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Teenage Fetish as American Dream

Several hours on the periphery of the life of Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper did not play at Woodstock. Considering that Ten Years After is still playin' "Goin' Home," Joe Cocker is dead and Sly can't ever seem to make it to work on time, Alice should be thankful. It would've been a good one, tho. Imagine the finale: while the band blasts behind him Alice boards a helicopter and proceeds to dogfight and blast an army copter out of the sky, then parachutes to the ground while singing "We Still Got A Long Way to Go" through a wireless mike. Needless to say, the crowd wouldn't have dug it. But that was almost four years ago and, well, let's say the climate of American youth has shifted slightly. After choking its system on organic food, it belched brown rice and ran for the nearest McDonald's. Kids realized that all the good vibes and alternate media in the world is not gonna change the basic fact of American life — that is, ya gotta eat. And to eat, you gotta have bread. And whether you're goin' to a health food store or McDonald's, you gotta have your General Motor to get there. And so here we are in 1973, "another year for me and you, another year with nothin' to do."

March 10th, 1973 finds Vincent whats-his-name, a/k/a Alice Cooper, sitting in a white room in the bowels of Philadelphia's Spectrum, one of the dozens of Madison Square Garden imitations that have popped out of the ground in every major American city in the past five years. Also in the room are the rest of the band, assorted female companions, enough booze for any two high school graduation parties, a large pile of dead animal flesh that is meant for human consumption, and The Amazing Randi, escape artist supreme, general charlatan and coincidentally, friend of your humble journaloid. Perhaps most interestingly of all, a color TV sits atop its travelling case. Now you wouldn't think that things would be so unexciting backstage at a big time rock and roll show that one would be tempted to see if there is anything good on, but this one was. Well, it wouldn't have mattered if Nixon had been goosing the remains of Checkers while explaining — with the use of diagrams — how he personally planted a TV camera in George McGovern's bathroom, nobody back here would've known about it. See, even a TV signal can't get through the tons of concrete amid which all this was going on. But that's ok, all they'd have to do is drag one of the two video projectors out of the private plane that Alice is travelling in and plop in one of the many cassettes on which are contained the entire TV adventures of George Burns and Gracie Allen and nobody would ever be bored. I guarantee it.

A few hours earlier this March 10th, 1973 finds Eric what-his-name, a/k/a Jack Daniels sitting on the aforementioned private plane, the fuselage of which is emblazoned in huge red letters ALICE COOPER and the tailfin of which bears a huger red $. Rumor has it that this is the same plane that the Stones used on their last American tour, but I can't get a straight answer on that one from anybody. (I wanna know if I may have shit on the same toilet as Micky.) Anyway, there I am with my fellow rock critics, and boy, what a lively bunch. R. Meltzer can't even think of anything outrageous to do. So there we sit as two young hippie-type stewardae pass out Alice T-shirts and Alice pillow cases (pillow cases???!!!) to everyone on this big class trip. And that's just what it seems like, a big weird class trip. Ya see, Alice isn't going to play the big Yapple 'till June, the last stop on the fifty-six city-plus tour. And New York being the center of the music business and therefore the music press, if the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then you gotta bring the Mohammeds to the mountain. And so one night they put nitrous oxide in the ventilation system at Max's and walked us all out to LaGuardia Airport. During the pre-boarding search they uncovered 43 handguns, 750 pounds of unidentifiable narcotic substances, 30 personal vibrators and a few bullwhips. But once on board everything went smoothly enough. I ventured up to the cabin to watch the world from the pilot's point of view, pretty neat. That is, until I heard the pilot say "Where the hell's the airport, over there on the left?" Well, he found it, and they loaded everybody on a bus or two. Everybody that is except me and Bob Cristgau, famed record grader, and Mr. Ren Grevatt, our teacher. Us they put in a taxi, 'cause the buses were full. The cab driver asked what the dollar sign on the side of the plane meant. Plucky Bob answered, "That's what Alice Cooper is all about." A-plus, Bob.

Well, by now everyone knows the truth. Alice Cooper isn't a homo, nor does he go about in his everyday existence committing heinous acts of violence against babies and helpless cripples. He's just a normal American kid like you and me who was born in or around Phoenix Arizona, by my guess sometime soon after Harry dropped the big one on Sonyland. And like you and me, the first thing he did upon crawling out of the womb was to turn on the TV to see if there was anything good on. Unlike you and me he was able to turn these countless hours spent in front of the tube warping his mind into one of the top grossing entertainment vehicles in America, and then the world, not to mention a killer rock and roll band.

Alice and the boys were high school chums who had nuthin' better to do than form a rock and roll band. After a while they realized that not only was it a lot of fun, but, man, you could get real rich and famous and get all those sharp chicks and drive snazzy cars. So they set out to make their fortunes playing rock 'n' roll. Thing is, Alice was probably a bit strange before he ever started watching TV and the combined result of natural and video-inspired idios was a rock band that was a bit much for public sensibilities. You've heard all the stories about killing chickens etc. And wait a minute!, why does that guy call himself Alice and dress and act like a queer? I got better things to do than watch some fag run around on stage! And so Alice Cooper had to wait for everybody else to get as weird as he was. It didn't take that long.

