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The Dada Rockers

When the whole audience got up and walked out of Los Angeles's Cheetah while the Alice Cooper rock band was doing its thing last year, Alice, now a willowy, darkly mascaraed 21-year-old, was elated. He was hoping for just that response. "When I saw 2,000 people walk out on them," says his manager, Shep Gordon, "I knew I had to manage them. They exhibited the strongest negative force I'd ever seen." The Alice Cooper band, a flamboyant gang of guys in spangled, unisex garb, now gets from $1,500 to $3,000 an engagement. Outstanding musicians, they use their sexual hijinks to "break the conditioning of the audience," as Cooper explains. "People feel threatened by the sexual thing."

Cooper is one of the more notable specimens of what might be called 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. Another such example is Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, a California boy who roamed the streets singing his "original" songs about love, motherhood, insanity and murder to strangers for a dime. Fischer's unique style did not go unnoticed; he was booted out of high school for his weird behavior, and his mother twice committed him to mental institutions. Now he has a double-fold album out, "An Evening With Wild Man Fischer," which has won him critical acclaim and a growing underground rock following.

Don Van Vliet was so talented a sculptor at 13, he had already won a scholarship to study in Europe. But his parents thought artists were weirdos, so to get little Don away from the oddballs they moved from Glendale to Lancaster, Calif. — where Don met Frank Zappa, the freakiest rock bandsman in the U.S.A. As growling, groaning Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Don's group has made three well-received albums.

Outrageous: The fountainhead of dada rock is unquestionably Frank Zappa, whose legendary Mothers of Invention, recently disbanded, for five years freaked the rock scene with far-out, brilliant music, keenly vicious satire and outrageous appearance and behavior. Zappa and the new breed of musician he has influenced resemble the Dada movement of World War I days, which with madcap irreverence heaped broadside scorn on established art styles, pulling off satirical ploys and esthetic guerrilla assaults that might serve as Marshall McLuhan's inspirations for his epigram: "Art is anything you can get away with."

In the world of rock, however, the dada rockers are a serried bunch of subversives. Some seem like the subtler pop artists — say, Oldenburg or Warhol. There is the Bonzo Dog Band, an English group of former art students who mix hilarious music-hall parody with onstage cutups involving a wacky array of noisy props. "We avidly look forward to recording sessions so we can utilize some of our more effective musical techniques," says leader (and accomplished mimic) Vivian Stanshall, "such as pants being pressed and rabbits munching carrots. Now, that's music!"

Dada-rock records make you wonder if your phonograph isn't having a nervous breakdown. Lyrics sound as if they have been run through Père Ubu's debraining machine. Most of the music, when not straight sha-boom or schlock rock parody, sounds like the bombing of Dresden electronically bent, folded and spindled. As with the antics of the dadaists of old, the object is often to needle both audience and icon. "We turn on the goods and try to get them to rush the stage," says Alice Cooper, who in sequined costume hurls live squawking chickens at the audience, smashes instruments, clubs amplifiers. "A motorcycle gang rushed the stage in Michigan a few months ago and tried to kill us," recalls Alice, who has legally adopted the distaff name. "It was great but we felt we had to get outa there."

Uproarious: "It always surprises us," says Bonzo guitarist Neil Innes, "the crowds we attract to hear this dreadful rubbish." Their rubbish (actually sophisticated satire of wonderfully trashy music styles) sells briskly in England and has become popular here, especially hit singles such as "Mr. Apollo" or "Urban Spaceman." Two highly entertaining Bonzo albums ("Gorilla" and "Tadpoles") skewer a whole spectrum of pop trends — from Elvis and the Beach Boys ( "Piggy Bank Love") to the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" ("Wendy Wetlips stares from her grocery / Ignoring the drawering and awning her smile," intones the Bonzo spoof, "Ready-Mades"). Between the doo-dah doo-dahs and simulated soul screams, some uproarious musical one liners slip by — such as a tuba going progressively insane during a Dixieland number or the cacophony the band makes out of "The Sound of Music." "Our songs," says Innes, "are self-destruct paintings."

Digging the great names and solemnized styles is the touchstone of the dada rockers' music. Nothing is sacred to them, nothing escapes their mockery. Captain Beefheart, whose "Trout Mask Replica" combines hard blues with frenetic rock jazz pushed to its extremes, can make his cement-mixer voice and bedlamite band sound like the Jefferson Airplane in a crash dive or chill the blood with songs such as "Dachau Blues" or "Bills Corpse." His ribs are brutal. "The Beatles have never forgiven me for writing 'Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones' and neither has Mick Jagger," he laughs.

Anarchy: But the stocky, Vandyked captain leaves pointless parody behind in most of his wildly surreal bombardments of free-association lyrics, phantasmagoric imagery and the dazzling anarchy of searing instrumental work. "None of us in the band can read or write music," he says proudly. "Written music comes up as a controlled plan and I can't see it. I want to play as if I were a child. If there's a form, you can't possibly actually be playing."

Kim Fowley, another dada parodist, cruelly mimes the gloppy sentimentality of commercialized teenage romance. In such songs as "Ode to Sweet Sixteen" and "Search for a Teenage Woman," he backs caramel-sundae love lyrics with screams, funhouse guffaws and madhouse cackles. His music sticks pins in the Barbie Doll notions and emotions that clot today's teen psyche, while "I'm Not Young Anymore" is a grim reminder of what waits beyond adolescence. One band of his LP "Good Clean Fun" is Fowley doing a typical kid's trick, calling random telephone numbers and putting on strangers — but now it's elevated to a record album, the kind of derisive gesture inherent in Marcel Duchamp signing a urinal and entering it in a serious art show.

Provocative: Behind the dada façade lurks an often surprising social concern. Beefheart disregards other artists' musical intentions, but does fret over their messages. "What about the Beatles?" he says. "They tell kids to go out and do it in the road. And they glorify drugs. And what about that group, the MC5, telling kids to 'kick the jams out, baby'? What the hell kind of thing is that to tell kids? Some little girl hears that and runs out into the streets of Detroit or Chicago and gets her head beat in. That group has blood on its hands."

Even Zappa, who adopted his wild appearance and provocative ways largely in order to get his music across, says: "I was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. The first thing they asked me was what was going on at Berkeley. I was thinking to myself, 'What you guys want to copy that too? It's really depressing to sit in front of a large number of people and have them all be that stupid, all at once. And they're in college." About his music's audience he is even more outspoken: "I don't think the typical rock fan is smart enough to know he's being dumped on... These kids wouldn't know music if it came up and bit 'em on the ass."

"People don't normally listen to us," says Alice Cooper, whose band members are also former art students. "We are a piece of kinetic art. We use crutches and brooms and inflatable toys the same way Dali uses watches." Then, in what might stand as the whole dada-rock credo, he concludes with a shrug: "Some say we're political; some say we're sexual; others say we're art; and some say we're crummy musicians. But we're just saying we are what we are."