walked through the kitchen where empty tuna-noodle casserole dishes had sprouted mold and through the dining room with the monkey that had turned a slimy green color. He wandered all through the house and found it unbelievable that we were still fast asleep in mid-afternoon. But as he wandered from room to room, watching us in drunken slumber, he was filled with joy. All of us were sleeping with girls!
CHAPTER 12
Success happened almost brutally, with a suddenness that sucked me into it without a moment of preparation. It was like somebody had grabbed me by the shoulder and started shaking me, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. Maybe there isn’t any kind of preparation, no way to brace yourself. Once it starts happening everything goes so quickly you’re too stunned to stop and think. Not even the experience of four years on the road was any good with what happened next.
I spent December of 1970 commuting between the RCA Mid-Recording Center in Chicago, where Ezrin and the group were trying to piece together four songs for Warner Brothers, and a little trailer on a Detroit street where Cindy was selling Christmas trees so we could eat. Each night I found her sitting in‘ a folding chair wrapped in blankets under a row of bar light bulbs, watching her trees. We ate beans from a can half warmed over a Sterno stove inside the unheated trailer. The farm in Pontiac had been quickly defeated by winter. The pipes burst, the heat went and the toothpaste froze. Eventually the electricity was turned off because Shep couldn’t afford to pay the bill and each of us was off on our own to scrape up whatever housing we could find. Cindy and I hoped we could sleep in the trailer but it seemed colder in there than it did in Pontiac and by the time Christmas Eve came we both had fever and the flu.
It was the hardest the band ever worked. We did preproduction with Ezrin for two months, rehearsing ten to twelve hours a day. The recording sessions were painfully slow in the way that all growing experiences are. Ezrin really had his hands full. He was completely inexperienced and there was lots of pressure from Warner Brothers, who had finally agreed to pay for four songs but nothing more. If they heard anything commercial on a single then maybe they would spring for an album, and we all wanted a shot at another album badly. We were so tight by the time we went into the studios we surprised everyone. Still, we took it slow, recording only seconds of music at a time, literally piecing together the very best, few notes. He pulled the melody out of the songs and strengthened them. He invented riffs and bridges and hooks. He ironed the songs out note by note, giving them coloring, personality. We never played so well or sounded so good. Glen Buxton actually turned out to be a distinctive and talented guitarist. With just a little bit of inspiration from Ezrin he developed a style that would set him apart in his field. Michael Bruce, although he resented Ezrin’s broad creative power, wrote the first of some million-selling records he was to compose.
Ezrin even directed me in my vocals, which opened a whole new world of interpretation and styling for me. I was no longer just another rock and roll singer, I was an actor, a song stylist developing a technique. We approached each cut like it was a role in a play. “Sing this like you’re Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and you’re horny,” he’d suggest; or, “Pretend you’re desperate for a drink. Sing like a sponge.”
The song of ours that fascinated him the most was one he called “Edgy.” Ezrin never understood the lyric when he heard me rehearsing it. He thought I was singing, “I’m edgy and I don’t know what I want.” The song was “Eighteen” and without even realizing what we had created we picked it as our first release. It took us six weeks to get four tunes ready: “Eighteen,” “Is It My Body?” “Sun Rise,” and “Nervous.” When Warner Brothers heard the cuts they refused to believe it was the same group. They even suggested to Shep and Joey that it was a hoax, that we had found another group to do it. The four cuts turned them on so much they rush-released “Eighteen” without an album to back it up.
In February the lights, gas and electricity were back on at Pontiac, and we returned to find the place a little cleaner. Most of our pet animals had either died or run away and the piles of rotting food we left in the house had been cleaned up for us by wild animals.
Warners suggested that if “Eighteen” had any initial impact at all we return immediately to the studio and lay down more cuts to fill up an album, still not sure at the time whether it was worth it to spend the money recording and pressing. We needed to make “Eighteen” into a hit, and that was Joey and Shep’s work in New York.
