Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

As soon as we moved in with Merry we played the Cheetah. The four months we lived with her she booked us into the Cheetah almost every week, and eventually, just as we had done at the VIP in Phoenix, we got to be the house band there. A year before we would have swooned at the thought of being the house band at the Cheetah, but now that it happened we were immediately discontented. There was something missing (other than a manager and a recording contract). There was no gratification. The audiences didn’t mind us, and we weren’t too bad, after a fashion, but wee were just another rock band playing the English blues — too typical, too sane, too average.

I let a groupie pick me up on the pier one night, and because I didn’t fuck girls at that point we got drunk instead. The reason I wouldn’t touch any of the girls that began to throw themselves at my feet at the Cheetah was disease. Everybody in Los Angeles seemed to have syphilis or gonorrhoea or anal warts or something! Groupies were a walking laboratory of disease. Pasteur would have wept for joy. I didn’t even think twice about the crabs. Crabs were a national disease of the young. But crabs could be washed off with that magic elixir, Pyrimate A-200. I learned to live with crabs just as I eventually learned to live with the Holiday Inns. By syphilis or gonorrhoea was another story. I believe in faith healing. I was, for the most part, still a spiritual member of the Church of Jesus Christ, and we didn’t believe in doctors and medication. I also hated the thought of getting an injection.

So I got lots of blow jobs starting then. Blow jobs were safe. You couldn’t get the clap from a mouth unless the chick had been kissing toilet seats. I got blow jobs in bath rooms from sleazy groupies and blow jobs under tables from fabulous-looking girls. I got sadistic blow jobs where I thought the girl was going to rip the skin off my cock with her teeth and soft, sensual blow jobs where I had to look twice to make sure the chick hadn’t slipped her false teeth out and she was gumming me.

I must have shot, I’m pleased to say, gallons and gallons of come into hundreds of mouths. I didn’t even let them undress all the way. They’d bare their breasts enough for me to get hard and I’d let them devour my cock. If only I had known about blow jobs when I was eleven years old I wouldn’t have cared that Edward Satriano made me believe my cock was broken. It fit into every mouth I ever came across.

Of course getting a blow job is a very passive act, and there’s not much chance to be creative. Oh, sometimes I’d stand up and sometimes I’d lay down and sometimes, if I was feeling raunchy enough, I’d just get on top and fuck a mouth. But when it was over I’d feel pressured to say or do something interesting, and the night I went home with the groupie from the pier I let her dye my hair. I don’t know what I was thinking. Groupies were always fascinated by musicians’ hair. It was a symbol of their power. Perhaps I was drunk enough at that time to think that blond dye would turn me into a pretty boy. It didn’t. It just made me look very weird. At first I just got a frosting, but a few weeks later I dyed the whole thing. Here and there, dyed locks began to show up in Glen’s and Mike’s hair. Dick Christian was ecstatic.

John Speer was very upset about the dyed hair. It was too dangerous, he thought, and we had to stick to more sensible and commercial images and music. He even got into fist fights with us. It was around the first Christmas we spent in LA that Glen suggested we hire Neal Smith to replace John Speer.

I always thought Neal Smith was a jerk. I first saw him as a Battle of the Bands in Phoenix when he was the drummer in a rival band, the Surf Tones. Every group in that particular Battle of the Bands agreed to pool their equipment so each band wouldn’t have to reset the stage after each set and lose the attention of the parking lot audiences. Neal Smith was the only musician there who was against it. He made all the musicians disassemble their equipment so he could set his drum kit on risers. Then in the middle of a sixteen-minute version of “Wipe Out,” he did a fourteen minute drum solo.

The next time I saw him was when I smacked up my car with Glen. He just happened to be riding by at that moment in his ‘61 Chevy (with mag wheels), and when he saw my car sitting there and smoking he revved his engine at me and waved. I swore vengeance, and now Glen suggested he replace John Speer! I hoped he still didn’t know how to play drums.

Neal Smith, the world’s tallest blond drummer, the platinum God, is not just tall. Neal towers. Careens around corners like a giraffe. With a shaft of glossy yellow hair half way to his ass, Neal’s presence in a room is unmistakeable. Actually, for a very tall person, Neal is very uniformly built. Everything is big. Long, square and handsome face. Huge long hands. A tremendous mouth.