mascara, and 20 mice a week for the snake.
We set off on this venture March 1, 1973, not healthy and strong from rest but worn and with no confidence. I had resumed a drinking schedule for the tour. There was no question that I could remain on the road sober. I had a physical when I got back from Jamaica, and it was decided that the most sensible drinking plan was to hold off on the VO until eight at night.
They woke us at ten every morning. Dave Libert did this himself, bounding through the halls with a room list in his hand, pounding on doors and cursing. Mandi Newall, who we stole from Derek Taylor in London, woke up the heads of each crew and the crew chiefs who in turn woke up their own people. At 10:45 A. M. everybody put their luggage outside their doors and Libert got to the phone to call people, praying not more than a dozen or so had taken their phones off the hooks and gone back to sleep. The band, at least, was always still in bed.
Somebody cheeked with the bus company and limousine service to make sure they were on their way. Libert called the airport to cheek on weather conditions here and in the next town. Rozwell, on advance in the next city for a day already, called his limousine service to make sure the cars are waiting at our destination. He also confirmed interviews and put hotel room keys in separate envelopes that included room lists. Then there was one person to count people. He stood in the lobby or the plane and checked names of a master list to make sure nobody got stranded in a bathroom in Toledo.
You get crazy leading your life like that. That’s why rock and roll groups wreck hotels, because they get crazy being uprooted and transported. Some guys trashed hotel rooms to relieve the tension. I got drunk and watched TV.
The only constant companion in your life when you’re on the road, the only thing you can count on to be there, is the television set. TV was always very important to me. It colored my life, gave me a sterling education and great insights into this country. But on the road it was more. It was an anchor with reality. It was the only thing that was the same everywhere. I was no longer in a strange city while I was with Art Fleming playing Jeopardy. I was home with friends on the Hollywood Squares, where Paul Lynde kept me company through my second can of beer. When I got off the tour I even had the Sony company build a five-foot TV screen for me to watch at home. But on the tour people kidded me about it; while everybody else was scoring chicks and getting laid, I watched TV. Cindy wasn’t on the road much, which we both agreed was best, and I didn’t have anything to do with the groupies, so the tube became my best friend.
My bodyguard, Norm Klein, left me alone in the room one night, and I decided that when he came back, it would be funny if I was making love to the TV set in the middle of the floor. I lugged the thing off its frame and laid it on the floor and turned up the volume. There was a knock and the sound of a key and I dropped my pants and started humping the set with my ass to the door. The door opened and slammed shut. I waited there on the floor for a while, looking around at the empty room. After a few minutes of Love of Life playing into my groin, I heard a key in the door again and started humping. When I didn’t hear Norm laughing I turned around. The maid had come to the door first. She called the house detective who met Norm in the hallway. All three of them were standing there in shock watching me.
The most hideous moment on the tour happened in Evansville, Indiana. I was warming up with Eva Marie Snake in my bedroom, trying to get her used to my body temperature because her cage had been on the floor. Eva Marie Snake was nearly fifty pounds, the largest snake I ever worked with and up until that time a complete sweety.
She played on my arms and neck for a few minutes and then very determinedly coiled around my rib cage. I paid no attention and just rubbed her back for a while. She gave me a tiny squeeze just to let me know that she could love me to death if she felt like it, and I decided it was time for Eva Marie to go back to her cage until show time. I was just beginning to unravel her from my chest when she started to constrict. I called out for help once, but the cry caused me to take a breath, allowing Eva Marie to tighten her grip. In a small panic I stood up, balancing her fifty-pound weight around me, and walked into the living room. Norm Klein was watching TV, and when I pointed at the snake he just said, “Hi, Eva.” It dawned on him a moment later that the snake was constricting. We grabbed hold of her head and tried to pry her loose, but she was stronger than the two of us. Norm took out his pocket knife and cut her off me.
