Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

He was deliriously happy. We went straight to a hospital where they examined him, and he filled out all sorts of reports for the doctors and police and told everyone that he had shot himself in the foot. The police told him, “The next time you shoot yourself, shoot yourself in the fucking head.” He was classified 4F and didn’t even complain much about the cast he had to wear for two months. The bullet is lodged in his right anklebone, and, contrary to rumor, it never improved his playing. We spent two months in Phoenix scraping together enough money to last us another stretch in Los Angeles. My hair and my stage costumes weren’t as popular with Arizonians as they were in LA. I began to stop in Salvation Army stores, and because I was so skinny and narrow-shouldered I found that little girls’ dresses fitted me best around the top. I started to wear them over a pair of jeans like a tunic. Dick decided it was time to get my blond lock permanented so my image would fit my new name, and I agreed. By the time Dick was finished giving me a home permanent I looked like a concentration camp version of a white Jimi Hendrix.

My mother had gone to Tennessee during all this for her father’s funeral, and when she returned home to Phoenix, Dick and I were sitting in the house. I was in a pink suit with my hair blond and frizzed out and when I said,” Mom! I changed my name to Alice!” I thought she would faint. She blamed everything on Dick. She still does, including Watergate and Vietnam.

By March of 1968 we were getting morose staying in Phoenix, and we knew we had to make it back to Los Angeles and work out the new image. We were going to have a new sound too, out of necessity. Neal Smith might have sounded great on his snare drum, but when it came to playing English blues, he was awful. All that he could do was try to rearrange the sound somehow and begin to play original music.

We bought a small van for two hundred dollars, loaded the equipmnet on the Thursday night before Good Friday, and set out for LA. Mike Allen drove, Dick sat in the middle, and I fell asleep on the passenger side while the rest of the group, including Neal with a cast on his leg from his gun wound, rode in the back on top of a pile of equipment.

By seven in the morning we had reached the LA freeways and rush hour. Mike was changing lanes when the equipment began to shift inside the van, dipping it over the right side. I woke up when I heard the breaks screeching, but before any of us could move we began to tumble, head-on, as if the van had tripped over something. The glass in the windshield splattered, and I remember seeing the cement of the freeway come hurtling through the window and the sound of metal scraping across concrete and the van tunmbling, and Mike Allen falling out of the glassless windshiled. There was a blast of horns honking and then I passed out.

When I woke up two police cars and an ambulance were by the side of the road, and a policeman was holding up the back of my head asking me what my name was. I told him I was Alice Cooper.

We were all unconscious for about fifteen minutes, then one by one we began to come to shivering and vomiting from shock. None of us was badly hurt (Neal’s cast had actually saved his foot from getting crushed, and Dick had a gash across his forehead that took eighteen stitches to close up) but the van and most of the equipment were wrecked. Later that night lying in the darkness on the floor in some cheap motel in Hollywood, Dick made a confession. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think I died,” he whispered.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Neal yelled from the other side of the room. “Is this another one of your crazy faggot ideas for the Alice Cooper band?”

“No, I’m serious,” Dick insisted. “When I passed out in the van I had a strange sensation, like my spirit leaving my body.”

Glen was making “woooo” noises of ghosts, but Dick went right on, insisting that his spirit rose above the freeway, and he could see the van laying on its side and other spirits rising up from the cement. He hovered at a certain height, waiting for them to join him, knowing they were friends, when something started to push him back down. He didn’t want to go back down though. He felt free, movable, released. But there was pressure, something literally pushing. Then he woke up.

Although I didn’t tell the other guys until later, when it came out in an interview, I had experienced the same thing. I was sure that we had all died, and that this life was really a reincarnation. I actually had become Alice Cooper.