Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) Movie Script
1
In my heart, I always knew what was right.
I never had a doubt of who God was
or who the devil was.
Because of that, I had a moral compass.
There were things I wouldn't do.
And maybe I created Alice to do those things.
I was the biggest rock star in the world.
But this Alice character nearly killed me.
It's hard to believe I fell so far.
Before I was Alice, I was Vincent Furnier
and I lived a really all-American childhood.
My dad was a pastor,
so I was in church on Wednesday night,
Friday night, all day Sunday.
And I didn't lie, steal or swear.
I was the perfect '50s kid.
But I grew up in Detroit.
So cars, street violence
and rock 'n' roll music was in the DNA.
I was sort of a frail kid.
I had asthma, really bad.
And every winter, I was under an inhaler.
Finally the doctor said,
"Get him out of this cold climate,
get him some place hot."
And that was Phoenix.
My very being here was a miracle.
I had appendicitis so bad, the doctor said,
"I don't know how he's alive right now.
"There's so much poison in his system.
"I can't guarantee he's going to survive this."
My mom and dad were
literally on the floor praying.
The next day, they walked in
and I was sitting up, chewing gum,
and reading an Archie Comic.
After they had done the operation,
I had this huge scar.
God said, "I'm gonna put this mark on you."
Every time I'd look at my scar,
I knew that my life was a miracle.
The story of Alice Cooper really begins
in high school art class.
In school, I was always drawing,
that's all I did.
I just drew, drew and drew.
And that's how I met a character
named Dennis Dunaway,
who immediately became my best friend.
I was in art class,
and here comes this skinny little guy
who is the only one in the class
that seems to be interested in
Surrealism and dada art.
We would go through books and I'd say,
"Look at this guy, Magritte."
And Vince would say,
"Oh, yeah, but check out this guy, Braque."
Who, sir, is the greatest
living painter in the world?
Today, Dali.
Salvador Dali totally piqued our imagination.
We'd sit there and go, "Who is this guy?"
He had this moustache
and he was wearing giraffe skin suits
and Aladdin shoes,
and he did all kinds of insane things.
Dali was outrageously different,
and Vince and I liked that.
We liked any artistic statement
that had impact.
3,000 screaming teenagers
are at New York's Kennedy Airport
to greet, you guessed it, the Beatles.
We were total Beatlemaniacs.
The style, the sound, the look.
They had long hair and
parents were confused,
which was a big part of it.
The school decided to have a talent show.
And I thought of this idea of
doing a spoof of the Beatles.
We decided we were gonna wear Beatle wigs,
so we could be the Earwigs.
Then we realised,
"How are we gonna do these songs?
"We don't know how to play."
Dennis says, "I know a guy
that plays guitar, Glen Buxton.
"He's a juvenile delinquent,
and he's getting thrown out every day,
"and he smokes cigarettes, and he's cool,
and he can play about six songs."
We thought, "This guy's pretty tough,
I don't know if we should approach him.
"He probably wouldn't go for it."
But we went up and told him
what we were gonna do.
And he said he didn't want to wear a wig
but he would play guitar
and play the Beatles songs.
The curtain opened and we just tried to
pretend to do what the Beatles were doing.
Sing into the mic, wiggle your head.
Everybody was excited because
Beatlemania was so new.
We got a big reaction.
All the girls started screaming.
That was the gasoline on the fire.
I wanted that experience
over and over and over and over again.
So that summer, Dennis learned bass,
I learned to sing in tune.
We would go over the same song
50 times a night.
Every day, we got a little bit better.
And then this club opened up called the VIP.
It was a rock 'n' roll teenage dance hall.
Sold Coca-Colas
and hot dogs and French fries.
Vince and the guys came in on
a Saturday afternoon and showed their stuff.
I liked them a lot, and I said,
"I'd like to use you,
"but we've got to do
something with the name."
We went, "Yeah, the Earwigs
is what we started with."
We were ready to evolve to the next bug.
The Spiders in the spider sanctum.
Boy, when they opened, it was instant.
We became the house band at the VIP Club.
We didn't even do Beatles at that point,
we played the Yardbirds,
Rolling Stones, the Who.
Make it loud, make it rock.
We got to actually open for
the Yardbirds and did all their songs.
I remember the Yardbirds
come out for their set
and half the crowd left.
There were even some people complaining
that they were doing our songs.
They'll Blow Your Mind from the sensational
Spiders from Phoenix.
We had a number two record on KRUX
and we're still in high school.
Our senior year, we owned the place.
Every senior girl, every freshman girl,
"Wow. You guys are in the Spiders?"
By now, church was
way down the menu on priorities.
But there was those times when
there was a definite pull back and forth.
"What do you mean you have
a show tonight? You have church."
So if I did do the show, I felt really guilty.
Dad was the preacher, so his obligation
was to go to church on Sunday.
But he would go to church
and people would say, "Look at his hair."
I don't recall too many people
complaining right to your face,
but we knew there was a lot of whispering.
But what can you do?
He was gonna stay in his band,
he was gonna grow his hair.
Everybody in church thought
I was going off the deep end.
It really angered me because, what is
the difference if I have long hair or not?
I was growing up and I knew
that there was something more out there.
