accomplish.
I told him I wanted to put an audience in a concert hall, bolt and lock the dorrs, shut the lights and shock them with electricity, lower the spiders on them, surround the audience with speakers blasting my voice and plant accomplices in the audience to have heart attacks and fits.
Then, when everything was the most intense, you let monkey semen out of the ventilation system. I told him that I had read somewhere that the smell of monkey semen makes people horny.
Then you blind everyone with the flash of quartz lamps. At that point you suggest an action. For instance, “fuck” or “dance.” Mass hypnotism.
My eyes were wide and I had really gotten myself off on the fantasy. The letter he wrote said I was a homocidal transvestite capable of mass murder. A megalomaniac. He sent it to the draft board and Mr. Buckley. I have a copy framed, hanging in my bathroom of my house in LA.
Curing this Phoenix interlude we spent days trying to figure out a new name for the band. The Nazz, it turned out, was already taken. This time we wanted a distinctive name, something that would draw attention to us but not a rock cliche. One boring January evening I said, “How about Alice Cooper?” and everybody said, “No, that’s ridiculous.” About half an hour later Dick Christian said, “What about that name, Alice Cooper?” But nobody even wanted to discuss it. I thought it was perfect. It was so American and so eerie at the same time. It had the same ring to it that Lizzy Borden did. I knew that if there was really an Alice Cooper somewhere chances were she was an ax murderer.
We forgot about it for a few days until Dick Christain dragged us all over to Alice Paxton’s house. Both Charlie Carnal and Dick were friendly with Mrs. Paxton’s daughter, who claimed her mother was a clairvoyant and could help us solve our problems. Alice Paxton also had her Ouija board, which she hadn’t used in a few years, and we started asking it questions. I wasn’t even working the board when we asked if there was a spirit in the room. There was.
The board spelled out the name Alice Cooper.
For three hours everyone drilled the board on Alice Cooper, and we came up with the following story (with a few additional details added by me over the course of some five thousand interviews):
In the early sixteen hundreds scientists and occultists became aware of a celectrial disturbance which seemed to have a strange concentrated effect on the British Isles. There was an odd feeling of unrest and suspicion in the countryside. In the midst of this general feeling of alarm, on February 4 (my birthday), 1623 (not my birthday), in Sussex, England, Alice Cooper was born.
She was the daughter of well-to-do parents and a very strange child. She seemed always to be listening to voices that no one else could hear, often smiling secretly as if she knew the answer to some cosmic joke.
Much of Alice’s time was taken up with her sister Christine, who was three years older than she. Christine taught her magic, including the use of strange plants that grew in abunance in the forest, and the techniques of speaking ancient words of old that could make thunder roll and fire burn. On Alice’s twelfth birthday her parents died in a mysterious fire, their charred bobies never recovered from the blazing house. One year later little Alice was to witness the death of her sister, Christine, who was accused of being a witch and burned at the stake by the villagers.
A week later little Alice herself was dead, poisoned perhaps by her own hand so she could join her sister Christine in the other world. She was only thirteen years old. Pretty good, huh? Well, it really worked at the time.
I was thrilled with the name, but Neal Smith was disgusted. He finally thought he had gotten into a group that was going to go somewhere, do something important, get him a Rolls-Royce and a mansion in the country and now we were changing our name to something stupid like Alice Cooper!
I couldn’t blame Neal for worrying. He was in a terrible spot. He was broke, his family had moved out of Phoenix, and the draft board was after him. All the rest of us had the draft board under control at the time, but Neal was a perfect specimen. He couldn’t even get drunk enough to pass out at his physical.
The same night we got the information from the Ouija board, Neal and I drove out to the desert in a borrowed car. There were two .22-caliber rifles in the trunk, and we were going to shoot jackrabbits. We would drive around the desert, blind them with the car headlights, and pick them off.
Neal took a shot at one from the hood of the car, thought he had hit it and swung his long legs around just as I pulled off my own shot. There was a thumping sound, and he fell on the ground. He scrambled around in front of the headlights and pulled off his boots. I had shot him in the ankle.
He was deliriously happy. We went straight to a hospital where they examined him, and he filled out all sorts of reports for the doctors and police and told everyone that he had shot himself in the foot. The police told him, “The next time you shoot yourself, shoot yourself in the fucking head.” He was classified 4F and didn’t even complain much about the cast he had to wear for two months. The bullet is lodged in his right anklebone, and, contrary to rumor, it never improved his playing. We spent two months in Phoenix scraping together enough money to last us another stretch in Los Angeles. My hair and my stage costumes weren’t as popular with Arizonians as they were in LA. I began to stop in Salvation Army stores, and because I was so skinny and narrow-shouldered I found that little girls’ dresses fitted me best around the top. I started to wear them over a pair of jeans like a tunic. Dick decided it was time to get my blond lock permanented so my image would fit my new name, and I agreed. By the time Dick was finished giving me a home permanent I looked like a concentration camp version of a white Jimi Hendrix.
My mother had gone to Tennessee during all this for her father’s funeral, and when she returned home to Phoenix, Dick and I were sitting in the house. I was in a pink suit with my hair blond and frizzed out and when I said,” Mom! I changed my name to Alice!” I thought she would faint. She blamed everything on Dick. She still does, including Watergate and Vietnam.
By March of 1968 we were getting morose staying in Phoenix, and we knew we had to make it back to Los Angeles and work out the new image. We were going to have a new sound too, out of necessity. Neal Smith might have sounded great on his snare drum, but when it came to playing English blues, he was awful. All that he could do was try to rearrange the sound somehow and begin to play original music.
We bought a small van for two hundred dollars, loaded the equipmnet on the Thursday night before Good Friday, and set out for LA. Mike Allen drove, Dick sat in the middle, and I fell asleep on the passenger side while the rest of the group, including Neal with a cast on his leg from his gun wound, rode in the back on top of a pile of equipment.
By seven in the morning we had reached the LA freeways and rush hour. Mike was changing lanes when the equipment began to shift inside the van, dipping it over the right side. I woke up when I heard the breaks screeching, but before any of us could move we began to tumble, head-on, as if the van had tripped over something. The glass in the windshield splattered, and I remember seeing the cement of the freeway come hurtling through the window and the sound of metal scraping across concrete and the van tunmbling, and Mike Allen falling out of the glassless windshiled. There was a blast of horns honking and then I passed out.
When I woke up two police cars and an ambulance were by the side of the road, and a policeman was holding up the back of my head asking me what my name was. I told him I was Alice Cooper.
We were all unconscious for about fifteen minutes, then one by one we began to come to shivering and vomiting from shock. None of us was badly hurt (Neal’s cast had actually saved his foot from getting crushed, and Dick had a gash across his forehead that took eighteen stitches to close up) but the van and most of the equipment were wrecked. Later that night lying in the darkness on the floor in some cheap motel in Hollywood, Dick made a confession. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think I died,” he whispered.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Neal yelled from the other side of the room. “Is this another one of your crazy faggot ideas for the Alice Cooper band?”
“No, I’m serious,” Dick insisted. “When I passed out in the van I had a strange sensation, like my spirit leaving my body.”
Glen was making “woooo” noises of ghosts, but Dick went right on, insisting that his spirit rose above the freeway, and he could see the van laying on its side and other spirits rising up from the cement. He hovered at a certain height, waiting for them to join him, knowing they were friends, when something started to push him back down. He didn’t want to go back down though. He felt free, movable, released. But there was pressure, something literally pushing. Then he woke up.
Although I didn’t tell the other guys until later, when it came out in an interview, I had experienced the same
