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Alice Cooper

Dear Alice Cooper: "Eat Shit!"

Alice, I got to apologise for getting drunk and stoned when I came to interview you, but it's all your fault for being so nice to me. Now I got to write this letter and hope you answer it so I won't lose my job. I'm ripping off a bunch of stuff from the Warner Bros publicity garbage for your latest album "Love It To Death", what includes your American hit single, "I'm Eighteen."

It says your act has a lot of spontaneous theatre with an over hanging threat of danger.

Towards the end of your act people start to realize that it's not going to stay on stage. Five young men with long flowing hair, no moustaches or beards, wearing feminine clothes make up the band. You are a specimen of Third Generation Rock and Roll, of TV and moonwalks, or what some people might call Dada rock, a branch of the multifarious rock universe in which the element of esthetic and social satire which is basic to rock music in general is carried to its ultimate logical absurdity and another example of this is Wild Man Fischer and Captain Beefheart. At gigs you turn on the goods and try to get the audience to rush the stage and in Michigan you were so successful in your sequined costume hurling live chickens at the audience that a motor cycle gang rushed the stage and tried to kill you. In Detroit a black vinyl, bra-like top, wearing super-long girlish hair, heavy eye shadow and lipstick and backed by a band of four playing heavy heavy ear-shaking, arse moving rock. You killed a watermelon, attacking it with a hammer, jumping on it, stomping on it. Red hunk by red hunk, seed by seed, messy, sloppy, juicy. From a burlap sack you threw live pigeons, ducks, chickens at the audience and ripped pillows to shreds, feathers flying all over the stage.

In Chicago in front of ten thousand people, all of you dressed in shiny jumpsuits, you did a striptease, hanging your jumpsuits on a huge white cross in the centre of the stage, then wearing only leotards and black knicks you wound a huge snake around your neck and toyed with it. When that song ended a nurse led you offstage and you returned seconds later in a straitjacket to sing the electrifying "Ballad of Dwight Fry", a monology by an insane hospital inmate.

Then something tall, covered in a white sheet was wheeled in as the drummer started building up the beat. It turned out to be a dummy on a throne. You stabbed the dummy to death and deposed him. When you sat on the throne, flashes of light started coming from your head as you lifted up a huge chain watch and hypnotized the audience with its pendulum swing. When all was calm you twisted the audience's brain by madly waving a spotlight at them, then came the wind machines and the smoke machines and all crazy hell broke loose, finally a grocery cart was sacrificed to the audience who clearly wanted to see blood spilt.

Alice, I don't really understand any of this. You sound like five crazy musician lunatics. I want to tell all my friends to come and see you, Alice, but how can I guarantee you won't destroy their minds? Even Salvador Dali was so blown by your potential that he's expressed a desire that his "Geopoliticus Child" be used as a future Alice Cooper album sleeve. Frank Perry wrote you into his most recent tit flick, "Diary of a Mad Housewife."

You've been around for six years, Alice, so why are we only being warned about you now? I did hear something about Frank Zappa first recording you, but now I'm told you've moved back to gangster ridden Detroit and are being produced by Jack Richardson. "Love It To Death" is your third album, Alice, and I hope you make a few more. But like I said, all that seems left for you to do when you come to England in September is "Eat shit" on stage. The latest rumour in England is that the grandson of Jack the Ripper, having heard about you getting away with being so absurdly bloodthirsty and eating live chickens, has decided to go back into the family business in a big way. I can't promise you anything, but I might try and arrange a meeting.

Love, Jamie.

Our Lovely Jamie:

We are coming to England to destroy minds! We want people to come to our concerts, not just to get rid of their bread but to enjoy themselves and be prepared for anything! The rest of the guys, Neal Smith, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway and Glen Buxton are nuts; so I can't promise you they'll behave. Being a product of pop-art Amerika we find ourselves being as pop-art and camp as possible. Some people take music too seriously. Amerika is getting back into a Rock and Roll revolution where 10,000 kids are turning up at concerts and ripping out the seats and wetting their pants. They no longer throw jelly beans on the stage, but their own naked bodies. The less brave ones throw their training bras — hundreds of training bras littering the stage. I once picked one up and put it on backwards and it fitted real well. That's our audience. Younger girls. I find you can influence them more easily than the college educated intellectual who sits back at our gigs and says, "Oh, you know — it's art! You know — ART." I hate intellectuals.

