers would groan at the sight of us. Then
we'd produce a check for our bill that literally sent many of them howling into
the street.
	From where I sat everything was a blur. After two or three headlining
dates it no longer mattered to me where we were playing or when. I just followed
my nose into the back of a limousine and got onto the plane with everybody else.
In June Shep and I went to London for a press conference so the European press
would get an inkling of what was happening in the United States. I spent only
two nights in London before jetting back to the U.S. to continue the
merry-go-round of touring.
	The station wagons turned into limousines, which turned into jet planes,
which turned into hotel rooms. One day instead of returning to Pontiac we flew
to New York. Two hours later a long line of black cars drove us through the
gates to our new home: a 42-room mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Ann Margret
had just vacated the estate the month before, and I spent the first week
searching every room, hoping she had left underwear behind so I could wear it on
stage. What a prize! Discarded Ann Margret underwear! There was a ballroom the
size of a football field and enough suites and sitting rooms and kitchens not to
have to see the other guys in the band for days at a time if we didn't want to.
That's as if we had days at a time to try.
	The road separated me from Cindy for months. We started to play at least
fifteen dates a month for the next two years, and with traveling time to and
from gigs, I was away from Cindy a lot. I missed Cindy, but at the time I didn't
really mind being away from her, in a strange way. I was used to a life-style,
of being on the road in bachelor company. If Cindy was the type of girl who
needed to be with me constantly, I don't think we would have liked each other
for as long as we did. I was wrong in the end. Eventually my life-style and the
road led to our break-up. 
	Warner Brothers sponsored our first press party at the Ambassador Hotel
in Los Angeles that July. The Ambassador didn't want to host a party for a rock
group. They had allowed a rock group to hold a party there the year before and
the Grand Ballroom had been wrecked. Shep told them they had misunderstood.
Alice Cooper was a debutante, not a singer. He wanted to arrange for a "coming
out" party for Alice, and the Ambassador was delighted to help. I'm sure the
guests, who received engraved invitations to Alice Cooper's coming-out party,
were just as confused as the hotel when they saw it.
	The party was fashioned after the movie Hellzapoppin. People still talk
about that party. Nobody expected it. It was a revival of the old-time Hollywood
shindig, the good old LA publicity stunt. People like that because it makes them
laugh. Guests were greeted at the door by two men in gorilla suits. The
Cockettes, a troupe of drag queens from San Francisco, wore full beards streaked
with glitter. They were the cigarette girls and they sold cigars, cigarettes and
vaseline. We hired the two worst bands in LA to play music and a
three-hundred-pound black woman named TV Momma sang "I Love You Truly," topless,
with her breasts hanging to her waist. But the hired people were no stranger
than the guests. Every greak and weirdo in LA gate-crashed. I saw people I
hadn't seen since the Hullabaloo Club. Sergeant Garcia even showed up. When I
was introduced to Jack Nicholson he shook my hand gingerly, but he gave me a big
smile. "I don't exactly understand what's going on here, but it's all right with
me." One of the gorillas carried Rod McKuen into the room and chased Richard
Chamberlain through the kitchen doors, which he was very peeved about because he
said it made him look foolish, which it did. Ahmet Ertegun, the president of
rival Atlantic Records, even showed up because he couldn't believe the rumors he
heard about the group were true.
	Rumors quickly turned into legends, and our next was the snake. My first
snake was named Kachina. She was a nine-foot-long boa constrictor, not very big
as far as they go, and she was the sweetest snake you'd ever want to meet. A
girl gave her to me as a gift in a hotel in Florida. Using Kachina in the act
didn't seem to be a more important idea than any of the other props at first.
One night I brought her up on stage with the feathers and fire extinguishers.
When I took her out of her box and held her up in the spotlight I thought a bomb
had gone off in the audience. There was an explosion of sound. Kachina whipped
her body around, clutching to me, reeling from the vibrations of the noise. The
crowd surged forward, hypnotized. She was so powerful up there! 
	I never understood what the big fuss was about snakes. I always liked
them. They were common in Arizona, and I grew up thinking of them as nice, clean
pets - you know, they look slimy but they're so clean you could eat off their
backs. Kachina liked being up there on stage with me. She was very docile and
friendly. She never once even gave me a little squeeze. She did however pop
herself into my open mouth one night, right in the middle of a note. Instead of
spitting her out I just closed my lips and sucked on her head. I could feel her
little tongue darting across the roof of my mouth, French kissing me back. It
was a friendly, warming 
experience. 	
	Kachina ran away one day in Nashville. She disappeared in a hotel. We
missed two planes looking for her but she had vanished in thin air. Two weeks
later the manager got a complaint about a stuffed drain in the bathtub. The
plumber found poor Kachina, who had crawled down the drain. It was a wonder she
didn't come back up when somebody was taking a bath.
	After I started using the snake and electric chair there was no stopping
us. I never turned down an interview. The press were playing sixty-nine with me
and we ate each other up. I faced dozens of reporters a day. They all started
off being very cocky and hostile. There was a distinct air of being out to get
me back then, and I thrived on that approach. I'd spend the entire interview
trying to win them over, show them that I wasn't so bad in real life. When they
left they were really confused. Most of them liked me, Vince Furnier, but hated
the Alice character. A few didn't like either one of us at all.
	They called me degenerate, not questioning that society was degenerate
and I was a reflection. They said I was money hungry, and I was, I had starved.
In the July 1971 issue of Life magazine, Albert Goldman said I was a "shrewd
operator," "a frightening embarrassment," and "You react less to the horror of
the image than to the sickness of the act." 
	Wow.