does my publicity and said, “Take off your blouse so I can get a shot of your tits with Alice Cooper.” She thought he was kidding. She gave him a wan smile and looked anxiously at me from under her blond bangs. The photographer grabbed her by the shoulders and ripped open her blouse. For a split second we were all so startled nobody could move. I took the cigar he gave me and shoved it into his open mouth. He bent over and sputtering and spitting pieces of tobacco, and I kicked him so hard in the behind he fell face first in the muddy runway.
Frankie was shocked! Nobody had ever seen me lift a pinky before! Frankie put his arm around me and said, “If I had to do that, champ, I would have murdered the guy.”
Our day was scheduled to end in Glasgow, Scotland, where the following morning I was supposed to represent the United States in the Glen Eagles Golf Tournament. I was so exhausted by the time we arrived at the Glen Eagles Country Club I didn’t even eat dinner, and when I woke the next morning it was raining and cold. I hadn’t even started touring yet and already I was beginning to fell like an opened can of dog food. I was paired with Tom Weiskopf for that morning’s game and I was really heartbroken when I had to cancel out. Golf is my passion. I think about playing golf all the time. That’s what Alice Cooper fantasizes about — not killing chickens. And representing the United States in a tournament like Glen Eagles was a great honor — more fun than getting a gold record, let me tell you. But I was too dragged out to make eighteen holes in the rain and sent my regrets. I went to meet Weiskopf at the eighteenth hole when it was over and chatted with David Foster and Christopher Lee for a while.
Then we rushed off to meet the AC-II, an F-27 Electra jet that the “Nightmare” touring party traveled on throughout the world. The AC-II was waiting for me in London and we took off immediately for Stockholm where my first show of the tour was scheduled for that night. Frankie was so excited that everything he did went wrong all day. He dropped ice on the floor and then slipped on it. He leaned on a chair, and it splintered under him. We were rushing to get to the concert and he used my shaving cream as his under-arm deodorant. He was so hassled he didn’t even laugh at first. Not until he rushed towards his bedroom with gobs of shaving cream under his arm and stepped barefoot into a used chef’s salad on the room service tray.
We performed at Tivoli Park that night and gave a great performance, as usual. Kids all over the world loved the “Nightmare” show, and it was a pleasure to do it for them. The entire cast and crew were tremendously hardworking people. Successfully transporting a Broadway rock show on the road with you all over the world is a small show business miracle all in itself. We were in rehearsals for four months in Los Angeles before we ever set foot on a stage and the final product shows the results.
It wasn’t even hard for me to get into the Alice attitude. It used to be grating, a difficult transformation, but now I just flip myself onto Automatic Pilot and out comes Alice, just like a Marvel comic book character. I choose nightmares as a concept because it was a universal theme — kids everywhere had bad dreams. Some people wake up screaming, Alice Cooper spends his nights that way. The show begins with Alice dressed in torn red leotards and black suspenders, asleep in a Gothic four-poster bed that rolls out towards the audience in foamy white clouds. For the next seventy minutes I lead the audience through a nocturnal world of bad dreams and good music. I battle life-sized black widow spiders who sting me on a twenty-foot web that’s pneumatically spun across the front of the stage. We put the Rockettes to shame with a chorus line of skeletons. I also do a ballet, and get attacked by nine- foot cyclops who rises from my toy chest and drags me around the stage until I do him in. The climax of the show — and you have to see it to believe it — begins with a movie of me in a misty cemetary. I wander among the tombstones, never noticing the monsters from the stage show lurk closely behind me on the screen. I came upon a huge neon tombstone with a frightening inscription, It says “Alice Cooper 1948-1975.” I smash at the neon and it splatters to pieces. I smash at it in slow motion, again and again. The monsters grab me and shove me kicking and screaming into a coffin where they nail on the lid and I burst out, out of the movie, off of the screen and onto the stage. I actually pop out of the film — an unbelievable effect — and all the nightmarish creatures follow me out onto the stage where we do a rock and roll Busby Berkeley dance number, jumping back and forth between the film and real life.
We brought the house down, and the next morning at the AC-II we learned that we broke the house record set by Paul McCartney; 18,000 kids!
