Keith Moons and you’ve got the Chessington Zoo party. There was a juggler and fire-eater for entertainment in the tent, and then Dave Libert went to the center of the ring and announced an Alice Cooper special, the amazing “Sheila the Squealer,” a Soho stripper. Sheila’s slow peel got the crowd to their feet, if somewhat crookedly, and when she finally exposed her boobs, which were tattooed Alice Cooper the audience started lobbing beer cans in the air and screaming. Sheila looked like she was having the time of her life until she got company. Up in the stands the spirit of exhibitionism was also moving an American girl named Stacia. Everybody in rock and roll knew about Stacia and her 48-inch tits. That’s 96 inches of bust. When Stacia unstrapped her boobs and danced through the crowds to the floor she stole the spotlight from Sheila. Sheila started slapping at Stacia’s tits and yelling, “Get out of here! Put your clothes back on! This is my gig!”
Up in the stands a man dropped his pants and sprinkled all over the bleachers as people scattered to avoid the golden stream. Then he rushed down into the ring shaking his pecker at Stacia and Sheila, and chased them around the park. Then lots of people began to take off their clothes and bottles and beer cans were flying like rain. By the time the London police arrived the place looked like a bomb had blown off everybody’s clothing. Total damages: five people arrested for indecent exposure. We were the only ones with our clothes on — and we thought we were crazy. We looked like prudes!
The following November we returned to Europe for another month-long blitz hot on the tail of another giant single, “Elected,” which had been released in September in the United States and turned gold there only a month after. The Europeans really went all out for us our second time around. They couldn’t have greeted us more warmly at Glasgow, where three hundred kids ran over the police barricades at the airport and tipped our limousines over. The average teenager in Glasgow actually drinks more than we do (see Guinness Book of Records, page 37.) I wanted to perform wearing only two scarves, one for each of the two big soccer teams in Glasgow, but the authorities made me put on my whole costume.
In Paris we finally made it to the Olympia Theater, but the Parisians were just as hotheaded as ever. We started the show two hours late and halfway through the set some madman came storming up the aisle shouting in French and waving a flaming guitar doused in kerosene. He jumped up on the stage and yelled something at me and I yelled back, “Viva la France, up-a-your pants!” The audience cheered, which prompted him to throw his burning guitar at Glen. When he took a swing at me Shep himself rushed onto the stage and flattened the guy with one punch. Shep had to literally stand on the kid during the show until the police arrived and hauled him off.
Never, at any time during all of this, did I have second thoughts about what I was doing morally because I was sure there was nothing wrong with it. I think the only time I got really shaken up was when word came to the Cooper Mansion that a fourteen-year-old boy in Canada had hanged himself and it was being blamed on me. They found a ticket to one of my concerts in his room and a Killer album. It was immediately made to sound as if I had inspired his death. What I needed to know the most was if I actually caused that boy to hang himself. Contrary to what you might believe, children are not that impressionable. I couldn’t believe that any stable child would put his head in a noose or into a guillotine from watching my show or listening to my music. Not anymore than they would try running through a screen door or put a lit stick of dynamite in their mouths from watching cartoons on TV, all of which are far more violent than I ever could have been.
If Alice Cooper was destroying anyone, he was destroying me. In looking back on it, it really wasn’t fun in the beginning. I was a very big success, to be sure, but I was also a freak, an oddball, a joke. I was the horror of every mother in Toledo. “What’s the matter with you, Herbie? You gonna grow up and become Alice Cooper?’ There were still radio stations and record stores that banned my albums. There were other performers who wouldn’t even speak to me. Steve Lawrence once stopped me in a restaurant to tell me that if I cut my hair I wouldn’t have a career left. I liked getting rich and I liked the fame and I liked the fans and limousines arid private jets, but don’t think that made me invulnerable to getting hurt. It bothered me every time I was criticized. I know, I know. I made my own bed, and I was being paid handsomely to sleep in it. But even if you’re grossing $20 million a year, it begins to drive you crazy when you get called a degenerate. I was tired of being the rebel. I was tired of being thrown out of church. I made my point, all right. Now what?