Our music is completely organised but the theatrics are 60% contrived and 40% whatever happens. We know when we are going to use the boa constrictor, the throne, the straitjacket, the twelve foot flapping wings, the cross and the electric chair. At the end of the show everyone is so relieved when I cover them in feathers it's like a gigantic snowstorm — an orgasm — they just sit back and sigh and have to admit they enjoy it, even if they didn't particularly like us. Sometimes it does get out of hand, when an incredible negative force suddenly appears and the wail in the audience gets so intense too damn fast. Then anything can happen! The number with the straitjacket is where I try to calm people down because the next one is the real Godzilla of the set.

I hope you liked the Alice Cooper T-shirt and other gimmicks I gave you. I just love gimmicks. We're the most gimmicky group in the world. We sit around all day in our pad in Detroit thinking up more and more gimmicks we can use. Even down to fortune cookies that say "drop dead" and "off the pigs"!

I'm seriously considering living in Britain, I mean it's so peaceful! The police are so undangerous! In LA where we lived for a while, they mace and club you to death or jail you for life on the slightest pretext. I get the feeling that someone is out to shoot me or stab me, I'm always looking over my shoulder to see who the maniac behind me is. Pigs in the US are getting like the gestapo. Marching down the street in armed formation, high stepping with their jackboots. They've even got listening devices they use now when they pull up alongside your car, just to pick up on your conversation. LA's the most police dominated state in the world. They're building cop cars with machine gun turrets on them. It's getting so military it's scary. The pigs are even more gimmicky than we are. They got at least a dozen little gimmicks that do nothing but kill people.

Living in Detroit is quite exciting. It's got the highest killing rate of any city in the US. People and pigs getting killed every day. We even have machine gun gang wars just like the olden days when over the weekend one gang will wipe out another! It's very photogenic. We just sit back and relax in front of our TV laying bets on who's going to kill who this weekend.

There are so many crooks around! We played this gig in New Jersey with John Mayall for a guy called Lucky Luicianno, and when it comes time to get paid he says, "Pay? Who's talking about money, this is for fun!" He was done up like Frank Nitty, in a pin-stripe suit and a bulge in his pocket, and he says to his boys, "In fact, they're going to play again for fun." We said no and he told his boys to lean on us a little. That was it — we played. We met Colonel Sanders on a plane from New York to LA. We wanted him to sponsor us with the whole bit, you know, chickens and white suit. I mean we use a lot of chickens though we got to get one point straight. I don't do the chickens in. I throw them out into the audience who rip them apart, like a wild beast. Anyway, this old Colonel and his wife were on the plane and we find out he's a paid actor who retired in Kentucky and is on to a good gig. Can you beat that? In good old plastic USA even Colonel Saunders is a phoney! I mean, he hates chickens!

I don't like English television. In Detroit I watch TV at least eight or nine hours a day. I go nuts when nothing good's on. And over here they don't have none of them late night movies! I mean how am I going to survive! I'm a product of that box and I'm lost without it. There also didn't seem to be too much of a dope thing in England. Can't the people afford to stay high? In Detroit you just got to go out into the street to find your dope, it's in the gutters all over the place, but you have to be careful if you don't know what the pills you find are. They could be anything. One real cheap way to get high is hyperventilation, breathing twenty times in the space it normally takes you to breathe once, or you could hold your nose and close your mouth until your eyes begin to pop and you see stars — a very good high!

A lot of people in the States are into drinking now, being real slippy walking round with bottles of whisky in their back pockets. The only other group I can think of who attack the audience and get the beast enraged and moving is the Stooges. Iggy just destroys the audience. He spits on em, picks a fight, once he got knocked out and the band just kept on playing until he came round and got into singing again. I like doing things like grabbing girls' feet and spitting on them real slow so it dribbles down them and they freak and faint.

I apologize for being so stoned and misleading you. I hope this letter does the trick, I mean you should illustrate it with lots of cocks and tit and ass and cunt photos, cause that's what rock and roll and Alice Cooper is about. Smoke dope, listen to "Love It To Death" and fuck, fuck fuck!

Love, Alice Cooper (all of us)

PS I just remembered that the authorities sometimes get hung up when we use chickens, like in Canada we could use them but they had to be Canadian chickens so when we come to England I suppose they'll have to be English chickens. I hope they're as friendly as the Amerikan ones! As for "eating shit' — I mean, in the space age, anything's possible!

(Originally published in the UK publication, International Times (IT), June 16 - 30, 1971; #106)