Alice Cooper: Beer and Loafing

On the Up Escalator in Denver, 1972

In February 1972, the last semester of my senior year at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Alice Cooper came to Denver to freak out the squares and thrill the teens. It was easy to do, since no one had seen a shock rock extravaganza like the one the Alice Cooper Band: Glen Buxton on guitar, Mike Bruce on guitar and keyboards, Dennis Dunaway on bass, and Neal Smith on drums--had brought to the stage. Behind the scenes, Shep Gordon introduced the notion of rock band manager as sixth man, making sure everything: sound, lights, staging, imagery, label support, from production to promotion, was working on all cylinders. I had moved from the (defunct) Boulder Express, to Boulder magazine, to the independent student-run Colorado Daily, where my buddy and sometimes roommate Sam Maddox had invited me to come over and help him overhaul the Friday entertainment section. When Alice Cooper came to Denver, Warner Bros. Records rolled out the red carpet for the press: an informal Saturday hangout at one hotel that begins the story, an after-party following the Denver Coliseum show, and of course, the concert, so fresh and over the top that kids actually got scared. Sam probably should have gotten a co-write on this: We did all the events together, and I'm sure he edited the story so well that I have made only the smallest updates. We got to see Alice Cooper as he was still on the way up: Only "Eighteen" had made the top 40; "School's Out," which would make him a major star, wouldn't hit until summer. This first appeared in the Colorado Daily, Feb. 25, 1972. All typos mine, retyped from the fading original.

Alice Cooper walked into room 723 of the Brown Palace Hotel, stately dowager of the West and Denver's answer to New York's Waldorf-Astoria. He found the dozen or so members of the Kolorado Kulture Korps watching the Maryland-Clemson basketball game on TV. Waving his trademark bottle of Budweiser, he dove for the couch.

"Why aren't we watching 'Horror Castle?'" asked Alice. "It's on channel four. Christopher Lee and Rossana Podesta, man. Rossana Podesta!"

If one had to describe Alice Cooper in two words, they are right there: television and beer. Ten hours a day of the former, and the amount of beer Alice consumes while watching the tube is one of Annheiser-Busch's most closely guarded corporate secrets.

The flesh and booze Alice Cooper put the Denver press corps through some changes. They expected Mondo Pervo. Instead, it got Terrytoon Circus.

A columnist for Denver's largest daily tried to back Alice into a corner. His reputation was, shall we say, "at stake." All week the columnist had been warning his readers about "Miss Cooper," this lewd disgusting rock and roller of doubtful gender. [His real name is Vincent Furnier, born in Detroit in 1948, raised in  Phoenix]. When he ran out of adjectives he cleverly referred to Alice Cooper, the man and band, as "It."

Do you enjoy shocking people? he asked.

"Sure," said Alice. "It's my favorite thing besides TV and beer."

The reporter said he had never seen the act before, but heard it was violent. "Do you think you're encouraging violence?"

My compatriot from the Colorado Daily, Sam "Mojo Man" Maddox, stealthily moved farther from that reporter. Even as college students, our sense of journalistic standards was under attack from this hack.

Alice swallowed more Bud while the press sipped our champagne, or more accurately, Almaden sparking white wine.

"Look, there has to be a balance," Alice said. "Look at 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and people like Elton John saying 'everything's cool," and all that stuff. "There's got to be a balance. And onstage, I'm violent. That's the way I am.

"We project a lot of evil," Alice continued, popping another beer can top and not spilling a drop on his purple t-shirt emblazoned with the words BITCH BITCH BITCH. "I'm like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Now I'm here drinking beer. On stage I'm also Alice, and I don't have to answer to anybody. All we're doing is giving people the images. People react the same because they're tribal. Like bloodlust . . . that's a tribal thing."

Another reporter compared Alice's act (which he hadn't seen) to the Theatre of Cruelty. "There's a lot in your act intellectuals could dig. Have you ever seen De Sade?"

Since the Marquis de Sade does not yet have a Saturday morning cartoon show, the answer was no. As for the intellectual bit, Alice said: "We don't play 'intelligent' music, we play sex music. It's rock and roll, which first, has to be fun. Our audiences are mostly teenagers, and with teenagers, you go for the crotch, not the brains. Like, the kids who come to our concerts see a unity with their own rebellion. Their parents hate us, which is how real rock and roll has always been. We're an alternative to Stephen Stills."

Alice had to leave for a sound check. In the parking lot, we give the attendant a dollar bill that looks real except it's three times the size of real money, and instead of G.W. there's a picture of you-know-who. "You can pass it off to midgets on LSD," Alice had told us. The parking lot attendant nods towards the hotel. "Are they up there?" asks the valet, a Denver teen with hair as long as Alice. We nod.