Every plane flight we also get to hear the ball scores. Ball scores have nothing to do with sports, although there’s quite a lot of athletics involved. Dave Libert reads them over the PA at the start of each flight in his own inimitable way. Libert’s been the road manager for the Alice cooper organization for hundreds of years now, and touring wouldn’t be the same without him in any way, shape or form.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen and whoever else is up here with us,” Libert said, “fasten your seat belts and settle down for today’s ball scores!”
A cheer went up in the plane. People snapped Budweisers open. I raised my poker bet.
“We have a pervert of the year award to give away today. This goes to Easy Arnie. Easy Arnie managed to get a b.j. from a sixty-four-year-old chamdermaid ten minutes before he checked out of his hotel room. Take a bow, Arnie! What an animal, folks!
“And now for the ball scores. Last night there were 4 three-ways, 3 five-ways, 6 one-on-ones, and 2 one- ways with poor response. Once again, Jerry dated and fell in love with his own right hand last night.
“Quiet down in the peanut gallery, all you rock and rollers. I have a serious complaint here. Robin has been looking for her roommate for five days now. If Cheryl is anywhere on this tour, she hasn’t slept in her bed once. So if anybody of this birdy knows where she is, please report it to the nearest stewardess…”
It went on like that for twenty minutes every plane trip. There was nothing like the ball scores to start off a flight and put a smile on your face. Smiling is the key to touring. Smiling gets you along. We invaded the rest of Europe with a smile: Gothenburg (good wine there), Copenhagen (boring TV, beautiful women), Bremen (I opened the draps in my hotel in the morning, stark naked, and found myself five feet away from a factory where forty-five ladies where stitching at machines. They all waved), Boblingen, Ludwigshafeb, and then Vienna.
Vienna was interesting. First of all it was a fortuitous flight there; I won $600 at poker. Then, as I was leaving my hotel to go to the show, I met a guy who’s probably my biggest fan in the world [Our own Renfield by any chances? :-) ] I was on my way into the back of a white Mercedes limousine when an incredibly pathetic character stepped out of the shadows. He was hunchback, dressed in rags [I was right!]. His face was gray and grimy and I had no idea if he was young or old. He held up a photo album for me to see. I took it from him and opened it. It was filled with articles and photographs about Alice Cooper collected from all over the world and must have weighed five pounds.
“This is terrific,” I told him. “Thank you.”
He looked at me with great admiration and awe, but he was so terrified of meeting me he couldn’t even smile. I tried to talk to him but soon realized that the poor man was deaf and dumb, to boot. I swear I would have hugged him if I could have gotten my arm around him. I said, “C’mon, you’re with us,” and scooted him into the limousine.
I don’t think anybody could have had a better time than he did. He was at my side for the rest of the night and we even took him up on stage and let him watch the show from up there. He pumped my hand up and down when it was over and I stuck some marks into his pocket. Then he disappeared into the crowds.
Frankie and I rushed towards the rear door of the stage to leave the auditorium before the crush of people started outside, but it was already too late. There were at least five hundred kids waiting for me, standing in a clump around the limousine. We had to get out of the arena and into the car before the rest of the auditorium was let out. There were 16,000 very boisterous and happy kids about to leave that place and it wasn’t a good move to have to walk through them to get to the car. A wrinkled Viennese man with a big frown on his face stood guard at the door. He refused to unlock it for us. He wanted to count keys or people or something. We tried to explain that the crew and business people were still inside and they would handle the details. But the old man couldn’t understand a word of English. Every second we tried to make him understand the crowd outside got bigger by the hundreds. Finally Libert lifted him off the ground and the man’s little legs sup around like he was on a bicycle. Frankie broke down the door with his hand, and we made a dash for the limousine.
The kids had ripped my clothing but the time I got through the car door and Frankie came hurtling in behind me like he was blown into the car out of a cannon. We tried to slam the door behind us, but the kids kept sticking their arms inside. The car started to accelerate and Frankie’s traveling bag got tugged on just as the door slammed, trapping it outside the car. Riding out of the parking lot every last thing inside the bounced out onto the ground and the kids running after the car picked them up for souvenirs, including Frankie’s camera and watch.
“Oh Alice,” he moaned, “you won’t believe what those kids got.”