Here comes Salvador Dali,
here comes the Beatles.
When all these elements come together...
I wanted to be sucked into that.
I wanted to get to LA,
and I wanted to play rock 'n' roll
and meet girls and do everything
I could possibly do to be a rock star.
The last thing on my mind was church.
It was 1967 in Los Angeles.
The heart of the love generation.
The whole hippy movement.
They were just everywhere.
I could not believe it.
We were just in this fantasy world.
We walked down Sunset Strip.
The Byrds are over here.
The Doors are over here.
Buffalo Springfield, everything.
And we're like, "Okay we've got to do this."
So you have the hopes and dreams
that, when you get there,
everything's just gonna fall into place.
But you get there and you realise that
there's 10,000 other bands there
from every state,
who were the best band in their state.
And they were all trying to
get into the same clubs.
Now, the one thing about LA
is that it is designed to destroy your band.
There's so many distractions,
so many parties, so many girls.
That's how we met the GTOs.
They were a girl band that lived
in the basement of Frank Zappa's log cabin.
They were professional partiers.
Girls from another planet.
I remember the day we all met the boys.
They were cute,
but they were pretty darn straight.
They were almost like this oddball,
kind of reserved, gentle group of guys
in the midst of a whole lot of
very stoned people.
Vince and I were pretty innocent, really.
But hanging outwith the GTOs,
there was experimentation going on,
that's for sure.
We got turned onto
these little pieces of paper
that would bend your mind extremely.
Not me, I was totally straight.
I didn't drink, I didn't smoke,
I didn't do anything.
But I went to a party one night,
and I just happened to run into
an old friend from church, Judy Jones,
who I had a little crush on,
back in the old days.
She handed me a beer.
This was still maybe a chance to hit on her.
I don't want her to think I don't drink beer.
That night, I was just praying
that Vince would walk in the door.
And I'm talking about a door that would
stretch like it was made out of rubber.
And I'm talking about a room
that wasn't square any more,
and all kinds of stuff like that.
Vince was the only one that would be
down to earth and be an anchor.
That night, I had two beers, maybe three.
And I was just blind drunk.
They had to carry me home.
The door opens up, Dennis is in there.
He's standing next to the drapes
and he goes,
"Who would wear pants this size?"
Who walks in the door?
Vince, who is now plastered.
And I'm like,
"Oh, no. This is terrible. This is terrible."
We were smart enough to realise
that nobody in LA cared about Phoenix.
You had to start all over here.
I said, "The Spiders is really dated,
we've got to come up with another name."
Somebody send, What about 'the Nazi?
It almost has a fuzz tone sound to it. Nazz.
"Or what if we went the other way?
What if we were 'the Flowers'?"
"Or what if we were 'Springtime'?"
"Or what about something really crazy,
like the Husky Baby Sandwich?"
So then, Neal Smith, our drummer,
the Platinum God,
decides to drop acid
and consult the Ouija board.
I asked the Ouija board,
"Did I live in a previous lifetime?
"What was my name?"
And it spelled out a German name.
So I said, "Okay, this isn't working out."
Then Vince sat down to the Ouija board.
And he said, "Did I live in a previous life?"
It said yes.
He said, "Where?" It said in England.
"And how was I killed?"
it said he was killed as a witch.
And he said, "What was my name?"
And it spells out "Alice Cooper".
I said, "Wow, Alice Cooper sounds like
a little old lady that lives down the street.
"Makes cookies for everybody.
"But there's a lot of bodies
buried in that cellar."
So the name stuck
and Alice Cooper was born.
The day that we played as
Alice Cooper for the first time,
I looked around, everybody in all three bands
on the bill were wearing Levi's.
And I said, "We've got to be different."
They saw that there was a need
to be more and more outrageous,
so we helped them out.
We always wore a lot of clothes,
a lot of boas, vests, belts, jangly things.
And we would just put them on the boys.
And they loved it.
The GTOs told us this thrift store
was selling old Ice Capades outfits.
For a quarter a pound.
So we went in and we bought 50 pounds.
This image was now part of Alice Cooper.
But we weren't musically
as good as we needed to be,
so we used a lot of theatrics to get attention.
If I found a watermelon backstage,
that was a prop.
If I found a broom, it was something
you could swing around your head.
You can ride on it.
A hammer, a light bulb.
No matter what it was, why not
incorporate it into the show somehow.
How do you become Alice Cooper?
Well, you create it.
Miss Christine and Miss Pamela,
they went to Frank Zappa
and they said, "Wait till you see this band."
Frank saw a picture of us and he went,
"Wow, how weird is that? A male GTOs.
"I could use that.
Have them here at seven o'clock tomorrow."
The next morning, we showed up,
knock on the door,
knock on the door, the door opens.
Miss Christine is standing there
and goes into shock.
We barge right in, set up all of
our equipment and started playing.
It was so loud I remember
the picture on the wall went crooked.
Frank comes down and he goes,
"What are you doing?"
And we said, "You said seven."
"I meant seven at night."
He listened and he went, "I don't get it.
Where are you guys from?"
I said, "Phoenix." And he goes,
"Phoenix, that's a cowboy town.
"Now I really don't get it."
And that's when he said,
"Do you have a manager?"
