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Alice's New Restaurant
This year's customers demand sadism with the music
ON A WARM NIGHT in San Francisco, Alice Cooper was running his fingers through his hair and watching a Danny Kaye movie on television. Alice is a male rock and roll singer, enjoying for the moment the rewards of sudden and gigantic success. He was drinking a Coors Beer from the bottle as he stared at the tube in the living room of a suite in the Fairmont Hotel. Shep Gordon, manager of the Alice Cooper band, came out of one of the bedrooms, carrying a briefcase. He opened the case and pulled out a newspaper clipping. "Alice," he said, "I have something you're going to love."
The clipping was from the front page of the Charlotte (N.C.) News. Alice put his beer bottle down and began to read. The Danny Kaye movie blared on. The newspaper story caused Alice to laugh.
"Well," said Shep Gordon, "how do you like it?"
"It's really nice," Alice said. "Did you get that part about 'alleged sadistic acts'? Where do they get that 'alleged' from? I feel like Sirhan Sirhan."
Gordon retrieved the clipping and put it back in his briefcase. "I called that newspaper," he said. "I told them I couldn't thank them enough. I told them I couldn't have written a better story myself."
But by this time Alice Cooper was being drawn back to the televised movie. "We'll be leaving for the show in about forty-five minutes," Gordan said. Alice nodded, his eyes locked on the screen, taking another pull from his beer.
IN THE DRESSING ROOM of the Berkeley Community Theater, the Alice Cooper band waited to go on stage. Assorted groupies and hangers-on cluttered up the room as the band prepared to begin what would be an extended tour of the United States and Canada.
They would be playing to capacity houses every night — the word had begun to spread about this band. The story in the Charlotte newspaper had been accurate, if incomplete.
At a time when rock and roll has gained respectability and stature, the Alice Cooper band sets out to be disgusting. It operates on the theory that if the show is hateful and revolting to parents, then the kids will go to any length to see it. The increasing profits (more receipts on each successive night) appear to prove the correctness of the theory.
In an age when advertising executives look far freakier than the Beatles did on their first arrival in the United States, the problem was one of standing out among the hundreds of rock and roll bands. To begin with, there was the name. When people first found out that Alice was a man, they assumed that the members were homosexuals or transvestites. The band did not discourage this thinking. They dressed in half-drag and affected a swishy stage manner.
In the dressing room Alice had painted evil-looking black spider shapes around his eyes, and he had drawn sharp fangs from the corners of his mouth. He wore thigh-high black leather boots and a ripped black leotard. Across his chest, the name "Alice" was written in sequins.
The other members of the band — guitarists Mike Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Glen Buxton, and drummer Neal Smith — were dressed in bright one-piece uniforms made of simulated foil. Their fingernails were extremely long and covered with dark polish. Their hair was tremendously long, even by rock and roll standards.
Out front, the kids were clamoring. "And now," the announcer screamed, "the most exciting group in the world — the legendary Alice Cooper!"
They ran on stage and went through the same routine they perform virtually every working night. The music is solid rock and roll. But with the music alone, this would be just another band trying to make it. It is the show that is making the Alice Cooper band rich.
AS SOON AS THE CROWD sees Alice, they rush toward the stage. By the time he is into the opening song, "Be My Lover," they are just inches from him. As he sings, he unsheathes a long sword and swings it over their heads. They do not flinch as the sharp blade flashes past them; they stare, fascinated. Alice brings a glob of spit from deep in his throat and it sails out into the audience. They are repelled and thrilled at the same time; the band apparently holds to no conventions at all.
Alice goes behind an amplifier and brings out a long, mean-looking boa constrictor. He holds it near the first row of fans. The snake's tongue whips in and out of its mouth. Alice winds it around his neck. He kisses the snake. He lets it stick its head in his mouth. He sticks it between his legs. He dangles it over the audience. They are breathing hard, not knowing what to expect from this man.
