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T.V. Rock

Alice Cooper walked into the BARB office last week and rapped with us about music dramatic presentation. Alice Cooper is a rock band presently recording for Frank Zappa's Straight Records. Five young men with long flowing hair, no moustaches or beards, wearing feminine clothes make up the band.

Alice himself described their main influence. "Since we're on Zappa's label a lot of people would say, 'They're funny — they're bizarre like the GTO's, they're funny like Wild Man Fisher, and they're funny like the Mothers.' But the main thing is that our influence was television. We didn't have a blue's influence. The music that affected us was the saucy theme songs, like on 77 Sunset strip, and Bourbon Street Beat. The Thin Man — hip stuff, cool jazz. That was the kind of thing that was going on when we Were watching TV."

Remember 77 Sunset strip — the jive-talking, hair combing parking attendant, Kookie. That was television's early image of the hipster. Remember the slick, swinger private detectives — those cats were really with it! "77 Sunset Strip," says Alice, "was the basis for shows like the Avengers — shows with real heavy sexual undertones. Shows like Mission Impossible — the very hip shows."

Television — the invisible environment that today's middle class youth grows up in. The tangle of images brushed on our visual cortex since early childhood. Perhaps the tube is the single unifying factor of our culture. Alice Cooper is one band that admits its powerful influence and consciously explores its potential.

"Our act has a lot of spontaneous theater," rhythm guitarist Mike Bruce said, "with an over­hanging threat of danger. Towards the end of the act people start to realize that it's not going to stay on stage."

In contrast to their female image, bizarre Barbarella costumes and lots of eye make-up, the music Alice cooper plays is loud and powerful. The conflict between hard masculine sound and feminine clothes is accompanied by childlike clowning with various stage props. Alice describes the desired combination — "When the whole act is integrated — male, female, and child — it is always a growing thing."

At the end of the performance the entire audience is drawn into the violent tempo. Fights break out on stage accompanied by electronic music. Band members hurl live chickens at each other and into the crowd.

"One of the main reasons that Zappa signed us," Alice told us, "Was that we were playing at the Cheetah at Lenny Bruce's birthday party, and about half the people left because they couldn't take all of that at one time. Zappa felt that was a really healthy thing.

"We want to completely blind the audience and completely deafen them — change their whole environment for like 10 seconds. That's a shock treatment for the nervous system."

Alice Cooper projects a new image in male sexuality reflected in today's dress fashions. For the first time in two centuries men can wear ornamentive clothes. The uniform working costume of the mechanical age has been discarded. LIke tribesmen in placid non aggressive primitive societies, the male of the television era places little emphasis on distinguishing himself from women by his clothes. "The ultimate goal," says Alice, is asexuality— unisex."

This does not mean a dull existence, devoid of eros, but a liberation of libido from genital tyranny. This is the object of Tantric yoga and metaFreudian polymorphous perversity. It means a participation of all senses and all zones of the body in erotic pleasure. "LIke a shower on the inside," says Alice.

"We work very spontaneously, so what we do is we let certain things affect us. We let New York affect us in a certain way, musically, and we let San Francisco affect us. You let your lower self go&mdah; it experiences all this stuff and it adds up all this stuff in your memory bank and then you draw from it when you write your music." Alice explained why the direction of their music came as a response to their immediate environment. "The songs we wrote in New York were really very chaotic. The songs we write on the west coast are a lot more casual."

Mike Bruce expressed it this way — "What you feed into yourself is going to come out. Sometimes we go out in the desert somewhere and set up. The moon will be hanging right there and you can see the whole sky — thousands of stars. You don't play blues, you play Space Opera."

"Our conditioning has been television, our conditioning has been the space age, so that's kind of music we're going to play," said Alice. "We're not going to play delta blues. I couldn't care less about how many times his baby left him.

"We were upper middle class suburban brats that had anything we wanted. We never had the blues. The whole end is that we are what we are now — a living social criticism."

The need for dramatic participation fostered by TV has led many to act out frustrations in the arena of political confrontation. Alice Cooper feels that this is at best only a diversion from the real revolution. "The physical revolution that is going on now is a good front — a healthy social front. But the real revolution is the MENTAL revolution in the arts. That is where the ideas are being planted — through the rock musicians and the people who are deeper into art. Revolutionaries mostly have a lot of adrenalin."

"The karma for blood is blood," Mike Bruce said, "but a lot of people have to experience these things. The cops are getting ready for it, and there is no way you can stop them from busting heads."

In bombarding the entire nervous system in a constant assault of energy, Alice Cooper seeks to prepare us for the new dimensions constantly being added to the world.

Technology in the space age age makes extraordinary demands on our sensorium. Our entertainment throws us into a world of sex and violence — mass fantasies verging on psychosis. The total environment barrage of Alice Cooper is the type of therapy desperately needed in our time.

(Originally published in the Berkeley Barb, August 29th - September 4th, 1969)