Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

“Killer” was a morality play, and now Alice had to be punished, put to death. The band left their instruments and pretended to beat the hell out of me. They kicked and punched at me, tied my hand behind my back and pulled a black executioner’s hood over my head. At one point we did a whole West Side Story knife fight parody, using breakaway bottles and chairs.

I could always feel the tension rise in the auditorium as the gallows were rolled out on the stage. Warner Brothers was kind enough to have their film prop department build a realistic gallows for me, some fifteen feet of ominous rough lumber bolted together. A coarse manila rope and hangman’s noose swung back and forth in the spotlight. The band dragged me up the back steps as I kicked and cried out, trying to escape, but they held me tight, punching me in my sides and groin, doubling me over with pain. As Glen Buxton put the noose around my neck a respectful silence fell over the auditorium. At the last moment before the trap door opened, Glen pulled the mask off my face, giving me one last glimpse of life, one last look at the spotlights and the crowds before I dropped four feet, my head snapping to the side as my neck broke, blood splurting from my mouth.

I was hung, actually, from a piano wire that clipped securely onto my leather harness and it took me a month to learn the effect from a professional stunt man. There was only one accident, when the clasp slipped through the harness and I actually fell five feet, knocking myself out cold when my chin slammed into the trap door. They woke me up underneath the stage and I went right back up and finished the show.

The Killer album included the hit single “Under My Wheels,” about a boy who fantasizes running over his girl friend in his car. “Desperado,” one of my favorite songs and a tribute to Jim Morrison, was immediately examined and dissected by rock critics, who thought it was a statement about Alice as a gunslinger. The title cut, however, actually summed up my position in life:

What did I do to deserve such a fate?
I didn’t really want to get involved in this thing
Someone handed me this gun
And I gave it everything

I came into this life, I looked all around
I saw just what I liked, I took what I found
Nothing came easy, nothing came free
Nothing came at all, until they came after me.

We had Kachina photographed for the album cover by Paris Vogue photographer Peter Turner, and inside the cover there was a foldout calendar, with me as the calendar girl, hanging from the noose with blood pouring from my mouth.

Needless to say, I was no hero with mothers and fathers. As the album rose up the charts and we toured the country there was an outcry of alarm from teachers and psychologists, the same teachers and psychologists that put King Lear or Macbeth on the required reading list in schools. Shakespeare would have been my biggest fan. But they said this was by far the most disgusting display anyone had ever imagined would be presented in the name of entertainment. And the fact that it was successful, that the children responded to it, even worshiped it, drove adults crazy.

The rumors the kids started about me were worse than anything I was actually doing. In Atlanta I was almost arrested as soon as I got into town because the story was circulating that I bludgeoned kittens to death with a hammer. When the police questioned me in my hotel room before the show I said, “It’s not a bad idea, but I didn’t think of it.” They also accused me of filling large balloons with earthworms and intestines and bursting them with a BB gun as they floated over the audience.

In the beginning of November 1971, not even eight months after the initial release of “Eighteen,” we left for our first tour of Europe. On the way out to the airport we had the limousines stop at record stores to make sure Killer was in the racks.

HELLO ALICE! WELCOME TO BRITAIN!

That’s what the sign said at the airport, but you could have fooled me. We tooled into Heathrow and did a fifteen-minute press conference in front of a hundred and fifty people. Then I stayed in a hotel for two days doing interviews before we took off for Copenhagen, Bremen, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris in what felt like four hours. Then back to London for two live shows and the taping of “Old Gray Whistle Test” and “Top of the Pops” for the BBC.