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Alice Cooper: Five Men with a Mission —
Be So Violent That Kids Won't Want to Be
REACHING for my vomit bag, I watch a creature of puzzling gender hang himself from the top of a stage in Passaic, N.J., while the audience goes wild. A bulletin from the court of Henry the Eighth? Grand Guignol? No, just Alice Cooper, the hottest hard-rock music act in show business at the moment.
Alice Cooper's "Killer" just won a gold record for passing the million-sales mark. Alice Cooper touring the country is breaking house records everywhere. On stage or off, people are just wild about Alice.
Well, not all people. Mostly those gullible freaks under 16. His fans. If one calls a hirsute mess of salivating teenagers people.
Mothers and fathers are wild about Alice, too — wild with rage. They forbid their kids to play his records or attend his concerts. But the kids sneak off and do it, anyway. Lured on by radio commercials on which a teenybopper's voice peeps, "My Mommy won't let me go to the theater tonight to see Alice Cooper, but me and my friends are going, anyway," they stand in line by the thousands to see an act that is musically paramount in the ultra-violence kick of our current subculture.
Alice loves it.
IN THE BACK of his limousine, Alice coils like a reptile in black and white dotted-swiss suit, tieless and open-shirted to the navel.
"It's frightening to scare parents half to death. That's what I love to do. It's great to widen the generation gap. Why shorten it? There are too many values already hardened. No conclusions. They want just what we give them — an imitation of violence.
"I see violence as the answer to what's wrong with everything. I don't care about ecology like James Taylor — who cares? No one. Sex, death and violence is what folks care about today."
Suddenly a throbbing throng of lumberjacked, gum-chewing youngsters spots Alice's gauntly emaciated head, with his long nose, high cheekbones, and at least a foot of tangled black hair growing down towards his knees. He sinks as far back as he can, fingers twitching nervously. Almost in a whisper he mutters: "Go play with each other, babies, but don't touch me."
FACE-TO-FACE, Alice Cooper is a personable-enough man who lives hippie-commune-style with four members of his group in a large Connecticut house filled with groupies, dogs, babies, and two Siamese kittens. They are a gentle, beer-drinking "family." No dope allowed, especially the hard stuff. Until six years ago they all studied art. They like to make you think one day it occurred to them they might better express their artistic urges in music rather than painting, but one secretly suspects the real reason is they are capitalists just like everybody else. Flower children is out, man, but there's money in violence and hard rock, and if you're clever, you might just create an act in which it's hard to tell the difference. So Alice Cooper was born.
They settled on the name Alice Cooper because it had such an all-American ring to it. "I mean, I could have called myself Mary Smith, but Alice Cooper just seemed to fit better," giggles Alice.
Why a female name for five musicians?
"People are both male and female, biologically, explains Alice. "I once studied under a hypnotist who taught me to become three equal parts — male for strength, female for wisdom and child for faith. We integrated this thought into the act: A feminine image, rough masculine music, and the 'toys' we play with onstage."
WHEN he started, Alice wanted to be like Barbarella. Then he changed horses in midstream.
"I thought of all those fabulous villains of the horror movies. I love horror movies. I love violence. I love violence on TV. I think it's cathartic. They kids sit there. I don't think they are then as apt to go out and really do it. It's been done for them already. I just act as a mirror for them. I try to live Alice as Dr. Jekyll. That's me right now. Onstage, I become Mr. Hyde. I don't see any point in becoming political. Calling cops dirty pigs doesn't appeal to me. That's for the liberated James Taylor-Elton John-sophisticated-older-brainy group."
A gigantic, blonde ectoplasm with hair to his waist stomps into the dressing room backstage in Passaic, N.J. He's done up in a shabby costume of Flash Gordon comic strips. "Hey, didja see the line? Who's on the bill?" he jokes. Dozens of people are sitting on the floor, rolling and taping together Alice Cooper posters to throw into the audience later, and popping open beer by the gallon. The vibes in the room are kinetic. They are like a bunch of overgrown boys dressing up in drag for a campy performance of a college musical.
