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'Alice' in Wonderland

BILLION DOLLAR BABY by Bob Greene
(Atheneum, 364pp., illustrated, $10)

It's a long way from a letterman's banquet at Cortez High to the biggest concert halls in the country. Alice Cooper has made that journey, quite successfully, and now has a Boswell to tell us all about it.

Not the complete journey mind you. In fact, only a six week trip, but Bob Greene packs enough punch into his 364 pages to make up for what has passed before.

Greene, a 27-year-old columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, joined the Alice Cooper group last year for the Holiday Tour and the result is the most provocative and well written book yet on the rock and roll culture.

WITH THE uncanny eye for detail that is essential to a good reporter, Greene strips away, layer by layer, the myth from reality. What remains is an incisive look at not only Alice Cooper but the generation that could produce an Alice Cooper.

That's a tall order, but Greene measures up to the task.

For many Cooper fans, the book will be a letdown because they will find that Alice/AKA/Vincent Furnier, Cortez High Class of '66, is in reality the embodiment of the all-American success story. He digs on Burt Bacharach albums, his favorite songs are "My Funny Valentine" and "The Lady Is A Tramp," golf is his favorite game, he tends to favor gray-flannel suits over the more outrageous stage outfits, he doesn't do drugs and he isn't gay or bi-sexual.

THIS WILL come as a shock to both fans and foes and one has a feeling that perhaps Alice and the gang were putting Greene on. But putting on a sham for six weeks on the road would be next to impossible, so the tendency here is to take Greene at his word.

And for those who worry about payola, Greene took no salary for his time and work with the Cooper band. He did not submit his manuscript for approval by Cooper and he was not asked to do so.

It's refreshing to find a rock and roll band that doesn't take itself seriously. Alice wrote the lyrics for the "Muscle of Love" album one afternoon while watching TV game shows. "I mean, what's it take to write this stuff, anyway? The rest of the band gives me the instrumentals, and I do the words in a couple of hours. It's not exactly deathless prose," Cooper tells Greene.

Greene didn't just tag along with the band, he became a part of it, playing the Santa Claus who comes on at the end of the show only to be presented as brutally beaten by Alice and Co. This he felt would help him understand the problems and feelings of a member of a superstar group.

ALONG THE journey, Greene introduces the reader to managers and promoters, groupies and fans, balking arena managers and accommodating drives, roadies and rowdies and the other members of the Alice Cooper band (all former Phoenix residents) — Mike Bruce, Neal Smith, Dennis Dunaway and the troubled Glen Buxton.

Greene exposes the other side of the rock and roll band. The side of envy and destruction as well as concern and helplessness. At times it's not a pretty picture — Smith wrecking the better part of a hotel floor during a drunken rage, the back-biting between the members and the realities of six weeks on the road.

But that's the way the game is played and the price necessary for entry is high. And it all centers around the Cooper stage show, "...a combination of leering sexuality and blood drenched simulated violence that had prompted inprint reactions labeling the band as sick, degenerate, perverted, obscene and 'Nazi-like,'" writes Greene.

Of course this is not the way Cooper looks at the situation. He tells Greene: "Our band is the epitome of everything that's American. We've got the American dream in the way that we worked our way from starving to being rich... You can't find anyone in the group who'll eat gourmet food. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, you know, McDonalds, Jack-in-the-Box, everything that's American for this period of time, we are. Beer, football, everything."

Which means that in the next war, we'll all be fighting for the flag, mom's apple pie and Alice Cooper?

© Phoenix Newspaper Inc. Reprinted with permission.