I pushed that car as much as I drove it. It cost so much to pay for it that I never had the money for gas. When it was only three months old Glen and I were tooling down the highway and I suddenly realized I was driving into the side of a green station wagon. My 390-horsepower engine crumbled in a loud explosion. I had this terrible sinking feeling when I realized that woman behind the steering wheel of the other car was crying. She jumped out the door and started punching me in the head yelling, “You moron, you could have killed me.” There were flames coming out of my engine, and I stood shoveling dirt on it with my hands while she hit me and shouted.
Glen was hopping around by the side of the road holding his toe, which was broken when he smashed it against the dashboard because his feet were almost up on the windshield when the accident happened. (It wasn’t my fault. She only had her driving permit for three days and she made an illegal left turn.) The experience was so awful I’ve never driven a car since and never bothered to renew my license.
Glendale Community College was an ugly expanse of cinder block and desert, hot and lifeless. All the action was in the air-conditioned cafeteria where the band and I set up camp at a long table in the middle of the room. Anybody who came near us was ripped to pieces with wisecracks. We had no mercy, this red-blooded American rock band, and sent many a flat-chested girl heading for the ladies’ room in hysterics. It was into this den that three more important people came into my life, completing what was to become the Alice Cooper band.
We were all seated around Formica clubhouse one day when a limbering guy sat down at the table with his lunch, pulled out a cap pistol and shot us all dead. This was Mike Allen, who also distinguished himself by carrying a Man From Uncle badge and ID card. Glen said to him, “You’re a crazy motherfucker,” and Mike Allen laughed a lot. Mike became our amp-boy — which is what we called the big guy who carried the equipment for us skinny guys. He signed on with us and stayed for the next four years.
It turned out that Mike Allen had a wealth of unused and unwanted knowledge stored up in his head. While at first we thought his six-foot six-inch frame was only good enough to carry our equipment, it turned out he knew a million disconnected facts. It was like we were a rock and roll Star Trek and he was Dr. Spock. He knew the amperage of amplifier fuses and who pitched for Brooklyn in the 1950 World Series. He could also explain the embolism, if anybody ever wanted him to, and sometimes he offered little facts just to make conversation. He had gone to St. Mary’s High School in Phoenix, a parochial factory that was enough to estrange anybody from the real world. He was very square actually, like me.
Mike Allen never swore or drank or used drugs the entire time I knew him. He was the cleanest living guy in the world. He was a virgin. He said he wanted to save it for his wife. I used to say, “Mike, the first time you get her you’re gonna blow her up.” But he was serious about it, even years later on the road when girls used to try to rape him and deflower him. His ultimate idol was John Wayne. He really wanted to be just like him!
Years later, when wee were to lose him somewhere in the web of touring and travel, Mike Allen returned to Phoenix and became a nurse. Within a year of getting his nursing degree he invented a mechanical respiratory system, patented it and sold the rights for two million dollars.
I met Dick Christian not long after Mike Allen. Dick was drawn to us in much the same way Mike had been. He called us the “Outsides Convention” because he said we reeked of sarcasm and unrest. Dick knew a lot about sarcasm and unrest. Like us he was not quite in step with the rest of Glendale Community College. His parents had sent him to a Jesuit prep school to curb “emotional outbursts.” It was an ironic cure.
Dick probably understood alienation better than anyone I have ever met. That, sparked with imagination and guts, made him a loyal and understanding friend. He was handsome, tall, curly hair, and knew when and how to be a phony.
Dick became our unofficial manager. We really didn’t want him to manage us because we needed someone with experience, but he was always there helping, plugging along anyway, dressing up in ties and jackets to try to intimidate club owners to pay us without too much trouble.
One night in the VIP club I was introduced to a young man I vaguely remember seeing at Cortez — vaguely only because he appearance had changed so much. His name was Charlie Carnal, and although this was only 1966 he had already evolved into a 1970’s glitter freak. His hair was shoulder-length on the right side of his head and cut in a crew-cut on the left, like somebody had hit him down the middle with a cleaver. He had an enormous handlebar moustache — on both sides — a tremendous perpetual grin, and wore costumes — not clothing — that made him look like he had stumbled out of a neighborhood theater production of Alice in Wonderland.