And we said, "No."
We may have even said, "What's a manager?"
I don't know, at that point.
I moved out to California from New York.
My life was completely fucked.
I worked as a probation officer,
quit the first day.
Drove up to LA,
saw the Hollywood Landmark Motel.
Checked in, got friendly with
a whole collection of people living there.
Arthur Lee from Love,
the Chambers Brothers,
Jefferson Airplane.
It was just crazy.
I, in college, had done a little dealing,
so I started dealing to all the guys.
And then Lester Chambers said,
"if the police come and ask you
how do you pay for your hotel room
"what are you gonna tell them?"
I told him, "I don't know."
And he said, "You Jewish?"
And I said, "Yeah."
He said, "You should be a manager."
"Great, who do I manage?"
And Lester said, "We have this group
living in our basement called Alice Cooper."
Lester brought us over to
the Landmark Hotel,
we knock on the door, open the door,
and it's like a wall of fog.
When you got through the fog,
there's Janis Joplin, there's Jim Morrison,
and there's Jimi Hendrix,
just all getting high.
We're standing there in rock royalty
'cause Shep had the grass.
Clearly, he knew what he was doing.
So we signed with Shep Gordon that night.
The next day, we go to Frank Zappa
and he says, "Who's that guy?"
I said, "That's our manager."
And he goes,
"You didn't have a manager yesterday."
And I went, "Yeah, we met him last night."
So we all shook hands
and we made a deal with Zappa.
That started the journey.
We were on Frank Zappa's label.
That was the biggest thing
that ever happened to us.
When we went into the studio,
Frank said,
"I don't want to do layer upon layer of sound.
"The charm of your band
is that you can do this live."
Frank says, "I want it to sound like
I'm driving by a garage
"and the band is practising."
So we just start tuning up,
adjusting the amps and stuff.
"Okay, Frank, I think we're ready to go now."
He says, "We got them. We got the takes."
"What, we didn't even play yet."
He says, "We can fix it in the mix."
Frank looked at his watch,
"Okay, I'm gonna be back at five.
"Anything more that you guys record,
that's the album."
Then he came back at 5:15,
and picked up the tape,
and that was Pretties For You.
Lester Bangs reviewed Pretties For You
and said,
"This album is a tragic waste of plastic."
Even though we had the stamp
of approval of Zappa,
we were kind of the joke of the town.
People were just like, "Alice Cooper?
"Look at these guys,
I'm gonna throw a beer at them."
One time, we played a show for 6,000 hippies
that were freaked out on acid.
And when we came out,
it was like a nightmare.
The place just emptied,
people were running for the doors.
It was like somebody yelled, "Fire!"
Bill Graham, a promoter, he said,
"You tell these fucking assholes
"either they play fucking music
or they fucking act.
"They're not doing both
on my fucking stage.
"Get these motherfuckers out of here."
Alice Cooper was really hated
in Los Angeles.
We basically left Los Angeles
with our tails between our legs.
It was a tough time.
We were completely desolate.
But we just put our heads down
and kept going.
And our mantra was we would move into
the first city
where we got a standing ovation.
There was a long period of time
that we were stray dogs without a home,
just wandering around,
playing wherever we could play.
We were living out of suitcases
in cheap hotels.
Bouncing cheques, blackballed by clubs.
"Look out for these guys."
But Vince and I had
that long distance mentality.
There's no rear-view mirror.
If something fails, it's behind us.
At one point, Shep says, "I got us a gig
at a big pop festival worth $2,000.
"2,000 could keep us going for quite a while."
So we played the Saugatuck Pop Festival
in Detroit.
Detroit was the antithesis of LA.
Every band was up there for blood.
The MC5 were like a full-out show band.
They were like Ike & Tina Turner
but with a bad attitude.
And I went, "Wow. Where are we?"
Then Iggy comes on and then,
"Bam! impact."
Iggy literally drained the audience
of their energy.
I don't want to go on after that guy.
I'm used to going on after a blues band.
We couldn't follow the Stooges
by trying to out-power them.
We would have to be much more dramatic.
The band came out and I just thought
they were fucking great.
There seemed to be a contest in the band
for who could have the longest,
most feminine hair.
I think the drummer won.
It was great theatrics,
everything was odd or weird.
And nobody was doing anything
quite like that at the time.
What they were doing was Salvador Dali
with electric guitar.
And Detroit was open to that.
All they care about is, "Do you produce?
Do you sweat? Do you entertain the people?"
And if you do that, they'll love you.
That night, we killed them.
Finally, an audience got it.
We got our standing ovation
and it felt like coming home.
Shep knew people.
They wanted to do a big concert called
the Toronto Rock Revival.
Shep spent a month
helping them put that thing together.
And they get John Lennon.
Shep says, "You don't have to pay me.
"The payment's gonna be Alice Cooper
goes on right before John Lennon."
The stadium was absolutely full, packed.
The crowd is getting very antsy.
There was tons of excitement.
There was a Beatle gonna be going on
next to us and we're a no-name.
I knew that was a moment
where we had to do something.
You don't get to play with John Lennon
too often.
Alice Cooper!
We get on stage
and the audience is a little bewildered.
But the energy behind the band, they dug.
