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The Alice Cooper Machine

When You're a Freak, Every Day's Like Alice in Wonderland

What is an Alice Cooper?

If you're not into the Kook Kulture that is contemporary rock music today, it's doubtful that you'd know. Surely you would remember if you'd ever seen or experienced him/her/whatever in person as I did. Alice and his accomplices are more than a mere rock music group or collection of high-wired (and I do mean high and wired) musicians.

Alice Cooper is rock theater.

Alice Cooper is madness in action.

Alice Cooper will kill you.

I first learned of Alice almost three years ago. Although the group has been in existence for over seven years, they have only reached prominence recently. Like myself, Alice is from Detroit — although an Alice Cooper could never have survived in my old Detroit neighborhood.

He (let's refer to Alice as he until we're convinced differently) would have messed over until he'd have had the good sense to join a nunnery or move to a zip code with a more worldly, tolerant attitude. The suburbs of Detroit have never been regarded as cosmopolitan.

But then again, maybe not. Alice is not only outrageous but terribly ballsy. He'd have probably held his ground and force-fed the natives with some instant gay liberation. He ignores rudeness and returns insults in spades.

My introduction to Alice Cooper never quite came off. When I arrived at the auditorium, everyone was leaving — incensed and loaded for bear. The promoters had closed the show and I learned that Alice had thrown a watermelon at the audience and then provoked the already enraged crowd to storm the stage.

Naturally this was a little too much for an uninitiated audience who had bought tickets and seated themselves simply for ordinary, garden variety rock 'n roll music. Watermelon throwing, flagrant transvestism and obscene name-calling wasn't on the program. But then, how would you feel?

You're seated and out comes this guy wearing a black body-stocking sequins for eyes and walking like a precious drag queen. In the middle of the first number, he (he?) changes off stage to orange and black vinyl bell bottoms with a bra-like top.

The lighting dims, highlighting his super-long hair, and his lipstick seems to change color like a chameleon with each turn of the gels on the spots overhead.

From out of nowhere comes a whip that he cracks over the heads of the front row and he growls as though in sexual agony before producing a pregnant watermelon from an invisible table of props behind the booming speakers.

"What's he doing with that watermelon?" whispers the audience. Their comments mix with the deafening electronics of the band. Why's he holding that tomahawk? Oh, it's only a hammer. Look out, he's going to throw it? No! No &mdash he's going to beat the watermelon. Good! Thank God.

Kill the watermelon, the band hollers. Stomp on it! Alice swings the lethal hammer — hollering, stomping, killing the watermelon. The watermelon is hurting. It is spurting all over the stage, until...

Alice picks it up and began pelting the audience, sending a steady spray over the first ten rows of the orchestra. Hunk after hunk — messy, sloppy, slurpy, juicy.

The crowd goes wild, berserk.

"The first time I saw them, 2 ,000 people walked out on them. They were outrageous. Right then and there, I knew that I had to manage that band," recalls Sheb Gordon, who is only a marginal more sane.

"I mean they weren't just breaking their instruments or carrying on. They were creating theatre. And the whole thing was sexual. Pretty soon the freakiest people were interested in them. Even Salvador Dali approached me to do the cover for their next album."

Yes, Alice Cooper is finally catching on although their apprenticeship hasn't exactly been the stuff of storybook legends. Only now are the audiences becoming outrageous enough to tolerate their pranks. While ascending superstardom, Alice has seldom found a kind audience response for his chicken throwing or bizarre antics.

A return to his native Michigan only months ago resulted in a motorcycle gang rushing the stage and literally trying to kill them. "It was great," Alice recalls, "but we had to scram out of there. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be here now."

"People don't normally listen to us. We are a piece of kinetic art. We use crutches and brooms and inflatable toys the same way that Dali uses watches. Some people say we're political, others say we're sexual. To some we're art, to some we're just crummy musicians."

Not long ago they were just that — crummy musicians. What they did to music was almost as outrageous as their act. But the group has developed tremendously in the past two years. They've even logged several hits ("I'm Eighteen," "Caught in a Dream," "School's Out ") as evidence of their musical growth.

Now their unisex garb and bizarre performances earn them fees equally outrageous and the changing social mores no longer resist Alice's efforts to "challenge the conditioning of the audience." They seem to personify Marshall McLuhan's epigram: "Art is anything that you can get away with." And no one gets away with more than Alice Cooper.

The group seems particularly preoccupied with violence. They've been known to ax dolls to death onstage, wear straitjackets on stage and, in mock penance, execute Alice at the close of their act in a blinking electric chair or on a full-size gallows that is carried on stage.

Why? To hear them tell it, they want to purge the evil within the souls of their young fans. Albert Goldman, learned music critic of Life magazine (which is now dead itself) offers this rationale: "All of Alice Cooper's psychodramas turn on death. He imagines death, enjoys death, looks like death and courts death at the hands of some enraged motorcycle hoodlum.

"Even his big message about accepting our (the audience's) latent homosexuality may be a metaphor for death. What did Thomas Mann reveal in Death in Venice, if not the ironic fact that realizing all mankind's potential — the female as well as the male — may be just another way of destroying our identity and thus committing suicide." But however intellectual his reasons are, the almighty dollar is Alice's most logical motive.

"Violence and sex sell," he's admitted. "That's our appeal. The audience knows that I'm just parodying what they see every day on television." Maybe so, but television doesn't show chickens being thrown into studio audiences. Or live boa constrictors dangling from a band leader's shoulders and then working its way between the legs as if charmed by the crotch area with blatant phallic suggestions.

But, it's good business and Alice has his/her/whatever eye on the buck. He now owns a 40-room mansion in fashionable Greenwich, Connecticut, an elaborate apartment in New York's Greenwich Village and a fleet of automobiles as a result of four straight million selling albums.

However, Alice's preoccupation with money has now antagonized the U.S. Treasury Department. Seems he's up to his false eyelashes in trouble over his new album. The album art includes a photo insert with Alice cavorting in piles of real money. Seems the Treasury Department prohibits photos or illustrations of real money on printed material such as album covers, magazines or newspapers.

It's even brought the Secret Service into the act. According to a spokesman: "The Secret Service has determined that it is not in public interest to grant any special exemptions from the law which prohibits colored photographs of currency." Naturally Alice isn't about to let the Feds interrupt his good time. He's stood up to stronger opposition in the past. Try slinging watermelon at a bunch of sado-masochistic bikers and then staring them down with sequined eyes. The boy's all guts.

Last word had it that Alice is buying all of the Monopoly sets in town in case his managers can't persuade the government to change its mind. Yet somehow play money doesn't seem right for someone as real as Alice.

Surely Alice deserves an "A" for effort. With social convention throwing up obstacles at every turn in his mad excursion through life, he has good reason to be peeved. Yet he's not. Alice loves us. As the power of his second album states, the inscription scribbled over the ghoulish faces of the band: "Love it to death — Alice Cooper."

Love, death, who cares? Alice Cooper will kill you.