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

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, but the spark was obviously gone between us. Although the album was another enormous commercial success, it wasn’t our most creative or pleasant recording experience. The following Christmas we hit the road again for a short holiday “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour, which only ripped the group further apart, compounded by a book written about the tour by Chicago journalist Bob Greene that washed our laundry in public for the first time. It made it embarrassing for us to see each other.

In spring we went to South America to do five concerts, a great honor considering there had never been a rock show in South America before. The reaction down there was total hysteria. They hadn’t even lived through Donnie Osmond or the Beatles and here they were being whelped on me, Alice Cooper. Talk about future shock. Welcome to the seventies, Brazil!

After South America we all went our own ways. Neal Smith got married and bought a house in Connecticut. Neal’s sister Cindy married Dennis Dunaway. Glen Buxton bought a home in Greenwich and retired to spend his days lazing in the sun with his girl friend, Susan. Michael Bruce bought an estate on Lake Tahoe and recorded his own solo album.

As for me, I had no home and I needed roots. I needed some personal independence, to begin living a semblance of a normal life.

I’m okay now.

I’m tan. And healthy. And rested.

In fact, I’m even better than I ever was.

I’m sitting in the sunshine by a pool in Beverly Hills.

I took two stretching and dance classes this morning.

I don’t drink as much as I used to, but I play just as hard.

I broke up with Cindy Lang, but we’re still best friends.

My liver and I are now on speaking terms.

I live in a rented house perched on a hillside. I’m staying here while they rebuild a house I bought. I was watching the Eleven O’Clock News in New York one night when they started to play “Welcome to My Nightmare” and showed newsfilm of my house burning down to the ground.