Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Curing this Phoenix interlude we spent days trying to figure out a new name for the band. The Nazz, it turned out, was already taken. This time we wanted a distinctive name, something that would draw attention to us but not a rock cliche. One boring January evening I said, “How about Alice Cooper?” and everybody said, “No, that’s ridiculous.” About half an hour later Dick Christian said, “What about that name, Alice Cooper?” But nobody even wanted to discuss it. I thought it was perfect. It was so American and so eerie at the same time. It had the same ring to it that Lizzy Borden did. I knew that if there was really an Alice Cooper somewhere chances were she was an ax murderer.

We forgot about it for a few days until Dick Christain dragged us all over to Alice Paxton’s house. Both Charlie Carnal and Dick were friendly with Mrs. Paxton’s daughter, who claimed her mother was a clairvoyant and could help us solve our problems. Alice Paxton also had her Ouija board, which she hadn’t used in a few years, and we started asking it questions. I wasn’t even working the board when we asked if there was a spirit in the room. There was.

The board spelled out the name Alice Cooper.

For three hours everyone drilled the board on Alice Cooper, and we came up with the following story (with a few additional details added by me over the course of some five thousand interviews):

In the early sixteen hundreds scientists and occultists became aware of a celectrial disturbance which seemed to have a strange concentrated effect on the British Isles. There was an odd feeling of unrest and suspicion in the countryside. In the midst of this general feeling of alarm, on February 4 (my birthday), 1623 (not my birthday), in Sussex, England, Alice Cooper was born.

She was the daughter of well-to-do parents and a very strange child. She seemed always to be listening to voices that no one else could hear, often smiling secretly as if she knew the answer to some cosmic joke.

Much of Alice’s time was taken up with her sister Christine, who was three years older than she. Christine taught her magic, including the use of strange plants that grew in abunance in the forest, and the techniques of speaking ancient words of old that could make thunder roll and fire burn. On Alice’s twelfth birthday her parents died in a mysterious fire, their charred bobies never recovered from the blazing house. One year later little Alice was to witness the death of her sister, Christine, who was accused of being a witch and burned at the stake by the villagers.

A week later little Alice herself was dead, poisoned perhaps by her own hand so she could join her sister Christine in the other world. She was only thirteen years old. Pretty good, huh? Well, it really worked at the time.

I was thrilled with the name, but Neal Smith was disgusted. He finally thought he had gotten into a group that was going to go somewhere, do something important, get him a Rolls-Royce and a mansion in the country and now we were changing our name to something stupid like Alice Cooper!

I couldn’t blame Neal for worrying. He was in a terrible spot. He was broke, his family had moved out of Phoenix, and the draft board was after him. All the rest of us had the draft board under control at the time, but Neal was a perfect specimen. He couldn’t even get drunk enough to pass out at his physical.

The same night we got the information from the Ouija board, Neal and I drove out to the desert in a borrowed car. There were two .22-caliber rifles in the trunk, and we were going to shoot jackrabbits. We would drive around the desert, blind them with the car headlights, and pick them off.

Neal took a shot at one from the hood of the car, thought he had hit it and swung his long legs around just as I pulled off my own shot. There was a thumping sound, and he fell on the ground. He scrambled around in front of the headlights and pulled off his boots. I had shot him in the ankle.