Album Guide

You don't need a reservation to seek asylum if your name happens to be Mr. Alice Cooper.

Certainly not any hospital teeming with the buxom nurses, oversized needles and willing misfits that decorate his wildly imaginative road shows — those vast visual extravaganzas that barnstorm the globe, leaving audiences either shaking their heads in amazement of baying at the moon.

Now limousines chase the moon down Sunset Blvd., three big blocks of east Vine, if you happen to know your way around this seaside jungle paradise, L.A. You are on your way to a "wrap up party" (as in: Could you please wrap up this Alice Cooper album for me?) at a Hollywood recording studio redubbed United Western Studios for the insane.

Tonight, Alice Cooper and Bernie Taupin are celebrating their "release from the studio" and the culmination of their songwriting partnership on From The Inside, Alice's 13th (?!) album, his freshest material in years and richest yet in personal experience.

The invitation guaranteed guest would be "part of rock and roll history when From The Inside becomes the record industry's first album SHIPPED INSANE!!!"

Two hundred were invited, 400 showed up. Everyone who attends checks their minds in at the door. To gain entrance, you are "admitted" by a nurse who tags you on the wrist with a plastic ID bracelet, gives you a surgical gown, then tells you you'll be singing along on "We're All Crazy," the mad, mad grand finale to the album and recurring theme to this launch party.

Conducting the Alice Cooper Captive Audience & Choir will be Sir Alice the Oft Beheaded and his record producer, David Foster. You lines, if you wish to memorize them beforehand (it won't do you any good):

we're all crazy we're all crazy we're
all crazy we're all crazy we're all
crazy we're all crazy we're all crazy

Inside, you can't help but notice the sprawling recording studio has been converted into a functional hospital ward. Complete with uniformed attendants, oxygen tents (for heavy breathers), operating tables (no-fault lobotomies), electric and acoustic wheelchairs. Parked in one corner of the noisy hospital zone, by a stack of stretchers, a sheet-white ambulance out of the flyin' '40s waits for a passing basket case (I'm not kidding) and a chance to carom the wide streets of Los Angeles one more time.

Alice is nervous — a slight trace of sanity? Behind him, on the wall, not a spider but a plaque declaring Alice officially banned in Birmingham. Ironically, earlier this year, he checked himself into a New York State hospital to fight alcoholism. And though the party bar was in full swing, Alice deftly cradled a Coke on the rock as he spoke with friend, neighbor and collaborator Bernie Taupin, the lyrical genius behind Elton John.

What exactly happened to Alice in the hospital? Far from the maddening crowds, from his window, the hard rock stage appeared to him as a gallows crossbar many miles up the road. He made friends with a four-walled moth. He began to write. Alice Cooper would have to greet the dawn without a drink if the real Alice was to ever know what the naked day was like. Alice thought: Must Alice die so I may live? Can both survive? They must. It was one hell of a nightmare for a while, but Alice had already written the script. He would return from the undead with his heart in it!

In his room, Alice was alone at last. Outside, in the room, waited an even crazier world.

Three months later, Alice tested his rubbery stage legs touring "dry" in "King of the Silver Screen." Not only was the special tour a box-office smash, but Alice got bombed — smokebombed in Minneapolis — in the middle of "School's Out." "I Was Gassed in Minneapolis" T-shirts spread through Alice Cooper headquarters in Hollywood. Alice felt energized, rejuvenated. He returned home to find his reward on the lawn; a customized 1957 midnight-blue Chevy convertible. The L.A. evening was crisp and crackling with stars that seemed to wink and sway in a tropical breeze. Somewhere along the way, he had already decided that the next album would come from the inside.

Alice is still not sure he didn't dream up the hospital and the help he got there, but that doesn't matter now. It was somewhere in that hospital tha Alice reached inside himself, deeper, closer to the real Alice. It was Bernie Taupin who injected Alice with a dramatic sense of his own songwriting signals, the powers buried just beneath the surface in craftsmanship. Along with Dick Wagner, who co-wrote "Only Women Bleed," "I Never Cry" and "You and Me," the musical team on From the Inside is the most substantial yet gathered for an Alice Cooper album. Davey Johnstone and Dee Murray from Elton John's band firmly anchor Alice's band in the sound that swept the world.

Across the room, the history of Alice is playing on a slide show, blinking like a magic lantern circus for the crowd. You try to digest all this and the edibles too — to the lunatic's clarion call, a bagpipe band, striking the perfect sirenic shriek of utter panic to the otherwise hysterical affair. You want to shake hands with Billy Preston and Wolfman Jack, Burton Cummings and Kiki Dee, Al Stewart and Peter Noone, Cherly Ladd and Betty White, Cheech & Nudie, Deby Boone and Timothy Leary. But you are wearing surgical gloves to get at the hors d'oeuvres and beef stew (no sharp instruments allowed!) Al Kooper back into Alice Cooper, and for a moment Alice wonders what his old friend Groucho would say and do.

A locking of doors from the inside and flashing red lights tell us that United Western Studios for the Insane is now in session. Alice is coming to tell us we are all crazy — although you may sincerely wish not to be so. You may not know it, but for Alice to suggest we're all crazy signals a great improvement in his condition. You see, Alice was created on Earth to be one of the craziest creatures in the whole universe. He succeeded far beyond his wildest nightmares. Before treatment, he thought everyone else was crazy and he was the only sane one left.

But since Alice bought an "O" in the new HOLLYWOOD sign for a mere $27,777 and deleted an "O" from his own name to remind everyone that everything's "Coper-setic," since he was named a Goodwill Ambassador to Los Angeles by mayoral proclamation — Alice feels great. His milestones are no longer chimed by the clunk of falling beer cans but buy the sizzle of success in television and movies. Having already sold 60 million records, Alice Cooper has crossed the threshold of an ever larger success that will bring Alice's patented humor to the widest possible audience.

Alice Cooper has not only come from an institution, he has become one.

And that, in a nutshell, is what From the Inside is all about.