Chaper Thirteen The "Killer" show was written in a bar at O'Hare Airport during a three-hour layover in August of 1971. "Killer" totally captured the imagination of the public and embodied everything we had been working toward up until then. It was a moralistic, dramatic statement, a masterpiece of shock and revenge, the first dramatized rock and roll show with a story concept. We conceived "Killer" as starting before we even arrived at the auditorium. A newspaper with the headline KlLLER and my picture on the front page was placed on every seat. Only this was a picture of a new Alice, a blacker, darker Alice. Not Alice playing Dwight Frey, but Alice who was a murderer himself. There were no longer little Twiggy eyelashes running down my cheeks. Now there were two dark sockets where deranged little eyeballs gleamed. My new costume was torn black tights and a leather harness that laced up the front like a vest and strapped around my legs and body with chains. I even stopped washing my hair, and it got dirty and stringy on the road. I looked like your most goulish nightmare. The epitome of the crazed boogeyman who comes to eat you up in the night. The problem was, who would I murder? A chicken again? No. Dennis suggested I kill my mother. Not bad. I was sure the kids would identify with it, but so would my own mother, and I didn't want to lay that on her. What was worse than killing your own mother? An old lady in a wheelchair? Do it by stuffing the spokes up her ass? Killing somebody defenseless? How about a cute, cuddly, helpless little baby? With an ax. Why not? What a laugh! A baby killer! We could splatter the whole stage with little arms and legs! And the song that came with it was so perfect, so off the wall.... Little Betty ate a pound of aspirin She got them from the shelf upon the wall Betty's Mommy wasn't there to save her She didn't even hear her baby call Dead babies can take care of themselves Dead babies can't take things off the shelves Well, we didn't want you anyway People suggested we use real infant cadavers during the show, but I thought that was going too far. Naturally word got around that I would be using real baby parts and it caused us a huge headache. There was no way to convince people it wasn't true until they saw the show. It's a good example of the way things get out of hand all the time. That's what people wanted to believe and that's what it became in their heads. Actually, I used rubber dolls filled with stage blood. In all reality I hated dolls when I was a kid. I didn't hate babies, even though babies are ugly little things. (Every baby I've ever seen looks like Winston Churchill.) I don't know why I hated dolls so much. Ask my psychiatrist. I lurched around the stage hacking at the dolls with a saber. It thrilled the audience, released their tensions in some strange way. I tossed the bloody pieces into the audiences and the kids took them home as souvenirs. But they were all in on the joke; it was only dolls. It was a black sense of humor, a sense of humor that people slowly got familiar with through Monty Python and M*A*S*H. The parents thought it was serious, but the kids just laughed. "Killer" was a morality play, and now Alice had to be punished, put to death. The band left their instruments and pretended to beat the hell out of me. They kicked and punched at me, tied my hand behind my back and pulled a black executioner's hood over my head. At one point we did a whole West Side Story knife fight parody, using breakaway bottles and chairs. I could always feel the tension rise in the auditorium as the gallows were rolled out on the stage. Warner Brothers was kind enough to have their film prop department build a realistic gallows for me, some fifteen feet of ominous rough lumber bolted together. A coarse manila rope and hangman's noose swung back and forth in the spotlight. The band dragged me up the back steps as I kicked and cried out, trying to escape, but they held me tight, punching me in my sides and groin, doubling me over with pain. As Glen Buxton put the noose around my neck a respectful silence fell over the auditorium. At the last moment before the trap door opened, Glen pulled the mask off my face, giving me one last glimpse of life, one last look at the spotlights and the crowds before I dropped four feet, my head snapping to the side as my neck broke, blood splurting from my mouth. I was hung, actually, from a piano wire that clipped securely onto my leather harness and it took me a month to learn the effect from a professional stunt man. There was only one accident, when the clasp slipped through the harness and I actually fell five feet, knocking myself out cold when my chin slammed into the trap door. They woke me up underneath the stage and I went right back up and finished the show. The Killer album included the hit single "Under My Wheels," about a boy who fantasizes running over his girl friend in his car. "Desperado," one of my favorite songs and a tribute to Jim Morrison, was immediately examined and dissected by rock critics, who thought it was a statement about Alice as a gunslinger. The title cut, however, actually summed up my position in life: What did I do to deserve such a fate? I didn't really want to get involved in this thing Someone handed me this gun And I gave it everything I came into this life, I looked all around I saw just what I liked, I took what I found Nothing came easy, nothing came free Nothing came at all, until they came after me. We had Kachina photographed for the album cover by Paris Vogue photographer Peter Turner, and inside the cover there was a foldout calendar, with me as the calendar girl, hanging from the noose with blood pouring from my mouth. Needless to say, I was no hero with mothers and fathers. As the album rose up the charts and we toured the country there was an outcry of alarm from teachers and psychologists, the same teachers and psychologists that put King Lear or Macbeth on the required reading list in schools. Shakespeare would have been my biggest fan. But they said this was by far the most disgusting display anyone had ever imagined would be presented in the name of entertainment. And the fact that it was successful, that the children responded to it, even worshiped it, drove adults crazy. The rumors the kids started about me were worse than anything I was actually doing. In Atlanta