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Alice Cooper's Image, Reality Are The Same

BILLION DOLLAR BABY.
by Bob Greene. Atheneum. $10

© 1974 New York Times

At first it's intriguing. Here's the Alice Cooper rock 'n' roll group — proud to claim the title of "the sickest, most degenerate band in America" — starring a young man from Arizona who turns his teenage audiences on by chopping up blood-spilling dolls while singing a number called "Dead Babies," fondling a boa constrictor to the tune of "Sick Things," and literally spitting on the frenzied fans who crowd and crush each other at the footlights of his performances.

And here's Bob Greene, a 27-year-old columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who's been given this chance to perform on a Christmas tour with the Alice Cooper troupe and indulge his fantasy of becoming a rock 'n' roll star. Some fun, huh? A slightly worm-eaten but otherwise fresh page from the notebooks of George Plimpton. An entertaining chance to see how the rock 'n' roll business really works.

Then it gets downright amusing. Greene turns out to be a very good reporter, painting in simple primary colors one deceptively innocent scene after another. Alice Cooper — despite his carefully manufactured image as the monster the parents of teenage America love to hate — is revealed as a witty but mild-mannered prototype of the successful kid next door. His real name is Vince Furnier, the son of an Arizona fundamentalist. He was popular in high school, and he likes to play golf. He never touches drugs, he's loathe to kill so much as a cockroach, he likes gray-flannel suits, and he regards his success as a horror with wry amusement. So Billion Dollar Baby is a study of the put-on, right? An anatomy of the principle that any publicity is good publicity, so long as the names are spelled correctly.

Then it begins to get disturbing. Though business is business and there's no connection between the image and reality, strange things begin to happen. The members of the band grow bored with their dull routine and fall to bickering over Alice's growing superstar status. At the height of the 1973 energy crisis, while many Americans are waiting in line for a tankful of gas, the 30 members of the Alice Cooper troupe lounge around their chartered superjet, watching pornographic movies and complaining over the slightest delay. On a one-night stand in Toledo, Ohio, the audience, taking Alice's monstrous image seriously, drives the band off the stage with firecrackers and other dangerous projectiles. And when manager, Shep Gordon, is asked if the band hasn't asked for this sort of incident, he blandly assures Greene, "If I had a child who was turned on by seeing actual nonsimulated death, then I'd sit down and talk to him... I would try to tell him what life means, what life is worth. I think that would do it." So Billion Dollar Baby is a study in hypocrisy, hmmm?

Finally, the light dawns, and we see what Greene is really up to. Half of him may be this starry-eyed, good-natured fellow who befriends the members of the band, eats up the excitement of the rock 'n' roll scene, and suffers a genuine letdown when the tour is over and he has to give up his role with the group (he played a Santa Claus who walks on to the set at the end of the show and then gets knocked down and stomped by Alice and the rest of the troupe.)

But the other half of him is showing us the connections between the image and the reality.

At last Greene shows us another member of the band acting out his deeper impulses, and what that member of the band does is this: he gets drunk, goes berserk, and smashes some $4,000 worth of a motel in Utica, N.Y. (of course, he's happy to pay for it, and of course the citizens of Utica see it as something to talk about after "you boys" have left town).

It takes us a while to catch on. It takes some time to see that Greene is not just another groupie.

He's a cultural explorer in search of the gap between the image and the reality, and a mapmaker trying to prove that the gap is nonexistent. Greene may look like a good-natured lightweight. But when he swings, he hits; when he hits, he hurts; and Billion Dollar Baby knocks you out.