Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

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 houses, but I’d never been in a huge open park where there was literally a pot stench. When I got up to the line a fat slob with a hairy belly dished a spoonful of watery stew on my plate and said, “Peace, Brother.” I couldn’t believe he was serious. I was afraid to eat anything. I figured that anything anybody gave me for free had to have LSD in it.

I took my plate over to a tree behind the stage where Glen and Dick were talking to a hippie with daisies stuck in his furry hair.

“It’s true man,” he was saying. “They come in off the freeway. They use the freeway as a landing strip, see? And then they steal people out of their houses for experimentation.”

Dick said, “This is Sergeant Garcia, and he knows a lot about flying saucers.”

“Don’t they land on any cars when they hit the freeway?” Glen asked him.

“That’s the thing man!” Garcia said, his face suddenly contracted into a ripple of nervous twitches. “They crush dozens of cars every night, and the government tries to cover it up so the people won’t panic. It’s our job, man, to spread the word.”

I learned from Dick that Sergeant Garcia had just been released from a psychiatric hospital and felt attracted to us because we were crazy, too. He gave us his address and phone number if we ever needed a place to sleep and even helped us load the equipment into the station wagon when the gig was over.

The next day we walked into a club on the Strip cold and asked if we could audition. The owner, who wore beads around his neck and smoked cigars, was surprisingly pleasant and told us to come back the next night at seven. Just as we set up our equipment he opened the doors to the club. He said he wanted to see what the public thought of us. This was the first of many scams we were to have perpetrated on us in LA. We “auditioned” for three hours that night, to a fairly crowded club, and when it was over he told us we didn’t sound just right but thanks anyway.

We went back to Phoenix and finished up some jobs; a prom in Gallup, New Mexico, one in Albuquerque, a rock concert in Riverside, California. But we couldn’t stay home another week after that. We decided to change out name to the Nazz, one of those arbitrary decisions that seemed very practical at the time. We were each able to save up forty dollars from our salaries and again we piled into the station wagon and headed for LA.

We checked into six-dollar-a-night cubicles at the Sunset Motor Inn and set off for the Hullabaloo Club. In 1967 the Hullabaloo was one of the most important clubs in the country. It was a showcase for new talent that spawned hundreds of rock musicians. Like the Scene and Max’s Kansas City and many other famous clubs, the Hullabaloo provided the space, setting and ambience for rock people to meet and make deals. The Hullabaloo worked an after-hours policy, running live acts from midnight to dawn. While Los Angeles withdrew, another world was just beginning to buzz at the Hullabaloo. The place was filled to capacity every night with record company A&R men, managers, groupies, publicists, and the whole rainbow of drug dealers, con artists and homosexuals that appear wherever rock and roll is.

If you were a known group with a record label, you were paid one hundred dollars to play. The Doors played the Hullabaloo often, even after their hit single, just to get off playing for a hip crowd. But most groups played for free, and we were lucky to get the chance. Being seen at the Hullabaloo was a ticket to heaven. We signed up for two nights and lucked out with a good time — four A.M.

I guess we expected a talent scout to come running out of the audience and offer us a million-dollar contract. We didn’t even get applause. By the end of our second show we were thoroughly depressed. The audience was completely indifferent to us. The speakers might as well have been turned off. All our money was gone and we couldn’t even afford the six-dollar-a-night motel. We had to leave Los Angeles again the next morning after only a five-day stay, and I couldn’t believe we had been devoured so quickly. We hadn’t.

As I glumly watched the equipment being loaded in the station wagon, I saw a woman with red lipstick and matching frizzy hair pushing her way through the crowded backstage area towards me. She grabbed hold of my jeans, dragged me to a corner and said her name was Merry Cornwall, and she was the booking agent for the Cheetah. The Cheetah was the hottest discotheque on the West Coast. It was hardly a year old and already a rock and roll legend. The interior design of mirrored chrome and flashing lights made it the hippie acid palace of the decade, and I would have given my right arm to play there.