on stage. I made people feel uncomfortable because I looked and acted strange, but I hadn’t yet made them feel I was dangerous. Ezrin especially enjoyed the dangerous element in me and helped nurture it. He and I both felt it urgent for Alice not only to be strange, but this time to be scary.
Scary to me means crazy. The most frightening thing in the world to me was insanity. The unpredictability of insanity frightened me. When I was a child and I first watched the classic Dracula with Bela Lugosi, the most frightening scene in the film was when they open a ship’s hatch and find Renfield, the real estatebroker, gone mad, eating insects and babbling wild-eyed up into the camera. The actor’s name was Dwight Frey, and Ezrin and I began to develope him in to a character on “The Ballad of Dwight Frey.” There was a lot of Dwight Frey in the original Alice character. He started out fairly sane and wound up so nuts it scared you half to death.
The lyrics I had originally written for “Frey” was about a man whose wife blows herself up by swallowing a stick of dynamite: “See my only wife explode right before my eyes.” With Ezrin’s encouragement I changed it to “See my lonely life explode right before my eyes.” The song went on about a man in a mental hospital who had been there for days and hadn’t eaten a thing. The plan was for me to do the entire song in a straightjacket and break out of it in the end as I screamed, “I gotta get outahere! I gotta get outahere, I gotta get out!” It actually made the audiences grit their teeth out of tension. If you weren’t crazy ahead of time, Frey could drive you crazy. Very few people experienced the feeling of having a straightjacket on. Everybody should strap themselves into one once in their life. Anyway, we called the completed album Love It To Death and it-shot right up the record charts and hung in there for months.
As soon as we moved to the farm in Pontiac, Charlie Carnal and Mike Allen began to build a death machine. Our first idea was called the “Cage of Fire,” which looked like I was being burned to death, and I very nearly was. The cage was made from a bent shower curtain rod. On it we hung forty or fifty tightly rolled, long plastic bags, like you get at the cleaners. At the finale of our show we rolled the cage on stage and I got inside. The rest of the group surrounded me with matches like pixies at a ritual and lit the plastic from the bottom. As the long plastic burned all around me it coagulated into fiery balls and fell to the ground with an incredibly loud whssst sound. When it all got going I looked like I was standing in the middle of a fiery rainstorm, imprisoned in burning bars. It was a great effect for $15, and we billed it as “Can Alice Cooper Escape the CAGE OF FIRE?!!” We used the cage only a few times, fortunately. Club owners and promoters didn’t like it because of the fire laws, and the few times we did sneak it on stage we wound up paying for damages we did to the stage floor and it nearly roasted me like Bavarian shish kabob.
The Cage of Fire was gripping enough, but the problem was, I didn’t actually die. The next plateau was an electric chair. The half-finished hot seat was actually standing in the corner of the room when Ezrin first came to visit us, but it wasn’t ready for use until the time “Eighteen” broke. The chair was cruel in its simplicity. A rough, over sized chair with thick leather straps and ominous wiring. My head was fitted into a metal skull plate and my arms clamped down to electrodes. When they threw the switch the whole thing lit up. I screamed in agony, the imaginary current surging through me, clamping my jaws shut tight, a seizure arching my body stiff, my eyeballs rolling backwards into my skull as I fried and smoked. The kids adored it. We got a terrific response to the electric chair. I didn’t know if they were just happy to see me get it or if they really understood the implications of what they were seeing.
In April of 1971 “Eighteen” broke nationally. It only reached number eighteen on the national record charts, but it was a healthy hit, selling long and hard, over 350,000 copies. It captured the imagination of every young, confused kid in the country — “I’m eighteen and I don’t know what I want.” There were stations who wouldn’t play it because they thought it had a drug reference, “The lines form on my face and hands, the lines form from the ups and downs.” If they had spent one week with me on the road they would have known what those lyrics were really about.
The kids did, obviously. Three months after Cindy had sold Christmas trees and we had shivered under piles of blankets together, I was making $15,000 a night.
