area of my crotch, which was so hard most of the time it must have torn holes in her clothing. Toward the end of my last year in high school she eventually let me get into her panties — but that didn’t mean she made it easy by removing any clothing. I had to somehow get my hand under her skirt without lifting it up too high and then bend my arm so it could slide down her panties and I could get my hand on her crotch. “This can’t be right,” I thought. “How can this be any fun?” The first time I actually felt her thatch I shot my load instantly, wracking myself with convulsions as I turned into a helpless blob of gelatin in Mimi’s lap. Mimi had never seen this happen before, but she was going to get used to it.
“Are you all right?” she asked me in the darkness with my hand twisted inside her clothing.
“Sure, sure,” I lied. “It’s just my asthma.” One night we were laying between two amplifiers in the back of a station wagon outside the VIP Club. She had a special treat for me: she popped a tit. First one, then the other, right out from under my letter jacket and her pink mohair sweater. I almost knocked her bubble hairdo right off her head getting my hands on them, stuffing them into my mouth like bologna sandwiches. I thought this was the prelude to actually getting to see and touch and smell and taste that forbidden thatch of hair.
“I’m letting you do this because it’s the last time,” Millie told me.
“I can’t hear you,” I thought, “my mouth’s full of tit.”
“Vince, honey. This is kind of a goodbye treat, because my mother says I can’t see you anymore.”
I knew that Mimi’s mother hated me, hated that I was in a rock band, hated the people in the band too, but I had never been simply banished from anyone’s life before. I stopped eating just long enough to ask her why.
“Because of your hair. My mother thinks it’s disgusting, that you’re turning into a queer or something.”
I would have gladly offered Mrs. Hicki a vivid display of my masculinity if Mimi would have opened my fly for me, but her objections really worried me because Mrs. Hicki wasn’t the only person who didn’t like my hair. Mr. Buckley, the principal of the school, was not delighted to see how long my hair had grown when I returned to school for my senior year, and told me not to come back until I got a haircut. I sat in front of a mirror while my mother stood behind me gingerly trimming my hair while I howled in pain.
The Jan Murray road show of Bye-Bye Birdie was booked into the Phoenix Star Theater in November, and by making slight alterations in the story line the plot was about a whole rock band called “Birdy.” The producers used a local rock group in every city to cut down on expenses and raise the community interest in the show. When they got into town someone contacted Jack Curtis, and he recommended us. We went into rehearsals just three weeks before the show opened.
I was thrown out of school the second time on the day of opening night. My hair wasn’t even that long — just over my collar — but Buckley had a whole year to think about long hair at the draft board, and he was obsessed by it. My mother went to speak to him and explained what he already knew. My father was a minister, I was a good kid, a fair student, and I needed my hair long because I was a professional. (Hah!) I was even in Bye-Bye Birdie. But Buckley wouldn’t hear of it. Long hair was a symbol of rebellion he told her. A symptom of disease. I was suspended from school until after the show when I took another trim.
In the spring semester, just before I was about to graduate, Buckley threw me out of school several more times, bringing my total suspensions to eight. But by spring, Buckley wasn’t the only one complaining.
I was still going to church with my family every week. The band wouldn’t even take Wednesday night jobs because it was church night. I was, after all, the minister’s son and I liked going to church. The church members didn’t like it though. They not only objected to my hair, they objected to rock and roll and everything that went along with it — people who smoked tobacco (and maybe more) and drank liquor (and maybe worse).
The church members were subtle.
“Cut your hair, girlie!”
“Are you a fairy?”
“When are you going to get a dress, Vincie?”
They tortured me in the tackiest, most adolescent ways for months. They alluded I was doing something sacrilegious. I just kept my mouth shut, but it wasn’t easy.
My parents had their own opinions about my hair. They came to my rescue all the time in church and in school, but at home it was a different story. My mother is an outspoken woman, and she believed in my individualism and that I had the right to wear my hair as long as I liked. After all, I was a professional, and she knew I was a faithful church member. In reality, what was the big deal about my hair? I wasn’t killing chickens.
