When I put them on I found the necklace. I thought she jilted me. I thought she was returning the necklace and never wanted to see me again. I was insanely heartbroken. When the time came to go on stage I did the wildest, most frustrated show I ever put on. I weaved and drooled around the stage like a madman and actually wept when I sang “Nobody Likes Me.” Out in the audience Cindy was having some second thoughts about me. Who was this animal on the stage? she thought. Which was the real Alice? We had been together three weeks and I still undressed under the sheets with the lights off; the Alice on stage was a brash maniac.
Yet she understood me, this strange skinny singer in makeup who kep a coffee can next to the bed to throw up into during the night. Cindy stuck. She stuck through that summer when we shared a can of tuna fish between us as our daily food, and she stuck for a good long time after.
Cindy said she wasn’t much impressed that I’m a rock musician. It never mattered, rich or poor, who I was or what I did. She says I make her laugh.
I’ll never marry. There are three things I have absolutely no use for:
marriage, funerals and underwear. Marriage is an insult. Does getting that official piece of paper mean you love somebody more? Why does anybody need the state or government involved in their love life? It’s almost as stupid as funerals. Why would you want to see somebody you loved dead? So Cindy and I set up our own rules and ethics, and our relationship lasted and weathered six years of stress and travel that would have easily destroyed a relationship bound by document.
She and Joey were involved in all sorts of crazy schemes to get the bills paid, but their greatest coup was Ziggy. Ziggy was a Toronto travel agent Shep had met while trying to establish a community of artists and writers in Canada. Ziggy was a wizened Jewish man who didn’t know or care much about rock and roll except that rock bands made a lot of money. Shep had convinced Ziggy he could be partner to the millions that would start pouring in any day in return for airline tickets. Ziggy became our angel, and on his wings and tickets we were able to fly all over the U.S. If we were offered a gig in Seattle for $1,000 we would use $2,000 worth of airline tickets from Ziggy and keep the grand to live on. We were picking up a following in Detroit, however, and we always went back to the Franklin Avenue hotels like they were home.
We moved slowly down the street, stiffing more and more hotels. We laid in the hotels for a week or two and then flew out to do a gig somewhere. Eugene, Oregon, $1,400, Vancouver, B.C., $2,500, Flint, Michigan. We shuttled back and forth between places, blindly using the Zorro system of gigging, slashing aimlessly through the country wherever there was a stage for us to play. Shep was working with two booking agents now, juggling us and hiding the existence of one agent from the other. Leo Fenn, who booked out of the DMA Agency in Detroit, got us a bunch of little jobs around the midwest. Alan Strahl in New York was handling the bigger gigs
As the days went by we got drunker and drunker, more exhausted from being in airplanes and cars. The more we played the worse our reputation got. If we were liked in one city the concert promoter in that state wouldn’t want to book us because the word was out we were berserk fags.
I got to see America and all the little towns that cover its backside like hair. I sat shoulder to shoulder with Dennis, Mike, Neal, Glen, Charlie Carnal and Mike Allen for months. I knew who chewed the loudest, who farted the worst, and who snored. Who got to eat the last half of a tuna fish sandwich became a matter of life and death.
By the end of the summer the Hotel Owners Association called a meeting about us, and one morning in August they chained our van full of equipment to a streetlamp. Shep got the van back by settling our bills for ten percent of our next imaginary album and $10,000 in bad checks. Things couldn’t have looked more bleak. We covered every outdoor festival in the nation, and with winter coming rock was moving in-doors, and it didn’t look like we could hang on much longer. Shep went to California on a Ziggy plane ticket and tried to convince Frank Zappa to begin work on our second album, but Zappa wasn’t too excited about it. There was a bad break between us and Zappa. Growing animosity and disappointment. There was no support at all from his record company and no distribution from Warner Brothers. Alice Cooper was a joke to Zappa. We had always been Alice Cookies to him, and the joke wasn’t funny anymore.
We stuck it out till mid-September when we were going up to Toronto to play one last outdoor festival before returning to Los Angeles either to record another album or disband. Cindy wanted to go to Toronto with me as a farewell trip. She was going back to school in the fall, and we’d be separated for whatever time fate had in store for us.