The band begins to play a loud, hard song called "Dead Babies." Alice comes to the front of the stage with a cute baby doll. The song is about a baby who ate a bottle of aspirin and died. As he sings the words, he fondles the doll, rubbing it across his body. He slowly undresses it, playing with it as he does so. Then the music quickens, and he tears at the doll's dress, ripping it. He begins to tear the doll apart. He slams it to the floor, turns around, and raises a hatchet above his head. The sounds of a crying baby are heard from a tape recorder somewhere backstage. Again and again and again he chops at the doll; fake blood turns the stage floor red. All the while he is singing. And the little girls in the audience are singing too; their eyes shine as they watch Alice kill the baby doll, and they sing along with him, "Goodbye, little Betty... so long, little baby."
After chopping up the doll, Alice places its head on top of a microphone stand. It rests there, obscene and taunting, as he flails a whip out over the audience. Some reach for him; he kicks out at them and spits some more. Then the lights go off.
Smoke fills the stage as the lights come back on. The rest of the band dons hangmen's masks. The music continues. They drag Alice, crying and kicking, to the side of the stage. There is a genuine gallows, massive and ugly. They hit at Alice as they carry him up the stairs to the platform and fasten the noose around his neck. He begs them to stop. They do not. They pull a lever; the floor under Alice opens, and he plunges downward. The noise is overwhelming as the young fans scream and shout with excitement. The lights go down again.
Within minutes Alice and the band are back, singing, "We've Still Got a Long Way To Go." Alice begins tossing rolled up posters into the swarming crowd. He throws one, then another, then another and another and another. The kids begin to fight for the posters. They hit at each other and swing and scratch at the people next to them. Girls faint, but there is no room for them to fall. Everyone in the auditorium is coming toward the stage. The unlucky ones, passed out on their feet, are pummeled from every side. Alice, laughing, continues to throw posters.
When it seems that it can get no worse, Alice brings out his last trick. He brandishes the sword again, but this time there are dollar bills strung on it, from handle to tip.
"Do you like money?" he screams. They roar and push forward once again. "How much do you like money?" he screams, and thrusts the sword at them. They leap at it, the last barriers down. They do not know why they are up here, fighting for the stage. They just know they cannot stop.
Which is how this night at the Berkeley Community Theater ended, as Alice and the band ran offstage and into the dressing room. They wanted to hurry and be gone; the limousines would take them to a local pizza parlor, where Warner Brothers Records was giving a party, complete with a stripper and free drinks.
EVERYONE IS TRYING to convince people that kids are interested in ecology, that kids are interested in politics," Alice Cooper said. "That's bullshit. Kids are interested in the same things that have always excited them; sex and violence. That's what they want, that's what they'll pay to see."
Alice was in another motel room in another town, drinking another beer and looking at another television screen. "You know, when I was a kid, I used to go to the movies every Saturday afternoon," he said. "If it was a funny movie or a love story, I'd go home with the vague feeling that I'd been cheated out of my money. But if the movie scared the hell out of me — man, I'd love that.
"So I think it's good if the kids are disgusted or frightened by our show. Because inside, it turns them on, they love it, they have to see it. They won't go home and shrug their shoulders; they'll talk to their friends about it, they'll try to figure it out, they'll wonder if we all go back and go to sleep in coffins after the show. They'll he fascinated."
Offstage Alice is a quiet young man. He and his band have put the show together with a deliberate purpose, and the purpose is being achieved. But the thinking was all done long ago, the dead-babies idea and everything else. Now it is only the people in the anonymous towns who have the spontaneity for outrage. For the Cooper people, it is a matter of logistics and mundane worries. How much time do we have to make it to the airport? Did anyone remember to buy mice to feed to the snake? Has the gallows been torn down and prepared for shipment? Has someone filled tonight's baby doll with fake blood? Are there enough posters to inflame the audience with? These are the problems that are important at this stage; the more complex questions have been forgotten by the band long ago. All they know is that the kids are coming to see them, and the money is piling up. (They can begin to afford luxuries; in San Francisco, for two days at the Fairmont, the hotel bill for the band amounted to $1,700.)
