Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

The GTOs were close friends with Frank Zappa. In 1969 Frank Zappa was still a teen hero. He was my teen hero at least, and Zappa really just about supported the GTOs. There wasn’t a zanier entourage in existance. Miss Christine was practically his social secretary, and after much begging and cojoling she promised me an audience with Frank. One night Miss Christine took me to a party and Zappa was there sitting on a sofa drinking wine, his mustache bigger than life. The moment we met we hit it off. Zappa had never been a huge commercial success himself. He was regarded unofficially as a drug freak, a nut, but that wasn’t the case at all. Zany, maybe, but he never touched drugs and he was the straighest, strictest businessman I ever dealt with. He told me that he was starting his own record company and looking for acts to sign, especially comedy and psychedelic acts that nobody else would take a chance on. I asked if he would come hear us at the Cheetah, but he put me off saying he was too busy, but I didn’t take no for an answer. As the party went on and he got drunker, I got more insistent. Finally he said, “All right. Come by in the morning and I’ll listen.”

I suppose he meant we should bring a tape, or maybe he forgot the next day was Sunday. Miss Christine let us into his house at the break of dawn, and we set up our equipment and lights in his basement and started playing. Zappa came rushing downstairs, naked, holding his ears.

“All right, all right,” he shouted, his cock swinging back and forth as he shook his head, “I’ll sign you! I’ll sign you! Just stop playing!”

Zappa wasn’t kidding. Just like that, out of the clear blue sky, he told us to come to his office on Monday and talk to his business manager, Herbie Cohen. Cohen offered us a six-thousand-dollar advance for our first three record albums to be released on Zappa’s newly formed Straight-Bizarre label distributed by Warner Brothers. Zappa had already signed Captain Beefheart and the GTOs.

Six thousand dollars! I couldn’t believe it! All the struggling and starving was over!

We told Merry Cornwall about it that night, but she was reserved in her celebrations with us. We talked Merry and Norma Bloom into buying us a couple of bottles of booze and some pizza, and Merry warned us not to get our hopes up. A kiss is not a fuck, she pointed out, and a promise i not a signed contract. That kind of verbal offer happened all the time in the music business and most often nothing would come of it. Merry saw a lot of pitfalls in signing with Zappa, especially because we didn’t have a manager to protect our interests. Zappa wanted Herbie Cohen to manage us, but Merry thought it was a conflict of interest. In the entire time we were in LA nobody showed any interest in managing us except for Merry. There was Dick of course, but he wouldn’t cut much ice with Zappa and Herbie Cohen. We were losing Dick in any event. He became distracted and invloved in a new life in LA, and as the next year went by we lost him somewhere in the confusion of our lives.

We were stumped. We had to find a manager before signing the deal, and we had to sign the deal while Zappa still wanted us. There had to be somebody, somewhere, who wanted a piece of the Alice Cooper group. After all, we were getting six thousand dollars. I thought it was all the money in the world. Think of it! In four more years I would be making ten thousand dollars a minute!

CHAPTER 6

In Los Angeles everybody wanted to know just two things: your sign and what you did for a living. It was the mentality of Hollywood. They needed an instant identity to hang on you. They wanted to know in you apartment building when you moved and when you brought your clothes to the cleaners. They asked when you rented a car or cashed a check at the supermarket. “What sort of line are you in?” “What is it you do?” They even wanted to know in a chic little boutique on Wilshire Boulevard that made shredded jeans to order at ninety-five bucks a leg, where Neal Smith’s sister sewed her little heart out in the back.

Cindy Smith was a blond, strong-willed twenty-year-old who had gotten it into her head, from some unfathomable source, that life in Los Angeles was glamorous. She offered to come live with us in Topanga Canyon when she left Phoenix, but we denied her the privilege. Undaunted, she took her own apartment in LA and found a job as a seamstress.

One morning she was stitching away at her machine when she heard two guys with New York accents tell the salesman they were rock managers. Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg were nothing of the sort. They were gamblers by nature, two New Yorkers in LA with a good head for poker and chips. They met each other five years before in the Port Authority Bus Terminal and spent their college years roaming up and down the hotel circuits of one-night poker games.