Cindy, by the way, had been dating a guy named Steven Hollander for the past two years and was having her share of problems with him. Steven had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was fourteen years old. The last hospitalization had been for drug abuse, which translated into real language means he ate two dozen psylocybin mushrooms for a snack one day and flipped out. Cindy introduced me to him and, although he wasn’t aware I was seeing her, he was hostile and tense, the kind of person you know is potentially dangerous.
When he found out I was dating Cindy I began to get threatening phone calls. All his messages were on the order of, “If you see Cindy one more time it’s death!” Instead of getting hardened to them I got more frightened all the time. As summer went on stories about Steven kept filtering back to me that developed a little ball of fear in my beer belly, a ball that grew to the size of a football by the end of the summer. Steven had burned down a building with two people in it and they were looking for him everywhere. Steven’s dog had puppies and Steven had mutilated them. Steven took too much LSD and was in the state mental hospital again where he knifed an aide.
One night I said to Cindy, “I can’t believe you went out with this guy. What a weirdo!” and she laughed for an hour. I guess Alice Cooper didn’t seem like a much better bargain on the surface.
Just as Cindy and I were leaving for Toronto she called him from my hotel and told him she was in love with me and was going off with me to Toronto and never wanted to see him again. It was all very dramatic and final and we were asking for trouble. Steven went berserk. He said he’d kill me and Cindy and both our families and we’d never make it out of Detroit alive.
With a Ziggy plane ticket gripped tightly in our hands we rushed out to the airport with the rest of the group and landed safely in Toronto two hours later. We checked into a hotel (Cindy and I shared a room with Glen) and forgot all about Steven, probably because the hotel had a television, a rare and beautiful luxury in those days.
The next night at the festival the problem with the chickens started. To this day I still have observers from the ASPCA turn up at my concerts to shake fingers at me because of the myth that’s been perpetrated about that night. I want to say right here and now that I’ve never killed a chicken on stage. Well, not purposely anyway.
A lot of the legendary chicken killing has to do with feathers. Feathers were a very helpful and cheap prop. If I broke open a pillow on stage it looked big and explosive, something the audience could see all over the theater. Mike Bruce would spray the feathers all over the audience with a stolen fire extinguisher, and when the feathers covered the audience they actually become part of the show. I felt that kind of audience contact was important, and I had already been using feathers and fire extinguishers for a year when the chicken scandal started.
At that Toronto concert somebody handed me a chicken from the audience. I thought chickens could fly. Really. It had wings, and birds fly. Now I ask you, how many chickens do you think I came across growing up in trailers in Detroit and Phoenix? The only chickens I ever saw were on a plate. So when this chicken was handed to me at the finale of the show, I held it tightly so it wouldn’t fly away. The pillow was broken and feathers were already flying out over the audience. I held the chicken out to the audience and threw it up in the air, expecting it to soar off above the stadium and fly away like a dove. Instead it screamed and squawked and did a nose dive into the audience. Twenty or thirty hands went up to catch it.
Some kid grabbed a wing and another person got a leg and suddenly the kids were pulling it apart, much to the bird’s dismay. One wing ripped off and blood began to spray all over everyone, then another wing and the head went sailing up in the air. A thousand flashbulbs went off in the audience.
The next day word spread throughout the rock business that I had killed a chicken on stage and drank the blood for an encore. Alan Strahl, who had booked the date, got a dozen calls in New York. Everybody wanted to know if it was true. Alan called Shep and begged him to say it wasn’t so, that I wasn’t killing chickens now, that we weren’t only fags but chicken-killing fags on top of it.
That night after the show I was exhausted. I went back to the room with Cindy and Glen and the phone rang. Cindy picked it up, screamed like Bette Davis, and slammed it down. She said Steven was in the lobby. Or something like that. She was too shocked to remember the exact words, but Steven was here in Toronto and he said he was coming up to kill us.
I panicked. The first thing I did was send Glen out to get two bottles of gin. A half hour later we were good and drunk. We pooled our money, about fourteen dollars, and decided to buy a gun.
Glen knew the name of a motorcycle bar, and we locked Cindy in the hotel room, got the address of the bar