"All these rock groups are talking about getting into politics." Alice said. "That's so stupid. Politics is boring, I hate it. Rock and roll is political by its very nature — it's antiparent, and that's a political statement in itself. You don't have to go beyond that."
Alice says he is repelled by random, offstage violence; he hates the thought of getting into a fistfight. The notion that young Americans eagerly pay to see brutality occurred to him by accident.
"We were doing an outdoor show a long time ago," he said. "This chicken wandered onto the stage. I picked it up; I figured it could fly, so I tossed it into the air. But chickens, you know, they can't fly, it turns out. It came down and it broke its neck. I didn't know what to do. So I kind of tossed it into the audience. You know what those kids did? They tore it apart, just ripped it to shreds! The kids were just like a pack of piranhas. It was amazing to see. It taught me a lot.
"Then all these rumors started to spread, like that we killed chickens onstage every night, and drank the blood. Never happened. It just happened that one time with the chicken, and we didn't drink any blood. But we couldn't convince people, and we began to figure that's the kind of thing they wanted to see. When we got to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, there was a court injunction waiting for us.
"The injunction said that we supposedly made a practice of smashing kittens with sledgehammers every night, and ordered that we not do it in Atlanta. Really."
For a moment, only the sound of the television game show filled the room.
"I wish I'd thought of it first," Alice said. "Kittens... Jesus."
ON A PLANE heading for Hollywood, a long-haired girl was sitting near the Alice Cooper band. She had the best body anyone in the band had seen in years. Conversation revealed that she was on her way to her father's funeral. She was to be picked up at the airport and driven directly to the cemetery.
"Ask her to bring her father's body to the Palladium tonight," Alice said to Shep Gordon. "We could bury him on stage."
On the way out of the plane, Mike Bruce, the guitarist, handed the girl a piece of paper. She looked at it and smiled, then waved at him and walked into the terminal.
Cadillacs were waiting to take the band to the headquarters of Warner Brothers Records, where gold albums were to be presented to the group for their LP, "Killer." But when the band arrived, Warner's president Mo Ostin, and executive vice-president Joe Smith were both out to lunch. The band walked into Ostin's private office anyway.
"Look at this," said Dennis Dunaway. "He's got one of those happy face notepads."
"Give it to me," said Neal Smith. "Let's burn it."
An autographed picture of Frank Sinatra hung on the wall. Alice sat directly beneath it. A secretary came in and asked the band to move to Joe Smith's office, which they did. Road manager Dave Libert brought in a boxful of drive-in tacos, and the band spread the food over the carpet as they reclined to eat. Which is what was happening when Smith and Ostin came in.
"They're all over the place," said Joe Smith. He said it out loud, but he was talking to himself. "They're all over my office and they have tacos all over the place."
Ostin and Smith behaved as you might expect them to behave. They are middle-aged men who make their livings off the appeal of singers half their age; they live very comfortably because of it, but there is still something wrong. So they were full of overly friendly good cheer as they greeted the band and made loud jokes. When the band lined up for promotional photographs, holding framed gold albums, Joe Smith and Mo Ostin pushed into the picture. "Let's all put our arms around each other," Smith said. "What are you trying to do, make us look like homosexuals?" said Alice Cooper.
After the picture-taking, the limousines took the band to the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip. The girl from the plane was in the lobby. She had come straight from the funeral, and she was waiting for Mike Bruce. They walked into the elevator together.
AN HOUR LATER, a middle-aged couple bustled through the hotel's revolving doors. They looked like any other middle-aged couple on vacation in California; maybe a little straighter than most. The woman looked at the wall behind the registration desk, where a clerk had pinned up a photograph of Alice Cooper in full makeup and costume. "Oh, look at that," the woman said. "They've got Vince's picture up."
Alice Cooper's parents. They called his room on a house phone, then walked to a couch to wait until he came downstairs. His mother was carrying an envelope that was inscribed, "Happy Birthday Vince."
