Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

We used everything we could borrow or steal as a prop: fire extinguishers and pillows, goggles, a toilet seat, an oar or a broom. We let out instruments feed back an ear-shattering squeal and beat each other up on stage like the inmates at Charington. Once we almost suffocated ourselves. We stole a large container of CO2 gas for a Coca-Cola plant and at the end of the act, when we did a big rave-up on a song called “I’m a man,” I let a weather balloon slowly fill up with the gas. On the last chord of the song I climbed up the amplifiers and broke the balloon with a sword. The heavy gas dropped on us. Neal fell into his drum kit and spawled on the floor and I passed out beside him. We got a standing ovation when they carried us off the stage on stretchers with oxygen masks. It was also around that time that Glen Buxton started to smear cigarette ashes under his eyes. This quickly snowballed into mascara and eyeshadow, and within a month we were all wearing makeup.

The time had come for us to get out on the road. In New York, She and Joey were frantically looking a booking agent to handle us before we bankrupted them. They played the telephone game, trying to get through to people who had just stepped away from their office or were in meeting. A million phone calls trying to get past a million closed doors. Using the invisible album as an edge, Shep finally got up the International Famous Agency, where we cajoled, begged and befriended a man named Alan Strahl. At twenty-four, Strahl was one of the most successful guys in the business. He was a short, sunshiny-faced man with a remarkable sense of humor — probably the reason he took up on us as clients.

Alan Strahl didn’t exactly know what he was getting into. He heard through the grapevine that we were a little weird, but that was all. Shep, after all, was a nice boy from Long Island, like Alan, so what could be wrong? With Strahl behind us we got a few dates.

We played Salt Lake City for $700, The University of Boulder for $1,000, The Black Dome in Cincinnati for $1,250, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in March for $1,500, where we saw the first copy of Pretties For You with an Ed Beardsley painting on the cover sealed in plastic.

Pretties For You may have been declared a classic years later in Germany, but in 1968 it was a dud. People hated it in droves. It was called a “tragic waste of vinyl” by one critic although it had some of our best compositions on it, like “10 Minutes Before the Worm” and “Swing Low Sweet Cheerio.” Dennis had written a masterpiece for that album called “B.B. On Mars.” When Alan Strahl got a copy of the record in New York, curious to hear what it sounded like, he was only able to listen to twenty seconds of it before he had to shut off the record player.

We had our fans, however. The Hells Angels adored the album. The president of the San Francisco chapter of the Angels was a longtime Zappa fan, and when Pretties For You came out he was one of the few thousand people who bought a copy. He told Zappa to tell us that we represented more of what the Hells Angels stood for than the Grateful Dead, a supreme compliment. As word spread on us, the Angels would show up backstage everywhere we played. It was a frightening fan club, and we treated them gingerly and with respect.

In April, only seven months after signing a recording contract, we were $40,000 in the hole. There was literally no work left for us in LA. We had played the town out. The only choice was to find another city or another location where the Alice Cooper band would be better received.

Whatever you do, if you’re new and haven’t played around, you don’t go to New York. New York isn’t considered a “breaking town” in the record business. You have to be big already by the time you hit New York, and then you’ve got to be good to stay big. If they don’t like you in New York they put the word out on you and you’re crippled in the music business. They send you back to the hinterlands without a second chance.

I don’t know if Shep knew how dangerous it was to take us to New York, but I think he wanted to get it over, put us out of our misery, so to speak. Alan Strahl and Shep wrangled a whole East Coast suicide spree for us. Strahl’s influence got us a booking fourth on the bill at the Felt Forum on June 6, 1968, followed by two nights at Steve Paul’s Scene. On June 13 we went to the Electric Factory in Philadelphia for two days before returning to New York for three more nights at the Scene.

Memorial weekend we piled into a station wagon like lambs to a slaughter and with a van full of lights and sound equipment following us we drove to New York. We arrived on a hot, humid day, a city-broiler that makes the tar soft and glistening and the air fetid and thick. We spent a good hour driving in circles around Madison Square Garden, gawking at the building and counting winos asleep on the sidewalk.