But at home we had tremendous fights.
“I don’t want you to get a haircut just for the church people,” she finally told me. “But it makes your father very uncomfortable. The church members bring it up to him all the time and it’s very embarrassing. He won’t ask you to cut it either, for his sake, so the decision is up to you.”
I stopped going to church. It was very confusing. I was hurt and angry. It was bewildering. I knew more about religion than most of them. I believed with more conviction than most of them. That I was even walking around was a miracle. I knew about God. God is inside you when you’re at your ultimate best, when you work to achieve godliness. It’s a state of mind, that’s all. Very nearly the same state of mind as when you’re at the worst with the devil. What the fuck did my hair or rock and roll have to do with what I felt inside of me?
People can be so cruel without even knowing it. I wasn’t even Alice Cooper then. It was just Vince Furnier they were torturing.
When I left the church my senior year of high school it was the last time I ever set foot in one.
I left a lot behind the summer of 1966. Cortez, Mr. Muckley, the church. John Tatum left the group. The Spiders had developed into a band of rebels, dressed in scruffy T-shirts and shoulder-length hair, and Tatum didn’t like the image. We were a very image-conscious bunch. I don’t think we played as well as we dressed the parts, since acting like you were in a rock band was just as important at the time as playing music.
We advertised for another guitarist and expected hundreds of calls, but only one person contacted us. His name was Michael Bruce, and he had been in a Beatle band called the Trolls. The Trolls were called a Beatle band because at the time nobody was playing original music. We were all “copy” bands. The Spiders were the best copy band for the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds material; the Trolls played great Beatle music. The only problem with Mike Bruce was his image. Michael was short and broad-beamed. What could have been a finely layered body of muscles was always just beyond that in the realm of beefiness. But he moved and thought with his groin, and although not a pretty boy, he was handsome because he believed in himself physically.
Michael, for instance, is the type of guy who touches himself a lot. Not an obvious jock scratch like you might see watching the NFL on TV. Michael’s hands would gracefully fall to his crotch or a nipple and hover there. You never knew if he just rested his hands in funny places or he was actually coddling his balls.
He has, to his credit, nice blue eyes, and because we had no choice, we hired him. John Tatum sold him a dirty pair of pants he had worn on stage for five dollars, and Mike let his hair grow long.
We went to Tucson the summer of 1966 and recorded another single for Jack Curtis called “Don’t Blow Your Mind,” which we wrote.
Recording wasn’t an easy chore for us. We had no idea of what we were doing. There wasn’t even a producer around, just us and the engineer. Se we played our parts in unison and came up with a version of the song that sounded like we were all stuffed into a phone booth.
Jock Curtis got them to play it on KFIF in Tucson and the station received hundreds of phone calls requesting the song, most of them placed long distance from Phoenix by our families. The first time I heard myself on the radio I was washing my car in the driveway of our house. I couldn’t believe it was me. It was familiar but foreign, like meeting a twin. After the first adrenaline rush I got very nonplussed about it. Whenever the song would play on the radio I’d switch to another station as if I hadn’t heard it. “Don’t Blow Your Mind” became the number three song on the KFIF play list.
In September I entered Glendale Community College as an art major. I wasn’t bad either. I painted almost every day, dark pictures of unsmiling people, which was odd because outwardly I was a happy, carefree person, and I think I felt that inside, too.
I had saved $2,700 to but a new 1966 Fairlane GT with a 390-horsepower engine. It was yellow with a black racing strip, and it got four miles to a gallon. American teenagers have to have cars. I think it should be made a legal requirement, like a four-wheel education. It’s part of American life, like crabgrass or television. Part of your growing-up happens in a car. The people I’ve met who didn’t have cars in their lives are social cripples. I almost feel un-American for not losing my virginity in the back seat of a souped-up ‘59 Chevy.