"We still call him that," she said. "I don't know, I just can't call him Alice. Mothers are funny, I guess."
They were from Phoenix, Arizona. The father is a minister. Their last name is not Cooper, and many of their neighbors do not know that their son is a rock star.
"I understand why they do the things they do," the mother said. "There are so many groups today, you have to attract attention the best way you can. I keep hoping that when they feel they've really made it, they'll go back to more normal types of entertainment.
"I love to watch the show. Vince has explained it all to me. The whole dead-babies routine is a warning to parents that they should not abuse their children. That's why they hang Vince after he does it; to show that he should be punished. I'm just sorry it's my son who has to take the blame.
"Of course, sometimes it gets pretty frightening. The audience, especially. But we're proud. Mothers are like that. Sometimes I get scared for him, though. You don't realize how many crazy, weird people are running around these days."
Alice came off the elevator and hurried to his mother and father. "Twenty-four, Vince," his mother said. "You're twenty-four years old today."
Alice smiled. "I know, Mom," he said, "I'm getting up there."
His father moved close to him. "What's that we read about kittens down South?" the father asked.
"Oh, that Atlanta thing," Alice said. "Nothing happened. It was just a rumor."
"We thought so, Vince," his mother said. "We know not to believe what we read about you."
Later that evening, after a performance more frenzied than most, the band was toweling off in the dressing room when the door opened and Alice's parents entered with another middle-aged couple.
Alice called to them: "Mom! Dad! Uncle Lefty! Aunt Sue!" Things got quiet for a moment. No one seemed to know what to say. Finally, speaking of the evening performance, Alice's mother said: "It was a goodie, Vince."
Alice's father shook his son's hand. Aunt Sue stayed in a corner, looking uncomfortable and unhappy.
Uncle Lefty just gazed at his nephew for a few moments. The makeup was still on, and the "Alice" sequins shone brightly on the chest of the leotard.
"I try, Vince," Uncle Lefty said. "I try to understand, Vince, I really do."
THE JET WAS ON ITS WAY to Sacramento. On board, the band was playing blackjack, killing time until their contract called for them to take the stage again and titillate more thousands of California children.
Of course, everyone on the plane was staring at them. That always happens. But one little girl was staring especially intently, like a bird watching a snake. She was about fifteen, blond and scrubbed and even innocent looking. She knew who these people were; she had listened to the albums and heard the rumors about the shows, although she had never seen an Alice Cooper performance. But she had never thought she would see them this close, and she was fascinated. All the horrid things she had heard, and here she was on the plane with them, and they seemed fairly subdued and almost human.
The stewardess handed the little girl a can of soft drink. She began to drink from it, at the same time not letting her eyes move from Alice Cooper and Mike Bruce.
She brought the can to her mouth again, and just as she was swallowing the soda, Mike Bruce leaned over to her.
"I just read in the paper where that stuff causes cancer in rats," he said calmly.
The girl choked on the drink as Bruce turned around and Alice Cooper dealt him another card.
Rock Show "Sickened" Girl
By Brooks McGirt
News Staff Writer
A 16-year-old Charlotte high school girl said she was sickened and disgusted by a rock show in town this weekend.
The student, who asked not to be identified, said she had to leave in the middle of the show after the rock group Alice Cooper performed alleged sadistic acts, which included the chopping up of a doll.
A girl in front of her fainted, she said.
The student said the leader of the group first brought out a big snake which she believed to be a boa constrictor, and "let it crawl all over him —his face and everywhere" during a number.
Then, she said, he brought a plastic baby doll on stage, "felt it" and then undressed it. He tore off one of its arms, she said, took an axe and chopped at it.
The doll was filled with red liquid which ran out as the doll was hacked, she said, and members of the group screamed during the chopping.
He then held the doll up to the audience, she said.
"I left then," the student told the News.
"I'm not one to get sick at things," she said. "But I just couldn't take that. It was too realistic for comfort."
The student's mother said her daughter called her from Park Center, where the performance was held, and said the show had "absolutely made her sick."...
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