I was almost arrested as soon as I got into town because the story was circulating that I bludgeoned kittens to death with a hammer. When the police questioned me in my hotel room before the show I said, "It's not a bad idea, but I didn't think of it." They also accused me of filling large balloons with earthworms and intestines and bursting them with a BB gun as they floated over the audience. In the beginning of November 1971, not even eight months after the initial release of "Eighteen," we left for our first tour of Europe. On the way out to the airport we had the limousines stop at record stores to make sure Killer was in the racks. HELLO ALICE! WELCOME TO BRITAIN! That's what the sign said at the airport, but you could have fooled me. We tooled into Heathrow and did a fifteen-minute press conference in front of a hundred and fifty people. Then I stayed in a hotel for two days doing interviews before we took off for Copenhagen, Bremen, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris in what felt like four hours. Then back to London for two live shows and the taping of "Old Gray Whistle Test" and "Top of the Pops" for the BBC. As far as getting to see Europe, I never got to see more than the back seat of a limousine, or two old prostitutes I had sent to my room at the Hotel des Croyons. (I didn't have old ones sent, that's the way they came.) I don't even remember driving past the Eiffel Tower, and all I remember about Germany is the inside of a pub where I passed out and slammed the back of my head on the bar. Or was that Zurich? Anyway, I didn't see Big Ben in daylight. Or Buckingham Palace. I spent the days doing interviews and photo sessions. We never turned down a journalist in those days. We figured that if a reporter wanted to speak to me, no matter how unimportant they were or how small their circulation, I could use the press. In Paris we originally wanted to play the Olympia Theater, where all the top musical acts gigged, but our reputation for chickens offended the sensibilities of the management, and they wouldn't even let Shep past the front door to talk about it. We wound up getting booked into the Pierre Cardin Theater, a chic little auditorium of plush red velvet used for designer fashion shows. Pierre Cardin was delighted to have us there, although I'm sure he didn't have the faintest notion what we were going to do. We were billed all over Europe as "Transvestite Rock." The Parisian kids were pissed as hell that we booked into such a tiny place. On top of a seat shortage a lot of tickets had been given away to celebrities who were curious to see me, including Omar Sharif, Bianca Jagger and Alain Delon. At least a thousand kids who couldn't get in were milling around in front of the theater in angry little groups when we arrived in a line of limousines. They booed us and yelled "Bourgeoisie" at us, making it all look very political. They waited outside during the show, and when feathers began to drift into the lobby during the finale they couldn't bear it any longer. They got so excited that a group of them drove Omar Sharif's white Rolls Royce right through the plate glass windows of the theater and into the lobby. They had to lock me in a closet until the fighting stopped. Everybody had to leave through the fire exits. Cardin hosted a party for us afterwards, much of which is a drunken blot in my memory except for Glen Buxton smashing Bianca Jagger in the face with a pastry and a free-for-all food fight erupting. Omar Sharif was sitting next to me, and as his hair got splattered with pate, he looked at me very confused and said, "Why do you do such thing?" By the time we did the last European show at the Rainbow Theater in London, the press was uniformly outraged and in love with us. The British in particular loved us because they had a wonderfully dry sense of humor and we were naughty enough to make them want to chuckle. Peck's Bad Boys. There were still a few hard hats to convince in the crowd, however. A fifty-six-year-old labor MP, Leo Abse, moved to the secretary of the foreign office to have me banned from Britain. On the floor of Parliament he said I was "peddling culture of the concentration camp and attempting to teach our children to find a destiny in hate, not love." The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals even investigated me to find out "whether unnecessary suffering is caused to poultry by terrifying them." They tried to ban my songs from the radio, too, because the National Viewers and Listeners Association said I had a "known propensity to involve young people in hysteria and violence." Two short years later the BBC asked me to do an anti-drug commercial for them - that's how much of a clean-cut hero I had become. I sent them a tape in which I said, "If I ever catch any of you kids using drugs I'll personally come to your homes and slit your puppies' throats." That winter I played fifteen to twenty dates a month, grossing nearly half a million dollars each month. The figures were unprecedented: Pittsburgh Civic, $91,000; Toronto, $125,000; Ottawa Civic, $61,000. My fan mail reached several thousand letters a week, completely out of proportion to the amount of mail a recording star receives. When the teen magazines picked up on me there was an explosion. They had tremendous selling power, and I, in turn, sold their magazines, reviving the circulation of two of them in the process. I was the new hero of the young. The leader of rebellion. The all-American boy who made good. One fifteen-year-old boy sent me a small plastic envelope filled with white fluid. He said I was the first man to turn him on sexually. He kept the picture of me hanging from a noose tacked to the inside of his bathrom door. He looked at it while he jerked off in the mornings before leaving for school, and he was writing me this letter in his EngIish class and enclosing a sample of his friendship. This attractive quality that made little girls have the hots for me and little boys no longer able to contain their homosexual feeling, drove adults crazy with fear. Some people were sincerely concerned - those that kept their heads about it - about why the kids were rallying around an ambiguous sexual figure. Was this the sum total of what they were learning? In a way, yes. I wasn't as calculated as everyone thought I was. I did many things on whim because I thought