At the end of the show, the idea was
to open up three feather pillows,
CO2 cartridge, so it looked like snow.
For some reason,
there was a chicken backstage.
And when the feather pillows went out,
I threw the chicken up.
The next thing, I looked down
and there's a chicken.
I went, "Okay.
It had feathers, it had wings, it should fly."
It's a bird, right? A chicken's a bird.
So I picked up the chicken
and I chucked it in the audience.
It came down
and people grabbed the chicken.
Let's just say
it wasn't healthy for the chicken.
The audience tore it to pieces
and threw it back up on stage.
It was just blood, head, feathers.
The crowd was totally shocked.
This whole stadium was dead quiet.
We killed a chicken in front of 70,000 hippies.
All of a sudden, we were
the most notorious band on the planet.
And everybody wanted to know
about Alice Cooper.
At that point,
the whole group was Alice Cooper.
But the PR lady said she didn't know how to
make five people called Alice Cooper stars.
But if we could pick one person,
that she knew how to do.
This is Alice Cooper and anybody
can have what they want out of Alice Cooper.
I'm not trying to press or push anything.
The whole theme of the thing is to attack,
just to have fun.
I get off just scaring people.
It's almost like a sexual thing.
To go on stage and completely expose
myself as far as my inner personality,
my whole Mr Hyde type of personality.
Even though we were notorious,
we still didn't have anything on the radio.
People were dying to love this band,
but what was missing?
A freakin' hit song.
So we looked at bands
that had a nice string of hits.
And the Guess Who kept popping up.
So we did our research and found out
that a company out of Toronto called
Nimbus 9 made their hit records.
I went to Toronto
and waited and waited in the office.
And I think the second day,
this young guy came out.
My boss said,
"Whatever you do, get rid of Alice Cooper."
He took one look at the picture of the band,
these five creatures of indeterminate sex,
and he didn't want to be in the same county
with them, never mind in the same studio.
But Shep is irascible
and wouldn't take no for an answer.
So finally, I agreed to go to New York
and see them play.
New York heard about this half-girl,
half-guy, half-alien band that killed animals.
So everybody that was anybody
in the underground hip world was there.
And our attitude was,
"Let's just kill 'em with Detroit rock 'n' roll."
The show opened up with Alice at the lip
of the stage with bloodshot red eyes
and blood-red gums and gleaming teeth,
scowling right in front of my face
as this band of monsters hit the stage.
It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
There were no T-shirts, there were no jeans.
It was sets and props and lights.
I said, "This isn't rock 'n' roll.
It's the beginning of a cultural movement!"
After the show, I came bounding up
the stairs into the dressing room,
had my hand in the air,
and I said, "We'll do it!
"We'll produce you
and you will make hit records!"
We're like, "Yeah, right, kid."
Glenn's like, "I'd buy him a drink,
but he's not old enough."
When we went into the studio,
Bob and I talked about Alice Cooper
in the third person.
So I could play Alice and be as insane
as I wanted to be behind this mask.
I saw Alice Cooper
as all kinds of different crazy characters.
So each song got dealt with theatrically.
Dwight Fry was cut with a straightjacket on.
So when he was singing,
"I've to get out of here,
"I've to get out of here,
"'l've got to get out of here."
He really meant it.
This character that we created
was coming to life right in front of us.
Doing it live was one thing,
we could project it live.
But with Bob Ezrin, we were able to
capture that in the grooves on record.
Which meant that now we're gonna do
something dramatic musically.
We had this song
that we used to warm up with.
It went on for 10 minutes.
And Bob kept saying,
"What are you singing there, 'I'm edgy'?"
"No, 'I'm 18'."
Bob saw that as the song
that would put us on the map.
But he would say,
"That's not a song, that's a whole album."
Bob said, "Just make it 'Bam! Bam! Bam!'
"So it keeps coming at you
all the way through the song."
Which is what a good single does.
All right, this is the new 45
from Alice Cooper, Eighteen.
On our way to rehearsal,
the radio was always on
and all of a sudden, we heard Eighteen.
It stunned us.
We pulled the car over
and I went, "That's our record!"
So we just started 24-hour-a-day
calling the hotlines of every radio station.
I had my mother doing it, my brother.
Everybody had every relative doing it.
Please may I hear
I'm Eighteen by Alice Cooper?
Eventually, they moved it
in the heavy rotation.
So, it would be I'm Eighteen,
then the Beatles, the Stones, and Hendrix,
and then I'm Eighteen.
We just went, "What?
"You can't say Alice Cooper
and Rolling Stones in the same sentence.
"That's sacrilege."
It's like, "What if they find out
that we're Alice Cooper?"
We were an overnight sensation.
All of a sudden, we were in limousines.
All of a sudden, we were in airplanes.
To us, it was so much fun.
We just drank beer all day
and just said, "What's next?"
With a hit record, we didn't have to
bite the head off of a chicken.
We play I'm Eighteen
and 5,000 people would go crazy.
His name is Alice Cooper,
the latest superstar to hit the rock scene.
His father was a preacher,
so was his grandfather.
They hoped he would be, too.
Instead, he became a rock musician.
Our audience was a new audience.
It was not
the Crosby, Stills and Nash audience.
