You wouldn’t believe the headlines the next day: ALICE COOPER DRENCHES CRIPPLES WITH WATERMELONS — HELPLESS AUDIENCE ABUSED BY ROCK STAR. I felt awful!Talk about embarrassing experiences! So help me, when I got handed that crutch I had no idea the front five rows were all paraplegics and amputees. But here’s how fucked-up everybody is after the chicken killing, the promoters turned their backs on us, but with the added press of abusing cripples so many people were curious about us that we started getting bookings. Not many, of course, but at least one $1,500 gig a month, which was enough to feed us and keep us on the road. Coincidentally, our popularity centered around Detroit where the hard-assed Michigan kids were into driving, high energy rock and roll, and Shep gave us the go-ahead to find us a house. That’s how we wound up in Pontiac, with one job a month and plenty of time to spend on the farm rehearsing.
The house was a gangling amoeba of rooms and anterooms and closets inside of closets. There was a screened-in porch the width of the house and a staircase with a banister made from a white picket fence. And there were two — count ‘em — two bathrooms with showers that trickled drops of water on you when you were lucky enough to find them unoccupied or the well hadn’t run dry.
Neal, who always had an emergency cash fund, begrudgingly loaned me fifty dollars so Cindy and I could go to the Salvation Army and buy a bedroom ensemble of a stained mattress and three yellow sheets. Glen moved into the living room and painted the windows black. Within a month there was a stack of dirty dishes and rotting food in the kitchen, which remained that way for eighteen months. In the dining room where we ate and socialized around an old oak table we kept a pet monkey in a cage. The poor little monkey was constantly horny and whenever it got loose it went after Neal’s sister, Cindy Smith, with a hot vengeance, latched onto her hair, bit her head and humped the hell out of her back. I’d hear screams for help from the dining room, but all we did was yell back at her, “Cindy’s got a monkey on her backl” as she rushed around begging us to help her. Just to make the household complete, we kept a pet raccoon named Rocky, who we unanimously disliked, who unanimously disliked us. He’d prove it, too, by bringing his shit into the house to throw at us.
Shep and Joey had taken a leave of absence from the group. They were off hustling ideas to make some cash to pay off our tremendous debt and keep us on the road. In the interim we were being supervised by Leo Fenn, who was Shep and Joey’s temporary partner. We felt abandoned, but we couldn’t blame them for wanting to be involved with other projects that promised to be more profitable than the band. Frank Zappa seemed to feel the same way about us. Our relationship with him had completely disintegrated. On top of that he sold his record company to its distributor, Warner Brothers, and they weren’t thrilled about having us on their label at the time. They said there was a slim possibility they would back us in recording a single if we could find the right producer.
We had been looking for the right producer all along. It was clear that a hit song was the only way we’d ever make it. David Briggs, who did Easy Action, was an excellent producer for a group who knew what they were doing in the first place. We needed a producer who would teach us how to make an album, someone who was talented and perceptive enough to make our sound commercial. It was no easy job to be sure. The stage show, we agreed, could stay as crazy as we wanted, as long as the music sold.
In late September of 1970 Shep was wandering through the streets of Yorkville in Toronto when he came across the Nimbus 9 Studios, Jack Richardson’s production house and a well-known Canadian hit factory. Richardson had produced several smash albums, including a national number one single by the Guess Who, “American Woman.” Shep walked in and asked for an audience with Richardson, but it was impossible to see him. In order to reach Richardson you had to work your way up a long line of assistants, foils and flunkies. Shep told Leo Fenn to get in touch with Richardson, no matter what. It wasn’t that Richardson was the only producer in the world, he was the last producer who hadn’t turned us down. So Leo Fenn started on the obstacle course to get to Richardson, beginning with his lowliest assistant, a nineteen-year-old Jewish hippie named Bob Ezrin. Ezrin was the opposite of everything we were. He wore blue work shirts and love beads and had shoulder-length brown hair. Leo Fenn sent Ezrin a copy of Easy Action and he hated it. This bright, sensitive boy with a classical music background played twenty seconds of each cut and told Richardson we were rank amateurs and the albums wasn’t worth the ten cents of vinyl it was cut on. Leo Fenn had heard all that before. He begged Ezrin to see us in person. It was the key — supposedly — to understanding our music. After literally hundreds of phone calls Leo wore Ezrin down, and he finally agreed to at least meet the members of the group at the Skyline Hotel, where we stayed the night after I dumped watermelon on the cripples.