I drank. I drank to sustain the pressure, to buffer the hatred. To blot away the endless days and nights of travel and touring. I was treated like a criminal, and indeed, it made me feel guilty. I drank out of anger that it was happening to me and I drank out of fear it would stop.
I was no longer an alcoholic, I was a drunk. I was a blubbering, stumbling drunk, drifting through days in a stupor. The year 1972 is just a puddle of VO in my head. I changed. I got loud and obnoxious. I thought that was what people wanted of me. I had to be Alice all the time. I wanted everybody to see how drunk I was wherever I went. I wasn’t satisfied until I had caused a scene in public. I wanted people to say, “Boy, I saw Alice Cooper last night and was he drunk!” I was very aggressive, turning over tables and screaming, “I’m Alice Cooper!” I was so obnoxious I hated myself. I hated every minute of what I was doing and I was too drunk to stop and think about it.
There are so many adjustments to go through in the rock business. It’s easy for a pop idol to do himself in.You have all the money you need, so if your vice is cocaine or heroin instead of booze, you can kill yourself in a few months. As a rock star everything is done for you, so it doesn’t matter how incapacitated you are. They treat you like an infant, and soon you begin to act like one. You never have to be sober enough to do your laundry or drive to work. Your life, your day-to-day existence, is part of a grand plan drawn up in an agent’s office. There’s a sophisticated organization behind you, arranging your life for you, waiting for you to pay off.
And there’s never anybody around to stop you from hurting yourself. That’s because people are afraid. You’re a star and you make millions of dollars and that intimidates them. Some people won’t dare tell you you’re killing yourself, and others don’t think you deserve the consideration.
People felt that I should have known better than to let myself depend so much on booze for backbone. If that was the only way I could handle it, well then, tough shit. In rock and roll, when it comes to self-destruction, everybody pulls down their hats and lets the chips fall where they may. Cindy even stopped nagging me about it. We were away from each other so often that she really didn’t know what was going on, and she didn’t want to know anymore either. When we were together she threatened to walk out on me a thousand times, but she never got up the courage. As long as I was working, who was going to rock a million-dollar boat?
Shep did.
On an ugly snowy morning in December of 1972 Shep insisted I have breakfast with him at the Americana Hotel. I hated the mornings. I vomited for a full half hour in the mornings, mostly a thick greenish material that my body poured out in buckets every day. I woke every morning fully dressed, with a bottle of VO in my hand, more often than not Glen Buxton in the same condition across the room. I had terrible headaches and shakes in the mornings and the only cure was more VO.
I stumbled down to the coffee shop in the Americana an hour late. Shep is usually very lighthearted, even with bad news. He says whatever he has to say in a matter of seconds, very directly. But he was stony-faced and silent that morning.
“What’s a matter, somebody died?” I said.
“No, man, but you’re on your way,” he told me angrily.
I was so taken aback that he was talking to me in that tone that he could just as easily have slapped me in the face.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he went on. “Will you take a look at yourself? You’re like a completely different person. You’ve lost your whole personality. I don’t even know you anymore. If you don’t straighten out you won’t be alive in a year. I’ll still take care of you as a friend, but I can’t manage you anymore. I can’t be responsible for your death. If you’re wasting your life and you’re my friend, I can’t stand it. I want out. I want to split now.”
I was shocked. He finished off by saying he hated the sight of me and then left the table. Cindy flew in from Los Angeles and met me at Kennedy Airport the next day. She was outside the Pan Am terminal when my car pulled up. We went through all the luggage on the sidewalk in front of the terminal and emptied it of all the VO. I gave it away to people who asked for autographs. Then we got on a plane to Jamaica, where Alan Strahl had retired the year before. Shep called him and told him I was coming down for a rest and to take care of me. Alan met us at the airport and stared at me strangely all the way to his house. He finally said, “You’re so white. You look so sick.”
By late that night I had the shakes. By the time they subsided to tremors a day later I had uncontrollable waves of nausea and diarrhea. I was angry and melancholy for a week. Cindy fed me an allowance of beer — only six cans a day — to keep from collapsing completely. I shrunk. I must have lost twenty pounds in water. My
