Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

She and Joey were involved in all sorts of crazy schemes to get the bills paid, but their greatest coup was Ziggy. Ziggy was a Toronto travel agent Shep had met while trying to establish a community of artists and writers in Canada. Ziggy was a wizened Jewish man who didn’t know or care much about rock and roll except that rock bands made a lot of money. Shep had convinced Ziggy he could be partner to the millions that would start pouring in any day in return for airline tickets. Ziggy became our angel, and on his wings and tickets we were able to fly all over the U.S. If we were offered a gig in Seattle for $1,000 we would use $2,000 worth of airline tickets from Ziggy and keep the grand to live on. We were picking up a following in Detroit, however, and we always went back to the Franklin Avenue hotels like they were home.

We moved slowly down the street, stiffing more and more hotels. We laid in the hotels for a week or two and then flew out to do a gig somewhere. Eugene, Oregon, $1,400, Vancouver, B.C., $2,500, Flint, Michigan. We shuttled back and forth between places, blindly using the Zorro system of gigging, slashing aimlessly through the country wherever there was a stage for us to play. Shep was working with two booking agents now, juggling us and hiding the existence of one agent from the other. Leo Fenn, who booked out of the DMA Agency in Detroit, got us a bunch of little jobs around the midwest. Alan Strahl in New York was handling the bigger gigs

As the days went by we got drunker and drunker, more exhausted from being in airplanes and cars. The more we played the worse our reputation got. If we were liked in one city the concert promoter in that state wouldn’t want to book us because the word was out we were berserk fags.

I got to see America and all the little towns that cover its backside like hair. I sat shoulder to shoulder with Dennis, Mike, Neal, Glen, Charlie Carnal and Mike Allen for months. I knew who chewed the loudest, who farted the worst, and who snored. Who got to eat the last half of a tuna fish sandwich became a matter of life and death.

By the end of the summer the Hotel Owners Association called a meeting about us, and one morning in August they chained our van full of equipment to a streetlamp. Shep got the van back by settling our bills for ten percent of our next imaginary album and $10,000 in bad checks. Things couldn’t have looked more bleak. We covered every outdoor festival in the nation, and with winter coming rock was moving in-doors, and it didn’t look like we could hang on much longer. Shep went to California on a Ziggy plane ticket and tried to convince Frank Zappa to begin work on our second album, but Zappa wasn’t too excited about it. There was a bad break between us and Zappa. Growing animosity and disappointment. There was no support at all from his record company and no distribution from Warner Brothers. Alice Cooper was a joke to Zappa. We had always been Alice Cookies to him, and the joke wasn’t funny anymore.

We stuck it out till mid-September when we were going up to Toronto to play one last outdoor festival before returning to Los Angeles either to record another album or disband. Cindy wanted to go to Toronto with me as a farewell trip. She was going back to school in the fall, and we’d be separated for whatever time fate had in store for us.

Cindy, by the way, had been dating a guy named Steven Hollander for the past two years and was having her share of problems with him. Steven had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was fourteen years old. The last hospitalization had been for drug abuse, which translated into real language means he ate two dozen psylocybin mushrooms for a snack one day and flipped out. Cindy introduced me to him and, although he wasn’t aware I was seeing her, he was hostile and tense, the kind of person you know is potentially dangerous.

When he found out I was dating Cindy I began to get threatening phone calls. All his messages were on the order of, “If you see Cindy one more time it’s death!” Instead of getting hardened to them I got more frightened all the time. As summer went on stories about Steven kept filtering back to me that developed a little ball of fear in my beer belly, a ball that grew to the size of a football by the end of the summer. Steven had burned down a building with two people in it and they were looking for him everywhere. Steven’s dog had puppies and Steven had mutilated them. Steven took too much LSD and was in the state mental hospital again where he knifed an aide.

One night I said to Cindy, “I can’t believe you went out with this guy. What a weirdo!” and she laughed for an hour. I guess Alice Cooper didn’t seem like a much better bargain on the surface.