He walked into our hotel room and I saw panic on his face, as if he had just opened a surprise package and found a box full of maggots. Not only was it bad enough we were lousy musicians, but we were gay too! I was wearing skintight pants with seductive splits up the side and when I saw Ezrin look away in disgust I goaded him by asking him if he liked the belt I was wearing, a three-year-old painted leather strap, curled over from rain and perspiration. I thought he would vomit. Talk about bad first impressions, wait until he told Richardson what we were really like!
It really didn’t matter to Leo Fenn what Ezrin told Richardson. Leo wouldn’t let him alone. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not for a minute. The phone calls continued to come into Nimbus 9 by the hundreds.
Ezrin: “No. Jack Richardson is not interested. No body is interested. I told you yesterday, Leo. Please stop calling here. It’s no dice.”
Leo: “But just come and see them in person. See them do one live show. That’s all I’m asking you. One live show. What can you tell from meeting them in a hotel room? If you see them live you’ll understand what they re getting at.”
Ezrin: “I heard all about the chickens and watermelon and it’s just not good enough. Chickens and watermelon can’t be put on an album. They just don’t have the sound or talent.”
It went on that way right through the rest of the summer and fall of 1970. We played twelve dates in the midwest in September, which included the last of the outdoor festivals, before the season was over. In October Shep booked us into Max’s Kansas City in New York to see if there was a producer or a record company — anybody at all — who was interested in us.
Max’s Kansas City is gone now. And it’s good and it’s a shame. In its last few years it turned into a depressing glitter groupie hangout, filled with everybody who had the carfare from Brooklyn. But years ago, in the late sixties and early seventies, it was a haven of decadence, of the unreal, theater of the absurd becoming life of the absurd. At the time the infamous back room at Max’s was restricted: freaks only. Mickey Ruskin, who owned Max’s, didn’t care if the place was empty. If you weren’t hip enough to belong there, you had to sit up front with the tourists. It was the Algonquin of its day.
This was a topsy-turvy world where drag queens and leather boys were held in esteem. There was no other single place that you could be accepted, even lauded, for being different. To the people in Max’s being different was a creative effort all in itself. Bob Ezrin, who was trying to give Leo Fenn the slip every day, was in New York on business the night we played Max’s. He dropped in there on his way home from Hair (which Ezrin thought was progressive theater at the time). I looked very rodentlike that night. My hair was unwashed and stringy. I wore enormous high heels and thick black mascara. I carried on no end. I shredded newspaper and spit at the audience and rubbed my crotch and smelled my hands. Fifteen minutes into the set a policeman rushed into the club. That was unheard of at Max’s. The police coming in! With all the strange things that had happened there nobody ever got the police there! He had received a complaint about the noise and had come by, politely enough, to ask us to turn down the volume. When he got there and saw me sashaying around the stage spitting at people and rubbing myself he thought the show ought to be stopped. The cop pushed his way down the middle of the room, asking people to stand up so he could get by. Leo followed him shouting, “You have no right to stop this show! This show is not obscene! Stay off the stage!”
Nothing more perfect could have happened. Not even if the cop had been hired. Maybe he was.
Ezrin was vibrating in the audience. He didn’t know what he felt. He saw us as a walking identity crisis. All the sexual ambiguity that was beginning to peak in the seventies, all the confusion and pain. We were powerful and we were weak. He was frightened and attracted. It was dangerous, and it was exhilarating. We were all the mixed-up, terrible things that this bright, middle-class boy was feeling himself, what millions of teenagers were feeling, a confusion that had been summed up in a million eloquent words before but never presented in one frightening performance.
Jack Richardson couldn’t believe Ezrin’s turnabout after he saw the show. There was no way after all the negative feedback Ezrin had been giving him that Richardson would touch the project. But if Ezrin was suddenly so excited about us Richardson would let him produce us.
With Richardson’s blessings Ezrin moved into the farm in Pontiac with us. He arrived at three one afternoon,
