Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

I never saw Long Gone Miles the entire month we lived there, but I heard him alright. He broadcast from his room. Every nook and cranny of the decrepit house had been wired with radio speakers and every three hours, like clockwork, he would broadcast to the house. I was asleep on the floor in a little space I had cleared of empty TV dinner pans when I heard this old southern black man singing. At first I thought it was the voice of God:

There was a poor black man from Tennessee
The white man stole him wrong
He worked his ass but never got free
And he’s the one who’s singing this song

Oh Lone Gone Miles

Oh Long Gone Miles

And he’s the one who’s singing this song

Woman say she loved him
Gave her grits and loved her strong
Then she go and fucked his best friend
And he’s the one who’s singing this song

All of his songs were about himself. The melodies changed, but the verses went on endlessly, and they all ended with “he’s the one who’s singing this song.” He sounded like a classic nigger. He never came out of his room either, and none of us bothered with him. He must have had a hot plate in his room because we’d smell food every once in a while and once a week an old black man with one arm would bring him a bag of groceries.

On afternoon Long Gone announced a special broadcast in the middle of one of our rehearsals.

“Long Gone Miles, here c’mun to ya fum Crenshaw Boulevard and the Freeway. It’s a good-looking day out there, but ‘bout two blocks away I can see the army settin’ in.”

We all ran to the window, but we couldn’t see any army. I thought that Long Gone had finally gone completely mad. We went back to rehearsals, but in fifteen minutes we saw a battalion of police pull down the street, called in to keep a vigil in Watts, which had exploded in riots the beginning of the summer.

The band was safe in Watts because we had long hair, and we were hungry and bedraggled enough to pass for hippies. The hippies were friends of the militant blacks because they were anti-establishment, but I was sure one of the local residents would have shot me dead if they ever figured out that I coveted their Cadillacs.

Merry Cornwall finally found a house for us on Venice Beach. It was a narrow Wooden building with a screened porch in the back and enough rooms to create five bedrooms so only two of us had share space. It was decorated with pillows, mattresses and posters from the Fillmore West. Merry wasn’t a great housekeeper either, and within a week the place looked no better than the Chambers Brothers’ house on Crenshaw.

When I first got to LA I had a small suitcase carefully packed with stage clothing; velvet suits made from old drapes and brocade jackets and pants from old evening dresses and slipovers. But with all the moving I either lost or ruined most of my clothing and my stage outfits became interchangeable with my street clothes.

I went everywhere with Merry Cornwall dressed that way. We traipsed from record company to record company trying to find somebody who would listen to us. We got auditions, too, dozens of them. But some people didn’t like us at all, some of them wanted the group if we did other kinds of material and some of them wanted us to add an instrument or drop a member. Nobody liked us the way we were. Most of all record companies hated the name the Nazz. We were warned several times that a group from Philadelphia led by Todd Rundgren was already using that name, and we would have to change it to get a contract.

I had my first glimpse into the higher echelon of the rock world when I made my rounds with Merry. It was a fantasy world of telephones in suitcases, credit cards that turned gold like the albums, free-flowing drugs, the best booze and free-flowing sex with the prettiest girls and boys. Offices were decorated with carpeting that ran up the walls and covered the ceilings. Everybody at record companies drove Jaguar-XKEs and wore sandals. It was a super-psuedo hip business world of high-powered forty-year-old guys who had wound up cutting vinyl in LA instead of cutting velvet in the garment center. They were making a fortune off the hippie movement and the tremendous national interest in rock music that had come with it.