Alice Cooper - Me, Alice - The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

I’ve made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine three times in my career, and we’ve finally come to pleasant terms, but back in 1971 to 1972 that was far from the case. At the time they suffered from some sort of inverse snobbism. They wanted every rock star to be some sort of transformed prince to the young. They wanted me to be political. Christ, it was a great shame to them that I was totally apolitical. They were still steeped in that 1968 philosophy and they just couldn’t understand the fact that I was a happy kid who wasn’t cool and didn’t want to be. I handled my newfound fame no better than the kid next door who wins a lottery. But I was not a mean person. I was never nasty. I never hurt anybody. I was never egotistical. I shared my success with everybody around me, wined and dined and treated the press royally all around the world, and still some of them were rotten to me. So what if I never voted in a presidential campaign or read Castaneda? Well, that wasn’t good enough for Rolling Stone.

In March of 1972 they ran a major story on me, “Gold Diggers of 1984 — wanna see my snake, little girl?” We were characterized as a group of stupid, wisecracking, spoiled, sex-obsessed kids, and maybe that was one side of us. I was in the midst of an alcoholic stupor at the time, trying to live up to a lot of expectations people had about me. In the middle of the article they inserted interviews they had done with my parents — most of it over the phone — and to anybody reading the article it sounded like they were along with me while I was cursing and getting drunk and exposing myself.

The neighborhood mailman in Phoenix was also in my father’s church, and when he spotted the story in a copy of Rolling Stone he was delivering, all hell broke loose in the church. There was talk of removing my father from the ministry. The whole community was outraged, and my parents took a big chunk of anger that people were really directing at me. I felt very bad for them because I knew how difficult it was to put up with a hostile community. That incident and similar ones have hardened my parents to the outside. It made two very warm people retreat for protection so as not to get hurt any further. It’s only recently, since people found out I was a clown and not a devil, that they can tell people who I am with pride.

I wrote “No More Mr. Nice Guy” a week after the Rolling Stone story ran, and it gave me a rush of satisfaction to be taking a swipe back at the press for a change.

We had known for several months that the theme of our next album would be School’s Out. I heard the phrase used in a Bowery Boys movie in the same way someone would say, “Get smart, Satch.” Now was the time for Alice to change again, this time away from the ghoulish character. This Alice was crazy, too, like all Alices, but he was a zany, lovable school kid. A wise-ass. A screwball. In short, me.

The album jacket, designed by Pacific Eye and Ear, was a school desk with the band’s initials carved on it.It opened like a school desk, too, and was filled with exam papers and report cards of a student, one Dwight Frey. Each album was encased in a plastic sleeve and a pair of pink panties.

The panties gave us the biggest headache. U.S. Customs officials seized 500,000 of them on their way into the country because they didn’t meet the guideposts of the Flammable Fabrics Act. Warner Brothers fenced for us, saying they weren’t panties at all, but packing material. The government told Shep, “You mean to say those freaky fans of his weren’t going to try these things on when mama isn’t looking?”

I said, “Okay, but who’s going to light a cigarette down there?” If anybody is that hot they should be wearing asbestos panties. Isn’t all this silly! Absurd! And the UPI and AP jumped on the story.

“School’s Out” was such a dynamite single it just couldn’t have missed. We broke it across the country just in time for summer vacation madness, and propelled it to the number-one single in the nation. The album followed close behind the single, leaping up the national charts in an awe-inspiring pace: from 116 to 51 to 17 to 14 to number two. And it sat there, for weeks and weeks, the second-biggest-selling album in the world and the biggest-selling single in the history of Warner Brothers. We even made it to number ten on the Singapore Hit Parade.

I can’t begin to explain how badly I feel when an album doesn’t sell or tickets to see one of my concerts don’t sell. It has nothing to do with money at this point — it’s a matter of rejection, of being jilted. I know it’s not a logical way to feel, but then again I’m not exactly living in a logical world.

Take Wembley Pool Auditorium for instance. There was no apparent reason that we shouldn’t have sold out Wembley Pool Auditorium. We just couldn’t figure it out. We hadn’t played a London date in six months and “School’s Out” was the number-one single in Great Britain that June. Wembley Pool only held 8,000 people, and we had sold less than half three days before the concert.

Shep and I went to Warner Brothers’ London headquarters to try and figure out what was wrong at Wembley with Derek Taylor. Derek was in charge of special projects for Warner Brothers and had long been a rock and roll legend for his publicity work with the Beatles. He and Alice Cooper were great lovers from the start. He delighted in a project he could really sink his teeth into, and the urgency of the concert being only three days away made selling 4,000 tickets all the more exciting for him.

Derek got busy on the phones. He called the Warner Brothers film division and had them blow up a photograph of me, dressed only in my favorite boa wrapper around my crotch, to a nine-by-twenty-foot billboard. Then he rented a twenty-two-foot semitractor and had the poster mounted on the side of the truck — that same afternoon.

They sent the truck out into the streets past Buckingham Palace and Parliament, but except for a few complaints from policemen, nothing happened. Derek alerted all the media that it was out there, but not one lousy photographer showed up. We just couldn’t understand how London could ignore a twenty-foot naked photograph of me parked in front of Buckingham Palace. We all got into a Bentley limousine and drove to Piccadilly Circus, where the truck was circling. There was a horde of American tourists gawking at it on the street.

I waited in the back of the car while Shep and Derek went out to have a few words with the driver. By the time they got back across the street a terrible thing happened. The truck broke down right across the middle of the intersection at the beginning of the afternoon rush hour. A lot of people got out of their cars and yelled at the poor driver in the truck, who shrugged and waved his arms. In a few minutes the police came and a committee of people crowded around the truck trying to get it going. Derek got on the car phone and had his assistant Mandi Newall re-call all the TV and radio stations to tell them to get their asses to Piccadilly Circus. But there was no rush. The truck was still there two hours later causing the worst traffic jam London had seen since the blitz.

The picture of the stalled truck and billboard appeared in almost every paper the next day and Wembley Pool Auditorium sold out by the following evening. Truly Cooperesque. But the party at Chessington Zoo was scheduled for the afternoon of the concert. If we had brought Hollywood back to LA at the Ambassador Hotel this time we were bringing LA to London. Chessington Zoo was a small park with a circus tent, not a typical place for a party. No less typical, though, than the fact we were serving only alcohol. I can’t imagine how we forgot to order any food. Alcohol in the afternoon is usually never served at press parties, especially in England where journalists get ripped when there’s any free booze around. I can’t say we blamed them. I didn’t get to the party until an hour after it started, and the moment I got out of my limo I knew I was going to have fun.