Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

The effects of the tour were devastating. Glen retired from rock and roll. So did Joey Greenberg. He had been on the phones every day for years, grinding, hovering three inches above his chair, taut and pulling himself tighter. Once Joey started working on an Alice Cooper project he couldn’t slow down. The business had gotten to him. It was like he was in shell shock. One day he just said, “Hey, this is too crazy. I’m leaving.” He walked out the door, and we haven’t seen him since.

I fought my way through the “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour like it was a war, and indeed it was. By the time I reached the end of the tour, at Madison Square Garden, I went on stage with six broken ribs, a broken wrist, a fractured elbow and I was twenty pounds overweight, bloated with fluid.

We turned to the grosses for consolation, but found none. Our glamorous life on the road, the parties and press junkets and jets, had eaten up most of our profits. We had devoured America and gotten very little flesh in the process.

“Billion-Dollar Babies” took the life out of the band. It killed the spark between us. Many years ago in the John Phillip Law house in Los Angeles, when we were all still children playing a game we didn’t think we’d win, Shep and Joey called a meeting. They said that for the sake of the group’s publicity, and because I was the lead singer, I should do all the interviews when possible. We all agreed to this because it was easier to sell one image than five. I represented all their personalities. When the public sat my face, they saw all of us. It was taken for granted that my name was Alice Cooper. As the years went on the public became interested in me, not the whole band. The band never dreamed that the personality of Alice could become bigger than the five of them. They never thought for a second that they’d be lost, that the press wouldn’t want to speak to them at all!

We were all making unbelievable amounts of money, but it didn’t make it up to them in ego. I don’t know what I would have done if I was in their boots. I don’t know if I could have tolerated being in the background. I just never would have let it happen in the first place, and come to think of it, I didn’t.

We began to have the same exact fights we had when we were poor, except “That’s my tomato you’re eating” turned into, “That’s my Rolls, get your ass out of it.”

After a few months’ rest we went back into the studios together and recorded a seventh LP, Muscle of Lose, but the spark was obviously gone between us. Although the album was another enormous commercial success, it wasn’t our most creative or pleasant recording experience. The following Christmas we hit the road again for a short holiday “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour, which only ripped the group further apart, compounded by a book written about the tour by Chicago journalist Bob Greene that washed our laundry in public for the first time. It made it embarrassing for us to see each other.

In spring we went to South America to do five concerts, a great honor considering there had never been a rock show in South America before. The reaction down there was total hysteria. They hadn’t even lived through Donnie Osmond or the Beatles and here they were being whelped on me, Alice Cooper. Talk about future shock. Welcome to the seventies, Brazil!

After South Arnerica we all went our own ways. Neal Smith got married and bought a house in Connecticut. Neal’s sister Cindy married Dennis Dunaway. Glen Buxton bought a home in Greenwich and retired to spend his days lazing in the sun with his girl friend, Susan. Michael Bruce bought an estate on Lake Tahoe and recorded his own solo album.

As for me, I had no home and I needed roots. I needed some personal independence, to begin living a semblance of a normal life.

CHAPTER 16

I’m okay now.

I’m tan. And healthy. And rested.

In fact, I’m even better than I ever was.

I’m sitting in the sunshine by a pool in Beverly Hills.

I took two stretching and dance classes this morning.

I don’t drink as much as I used to, but I play just as hard.

I broke up with Cindy Lang, but we’re still best friends.

My liver and I are now on speaking terms.

I live in a rented house perched on a hillside. I’m staying here while they rebuild a house I bought. I was watching the Eleven O’Clock News in New York one night when they started to play “Weleome to My Nightmare” and showed newsfilm of my house burning down to the ground.

The ugly Alice is gone for good. I’ve totally divorced him from real life. I never even see him till I’m on stage.

I play golf, with a passion, and I shoot in the high 70’s.

I have a mustache now because Alice would hate having one.

Grandmothers in Florida hotels love me.

I’m a deputy sheriff in Nashville and a deputy senator in Kentucky.

I’m on the National Arts Committee for the Bicentennial.