Kids on the lunatic fringe of society,
the ones that were left out,
they finally had a rock star
that represented them.
I was wondering
when you started to adopt the theatrics.
Some of the outrageous things
that you do on stage
to provoke people
and to shake them up a little bit.
Well, there's such an enormous lack
of entertainment in rock music.
It got to the point where,
if you go to a concert,
all you're gonna see is a guitar solo,
a drum solo.
And how far can that go?
You wanna see something
that you're gonna go home and talk about
and scare your parents with.
So if some 14-year-old boy goes home
wearing eye make-up, saying,
"Alice Copper wears it, why can't I wear it?"
Of course, his parents are going to say...
We knew chopping up the baby dolls
would really drive parents crazy.
Then we thought,
"Well, is Alice wearing a snake on stage,
"something that parents would hate?"
"They'd just cringe."
"That's perfect. Then let's use a snake."
Alice with this snake and the make-up!
This is going to blow it right off the map.
Especially, when they hang me.
The sadomasochistic exploits
of West Coast mass murderers
are now acted out on stages
across the country.
For it appears, America's children
are turning on to a new message.
The message of sex, death and violence,
as portrayed on stage by Alice Cooper.
How are we gonna outdo this?
That's all I ever thought about.
We picked up ideas like sponges.
You never know
where inspiration's gonna come from.
On the road,
the television was our constant friend.
Two cars!
Let others wallow with Watergate.
We're gonna do our job.
Skinny!
Hey, Skinny!
Hey, hold your horses, Mugs, I'm comin'.
Relax, Skinny.
School's out!
Did he just say, "School's out"?
We thought Eighteen was our anthem.
We didn't know that
School's Out would be even bigger than that.
In the music business,
if you have a hit record, you are in.
Giving Alice Cooper a hit
was like the lunatics running the asylum.
So I said let's put panties on the album.
The mothers would go crazy.
This is the last straw.
No more Alice Cooper!
So then, Shep goes, "Alice Cooper
is gonna take over the Hollywood Bowl,
"where all the classy acts play,
and turn it into Hellzapoppin'."
Alice Cooper programmes!
Free record in the back!
I've seen him three years ago,
a real small concert in Michigan.
And I followed him out here.
He just does freaky things on stage
that are just really out of sight to watch.
His music, man.
I like the way he presents himself
and performs up on the stage, man.
It gets in me. I don't know. I just freak out.
Well, see, I'm this perfectly normal guy.
I'm not a freak and I like Alice Cooper.
It's the Alice Cooper show
and how many here feel it,
they want to to get it on?
Wolf man Jack, one of my all-time idols,
he comes out on stage
with a camel, an elephant and harem girls,
and introduced the band.
"All right, everybody!
Wolf man Jack, Alice Cooper, yeah!"
I'm going, "That's the Wolf man!"
The legendary Alice Cooper!
You're on stage, you're playing,
you've had the camel,
you've had Wolf man Jack,
so what are you going to do next?
Shep was like, "We're gonna pay
these helicopter guys to fly over the crowd."
And then here comes
all of these panties, different colours,
falling down on the audience.
And I'm ready to just burst
because I am so excited
about how cool this idea is.
It was a show I'll never forget.
I remember the helicopter coming over,
and me fighting people in the crowd.
I so desperately
wanted a pair of these panties.
For me, it was the perfect rock 'n' roll show
of that time.
Alice had this incredible ability
to be a ring leader.
And he wrapped that audience
around his little finger for two hours.
Stop!
You know what?
A lot of people say
me and my boys are funny boys.
Isn't that just a little bit silly?
Goodbye, everybody in Los Angeles.
School's out! Now!
I was inspired, I was moved by
what Alice put together as a showman.
You couldn't help but just love this guy.
Alice Cooper!
Alice. I love him.
- Do you think he's sexy?
- Yeah.
- Do you wanna have sex or fall in love?
- Yeah.
I feel so excited and everything.
Just seeing him in person
on stage is just great. it really is.
- He's better than Mick Jagger?
- Yeah.
- What would you do if you met him?
- Everything.
- Parents hate him, though.
- Yeah.
All of a sudden, Alice became
more in the fish bowl than the rest of us.
I'd walk in Alice's room
and it would be Alice staring at a television
and all of these people staring at Alice,
watching him watch television.
If Alice said, "Can somebody get me a beer",
everybody would scramble.
It wasn't a world of reality.
This character had to be
constantly fucked up, really out there.
And it wasn't necessarily his nature.
But the alcohol really drove him.
I got lost in the character.
Why would I wanna go back to being Vince
when Alice was so successful?
"Hey, everybody loves Alice. I'll be Alice.
Vince is fine, but who needs him?"
I was on fire with this Alice character.
The most musical act to be playing
on pop radio. Alice was so much more.
We're able to manufacture moments
then spread them out
to every corner of everything.
We got a call from Salvador Dali's people
that he wanted to meet us.
I said, "This is gonna be great."
He's the guy. It's like meeting the Beatles.
We go to the St Moritz hotel,
Salvador Dali walks in and he goes,
"The Dali is here".
Then he went into this speech about
"The Dali, the greatest artist.
"The Cooper, the greatest artist."
