Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

During dinner Peter insisted he wanted to change places with me on part of my tour. This was September of 1975 and I was on the eve of the European leg of a worldwide “Welcome To My Nightmare” tour. I had been on the road for seven months at that point in the United States alone, zigzagging relentlessly across the country with a crew of forty-fve people, including dancers, carpenters, electricians, roadies, publicists accountants and as sorted feminine pulchritude. At that point I would have switched with Sellers for a show, but only if I could play Inspector Clouseau in a movie.

Later that night after dinner I lay in bed, my eyes closed, a grin on my face, a bulging blonde in my arms, and I tried to fathom all the things that had happened to me in the past year. In the last month. In that day alone. I could hardly believe any of it was real. Yet it never stops. My life seems to get more fantastic all the time. One day is zanier than the next. Take the European “Nightmare ‘ tour for instance.

The very next morning I was up early for a press junket. A press junket is one of the most grueling — and sometimes boring — aspects of touring. I had to appear in five cities in one day all over England, which included eight individual interviews and four press conferences. That means fielding at least five hundred questions for starters. So at the first light of morning I packed an overnight bag, and we drove out to the airport, where I expected to find a baby Lear Jet. Instead there was a shaky Piper Cub waiting for me that looked like somebody had just made it out of a hobby kit. The wings weren’t even on straight. I couldn’t believe the plane would make it to all those cities in one day. Chances were it would turn into a pumpkin by nightfall. We spent so much time climbing and descending, going up and down, avoiding turbulence, bumping and dropping that I still get queasy at the sight of an elevator.

I brought my guns and darts along with me on the plane for entertainment. Before we left for Europe Frankie and I went to a toy store and brought six hundred darts and thirty-five guns to take along with us. When you’re on the road day after day for months, little toys like that help break up the monotony. Whenever the plane landed for an interview, I’d come out shooting. Five or six journalists would be waiting at the airport, and the first thing I did was bob them on the belly with a rubber-tipped dart. Talk about ice-breakers! All the staid, serious English journalists melted. Then they were given their own gun and allowed to shoot back. You had to see these guys in suits, crawling around the floor of the airport lounges like Hopalong Cassidy trying to get a good shot at me. It was so much more interesting to shoot it out than talk it out.

At the third stop and tenth gun fight we picked up a photographer who stayed with us for the rest of the day. In between snapshots and gun shots the photographer managed to slug down a few real shots. By nightfall and the last city he was a smashed shutterbug. I couldn’t figure out how he could focus. All day long he had been insisting I put on an English business suit and bowler hat so he could take a photo of me in it. I told him that was the corniest idea I had heard since last year, when a photographer asked me to do the same thing — and I did it.

So this time I said, “No thanks. Let’s try something else, something different.” But he kept insisting, and the drunker he got the nastier he got. Just as we were saying goodbye to him on the airport runway, he stuck a half chewed cigar in my mouth and asked for a last picture. Then he turned to one of the sweet little English girls who does my publicity and said, “Take off your blouse so I can get a shot of your tits with Alice Cooper.” She thought he was kidding. She gave him a wan smile and looked anxiously at me from under her blond bangs. The photographer grabbed her by the shoulders and ripped open her blouse. For a split second we were all so startled nobody could move. I took the cigar he gave me and shoved it into his open mouth. He bent over and sputtering and spitting pieces of tobacco, and I kicked him so hard in the behind he fell face first in the muddy runway.

Frankie was shocked! Nobody had ever seen me lift a pinky before! Frankie put his arm around me and said, “If I had to do that, champ, I would have murdered the guy.”