"Those weird fuckers," he says, smiling.

It was almost showtime at the 10,000-seat Denver Coliseum. Last night, Alice Cooper was in Albuquerque. The week before, he ran the table on the Bible Belt circuit: Indianapolis, Cincinatti, Sioux City. In Cincinatti, the Warner Bros. Records promo man said, there was a kidnapping threat.

"Who did Alice threaten to kidnap?" I wish I had asked. Instead: "Who would have done such a thing?"

"Weirdos, [colloquial insult for homosexuals], those kind of creeps," the promo man said.

That's what happens when you look as weird as Alice Cooper seems to look, when you sell out every mammoth cowbarn [arena] in middle America, when your latest album, Killer, has just earned a gold record for $1 million in sales. When Playboy, Time, and ABC-TV send reporters and camera crews for features . . . well,  when you're hot, you're hot, and right now Alice Cooper is the hottest group in the country.

Last time around on tour, Alice Cooper met his 'demise' in a custom-built electric chair. This time, Copper emerged on stage in ripped black leather leotard, huge silver streaked boots, and oddles of other dracho-leather paraphernalia.

During "Is It My Body?" Alice is joined by a boa constrictor for simulated soul-kissing and love-it-to-death contortions. The visual on "Dead Bodies" is bound to bring a regurge to the gut of those who breakfast on warm rats and crunchy granola. Alice mangles a doll with his hands,  stomps on it with both feet like a paratrooper landing, and finally chops it up with an axe before throwing the pieces at the delighted front rows.

For every crime, there's a punishment. Alice is led to gallows amidst outpourings of smoke, thunder, and climactic TV music. A noose is placed around his neck. He disappears through a trap door and resurrects triumphantly. Wearing a top hat, mock formal tux, and brandishing a cane like a sword, he looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and Ebeneezer Scrooge. The band kicks right in with "We Still Got a Long Way to Go," a great rock and roll tune recontextualized into a fabulous vaudeville routine.

It ain't over yet, folks. With rock and roll crazed kids rushing the stage, Alice begins tossing rolled up posters of the band into the audience. The kids go nuts, and Alice is in manipulative ecstasy. He takes the sword-tip of his cane and skewers those fake dollar bills like so much Federal Reserve shish-kebab and flings them on the foaming teenagers.

"I really enjoy crowd control says Alice," at the hotel presser. "There's a little bit of Hitler in me. Sometime I'd like to do something that makes the entire audience pass out. We'd leave and they'd wake us to find us gone. . . My psychiatrist thinks it's scary."

Merch for sale at the current Alice Cooper website

The stage show is consistent with other great rock and roll traditions. There's a little Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who used to rise from a coffin to "I Put a Spell on You" in the fifties; Arthur Brown and his fire brigade; the Jagger prance, the [Jim] Morrison leather strut. At one point, Alice even duckwalks across the stage like a bizarro Chuck Berry.

During "Dead Babies," I thought, "hey, this is great choreography that might even work without music." Deep insight! It would be like watching TV with the sound turned off.

None of the theatrics would work if the music wasn't great, which is sure-as-sheet-metal is. Alice Cooper has developed enormously as a musical combination on Killer, with Mike Bruce's writing (though many songs credit the entire band) and Bob Ezrin's production on their last two records.

Now that the curiosity seekers have buzzed off from the Brown Palace, Sam and I can have a real conversation with Cooper about his music and its roots. He said he never listened to "da blooze" growing up in Phoenix, just rock and roll distilled from a number of sources. The garage rock of the Music Machine and Syndicate of Sound. From another direction there's Dylan in his vocal tracings, as well as the Stooges, which Alice says, "should be the biggest group in America, and the Velvet Underground, too."

There's Stones kineticism and stylings on the best singles, like "Under My Wheels" and "Be My Lover," which is only as far from "Honky Tonk Women" as Detroit, the current Cooper band base, is from Memphis. Also, on "Killer" and "Desperado," there's Doors-a plenty. "That song," Alice acknowledges, "really needed that voice."

During the concert performance of their already classic "Eighteen," while the band is driving down the lead-and-metal expressway, Cooper found the space to scat: "Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry." Not only a great slice of 'American Pie," but a pretty great bit of rock and roll assimilation/transposition to boot.

After the show there was a party for the band in the penthouse of the ritzy Hampshire House hotel. A stripper danced for the cool but attentive crowd. It was a strange scene.

Denver music and record people high on power, anticipation, money, booze, and dope. Cheech and Chong clowned, one of Redbone's crew drank too much and insulted people, girls sat alone in corners.

But where was Alice? Finally, he came to his own party and grabbed a few beers. "Hey, aren't you guys gonna turn on the TV? Anatomy of a Murder is on. James Stewart, man. James Stewart!"