Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Everybody in school was overjoyed with out new-found fame. There were, of course, the Balducci Brothers. These geeks were the school’s tough Mexican family, and Rubin Balducci was like the Phoenix Godfather. Rubin and his brothers weighed two hundred pounds apiece, and when they pulled up at school every day in a little blue Corvair we used to stand outside in the parking lot to watch the car scrape into the parking lot two inches off the ground.

Rubin had an odd sense of humor. He was always doing things like shaking your hand and then squeezing it real hard until he made you get down on your knees in pain or climb into a garbage can to get him to stop. Then he’d laugh a deep “ho, ho, ho” like a demented Santa Claus.

After Rubin saw us in the Letterman’s show he wouldn’t leave us alone at school. He tripped me in the hallways, pulled at my hair, and once led me around the campus by holding tight onto my nose until Mr. Buckley caught him doing it and made him stop. Somehow I got the blame and wound up coming to school an hour early for a week for punishment.

One afternoon I walked by Rubin in the parking lot and patted him on the back as I said, “Hiya, Balducci!” There was sand and cement under his feet and his legs slid out from under him. His ass seemed to twist up over his head as he hit the ground. When the tremors died down I knew I was dead. Suddenly I heard, “Ho ho ho! Hohohohohohohohoho. Hohohohohoho. You mean that little guy’s the only guy who ever knocked me down?”

After that he always protected me.

Over the year, we taught ourselves how to play instruments and changed our name to the Spiders. We learned all our songs from Yardbirds and Rolling Stones albums which we had to play several hundred times each to figure out the chords.

Although there were some personnel changes for the first two years, the line-up settled to John Speer on drums, Dennis on bass guitar, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, and a friend of Glen’s, John Tatum, on rhythm guitar. I didn’t want to play an instrument. I knew I wasn’t a musician. I was a front man. An entertainer.

I don’t know what we expected from the band. Certainly not to make money, and believe me, we didn’t. We played anywhere they would let us: parties, the community swimming pool, pizza parlors, the school cafeteria. We played our first gig at a party. A pimpled. ugly girl named Lisa Hawks gave a sweet sixteen party and she couldn’t get anybody to come, so her mother hired the Spiders fro twenty bucks.

We spent the summer of 1965 playing in the “Battle of the Bands.” A battle of the Bands was basically a volume contest held in the parking lots of shopping centers all around Phoenix. Every two-bit garage group like us turned up to compete with honking cars, screaming kids and the brutal summer heat. We developed some stage style and even began to play our Yardbirds songs with some ability and by the end of the summer the Spiders were winning every Battle of the Bands we entered. In September we were invited to audition for an ex-disc jockey named Jack Curtis who ran a teen club the VIP Lounge. Curtis hired us, not just for an evening, but as the house band.

The deal that Jack Curtis gave us was quite good for a group that hadn’t been playing more than a year. We had steady employment at $500 a weekend and Curtis even sponsored the recording of a single on his own label. It was called “Why Don’t You Love Me?” and Curtis pressed fifty copies of it. The group bought twenty-five of them and the rest rotted in a phoenix record store.

My sudden elevation to professional standing brought along with it the fruits of stardom: women. My great high school flame was Mimi Hicki. I loved Mimi because she was built like a Corvette. She had conically pointy tits and blue eyes. My zipper got hard whenever I looked at her. The year before I met her father had been killed in a car accident on his way to a corner store for a pack of cigarettes. Since then Mimi wouldn’t let her boyfriends out of her sight, and I loved every minute of the attention.