He wants to do this moving hologram.
He said, "I want you to sit in the middle
and wear four million dollars in diamonds."
And he has this brain with him.
And he goes, "This is the Alice brain."
It's got ants crawling all over it,
and the ants spelled out Alice and Dali,
and a chocolate clair
running down the back.
Alice being with Dali
was as significant as a record.
'Cause it defined who he was.
Alice was becoming a real icon.
I wasn't even told that it was going on.
The band had been sent one place
and Alice went to the unveiling.
Here's something that's symbolic
of our achievement of our vision,
and then I was excluded.
That really hurt me because,
even though I was happy for Alice,
I just felt like I was left out of something
that him and I should be sharing.
Things started changing with success.
The band became treated like outsiders
and barely a step above any fan
that would try to get into Alice's room.
We always had two limos.
And one time, I got in one of them
and somebody came out to me and said,
"You can't sit in there. That's Alice's car."
All the shit that this band
had ever gone through together as one unit.
I had a switchblade,
and I was ready to stab this motherfucker.
Alice needed his own car because
Alice would have to go to radio stations,
Alice would have to go to red carpets,
Alice would have to attend all these parties.
Everybody else would go into town,
take a nap, go to the pool,
but Alice never had a minute.
Even though touring was hard,
it didn't ever feel like work.
But now, six or seven years of it
was catching up with me.
"Okay, wait. I got to take a breath."
Look at me.
Would you buy a car from this man?
I needed a break from the band,
I needed a break from touring,
I needed a break from Alice.
But you can't stop.
You got to put another album out
that was gonna be a number one.
The band had decided
we wanted to get back to being a band,
not just the vehicle for Alice.
We're going to get back to our roots
and we're gonna work up this song
that we had had for a million years
called Woman Machine.
We're feeling really good about this,
and then Bob showed up.
"Bob, we got this new song. Listen to this."
We didn't even get past the intro
when Bob stopped us and said,
"Wait, I think you should play
something different on that."
"What are you talking about?
We didn't even play the song yet."
Ladies and gentlemen,
it's a privilege and pleasure
to introduce the world's greatest singer,
Alice Cooper.
The band really felt
like Alice and I had too much control.
They had a vision
and they wanted to see that vision through.
For the first time ever in our relationship,
they just go,
"No, that's not the way we hear that.
"We would rather do it this way."
I had a little meeting with Alice
and I just said, "it's obvious that they don't
really wanna work with me any more.
"And if you ever decide
to go out on your own, let me know.
"'Cause I love you
and I love working with you."
I always believed in the sure thing.
And I know that Bob was the only one
that understood Alice Cooper.
But I'm still in the band,
I'm going, "Okay well, if Bob's not in,
we're still gonna make a record, right?"
So we flew to Los Angeles
and did the next album without Bob Ezrin.
I went and lived in Malibu
while we were recording.
It probably was one of the first times
that I ever avoided the other guys.
We were fracturing and this album
just didn't have any cohesion.
We didn't have Bob to hold it together.
Everybody was frustrated
and the band wanted to do solo albums.
Other bands have done it,
but we were sort of warned by management
that it's not a good idea to take a year off
and do a solo album.
I don't know if it's a warning or a threat.
My attitude was,
if you do solo records then Alice
does his and you're fucked.
'Cause he's the only one people care about.
So please don't do it.
But if you do it,
then we better do what we do.
Shep was smart enough to understand that,
if there is gonna be a solo career,
I should own the name.
I walk down the street,
nobody says, "Hey, Vince."
Everybody goes, "Hey, Alice."
I was the character of Alice Cooper.
Could any of the rest of us
have carried off that character?
I don't think so.
So when Alice became the solo artist,
then I realised,
"Okay, Alice Cooper the band
is definitely over."
It was very, very tough.
The separation from the art.
But mostly, the separation of friendship.
Dennis was the first one that encouraged me
to become something other than myself.
For the Vince part of me,
it was hard to leave Dennis behind.
But now I was Alice.
And Alice had a life of his own.
Of course, coming through and the
photographers are snapping this,
- Alice Cooper...
- I just left my drink over there.
And I don't have anything in my liver.
- Tell me, are you working on an album?
- Yes.
Name of the album is
Welcome To My Nightmare.
That sounds interesting.
I'm the murderer and I will be murdered.
You're gonna murder yourself?
Very possibly, that could happen.
I was scared to death to go on my own.
How many lead singers broke away
from their bands and became successful?
Especially with him separating
from the group,
I wanted to make a statement.
This was a new beginning.
Everything we could get,
we threw into that show.
It was like a big Broadway play.
We had Vincent Price, we even had dancers.
There was this one girl that was
the most beautiful dancer you've ever seen.
She just floated out there.
I was 18 years old,
and the very first day I met Alice,
he comes waltzing in the room
all dressed in white.
Flowing black hair,
these gorgeous blue eyes.
I remember getting lost in conversation
with Alice about childhood.
We found out that we're both pastor's kids.
Every night, there were
very romantic moments with her.
And I started looking forward more
to those moments than anything else.
I was best man at Alice's wedding
and life was fantastic.
We actually pulled Nightmare off
and it actually worked.
Everybody loved the show.
