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Alice Cooper at the Ambassador

A Debut Fit For a Queen

The highlights dance on his super long hair, and his lipstick changes color like a chameleon with each turn of the gels on the spotlight. It's Alice Cooper!

It's doubtful that many of you would remember him/her/whatever if you had ever seen or experienced Alice Cooper in person as I did. Alice and the group are more than a mere rock group or collection of high­wired (and I do mean high and wired) musicians.

Alice Cooper is rock theater.

Alice Cooper is pop nostalgia in action.

Alice Cooper is something else!

I first learned of Alice almost two years ago. Although the group has been in existence for over six years, they have only reached prominence recently. Like myself, Alice hails from Detroit — although an Alice Cooper could never have survived in my old Detroit neighborhood.

He (let's refer to Alice as he until we're convinced differently) would have been pissed on and fucked over (we didn't tar and feather in my neighborhood) until he would have joined a nunnery or moved to a zip code with a more tolerant, cosmopolitan attitude.

But then again, maybe not. Alice is not only outrageous but terribly ballsy. He'd have probably held his ground and force-fed my neighbors with some instant gay liberation. He ignores rudeness and returns insults in spades.

My introduction to Alice Cooper never quite came off. When I arrived at the auditorium, everyone was leaving — incensed and loaded for bear. The promoters had closed the show and I learned that Alice had thrown a watermelon at the audience and then provoked the enraged crowd to storm the stage.

Naturally this was a little too much for an uninitiated audience who had bought tickets and seated themselves simply to rock and roll. Watermelon throwing, flagrant transvestism and obscene name calling wasn't on the program. But then, how would you feel?

You're seated and out comes this guy wearing a black body-stocking, sequins for eyes and walking like a woman. In the middle of the first number, he (he?) changes off-stage to orange and black vinyl bell bottoms with a bra-like top.

The lighting dims, highlighting his super long hair, and his lipstick seems to change color like a chameleon with each change of the gels on the spotlights.

From out of nowhere comes a whip that he cracks over the heads of the front row and he growls as though in sexual agony before producing a pregnant watermelon from an invisible table of props.

"What's he doing with that watermelon?" whispers the audience. Their comments mix with the deafening electronics of the band. Why's he holding that tomahawk? Oh, it's only a hammer. Look out, he's going to throw it? No, no! He's going to beat the watermelon. Good! Thank God!

Kill the watermelon, the band hollars. Stomp on it! Alice kills and hollers and stomps. The watermelon is dead. It is spurting all over the stage, until ...

He picks it up and sprays the audience with it. Hunk after hunk — messy, sloppy, slurpy, juicy.

The audience goes wild.

"The first time I saw people walked out on them. They were outrageous. Right then and there I knew that I had to manage them," recalls Sheb Gordon, who is just a marginal more sane.

"I mean they weren't just breaking their instruments or carrying on. They were creating theater. And the whole thing was sexual. Pretty soon the freakiest people were interested in them. Even Salvador Dali approached me to do the cover for their next album."

Yes. Alice Cooper is finally catching on but their apprenticeship hasn't exactly been the stuff of storybook legends. Only now are audiences becoming jaded enough to tolerate their antics. While ascending super­stardom, Alice has seldom found a kind audience response for his chicken throwing or other bizarre antics.

A return to his native Michigan only months ago resulted in a motorcycle gang rushing the stage and literally trying to kill them. "It was great," Alice recalls, "but we had to scram out of there. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be here now."

Here was the Venetian Room of the plush Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The location has a star studded, legendary past what with the Coconut Grove on the premises and a reputation as the one-time mecca for the visiting elite. The Ambassador has also had its share of excitement, however tragic. Only three years ago Bobby Kennedy was assassinated a couple of banquet rooms away after winning the California Democratic Primary.

A likely setting for Alice's coming out party. Right.

That's what the invitations read: You and a guest are cordially invited to attend the summer season debut of Alice Cooper, to be held at the Venetian Room, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, 8:30 to midnight. Formal dress or equivalent costume is requested but hardly mandatory.

The mandate was clear — a gathering for freaks.

"People don't normally listen to us," Alice confesses in the afternoon quiet of the Venetian Room as the band checks out its equipment. Later that evening, the speakers and all of their electronics would get the accustomed work out but now there was a surrealistic quiet as Alice rapped on audience response.

"We are a piece of kinetic art. We use crutches and brooms and inflatable toys the same way that Dali uses watches. Some people say we're political, others say we're sexual. To some we're art; to some we're just crummy musicians. As far as we're concerned — we are what we are."

Not long ago they were just that — crummy musicians. What they did to music was almost as outrageous as their act. But the group has developed tremendously in the past year. They have even logged two hits ("I'm Eighteen" and "Caught in a Dream") as evidence of their musical growth.

Now their unisex garb and bizarre performance earns them from $1,500 to $3,000 an engagement and the changing social mores no longer resist Alice's efforts to "challenge the conditioning of the audience."

They seem to personify Marshall McLuhan's epigram: "Art is anything that you can get away with." And Alice Cooper gets away with a lot, obviously.

That night was no exception.

There was a full moon over Los Angeles, which seemed only fitting for the "debut of Alice Cooper." The palm trees swayed only slightly over the Ambassador parking lot. It was a setting from the typewriter of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

A tingling filled the center of the room, catching you as you entered. A certain excitement like stepping out of a tenement in Spanish Harlem and wondering if you'd make it to the corner if you tried.

