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Welcome To My Nightmare

The twilight world of Alice Cooper

'Alice is such a nice, American name.' There was a twinkle in Alice Cooper's eye when he made that statement. He was the man who shocked middle-aged middle America by turning over the stone of the national dream and making love to what crawled out — and the joke was on anyone who failed to see the irony of it all. 'Alice', he explained, 'is really nothing more than a mirror which I place in front of an audience to reflect the very darkest side of human nature. Alice is what's hiding inside most of them.' That is not a happy thought, for Alice Cooper deals in images of sex and violence, corruption and decay — the razor blade in mom's apple pie.

Alice Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier on 4 February 1948 in Detroit. The son of a Methodist minister, Vincent was brought up in Phoenix, Arizona, and his introduction to music came during his days at Cortez High School when he formed a band in the early Sixties with school friends Dennis Dunaway (bass), Glen Buxton (guitar), Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar and keyboards) and Neal Smith (drums). The band were called the Earwigs, the Spiders and later the Nazz, and played in local halls and at dances arranged by the Catholic Youth Organization. With moptop hairstyles and Mod clothes, they followed closely their British idols such as the Beatles. Vince played his first concert in a bathtub and the Spiders played in a big green web, doing cover versions of Rolling Stones songs.

It was in 1967 that Vincent changed his name to Alice Cooper and began performing in dresses, high heels and makeup, and the band moved to Los Angeles. Alice was never in the peace-and-love hippie scene of San Francisco; he preferred the decadence of LA, where the squalid lust for money and sex lay just beneath the veneer of charm.

Coming of age

Adopting the high camp of the boulevard gay queens, the band made their stage act even more bizarre; when Alice introduced live chickens into his set and then threw feathers out into the audience, rumours began to circulate that he bit the heads off chickens and spat the blood on onlookers. They gained a reputation as a band to be avoided and found it increasingly difficult to get bookings. When they played the LA Cheetah with the Doors, 2000 people walked out. They were freaky enough, however, to arouse the interest of Frank Zappa; he signed the band to his Straight label for which Alice Cooper made two albums — Pretties For You (1969) and Easy Action (1970). Both were undistinguished, and with poor tunes played badly and recorded amateurishly. Alice Cooper's fortunes took a turn for the better when the band met up with manager Shep Gordon and producer Bob Ezrin and put down roots in Detroit. The music scene in Detroit at that time was lively, and Alice Cooper shared concert bills with such energetic bands as the Stooges and MC5. Ezrin was a management consultant for a Canadian company called Nimbus 9 which linked up with Warner Brothers in 1971. He produced Cooper's next LP, Love It To Death (1971).

It would be a mistake to look too closely at the band's music — Alice was always more of an attitude or concept than a musician. In many ways, however, Love It To Death was the band's best album. Ezrin stripped away layers of flaccid musical excess, leaving the rest tight and punchy. The guitar section was a little more than competent and mainstream in the US hard-rock tradition, while the drummer and bass player were capable of producing a lumbering backbeat that moodily complemented Alice's vocal range — from eerie whisper to maniac shout. Most of the songs were about sex, madness and death. The album gave Alice Cooper and the band their first big chart success with the single 'I'm Eighteen', a celebration of the confused delights of adolescence.

The next five years were to prove Alice Cooper most productive. Money and notoriety released Alice's creative ideas, and the stage show developed into a macabre elaboration of the songs' most bizarre elements. In the eyes of his fans' parents, Alice Cooper seemed to embody violence, perversion and rebellion. During the stage performance of 'The Ballad of Dwight Fry' — a disturbing evocation of insanity – the band bound Alice in a straitjacket and had a white-coated nurse lead him off the stage. The follow-up album, Killer (1971), was even more of a shocker. Musically, it was mainstream rock, but thematically it contained all Alice's preoccupations: sex in 'Be My Lover', death in 'Desperado' and 'Killer', and parental negligence in 'Dead Babies'.

On stage, Alice, eyes blacked out with spidery makeup, crooned to a six foot python draped sensuously around his torso, fought with members of the band and, with a real axe, slowly chopped up baby dolls. The finale involved Alice being strung up on mock gallows or tied to an electric chair, though he bounced back reassuringly for an encore, dressed in a top hat and tails.