While the technicians still in beardless puberty scramble all over the stage, setting up lights and microphones, old movies are running for the milling, chattering crowd of kids jammed into the auditorium. "The Destroying Ray, Serial No. 5" Some never-to-be-known starlet is locked in a vault which is slowly filling with water. To the rescue, Buster Crabbe appears with his ray-gun... and, zippo, she's free. The kids howl and jeer and stamp their feet.
THEN they start stamping and howling for Alice. "Come on, Alice," they all yell, male and female. An announcement is made that the City of Passaic is giving full cooperation. "Smoke anything you are holding, but, please, NOT in the auditorium. Thank you."
Mothers, where are your kids tonight? It makes you laugh when you think about all these nervous parents worrying about X-rated movies, doesn't it?
Darkness. An eerie crimson glow backlights a set of drums elaborate enough to give Gene Krupa a breakdown. Brighter, brighter grow the lights, and louder, louder grows the ominous hum of an electric organ. Ear wax runs with the vibrations the amplification system sends out, as the first violence of the evening is committed on the eardrums.
Alice Cooper is there at last, in torn black leotards, leather vest, leather buckles, high black rocker boots, and an evil sado-masochist sneer painted in black on his face. "You can be my slave and I'll be your master," he shrieks, setting the scene for the first fantasy of the evening. A rapier, used to accent the grotesque lyrics, slashes the long hair of a child in the first row. A beer can is opened and sprayed over everyone.
The audience strikes back. All kinds of things are thrown at Alice — dolls, paper, marshmallows, popcorn, cigarette butts. He nastily kicks them back. A boa constrictor is now around his neck, winding down his back and between his legs. "I'm a killer," he continues. "I wear lace and black leather. My hands are lightning on my gun."
The kids are in a frenzy now. Neal, the drummer, is going bananas under his 40 pounds of unwashed hair. Dennis, on bass, is suffering from a hernia, so he's seated for this performance in a chair to which is attached a bottle of simulated blood plasma running into his trousers. Bubbles are spurting in masses from several bubble machines. Alice bites at them. Smoke is filling the stage. Glass balloons are released and batted from audience to stage with hysterical venom. This is silly, the kids have had enough. They whimper, and start to move forward. They are crawling over the seats. Huge young men in football shirts link arms to keep them back.
THIS IS IT. This is what they've been waiting for all night, what they sneaked out of their homes and lied to their parents about spending the night at a friend's house to see. Alice Cooper, singing "Dead Babies" (a song claimed to have taken four years to write, and labeled a "psychodrama").
Alice takes a golden-curled doll and rips its clothes off, piece by piece, throwing the pieces to the slithering, crawling children. An arm in then broken off and thrown to the screaming mob. The legs. Then an ax appears. Hysteria is cresting. The doll is decapitated onstage, with red, inky juice running over its face. Four thousand kids who can't get into "A Clockwork Orange" are now screaming with pain, and yelling encouragement. Some have brought binoculars to see this unbelievable event in closeup. For his crime, Alice is punished. Out of the shadows emerges a real gallows. Spitting and hissing, Alice is hanged — amid the unearthly, unimaginable shriek of hard-rock music that sounds like garbage-can lids being smashed together.
"THAT'S IT. People put their values on what they just saw, and their values are sometimes warped. They react out of insecurity. They consider it shocking, vulgar. But people who are really pure enjoy it, for what it is, entertainment. The more liberated you become, the more you realize you are not just this or that, but everything. That's the future." So says Alice Cooper, creator of a new musical form — bubble-gum violence. Exhausted, he slumps grimly into stuffed chair and pops open another beer. "I don't care what they throw at me, just so long as it's nothing worse than marshmallows."
Pray harder, Alice.