Tweedy conservatives and people who looked like visiting Rotarians dotted the lobby and stared with wonder mixed in disgust as Alice's fans entered. A collection of electric hair styles and ballet-painted faces. Zoot suits and spats. Chintz dresses and tacky fur stoles with inch-high wedgies. Drug store cowboys and fugitives of the CCC camps. Pin-stripes and hand-painted ties wearing spectator shoes and hugged tightly by a pegged cuff. Forties-styled tarts looking for a lamppost and flashing Chinese Red fingernails.

And a generous assortment of tank shirts and tie-dies among the 1920 tuxedos. A look of then ... and now . .. and never!

The straights looked on in shocked disbelief.

And inside the Venetian room it was even wilder. A full-dressed gorilla oversaw two pretty girls from Warner Brothers who checked the guests of the select invitation list and offered a warm welcome. Nearby a young man in a tuxedo rotated from side to side and moved his hands with a jerky-yet­-smooth movement in a mechanical pantomime. Not once in all of the time that I watched him did he break character. He had the concentration worthy of a Buckingham Palace guard.

Freaks passed in every direction and there was a madness in the air. (It was also the evening of July the Fourteenth, which the French celebrate as Bastille Day. That ought to tell you something.)

It was Fellini come to life.

"Wasn't that Zelda Fitzgerald at the bar? Figures. I wonder what that cunt's doing here?"

There was a Visconti-like decadence. Like the Nazis were marching into Paris but the beaujolais was too bitter. "Can't those fucking French do anything right?"

Eddie Gould's wandering musicians moved about in tuxedos, stringing music befitting the coming out of a Long Island debutante in 1936. "Somewhere My Love" and tunes too syrupy for even a golden anniversary.

And then, somewhere between a Borsalino hat and a superbusted chick who looked like she was in drag but wasn't ... the first of the Cockettes appeared. It wasn't Hibiscus, Rumi or even Ramon. It was Bobby, one of the San Francisco sisters who came down for the event, and his bony, six-foot frame was swabbed in white chintz with rhinestones in his well-coiffed hair. A cigarette tray was strapped over one shoulder and his sibilant voice punctured the growing din.

"Cigarettes! Candy! Vaseline ... ?"

Bippitty-Boppitty-Boo! Things were swinging.

More of the Cockettes emerged reveling in their finery. It wasn't the Palace in North Beach at midnight; it wasn't Finocchio's in the early 50's; and it wasn't Halloween and it's permissive drag night.

Uh uh! This was the straight world, and their world and the fringe of lunacy that culture and pollution and cosmic hysteria had wrought. It was happening because it was ... because it was right, goddamnitt!

Posh parties, poo! Who the fuck needs Truman Capote, Lenny Bernstein or Jackie Onassis? Alice is here and the vibes is righteous.

There's Rod McKuen ... and there's Richard Chamberlain (my, isn't she butch tonight!) ... and there's two more of the Cockettes — Pristine Condition and Goldie Glitters (My Gawd, you guys did a great job with Tricia Nixon's Wedding. Hollywood should be beating your door down.) ... but where's Alice Faye?

Where is that nigger band coming from? Everyone began to wonder. And there — in the main room where Alice and the Boys in the Band were to entertain — was a gang of spades. Already the dance area around the bandstand was ten deep. There was a clamor as throngs rushed forth.

"Just to see a common, old black band?" complained one of the Cockettes, who saw her tip filing away and her court disintegrating.

But this was no ordinary black band. The singer was an elephantine black woman (she was hired out of the Yellow Pages and gives her weight as 350 pounds and will sing topless for an extra $20) with tits down to her navel, scatting rebop and doing splits and terribly dangerous things with her pendulous breasts.

She was introduced as "TV Mama" which the black band leader couldn't accept. "She might be TV Mama to you," he jibed, "but she's TV dinner to me!"

She couldn't sing but she could rock and roll. And the boogie'n held forth until Alice's triumphant entrance minutes later.

Magically, the crowd parted and there he/she/it was ... Alice Cooper — a freak for all seasons. He tramped past the tables of hors d'oeuvres and sculpted fountain of ice. As smooth as the cold duck streaming out of the fountain, Alice and the Boys gave their blessing to the crowd and went off to an area right of the stage where they held court and gave audience for another hour.

The boogie and the blues went on.

Finally Alice took the stage. He was splendificent. He looked fantabulous! Fan — fucking — tastic! Mascara'd cobwebs for eyes and resplendent in silver lame and boots. He then proceeded to do a killer set, opening with his classic: "Eighteen."

"I'm Eighteen and I don't know what I want,
Eighteen — gotta get out of this place
I'm a boy and I'm a man,
I'm in the middle without any plans!"

The joint was rockin! One bizarre tune after using harpoons, straight jackets and an electric chair as props. Alice was a bitch!

Cynthia Plaster-Caster (who does her own "plating" now) was boogie'n with the gorilla. TV Mama had moved to the front of the dancers. No one seemed to care that Andy Warhol didn't show as expected. It was his loss. But who knows — among all that make-up and plumage he may very well have been there. As one of the other revellers so aptly put it:

"Full moon or not, it's safe to walk the streets tonight. All of the freaks are here!"

Then suddenly the band went into the Marseillaise — as though Alice had lapsed into a Bogart fantasy and the movie Casablanca. But instead, a giant cake with a zillion lighted candles was wheeled pronto through the crowded dance floor and in front of Alice's microphone.

Up jumped Miss Mercy, one of the legendary GTO's of horrible music fame. Grinning, she put several hugs on Alice and began spraying the crowd with icing that she scooped from the supercake.

And it went on like that into night.

I doubt that the Venetian Room or the Ambassador will ever be the same. Surely the Republicans would never use the hotel for a convention again.

And all because of this half-boy, half-man from Detroit.

Alice Cooper, phew!