A moral message

According to Alice himself, the message was a moralistic one. His songs merely reflected the sick side of life, and after Alice had performed his gruesome mock murders, he had to be punished for them by mock execution. The aim was to shock, and shock it did. It was the title track of Alice Cooper's next album, School's Out — released in the summer of 1972 — that sparked off a public outcry with its anarchic refrain and rejection of childhood innocence. The single made Number 1 in the UK charts in July and the band appeared on BBC-TV's 'Top Of The Pops', Alice brandished a rapier and fixing the camera with a murderous glare. The song became that year's anthem for kids during their school holidays, with a list of disruptive chants: 'Well we got no class/And we got no principles/And we got no innocence/We can't even think of a word that rhymes!'

Anything that threatened an institution such as school was guaranteed to arouse the anger of such a self-appointed guardian of public morals as Mary Whitehouse, while Member of Parliament Leo Abse declared that Alice Cooper should be banned from Britain; their autumn tour was, consequently a huge success. The album sleeve resembled a desk top and the record inside was covered with a pair of pink paper panties. A West Side Story style street-fight theme ran through the LP; on stage, the ever more sinister Alice would engage the band in mock knife fights.

Critics found, to their surprise, that the man behind the Alice mask was actually polite, intelligent and articulate. As Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times observed: 'Rock 'n' roll's foremost kook is not very kooky off stage. Cooper is an amusingly mild-mannered man who does not seem to be plagued, like so many rock superstars, with a bloated ego.'

School's Out marked the high point of Alice Cooper's career. It was a huge money-maker for Warner Brothers, ensuring that no expense was spared for the follow-up album and tour; Billion Dollar Babies (1973) featured lush production and extravagant packaging. Each album sleeve contained a large dummy billion-dollar bill decorated with missiles and troops; the cover was a snakeskin pattern, and the inner sleeve photo (taken by David Bailey) featured Alice in white satin, clutching a naked baby daubed with the characteristic Cooper eye makeup.

The album contained such track as 'Elected' — a dig at the presidential system — which was released as a single and made Number 4 in the UK in October 1972, and a nauseatingly tasteless hymn to necrophilia, 'I Love The Dead'. The show went on tour in the spring of 1973 with 600,000 dollars worth of stage and sound equipment, visiting 56 cities in 62 days and grossing five million dollars.

The stage show was slicker and sicker than anything Alice had previously attempted. Among the chosen delights he highlighted in song was the universal fear of the dentist, realized on stage by a pantomime confrontation between a giant decaying tooth and a spinning drill. For 'I Love The Dead', Alice dragged a mannequin on stage, crooning to it obscenely until the band dragged him off to a guillotine at which, under the watchful eye of a professional magician called the Amazing Randy, Alice was decapitated and realistically gory rubber head tossed among the players.

Surrealist artist Salvador Dali was so impressed with the Billion Dollar Babies tour that he proclaimed Alice 'an exponent of total confusion' and proposed to make a sculpture of the singer's brain. The result was a plastic surgical aid with a moulded chocolate eclair oozing from it.

With the growing popularity and affluence he had attracted, and the move into increasingly more gimmicky stage productions, Alice Cooper's appeal to the rock audience began to wane. Reveling in fame and relishing the irony of it all, Alice himself began to move more and more in the glamorous world of showbiz. He appeared on chatty-show, played golf with President Ford, and it seemed he was becoming part of the very establishment he attacked. The Cooper Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut was a rambling 40-room Hollywood fantasy mansion, with the singer himself had become a 17-million-dollar-a-year business, with Alice Whiplash mascara, deodorant and 'take A Bath With Alice' bubble bath on the market. In 1975 the man who had emptied rubbish bins on stage took part in a Clean Up New York campaign.

By 1975 Cooper had replaced his original band with musicians who had all played with Lou Reed — Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter (guitars), Prakash John (bass), Whitley Glan (drums) and Josef Chirowsky (keyboards). Welcome To My Nightmare (1975) and Alice Cooper Goes To Hell (1976) sold on the reputation of their predecessors, but the raw tastelessness of the Killer show had given way to a prolonged production of American High Gothic.

It has often been said that Alice Cooper was responsible for keeping the Budweiser beer company afloat during his golden years; large quantities of it certainly fuelled his manic stage performances, but eventually he found himself battling with alcoholism. During the later Seventies, Alice Cooper underwent drying-out treatment in a New York hospital and emerged to make a largely autobiographical album, From The Inside (1978). The lyrics for the LP were written by Elton John's long-time partner, Bernie Taupin, and the album featured Elton's backing musicians Davey Johnstone (guitar) and Dee Murray (bass), as well as backing vocals by Kiki Dee and Flo and Eddie.