My solo career was a success.
So I was in my glory.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the debonair and adorable Alice Cooper.
You're not exactly what I expected.
I kind of expected that grotesque make-up
and those weird crazy costumes
and a snake and a coffin
and all those things that drive me crazy.
- You know.
- Well...
Well, I'm trying to change my image.
I was becoming a real celebrity.
I would sit down next to Jack Benny
and he would be like,
"Alice, everything I see
has got your picture on it, it's ridiculous."
George Burns had watched the show
and he saw it as vaudeville.
"Yeah, I remember 1923, the great Momar
cut his head off and he had a snake."
My mom didn't really consider me a star
until I had a picture taken with Frank Sinatra.
Frank would call me Coop.
Coop, pretty cool.
Would you welcome, Alice Cooper.
- Hey, big fella.
- Hey, baby, what's happening?
- What kind of a snake is this?
- This is a boa.
- Is this a boa?
- This is actually not a...
Alice Cooper was good TV.
And that's when Alice became
more than a rock star.
Almost woven into the fabric of America
was this Alice character.
Alice Cooper organised a big clean-up
at Riverside Park today.
People accuse you
of doing this whole thing for publicity.
What's wrong with that?
Alice was so big and so on
that he played Alice all the time.
And Alice drank all the time.
None of us ever really thought
about the consequences to him
for being this character.
And it started to consume him.
There was no time for Vincent.
He got lost somewhere in the shuffle.
It was just a slow disintegration.
And somebody had to intervene.
I had a house in upstate New York.
So we found a hospital right by the house,
and it was bizarre.
It was a lock-up place
for people with real mental disorders.
And the people were really scary.
Everybody was whacked.
This was tough, my best friend
is in this place with lunatics.
And I put him there.
I remember them closing the door
and realising that I wasn't
gonna come out again.
That was it.
And I went, "Wait a minute.
Get my manager on the phone.
"Get my wife on the phone. How dare you?
"I'll buy this place and tear it down
and build a bar out of it."
There was not one person in there
that one time ever said,
"Alice Cooper, rock star."
They were so involved in their own insanity
that I was just another guy.
I was away from the responsibility
of being Alice Cooper,
away from the parties.
And every day I felt a little better.
Finally. Maybe I'm not gonna die.
I'm not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist,
but do you think you're cured?
Yeah, I can't even think about drinking.
Do you think that you could turn back
to alcohol as a crutch?
No, I don't think so.
I've got a second lease on life on the thing.
And to me, it's real exciting.
And you've now linked up
with Bernie Taupin?
Yeah, we've been threatening
to write together for years
and finally, we got a chance.
When I got out of the hospital,
I was totally serious about it,
I said, "Now I wanna write."
And he still thought
it was one of those things.
"Yeah, let's go get drunk and talk about it."
My association with Alice
was based on pure friendship.
We were two people who
really liked being together.
And when he came out of the sanatorium,
he approached me with the idea of
doing an album based on his experiences.
- The album starts...
- And I'll sing the bits I can sing.
Alice had a pool house at the back.
We would just hang out in there
and he would talk to me
about these characters from the sanatorium.
We just wanted to do something together
and be able to say it was our project.
I like to think that was a help to him.
This album was a total confession.
The audience has been through
my alcoholism with me.
So let's let them be
through the cure with me.
I was sober.
What if you don't love me like this?
Hello, anybody there?
All right. Well, listen,
everybody who makes music
feels that they're kind of out of sync
as the years go by.
But I never meant the Pistols
to be a challenge to Alice Cooper.
More like a compliment, thank you.
He had an influence on us.
I think anything that Alice has ever done
is good enough for me.
Except golf.
Alice, lay off the golf.
It was a new period of time,
there's new kind of bands coming out.
I was totally sober
and not fully armed to fight them.
But there was something called cocaine.
Personally, myself, at the time,
who had a drug problem.
It's the old thing of "I'll be right back."
Go to the bathroom and I'd be doing coke.
And Alice, he's not a stupid guy,
he's catching wind of something here.
I kind of thought, "Well, I quit drinking.
"I can probably allow myself
to do something like this."
And I started, like everybody else,
"One little hit of this, a little hit of that."
Just that little push over the cliff.
All these punk kids thought
they were faster than me.
I am going to destroy you all.
For those of you unfamiliar with Cooper,
you could say he's the forefather
of some of those punk rock groups.
When Cooper and his entourage
arrived this morning,
I found him minus his make-up
and perfectly calm and sober.
How has it changed your music?
Well, now the great thing about it
is I lost 20 pounds.
The energy is so much up,
it's like my old running days
when I was a miler.
I've got that same kind of energy.
Hello.
You have been chosen to take a glimpse
at the first galaxy tour.
We're now travelling through outer space.
For Alice, it's easy
to get caught up in something new.
I remember freebasing with him,
which I'd not done before.
And I said, "But coke's okay, dude."
But when you start smoking that shit,
it's like smoking your home.
He sunk into an abyss that was way, way
more tragic than any of the drinking.
And it broke my heart,
because this was my buddy.
Galaxy tour.
It's one of the hardest things I ever did.
But I remember leaving that pool house
and just going,
"I can't stay here,
because I'm gonna go down, too."
