Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Just as Cindy and I were leaving for Toronto she called him from my hotel and told him she was in love with me and was going off with me to Toronto and never wanted to see him again. It was all very dramatic and final and we were asking for trouble. Steven went berserk. He said he’d kill me and Cindy and both our families and we’d never make it out of Detroit alive.

With a Ziggy plane ticket gripped tightly in our hands we rushed out to the airport with the rest of the group and landed safely in Toronto two hours later. We checked into a hotel (Cindy and I shared a room with Glen) and forgot all about Steven, probably because the hotel had a television, a rare and beautiful luxury in those days.

The next night at the festival the problem with the chickens started. To this day I still have observers from the ASPCA turn up at my concerts to shake fingers at me because of the myth that’s been perpetrated about that night. I want to say right here and now that I’ve never killed a chicken on stage. Well, not purposely anyway.

A lot of the legendary chicken killing has to do with feathers. Feathers were a very helpful and cheap prop. If I broke open a pillow on stage it looked big and explosive, something the audience could see all over the theater. Mike Bruce would spray the feathers all over the audience with a stolen fire extinguisher, and when the feathers covered the audience they actually become part of the show. I felt that kind of audience contact was important, and I had already been using feathers and fire extinguishers for a year when the chicken scandal started.

At that Toronto concert somebody handed me a chicken from the audience. I thought chickens could fly. Really. It had wings, and birds fly. Now I ask you, how many chickens do you think I came across growing up in trailers in Detroit and Phoenix? The only chickens I ever saw were on a plate. So when this chicken was handed to me at the finale of the show, I held it tightly so it wouldn’t fly away. The pillow was broken and feathers were already flying out over the audience. I held the chicken out to the audience and threw it up in the air, expecting it to soar off above the stadium and fly away like a dove. Instead it screamed and squawked and did a nose dive into the audience. Twenty or thirty hands went up to catch it.

Some kid grabbed a wing and another person got a leg and suddenly the kids were pulling it apart, much to the bird’s dismay. One wing ripped off and blood began to spray all over everyone, then another wing and the head went sailing up in the air. A thousand flashbulbs went off in the audience.

The next day word spread throughout the rock business that I had killed a chicken on stage and drank the blood for an encore. Alan Strahl, who had booked the date, got a dozen calls in New York. Everybody wanted to know if it was true. Alan called Shep and begged him to say it wasn’t so, that I wasn’t killing chickens now, that we weren’t only fags but chicken-killing fags on top of it.

That night after the show I was exhausted. I went back to the room with Cindy and Glen and the phone rang. Cindy picked it up, screamed like Bette Davis, and slammed it down. She said Steven was in the lobby. Or something like that. She was too shocked to remember the exact words, but Steven was here in Toronto and he said he was coming up to kill us.

I panicked. The first thing I did was send Glen out to get two bottles of gin. A half hour later we were good and drunk. We pooled our money, about fourteen dollars, and decided to buy a gun.

Glen knew the name of a motorcycle bar, and we locked Cindy in the hotel room, got the address of the bar from a phone book, and ran down the streets trying to hitch a ride. Nobody was about to pick us up looking the way we did so we had to run halfway until we were out of breath and took a taxi the rest of the way which left us with $12.

From the outside the place looked more like a brightly lit greasy spoon diner than a sleazy motorcycle bar, but there were plenty of tough bikers there all right. I could see dozens of them and their girls in the window as the taxi pulled up. The curb was crowded with a row of choppers, and it looked as good a bet as any that we’d find a gun there.

Our entrance caused quite a commotion. The second we walked in a buzz started that grew to a roar until it was louder than the jukebox. Everybody was staring at us, huge hulking leather bikers who whistled and cat-called. Somebody yelled, “Take it off, faggot!”

We sat down in a corner and I stared at the floor.

“You can’t just sit there, man. You have to ask somebody,” Glen whispered.

“Ask somebody!” I choked back. “Do you think I’m nuts? We’re not going to get out of here alive! You want me to ask for a gun on top of it?”