Surgical aids

From The Inside may have been a more introspective venture, but Alice was still reveling in gimmickry. He renamed the Hollywood recording studio United Western Studios for the Insane and decorated it like a hospital ward, with oxygen tents and operating tables.

Alice Cooper never regained his position as King of Shock Rock, although he continued to tour regularly and make albums. His 1982 UK tour hardly caused a raised eyebrow, although he received an encouraging reception from the music press. His music has slipped into heavy-metal cliches, but he was still displaying his old preoccupation with sex and sadism, still attacking the establishment. Punk may have taken up the threads Alice Cooper left dangling in the mid Seventies and upstaged him somewhat by the Eighties, but he could still chill an audience with his sinister presence, clutching the British and American flags and hissing, unsmilingly: 'Britain and America — allies!' It is said that Malcolm McLaren discovered Johnny Rotten singing along to 'I'm Eighteen' on the jukebox at the Sex boutique in Chelsea — perhaps that is a fitting tribute to the legend of Alice Cooper

Shock Tactics

A new era of decadence saw rock take a walk on the wild side

DESPITE THE HIPPIES' best efforts for love and peace, an are of lush decay hung over the end of the Sixties and the early Seventies. From the Manson massacre and the killing at the Altamont pop Festival to the Vietnam War and Watergate, American youth witnessed its nation's decline into a creeping malaise interrupted by bouts of violence and paranoia.

Writers, artists, and especially rock musicians looked at America's fall — and to their own private lives of sex parties and drug deaths — and saw rich black comedy in it. The seamy side of American life in the late Sixties and produced the heroin nightmares of the Velvet Underground and the evil reptilian fantasies of the Doors. Neither group survived for long in the Seventies, however, and new heroes emerged to reflect and satirise the atmosphere of decay. The new groups, obsessed with themes of horror and sex, never formed a 'movement'. Showbiz stars like Alice Cooper, heavy metal caricaturists like Kiss and the deliberately trashy New York Dolls all had different roots, styles and ambitions.

Decadence may be defined as a decline in creative excellence, vitality and originality, but usually represents a period of transition from one style to another. If often takes refuge in morbid, neurotic, occult and horror themes, unconventional social behaviour, if feelings of decay and nostalgia for an age of innocence and youth. This fin-de-siècle flavour had existed in the nineteenth-century French literature of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine and also in turn-of-the-century England, when writer Oscar Wilde and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley scandalised Victorian society.

Similarly, rock music at the end of the Sixties was passing out of the classic era of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and of the American West Coast boom. In this period of artistic decline, as well as social decay, the rock decadents would take their walk on the wild side.

The ghoul can't help it

It was Alice Cooper who drew first blood. Early in the Seventies, Alice (real name Vincent Furnier) showed his commercial acumen in realising that rock music and horror could be harnessed in one sensational, shocking showbiz package. Dressed as a ghoul, he exploited all the macabre possibilities of madness, execution (by noose, electric chair, guillotine and axe) and necrophilia: 'I love the dead before they're cold/Their blueing flesh for me to hold', he sang on 1973's Billion Dollar Babies LP. Although he contended that it was all harmless fun, Alice took the opportunity his fame allowed him to have a go at the potentially more damaging sicknesses at the heart of America. And now and again he hit a nerve — his 1972 single 'Elected', a dig at 'honest' Presidential candidates, made the charts just a year before the Watergate crisis.

Cooper's Grand Guignol had been influenced by the Gothic horror of romantic literature and Thirties Hollywood — his terrifying hymn to madness, 'The Ballad Of Dwight Fry', was named after the little actor who had played the demented hunchback or vampire acolyte in the Universal films Frankenstein and Dracula (both 1931). This theme was next elaborated upon by two important rock films: the grotesque fantasy Phantom Of The Paradise (1974), based on the Gothic tale of The Phantom Of The Opera, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), based on Richard O'Brien's spoof horror musical The Rocky Horror Show. The latter told the story of Frank N. Furter, a transvestite and modern day Dr Frankenstein, and his attempts to build the perfect male sex object. Here, rolled into one, were the three most potent elements of decadent rock: horror, homosexuality and narcissism.

