Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

This attractive quality that made little girls have the hots for me and little boys no longer able to contain their homosexual feeling, drove adults crazy with fear. Some people were sincerely concerned — those that kept their heads about it — about why the kids were rallying around an ambiguous sexual figure. Was this the sum total of what they were learning?

In a way, yes. I wasn’t as calculated as everyone thought I was. I did many things on whim because I thought it felt right. I took the snake out on stage not because I thought it would get press, but because I was drawn to entertaining with the snake. I wore makeup because I liked the way it looked. I had a girl’s name and dressed funny because instinctively I recognized this is a bisexual world. I was everyone’s secret fantasy. I said to the kids, “I’m a boy, I’m a man. I don’t know what I want.” I released their sexuality, and I was a catharsis for their violence. I did it for them. After I went to see A Clockwork Orange the last thing I wanted to do was see or be in a fight. (Even though boxing has nothing to do with my life. Now what does that mean?) Most important, I was honest with the kids.

A very important thing about being honest with kids: if I manufactured anything I did the kids would feel it. Kids are very sensitive about honesty and what’s natural. The most base, honest, common thing I could do on stage was to touch myself. I touched my athletic cup a lot on stage in those days, much like Joe Namath does in every football game. The kids related immediately to that. All of those kids out there touched themselves every day. I guarantee you that every single boy and girl in my audiences masturbated the very day they saw me. And everything they saw me doing on stage rang true, rang honest.

I believed in absurdity. I didn’t make any sense then and I don’t plan to in the future. The best things in life don’t make any sense. Sex is like that. When was the last time you had sex and really got off? Did it make any sense to you? At the time, when you had an orgasm, did it make any sense the way you felt? That’s what I am. I felt good to people, but I was unexplainable. I was an enzyme. I digested the public and returned themselves back to them in another form.

The journalists that understood this were able to accept it at face value and judge me on those artistic terms. There were some who could never do that, though, and I found myself the subject of gigantic personal criticism, some that really hurt me.

I’ve made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine three times in my career, and we’ve finally come to pleasant terms, but back in 1971 to 1972 that was far from the case. At the time they suffered from some sort of inverse snobbism. They wanted every rock star to be some sort of transformed prince to the young. They wanted me to be political. Christ, it was a great shame to them that I was totally apolitical. They were still steeped in that 1968 philosophy and they just couldn’t understand the fact that I was a happy kid who wasn’t cool and didn’t want to be. I handled my newfound fame no better than the kid next door who wins a lottery. But I was not a mean person. I was never nasty. I never hurt anybody. I was never egotistical. I shared my success with everybody around me, wined and dined and treated the press royally all around the world, and still some of them were rotten to me. So what if I never voted in a presidential campaign or read Castaneda? Well, that wasn’t good enough for Rolling Stone.

In March of 1972 they ran a major story on me, “Gold Diggers of 1984 — wanna see my snake, little girl?” We were characterized as a group of stupid, wisecracking, spoiled, sex-obsessed kids, and maybe that was one side of us. I was in the midst of an alcoholic stupor at the time, trying to live up to a lot of expectations people had about me. In the middle of the article they inserted interviews they had done with my parents — most of it over the phone — and to anybody reading the article it sounded like they were along with me while I was cursing and getting drunk and exposing myself.

The neighborhood mailman in Phoenix was also in my father’s church, and when he spotted the story in a copy of Rolling Stone he was delivering, all hell broke loose in the church. There was talk of removing my father from the ministry. The whole community was outraged, and my parents took a big chunk of anger that people were really directing at me. I felt very bad for them because I knew how difficult it was to put up with a hostile community. That incident and similar ones have hardened my parents to the outside. It made two very warm people retreat for protection so as not to get hurt any further. It’s only recently, since people found out I was a clown and not a devil, that they can tell people who I am with pride.

I wrote “No More Mr. Nice Guy” a week after the Rolling Stone story ran, and it gave me a rush of satisfaction to be taking a swipe back at the press for a change.