He also had to get a sound going that people would like to hear rather than the electronic wailings that drove so many people screaming for the door. The concept, ideas and skill were there, they just needed someone to organize it so your average kid in the streets could hear it. So Alice teamed up with one Bob "Boy Wonder" Ezrin, producer of the Guess Who's hits. Meanwhile, people were getting sicker. The government that promised to stop burning babies to prop up a corrupt dictatorship was still dropping burning vaseline on hospitals. Charlie Manson did his thing and the Stones threw a party in San Francisco and the vibes were so groovy that people were killing each other. And all this was on film so you could watch it — VietNam, Altamont, everything but the actual Tate murders (Polanski was in Europe, see.) And what the Beatles started by growing their hair over their collars and Jim Morrison paradoxically personified was spreading fast and far so that everyday it got harder and harder to simply tell who is a male and who is a female. So America had met Alice Cooper halfway and he met America more than halfway by releasing a single about being eighteen and confused. A star was born. Alice and his high school chums are rich as shit now. They've got a big mansion and they've only just begun. And they've come to think of themselves as Billion Dollar Babies, fortunate sons of the American Dream Machine who made it big by playing the game, albeit in a slightly bizarre way. And they're gonna enjoy it, you bet your bottom billion. And they are the ultimate in the American dream. A bunch of guys who've never had any other jobs since high school and have made it real big by acting out their teenage fantasies of sex, speed and violence. What a life. And you won't find any of that "I don't know how much I make, I never see it" rockstar bullshit here. Alice has a digital readout meter fashioned as a wristwatch. By pushing one button he can get a running figure of how much he is making second by second, by pushing another he gets a total. No kidding, I saw it! The Coop's come a long way from Tucson and he wants everyone to know it.

It's just about showtime in the city of Brotherly Love where 20,000 of Philly's finest youth have come to watch Alice Cooper have his head cut off. The Spectrum's press lounge is the site of a "press reception" where we are being kept until showtime. A small scale banquet is layed out under a wall-length mural depicting to the right a basketball game and to the left a hockey game. The two meet mid-court as if there had been some terrible scheduling mistake. I can just imagine the basketball team trying to dribble a puck so nobody would notice. I'm talking to one of our bus drivers, a fifty-ish black man of largish size. He says, "I'd like to get her autograph," meaning Alice's. So I chuckle like a sophisticated New Yorker and good-naturedly inform this knave that Alice Cooper is a man. "I know," he says, "I was jus' tellin' my buddy here that 80% of my wife and my friends are gay. And they come over all the time and spend the weekend and we never have any trouble." The sophisticated New Yorker almost chokes on his chicken. And then the Knave's buddy, the other bus driver, a white fellow of about the same age chimes in, "Yeah, this world's gotta change, it can't keep goin' the way it is." Me, I'm tryin' to figure out just what the hell is going on. Fortunately I don't have that much time to be confused by reality, it's time for the show to start and I wiggle out through the dense crowd of high school and junior high school kids to get as close to the stage as possible. I finally get as close as I'm gonna get, and just in time. The lights go out and the tension is building. A 14 year old girl next to me is having what must be her first orgasm in anticipation of Big Al's appearance. She's jumping up and down and generally making noises that are associated with, um, very personal relationships. And though she is standing right next to me I swear I am not touching her. It's as if the Invisible Man had turned sex maniac. Finally Alice comes out and she comes, and I'm thinking, what would her mother say?

The stage resembles a set from HuHabaloo or Shindig! with light-trimmed cages for the guitar players and several series of glowing stairs. Alice is dressed in white and belts into "Hello, Hurray," greeting the audience like old friends. Then they go into "Billion Dollar Babies," complete with a tape track of Donovan, just like on the record. Now I'd just gotten the record a few days before and was quite disappointed with it. And this band onstage was not the fantastic tight live group I'd seen a few times before. And what's this, there's another guitar player and a keyboard man somewhat hidden to the side? I wonder if all this good living has rotted their fingers or something. But soon enough they get things goin', though not quite as well as they have in the past. The stage show makes up for it. They run through some tunes and Alice does a few sleight of hand tricks that The Amazing Randi taught him, like producing a cane out of thin air, and it's real good. But the whole point of the show is the production numbers and so Alice begins "Unfinished Sweet," a song about going to the dentist. As they go into the part where the tooth is being drilled, Randi comes out dressed as a mad dentist with a huge conical drill strapped to his chest, covered with lights that beam out as it spins. It's the ultimate paranoic nitrous oxide bad trip of dentist fear, as Randi gleefully drills the entire length of Alice's prone body. He raises his fists and grimaces with sadistic pleasure as Alice squirms under this huge phallic symbol. Randi's great, and I'm thrilled to see this guy who I used to watch all the time on Wonderama and who I later befriended up there with the Coop doin' great rock theater. Then Randi exits and a large tooth begins to dance about the stage and Alice attacks it with a huge toothbrush. This is not only great rock theater, it's educational and all American. Brush your teeth or this maniac will fuck you with a drill and large teeth will attack you!

The next good 'un is "I Love the Dead." As Alice sings the refrain a black-shrouded Randi places his neck in a guillotine. He continues singing as Randi impatiently taps his fingers against the device. Then Shcwoomp!!! and off wit yer head, Al. The boys grab his fake body and carry it to center stage where they grovel over it like hungry humanoids. Then one of them gets the prize, man, the fuckin' head! He carries it across the stage by the hair and the others follow him into the darkness. Now it's encore time and they blast into "Under My Wheels," perhaps the epitome of the Alice Cooper sound and one of their best songs. Then it's encore time again and they've got it all planned out, these dudes. Alice comes strutting out as Kate Smith blasts over the P.A. singing "God Bless America." He carries a can which he flips and it becomes a huge American flag; he sticks it in a holder on the set and proudly salutes it, back arched. The other guys come out one by one carrying sparklers and stiffly saluting. Then they gather together for a Broadway curtain call, and the rest of the cast (Randi, Tooth, etc.) takes a bow. Some high school locker room goosing and they're off.

Weird. And the weird thing isn't Alice Cooper saluting the flag. The weird thing is, he means it.