Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Ashley knew the editor of the local underground paper, the Ann Arbor Argonaut, and although we didn’t realize he was initiating a service that he would perform several thousand times in the years to come, he set up an interview. It was the first and only time I participated in an orgy, and the only time I fucked a member of the press. There couldn’t have been a less erotic atmosphere than being locked in a stuffy hotel room with Neal, Glen and a fat, puffy girl who asked us the most inane questions: “Why do you dress like that?” “Is your name really Alice?” We knew right off that we weren’t going to be bothered with this idiocy, so we said, “Because we fucking please to, that’s why.” We were incredibly rude. She wrote it all down and asked her next question, and Glen said, “You cunt, I’d like to fuck you up the ass.” And she wrote that down, too. Finally, we started doing all the filthy things we were talking about. We each got millions of crabs. We should have known better. We should have seen them running down her legs. And she printed the interview, verbatim, in her newspaper. To this day that’s the funniest interview I ever did.

We also got a new roadie, Zipper, who had a strange expression on his face all the time, as if he had just thrown up. As a matter of fact, he often did throw up. It was the heroin that made him sick. We never even knew he had a habit until we found him dead from an OD the first day we moved into the farm in Pontiac. Cindy found him in the downstairs bathroom slumped over the edge of the bathtub like he was praying.

In April we played the Strawberry Fields Festival in Canada to an audience of 300,000 people. We did our usual act, but this time I lugged three big watermelons on stage and went after them with a hammer. Someone in the audience tossed a crutch on stage and I put the hammer aside and started hacking at the watermelons with the crutch. They burst open with a dull thud and I chopped and mashed at them until there were hundreds of mushy pieces all over the stage. Then I tossed it out all over the audience. I had already tossed watermelons and feathers and beer at audiences dozens of times and they all did the same thing, they moved back. But this group of dummies just sat there, wiping the pits out of their eyes with their hands. I unleashed two pillows of goose feathers on them, too, and soon the people in the first five rows were tarred and feathered with watermelon. Lots of people were shouting for me to stop, and the more they yelled the crazier I got onstage.

You wouldn’t believe the headlines the next day: ALICE COOPER DRENCHES CRIPPLES WITH WATERMELONS — HELPLESS AUDIENCE ABUSED BY ROCK STAR. I felt awful!Talk about embarrassing experiences! So help me, when I got handed that crutch I had no idea the front five rows were all paraplegics and amputees. But here’s how fucked-up everybody is after the chicken killing, the promoters turned their backs on us, but with the added press of abusing cripples so many people were curious about us that we started getting bookings. Not many, of course, but at least one $1,500 gig a month, which was enough to feed us and keep us on the road. Coincidentally, our popularity centered around Detroit where the hard-assed Michigan kids were into driving, high energy rock and roll, and Shep gave us the go-ahead to find us a house. That’s how we wound up in Pontiac, with one job a month and plenty of time to spend on the farm rehearsing.

The house was a gangling amoeba of rooms and anterooms and closets inside of closets. There was a screened-in porch the width of the house and a staircase with a banister made from a white picket fence. And there were two — count ‘em — two bathrooms with showers that trickled drops of water on you when you were lucky enough to find them unoccupied or the well hadn’t run dry.

Neal, who always had an emergency cash fund, begrudgingly loaned me fifty dollars so Cindy and I could go to the Salvation Army and buy a bedroom ensemble of a stained mattress and three yellow sheets. Glen moved into the living room and painted the windows black. Within a month there was a stack of dirty dishes and rotting food in the kitchen, which remained that way for eighteen months. In the dining room where we ate and socialized around an old oak table we kept a pet monkey in a cage. The poor little monkey was constantly horny and whenever it got loose it went after Neal’s sister, Cindy Smith, with a hot vengeance, latched onto her hair, bit her head and humped the hell out of her back. I’d hear screams for help from the dining room, but all we did was yell back at her, “Cindy’s got a monkey on her backl” as she rushed around begging us to help her. Just to make the household complete, we kept a pet raccoon named Rocky, who we unanimously disliked, who unanimously disliked us. He’d prove it, too, by bringing his shit into the house to throw at us.