Although Little Richard had affected an androgynous image in the days of rock 'n' roll, the notion of camp had really been instilled into Sixties rock by Andy Warhol through his connection with the Velvet Underground and, later, his influence on David Bowie. Alone among English glam-rock stars, Bowie really seemed to understand the eroticism and sense of danger evoked when a man knowingly tries on the mannerisms, clothes and make-up of a woman. No matter how hard Marc Bolan and Sweet tried to be camp, they had none of Bowie's sophistication. Gary Glitter, however, succeeded as a rock 'n' roll Liberace, affecting surprise at his own besequinned theatrics, whole the early incarnation of Roxy Music used night-club sleaze to introduce their songs of romantic nostalgia. Fusing heavy-metal bombast with flagrant limp-wristedness, Queen came over as camp, upper-class poseurs, preening and pouting their way to success as singer Freddie Mercury's costumes became ever more risqué

Patently, all this was bogus — it was showbiz rather than genuine decadence. Back in America, however, camp was camper. Bette Midler began as 'The Divine Miss M', an over-the-top night-club queen, but found her biggest audience as a brash and vulgar rock comedienne, a Mae West for the Seventies. Then there was Jobriath, a fey, hyped-up pretty boy who was going to take the rock world by storm. He failed in his aim and ended up living in an artificial dome on tope of New York's notorious Chelsea Hotel — that last bastion of Sixties camp culture, home of The Chelsea Girls of Warhol's 1966 movie, and the crumbling edifice in which punk groupie Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death, allegedly by her Sex Pistol lover Sid Vicious.

Punk itself may have originated with the New York Dolls, perhaps the most decadent group of all. The Dolls were almost Rolling Stones clones, five naughty boys with long, rumpled hair, pouts and strutting behaviour. The New Musical Express wrote of them: 'Inveterate poseurs decked out in a glitzy tack of high heels, halter tops and too much mascara, the Dolls reintroduced musical incompetence, narcissistic flash and hyper energised, raw, basic rock 'n' roll to a scene stagnating in giant stadiums, self-parody and suffocating technology.'

Ravaged by drugs and drink (16-year-old drummer Billy Murcia died overdosing on pills and alcohol, bassist Arthur Kane ended up an alcoholic vagrant and two other band members were heroin addicts) and loathed by the rock industry, the Dolls fell apart in 1975, although there were later abortive revivals. Inspired by their example, their last manager Malcolm McLaren returned home to start the Sex Pistols. The Dolls were also a major influence on the early heavy-metal version of Japan, who began as self-conscious, cosmeticised would-be teen-glam heroes before shedding this image in favour of a cool, tailored inscrutability that matched the new graceful musical styled they had developed by 1979.

Punk in charge

When punk emerged in 1976, it adopted many aspects of decadent style, but rejected the high-camp glitter in favour of trashy, down-market chic. Richard Hell, another influence on McLaren, got together briefly with ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan in the Heartbreakers, a band that was to infest both the New York and London punk scenes with their rock'n'roll tributes to drugs. By 1976, too, Debbie Harry, a former Dolls camp-follower, had perfected her own brand of tackiness in groups like Pure Garbage and the Stilettoes, and Blondie were soon among America's premier punks. It was in England, however, that punk's adoption of fetishistic S-M styles — leather, rubber, bondage and Nazi regalia — grew out of the fashion for bin-liners and safety-pins of 1976 and 1977. In truth, this was less an immersion in decadence than an act of defiance and parody.

In 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan reflected the prevailing new attitudes in the US. Rock represented not decay but cosy, comfortable living. Act like Meatloaf, whose grandiose heavy rock had originally been old-fashioned Graveyard Gothic, and Seventies survivors Kiss, a futuristic heavy-metal fantasy, continued to trade on images of souped-up camp melodrama, but were only decadent in the sense that they were bloated and lazy in their attitudes. Arch-parodists the Tubes were never short of sick jokes; singer Fee Waybill, in leather jock-strap and executioner's mask, would delight in murdering the lovable cinema character ET on stage as his two scantily-clad girl assistants taunted him sexually — but once again, it was mere showbiz. Meanwhile, lewd transvestite parodist Wayne County had changed his sex and his name (to Jayne), but had faded from view along with punk.

In England, post-punk groups like Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children and Bauhaus offered some horrific visions, but their sense of evil was again largely theatrical. Sleaze, however, opened doors for camp electro-pop duo Soft Cell, whose notorious Sex Dwarf video, which featured an orgy of blood, butchery, bodies and raw meat, was an attempted (but heavy-handed) satire on the booming market in video 'nasties'. It is no surprise that one of Soft Cell's biggest American fans was Andy Warhol.

Graham Fuller

(Originally published by Orbis Publishing in 1983. There was also a printing of this magazine in 1985, with a differing contents page layout. An easy way to to tell the difference is from the cover -- the original issue is priced 75p, while the later edition was priced 90p. The contents inside appear to be the same).