They had opened up a small office in a Greenwich Village brownstone on West Thirteenth Street, a brownstone we would eventually buy along with several others and an apartment building or two. At the time, though, it was a barren office with five telephones and three desks, and Joey Greenberg sat there, on the phones, selling the record.
Everybody wants to know the scoop on the music industry with payola, and I’ll tell you the truth, it doesn’t exist. Not anymore. You can’t even take a disc jockey out to lunch these days. In the old days, long before I was around, I guess it happened all the time. But in the late 1970’s you just can’t buck the system of play lists.
A station plays a record these days because the listening audience wants to hear it. If they play enough records the public wants to hear, they get a larger listening audience and more money. Before I release a single now I send it to a listening laboratory and have it analyzed for public acceptance. Tod Storz, some guy in Milwaukee, invented the play-list formula, which says to play the least number of songs the most amount of times to build up an audience. His father owned a brewery along with a radio station, and Storz collected beer money from bars every day. He noticed the same records were playing in every juke box, and that people played the song over and over. Using the same method Storz turned his station into a huge success. So now almost every radio station in the country is playing the same thirty or so hit songs. You can’t get on the play list unless you already have a hit and you can’t get a hit unless you get played. So how do you get on the list in the first place?
You beg. You promise. You lie. Especially lie. Joey Greenberg stayed on the phone ten hours a day for the next three years. He got to the Alive offices in New York City early in the morning and started calling program managers in stations on the East Coast and worked his way west as it got later in the day.
“Betty? (Syd? Dick?) This is Joey Greenberg from Alive in New York. How ya doing? Alive? It’s Alice Cooper’s management company. No, no chicken killing. Listen, Betty (Dick, Ira), all that chicken stuff is just publicity, honestly. Did you hear the kid’s new single? It’s a smash, a monster. A real killer. Of course they know how to play. Listen, Bob Richardson chased Alice all over the midwest to get him to record this one number with him. Honest. Richardson says he’ll put his reputation on the line for ‘Eighteen.’ Have you heard it? It’s an anthem. Betsy, it’s going to be the biggest song of the year. I know it’s right for your station. How? We listen to it when we’re in the area. It’s Alice’s favorite station in the midwest. I swear! Oh, yeah? But the song doesn’t have makeup on it. You wouldn’t know the kid was wearing makeup if you listened to the song. Mike (George, Peter), they’re getting hundreds of requests every day for it in Virginia. Just call Joe (Peter, Stan) at WHAR. People are adding it to play lists by the dozens. I know you need this for your station, Ralph (Jeffrey). It’s gonna pull the kids in by the thousands and you’re going to be the last one to go on it. Don’t embarrass yourself. It’s got smash written all over it.”
Sometimes you have to go down to the station in person. Disc jockeys and station managers are so touchy about payola and bribes they didn’t want them near them, but Shep and Joey kept on knocking on doors and forcing people to listen to it. Just play it once. With a fistful of Ziggy plane tickets and a lot of energy Shep scoured the country looking for stations to play “Eighteen.” CKLW went on it first. They broadcast on a powerful 50,000 watts from Windsor, Canada, and were heavily influenced by the audience in Michigan, where we were already well known from our stage act. Shep brought “Eighteen” to them and they believed in it immediately.
We were loading equipment in downtown Detroit when we heard it played for the first time. It had been four years since I was washing my car in Phoenix that I heard myself over the radio. But that was FM in Phoenix. It was AM in Detroit. That was the boner right there. AM radio means everybody is listening. We were right up there, with Simon and Garfunkel and the Carpenters. The time had come for Alice Cooper. We rushed to the nearest phones and deluged the stations with requests to play it again, but we didn’t have to. Thousands of requests were already coming into the station. By February “Eighteen” was fifteen on the CKLW play list and hundreds of other stations picked up on it. It was like Christmas and winning the World Series mixed together.
We rushed back into the studios with Ezrin, determined to blend any new music on the rest of the album with a concept for a new stage show. The black Alice, the next Alice the public came to know, was developed during those sessions. Before we went back to finish what turned out to be an album I was a trashy-looking transvestite