After two months on the road it was as if I had never been to Jamaica. I was right back in the hole. I fell down continuously but elegantly on stage, bruising myself and breaking bones. My falling looked professional, as if I had choreographed and rehearsed it for years, but it was a killing pace. Norm kept a towel by the side of my bed so I could throw up on something during the night. I dreamed every night of the moment in the morning when I would vomit, clearing my stomach and bronchial tubes, which had became clogged.
On it went for three months. The same hotel room. The same hotel, the same city in every state, the same reporter waiting for me outside my bedroom or down the hall. The same groupie — I swear it looked like the same groupie — in every town with smudged Alice Cooper eye makeup waiting to shoot LSD under her tongue with me.
I can’t tell you how hideous the monotony of it is. The repetition, the uprooting from one town to the next, the sweating, the waiting. Yet the moment I stepped up on the stage I was all right. I loved being up there. I lived for the giving and taking. It was the only thing that got me through the rest, especially the waiting. It makes me sick to my stomach, quite literally, to think about those hotel rooms. The wallpaper and plastic furniture haunt me like no other demons.
The rock star who kills himself or becomes a junkie is supposed to do it because of the strain of stardom. Well, there is no strain of stardom. Being famous can be dealt with. It’s the strain of the rock business. It’s the machinery that grinds you to a halt, keeping one step ahead of the public, on schedule, on tour, getting the next album out, doing promotion. It goes on forever. No days off. No time away. You have to work twenty-four hours a day to stay on top. Once you interrupt the flow you could be finished, over, a fifteen-minute star.
There’s some sort of disrespect for rock stars that makes them rebel. A rock star figures, “Well, I’m no Frank Sinatra and I’m never going to be treated like one, so I might as well do things my own way.” Then they go on taking their career as a joke. It’s so much easier to look down on yourself and get sloppy instead of trying to raise your standards and become a professional. If you take your own career as a joke then it becomes a joke. That’s not for me. Fred Astaire didn’t do that. He worked at his craft, and I wanted to work at mine. It’s that chemical in me that drove me on, and I knew that to exist by my terms and standards I had to become a total pro.
The effects of the tour were devastating. Glen retired from rock and roll. So did Joey Greenberg. He had been on the phones every day for years, grinding, hovering three inches above his chair, taut and pulling himself tighter. Once Joey started working on an Alice Cooper project he couldn’t slow down. The business had gotten to him. It was like he was in shell shock. One day he just said, “Hey, this is too crazy. I’m leaving.” He walked out the door, and we haven’t seen him since.
I fought my way through the “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour like it was a war, and indeed it was. By the time I reached the end of the tour, at Madison Square Garden, I went on stage with six broken ribs, a broken wrist, a fractured elbow and I was twenty pounds overweight, bloated with fluid.
We turned to the grosses for consolation, but found none. Our glamorous life on the road, the parties and press junkets and jets, had eaten up most of our profits. We had devoured America and gotten very little flesh in the process.
“Billion-Dollar Babies” took the life out of the band. It killed the spark between us. Many years ago in the John Phillip Law house in Los Angeles, when we were all still children playing a game we didn’t think we’d win, Shep and Joey called a meeting. They said that for the sake of the group’s publicity, and because I was the lead singer, I should do all the interviews when possible. We all agreed to this because it was easier to sell one image than five. I represented all their personalities. When the public sat my face, they saw all of us. It was taken for granted that my name was Alice Cooper. As the years went on the public became interested in me, not the whole band. The band never dreamed that the personality of Alice could become bigger than the five of them. They never thought for a second that they’d be lost, that the press wouldn’t want to speak to them at all!
We were all making unbelievable amounts of money, but it didn’t make it up to them in ego. I don’t know what I would have done if I was in their boots. I don’t know if I could have tolerated being in the background. I just never would have let it happen in the first place, and come to think of it, I didn’t.
We began to have the same exact fights we had when we were poor, except “That’s my tomato you’re eating” turned into, “That’s my Rolls, get your ass out of it.”
After a few months’ rest we went back into the studios together and recorded a seventh LP, Muscle of Lose,