Charlie rustled us up our first black lights. He turned up at the VIP with a ten-foot color wheel, one of those giant hypnotic discs that he turned in the back with a crank. It sounds corny now, but that was how our effects started. I was just as excited by black lights and hypno-wheels as I am with my latest $400,000 gimmick. Charlie Carnal signed on with the group and stayed with us for five years. He was eventually cut in as an equal partner as his lighting effects became more important.
By spring of my freshman year my thoughts turned not to love but west, to Los Angeles. We had done just about everything we could do in Arizona. We played every city, school, and dive with a stage. We were, in fact, famous in Phoenix, which to me was the worst kind of compliment. College was boring, and rock and roll was fun. In order to go one step further we needed a record deal, and we knew that the only way to get one was in LA.
Armed with a few dozen posters of the Spiders (in which we looked like five hungry, hairy orphans) and some “Don’t Blow Your Mind” singles, Dick Christian went off to the glittery city on the sea to get us auditions with record companies.
He never quite made it to the record companies. As soon as he got to LA he stopped into a bar on Sunset Boulevard to have a beer. A tall, blond woman shuffled up next to him. Dick swore she was as exact ringer for Kim Novak. Dick had been a Novak freak ever since he saw her in Bell, Book and Candle. He fantasized when he was fifteen about being a warlock to Novak’s witch while he jerked off.
She took Dick home with her. There was a lot of heavy tongues and feels, with “Kim Novak” keeping Dick’s hands away from the secret thatch. After forty minutes of trying, Dick got her dress off and found that his cock wasn’t the only hard one in the room.
“Kim Novak” explained that she (he) often picked up young guys in bars, took them home and made out with them for a while, and when the guys were hot enough so it didn’t matter, she (he) let them in on the joke. She (he) insisted that all of the guys were horny enough at that point to fuck her (him) anyway, and that Dick should go right ahead with what he was doing. But Dick didn’t have the heart, or the hard-on, and thanked her and left.
It was the craziest thing I had ever heard! And I thought I was weird! LA sounded so crazy, so otherworldly. I couldn’t wait to go! It wasn’t that I wanted to meet a drag queen — it was that I wanted to live in a society where one could exist.
CHAPTER 4
The year 1967 was the year of the follicle. Hair. Hippies.
Boy, what a strange movement that was. I never understood the hippies at all. Communes? Drugs? Sharing everything? How dumb. I thought the American Way was to want to be rich and famous. I never understood people who dedicated their lives to causes, like politics. The only politics I knew about was Mr. Buckley and the draft board. What did I know from free love? I still got excited if Mimi Hicki let me feel her up!
But that’s all there was in Los Angeles in 1967 — hippies — and you had to learn to deal with it. The first time the band ever went there was on Easter Sunday to play at a hippie free concert in Griffith Park. We drove straight to Sunset Boulevard and couldn’t believe our eyes. There must have been 10,000 hairy, barefoot, stoned flower children, listlessly gliding along Sunset Strip. And all the girls had hair under their arms. They lived up to ever cliche I had ever heard about them in Phoenix. They threw flowers in the open windows of the car and waved Easter Sunday palm branches at us. We hung out of the car and shook hands with them and kissed the girls. One girl ran alongside the car and fed me half and egg roll in little bites. Somebody in the backseat dropped down his pants and stuck his cock out the rear window of the station wagon which the girl managed to kiss as the car picked up speed. It was astounding that all this energy existed in Los Angeles when Phoenix was so low key. And it was even more shocking to me that I had little in common with all those kids, even though our hair was the same length.
Later that afternoon I stood on a food line in the park for two hours and watched 15,000 people sway in unison to Iron Butterfly playing “Ina Gadda Vida.” I had smelled grass backstage at gigs and in open cars and