it felt right. I took the snake out on stage not because I thought it would get press, but because I was drawn to entertaining with the snake. I wore makeup because I liked the way it looked. I had a girl's name and dressed funny because instinctively I recognized this is a bisexual world. I was everyone's secret fantasy. I said to the kids, "I'm a boy, I'm a man. I don't know what I want." I released their sexuality, and I was a catharsis for their violence. I did it for them. After I went to see A Clockwork Orange the last thing I wanted to do was see or be in a fight. (Even though boxing has nothing to do with my life. Now what does that mean?) Most important, I was honest with the kids. A very important thing about being honest with kids: if I manufactured anything I did the kids would feel it. Kids are very sensitive about honesty and what's natural. The most base, honest, common thing I could do on stage was to touch myself. I touched my athletic cup a lot on stage in those days, much like Joe Namath does in every football game. The kids related immediately to that. All of those kids out there touched themselves every day. I guarantee you that every single boy and girl in my audiences masturbated the very day they saw me. And everything they saw me doing on stage rang true, rang honest. I believed in absurdity. I didn't make any sense then and I don't plan to in the future. The best things in life don't make any sense. Sex is like that. When was the last time you had sex and really got off? Did it make any sense to you? At the time, when you had an orgasm, did it make any sense the way you felt? That's what I am. I felt good to people, but I was unexplainable. I was an enzyme. I digested the public and returned themselves back to them in another form. The journalists that understood this were able to accept it at face value and judge me on those artistic terms. There were some who could never do that, though, and I found myself the subject of gigantic personal criticism, some that really hurt me. I've made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine three times in my career, and we've finally come to pleasant terms, but back in 1971 to 1972 that was far from the case. At the time they suffered from some sort of inverse snobbism. They wanted every rock star to be some sort of transformed prince to the young. They wanted me to be political. Christ, it was a great shame to them that I was totally apolitical. They were still steeped in that 1968 philosophy and they just couldn't understand the fact that I was a happy kid who wasn't cool and didn't want to be. I handled my newfound fame no better than the kid next door who wins a lottery. But I was not a mean person. I was never nasty. I never hurt anybody. I was never egotistical. I shared my success with everybody around me, wined and dined and treated the press royally all around the world, and still some of them were rotten to me. So what if I never voted in a presidential campaign or read Castaneda? Well, that wasn't good enough for Rolling Stone. In March of 1972 they ran a major story on me, "Gold Diggers of 1984 - wanna see my snake, little girl?" We were characterized as a group of stupid, wisecracking, spoiled, sex-obsessed kids, and maybe that was one side of us. I was in the midst of an alcoholic stupor at the time, trying to live up to a lot of expectations people had about me. In the middle of the article they inserted interviews they had done with my parents - most of it over the phone - and to anybody reading the article it sounded like they were along with me while I was cursing and getting drunk and exposing myself. The neighborhood mailman in Phoenix was also in my father's church, and when he spotted the story in a copy of Rolling Stone he was delivering, all hell broke loose in the church. There was talk of removing my father from the ministry. The whole community was outraged, and my parents took a big chunk of anger that people were really directing at me. I felt very bad for them because I knew how difflcult it was to put up with a hostile community. That incident and similar ones have hardened my parents to the outside. It made two very warm people retreat for protection so as not to get hurt any further. It's only recently, since people found out I was a clown and not a devil, that they can tell people who I am with pride. I wrote "No More Mr. Nice Guy" a week after the Rolling Stone story ran, and it gave me a rush of satisfaction to be taking a swipe back at the press for a change. We had known for several months that the theme of our next album would be School's Out. I heard the phrase used in a Bowery Boys movie in the same way someone would say, "Get smart, Satch." Now was the time for Alice to change again, this time away from the ghoulish character. This Alice was crazy, too, like all Alices, but he was a zany, lovable school kid. A wise-ass. A screwball. In short, me. The album jacket, designed by Pacific Eye and Ear, was a school desk with the band's initials carved on it.It opened like a school desk, too, and was filled with exam papers and report cards of a student, one Dwight Frey. Each album was encased in a plastic sleeve and a pair of pink panties. The panties gave us the biggest headache. U.S. Customs officials seized 500,000 of them on their way into the country because they didn't meet the guideposts of the Flammable Fabrics Act. Warner Brothers fenced for us, saying they weren't panties at all, but packing material. The government told Shep, "You mean to say those freaky fans of his weren't going to try these things on when mama isn't looking?" I said, "Okay, but who's going to light a cigarette down there?" If anybody is that hot they should be wearing asbestos panties. Isn't all this silly! Absurd! And the UPI and AP jumped on the story. "School's Out" was such a dynamite single it just couldn t have missed. We broke it across the country just in time for summer vacation madness, and propelled it to the number-one single in the nation. The album followed close behind the single, leaping up the national charts in an awe-inspiring pace: from 116 to 51 to 17 to 14 to number two. And it sat there, for weeks and weeks, the second-biggest-selling album in the world and the biggest-selling single in the history of Warner Brothers. We even made it to number ten on the Singapore Hit Parade.