We were booked into Town Hall in New York on May 3 and sold out the place. In June Bill Graham put us into the Fillmore East just two weeks before it closed for good. Within a month the national press picked up on me. Shep called Ann Arbor, where Ashley Pandel was still managing a club, and asked him to help handle publicity at Alive. In early July, almost twenty months after we had moved into the farm in Pontiac, each member of the band received his first check of record royalties on “Eighteen” of $8,000 apiece. I went to a bank in downtown Detroit, got a fifty- dollar bill and wrapped it around a rock. Cindy and I went to the side of the farm house and threw the rock through Neal Smith’s closed window. When the glass stopped falling he put his head through the hole and said, “What the hell is that for?” “That’s the money you loaned me for a mattress,” I said.
He threw the rock back at me and yelled, ‘ There’s interest on that, you bastard!”
We spent three months on the road working the single. The jobs came floating into us and if by magic. “Eighteen” seemed to open every door in the country. At $15,000 a night we suddenly had so much money we didn’t know what to do with it. Ziggy stepped into the picture and retrieved some of the $50,000 he laid out in airplane tickets. We visited Franklin Avenue in Detroit in a limousine and had the car stop in front of every hotel and motel we had stiffed. All of us would go inside and the managers would groan at the sight of us. Then we’d produce a check for our bill that literally sent many of them howling into the street.
From where I sat everything was a blur. After two or three headlining dates it no longer mattered to me where we were playing or when. I just followed my nose into the back of a limousine and got onto the plane with everybody else. In June Shep and I went to London for a press conference so the European press would get an inkling of what was happening in the United States. I spent only two nights in London before jetting back to the U.S. to continue the merry-go-round of touring.
The station wagons turned into limousines, which turned into jet planes, which turned into hotel rooms. One day instead of returning to Pontiac we flew to New York. Two hours later a long line of black cars drove us through the gates to our new home: a 42-room mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Ann Margret had just vacated the estate the month before, and I spent the first week searching every room, hoping she had left underwear behind so I could wear it on stage. What a prize! Discarded Ann Margret underwear! There was a ballroom the size of a football field and enough suites and sitting rooms and kitchens not to have to see the other guys in the band for days at a time if we didn’t want to. That’s as if we had days at a time to try.
The road separated me from Cindy for months. We started to play at least fifteen dates a month for the next two years, and with traveling time to and from gigs, I was away from Cindy a lot. I missed Cindy, but at the time I didn’t really mind being away from her, in a strange way. I was used to a life-style, of being on the road in bachelor company. If Cindy was the type of girl who needed to be with me constantly, I don’t think we would have liked each other for as long as we did. I was wrong in the end. Eventually my life-style and the road led to our break-up.
Warner Brothers sponsored our first press party at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that July. The Ambassador didn’t want to host a party for a rock group. They had allowed a rock group to hold a party there the year before and the Grand Ballroom had been wrecked. Shep told them they had misunderstood. Alice Cooper was a debutante, not a singer. He wanted to arrange for a “coming out” party for Alice, and the Ambassador was delighted to help. I’m sure the guests, who received engraved invitations to Alice Cooper’s coming-out party, were just as confused as the hotel when they saw it.
The party was fashioned after the movie Hellzapoppin. People still talk about that party. Nobody expected it. It was a revival of the old-time Hollywood shindig, the good old LA publicity stunt. People like that because it makes them laugh. Guests were greeted at the door by two men in gorilla suits. The Cockettes, a troupe of drag queens from San Francisco, wore full beards streaked with glitter. They were the cigarette girls and they sold cigars, cigarettes and vaseline. We hired the two worst bands in LA to play music and a three-hundred-pound black woman named TV Momma sang “I Love You Truly,” topless, with her breasts hanging to her waist. But the hired people were no stranger than the guests. Every greak and weirdo in LA gate-crashed. I saw people I hadn’t seen since the Hullabaloo Club. Sergeant Garcia even showed up. When I was introduced to Jack Nicholson he shook my hand gingerly, but he gave me a big smile. “I don’t exactly understand what’s going on here, but it’s all right with me.” One of the gorillas carried Rod McKuen into the room and chased Richard Chamberlain through the kitchen doors, which he was very peeved about because he said it made him look foolish, which it did. Ahmet Ertegun, the president of rival Atlantic Records, even showed up because he couldn’t believe the rumors he heard about the group were true.
Rumors quickly turned into legends, and our next was the snake. My first snake was named Kachina. She was a nine-foot-long boa constrictor, not very big as far as they go, and she was the sweetest snake you’d ever want to
