Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

As soon as we moved to the farm in Pontiac, Charlie Carnal and Mike Allen began to build a death machine. Our first idea was called the “Cage of Fire,” which looked like I was being burned to death, and I very nearly was. The cage was made from a bent shower curtain rod. On it we hung forty or fifty tightly rolled, long plastic bags, like you get at the cleaners. At the finale of our show we rolled the cage on stage and I got inside. The rest of the group surrounded me with matches like pixies at a ritual and lit the plastic from the bottom. As the long plastic burned all around me it coagulated into fiery balls and fell to the ground with an incredibly loud whssst sound. When it all got going I looked like I was standing in the middle of a fiery rainstorm, imprisoned in burning bars. It was a great effect for $15, and we billed it as “Can Alice Cooper Escape the CAGE OF FIRE?!!” We used the cage only a few times, fortunately. Club owners and promoters didn’t like it because of the fire laws, and the few times we did sneak it on stage we wound up paying for damages we did to the stage floor and it nearly roasted me like Bavarian shish kabob.

The Cage of Fire was gripping enough, but the problem was, I didn’t actually die. The next plateau was an electric chair. The half-finished hot seat was actually standing in the corner of the room when Ezrin first came to visit us, but it wasn’t ready for use until the time “Eighteen” broke. The chair was cruel in its simplicity. A rough, over sized chair with thick leather straps and ominous wiring. My head was fitted into a metal skull plate and my arms clamped down to electrodes. When they threw the switch the whole thing lit up. I screamed in agony, the imaginary current surging through me, clamping my jaws shut tight, a seizure arching my body stiff, my eyeballs rolling backwards into my skull as I fried and smoked. The kids adored it. We got a terrific response to the electric chair. I didn’t know if they were just happy to see me get it or if they really understood the implications of what they were seeing.

In April of 1971 “Eighteen” broke nationally. It only reached number eighteen on the national record charts, but it was a healthy hit, selling long and hard, over 350,000 copies. It captured the imagination of every young, confused kid in the country — “I’m eighteen and I don’t know what I want.” There were stations who wouldn’t play it because they thought it had a drug reference, “The lines form on my face and hands, the lines form from the ups and downs.” If they had spent one week with me on the road they would have known what those lyrics were really about.

The kids did, obviously. Three months after Cindy had sold Christmas trees and we had shivered under piles of blankets together, I was making $15,000 a night.

We were booked into Town Hall in New York on May 3 and sold out the place. In June Bill Graham put us into the Fillmore East just two weeks before it closed for good. Within a month the national press picked up on me. Shep called Ann Arbor, where Ashley Pandel was still managing a club, and asked him to help handle publicity at Alive. In early July, almost twenty months after we had moved into the farm in Pontiac, each member of the band received his first check of record royalties on “Eighteen” of $8,000 apiece. I went to a bank in downtown Detroit, got a fifty-dollar bill and wrapped it around a rock. Cindy and I went to the side of the farm house and threw the rock through Neal Smith’s closed window. When the glass stopped falling he put his head through the hole and said, “What the hell is that for?” “That’s the money you loaned me for a mattress,” I said.

He threw the rock back at me and yelled, ‘ There’s interest on that, you bastard!”

We spent three months on the road working the single. The jobs came floating into us and if by magic. “Eighteen” seemed to open every door in the country. At $15,000 a night we suddenly had so much money we didn’t know what to do with it. Ziggy stepped into the picture and retrieved some of the $50,000 he laid out in airplane tickets. We visited Franklin Avenue in Detroit in a limousine and had the car stop in front of every hotel and motel we had stiffed. All of us would go inside and the managers would groan at the sight of us. Then we’d produce a check for our bill that literally sent many of them howling into the street.

From where I sat everything was a blur. After two or three headlining dates it no longer mattered to me where we were playing or when. I just followed my nose into the back of a limousine and got onto the plane with everybody else. In June Shep and I went to London for a press conference so the European press would get an inkling of what was happening in the United States. I spent only two nights in London before jetting back to the U.S. to continue the merry-go-round of touring.