We're very sorry. Alice Cooper is ill.
Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
I remember saying, "I am not gonna get up
at six in the morning
"and work till twelve at night
to make you money to go kill yourself with."
"You wanna kill yourself? Be my guest."
it was apparent that Alice
had an addictive personality
when I can see that he went
through that stuff.
Either way, it was gonna be
a very fast slide down.
We're back now with Alice Cooper.
Now, is Alice somebody else?
Yeah, well, Alice is the character
that performs, really.
- And...
- And then who are you?
I'm just Ozzie Nelson.
You're a family man I understand.
- Yes, I have a little girl.
- Well, how are you at home?
When this little baby came along,
my primary concern was her well-being.
So I was not so focused on
what was going on with him at the time
until it spiralled out of control.
Whatever happened to good old
Vince Furnier back there on the trail?
- What happened to him?
- He's still around.
- Yeah?
- He was fun and everything like that.
I'm still Vince a lot of the time. Vince.
I look like Vince to you?
Hi, I'm Vince.
I was raising our daughter and I was
watching my husband die before my eyes.
And I was powerless to make any difference.
We will continue with Alice Cooper,
with more conversation and more music
right after these announcements.
I had begun divorce proceedings saying,
"Can't do this.
Won't continue to raise our child with this.
"And I'm moving to Chicago.
"And I hope you get through this."
Mommy, where's daddy?
He's been gone for so long.
Do you think he'll ever come home?
I blamed all this on Alice.
I said, "None of this would have happened
if it wouldn't have been for my success.
"I worked too hard, I should've stopped."
I should've this, I should've that.
And there was a million should'ves.
And now, I was by myself.
Just me and Alice.
I had been up for about three days
and I was locked in my house up there
with a rock the size of a baseball and a gun.
I had all Sheryl's dresses
around the windows.
I didn't want anybody around
to see what I had turned into.
I remember I got up and I went...
I looked in the mirror
and my eyes were bleeding.
And then I realised
that was what my make-up looked like.
And I had that one second of
"What insanity are you in right now?"
I took the rock that I still owed money on,
put it in the toilet and flushed it.
And I Went, "What did I just do?"
And I went back to bed and I laid in bed
and I slept for about 14 hours.
Finally, I woke up, I went in the other room,
opened the doors up,
there was sunlight outside.
It was like a point where I realised
I was either gonna die right there
or I was gonna live.
I had done a hundred million miles
since I left Phoenix,
and ended up coming back to start all over.
My husband and I,
we just went and picked him up
and helped him out as much as we could.
His condition was very bad.
He couldn't hardly function.
I believe that the only time
that God can help you,
is when you have no fight left.
All you can do is just go, "Help! I'm done."
My husband and I were fasting and praying.
We just had to trust
that the Lord was gonna be with him.
We had seen another time
when he came through a miracle.
This was his second miracle.
When I finally came out of the hospital,
I called up Sheryl and said, "it's clone."
She said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "I'm over it.
"No craving for alcohol, for drugs."
Of course she's going,
"Right. Gonna take a little more than that
"to make me believe this."
I said, "Well, I'll agree to counselling,
"but you got to arrange it
and I might show up."
God saved me, so I'm here now.
Let's see what happens.
I think that's when God can go,
"Okay, now you're ready?
Ready to start this?"
Alice Cooper raised us.
He raised a bunch of
sick motherfucking little kids.
Children of the '70s who became
the sick motherfucking '80s rock stars.
We came from this man's loins.
He ejaculated and glam metal was born.
This metal thing snuck up on me a little bit.
There was these bands now
that were show bands.
They're image bands
and they wrote good songs.
Once again, the world had moved on
and now Alice Cooper fit in.
I kind of felt like I can take my crown back.
But I wasn't a rock star any more.
I was a dad and a husband.
Could I become that Alice character again?
After five years away,
my return to the stage was Halloween night
in my hometown Detroit
for a concert broadcast live on MTV
to millions of teenagers.
I was terrified.
I remember walking
for about two hours in a circle.
When that music starts,
I don't know what's gonna happen.
What if Alice doesn't show up?
I'd never played him straight.
What if I go out there and I'm just Vince?
Soon as the band started, I said, "This is it."
My back was rigid. When I walked out there
and I looked at the audience, it was, "Yeah!"
I finally figured out that this character
didn't wanna live in my world.
He only wanted to be on stage.
As soon as he walked off the stage,
the curtain came down, he was gone.
Because Alice didn't wanna live
in the house I lived in.
He didn't wanna be married.
He didn't wanna play golf.
He wouldn't do any of that stuff.
He just wanted to perform.
I think it was so amazing after being
almost dead and near the bottom
that he could sell out Joe Louis Arena
in Detroit, where the first spark really started,
and have Alice live as Alice
with a healthy Vincent behind him.
Friends in high school, dreamy-eyed kids,
clawing their way all the way
to the glittery top of the rock pile.
I love what we did,
despite the way that the band had broken up.
Here's this vision that began in art class.
And now the Alice character
is known worldwide.
I'm very proud of that.
When I first got on stage and sang,
"I'm eighteen and I like it",
I was close enough to eighteen
to believe that.
And then you go through this incredible hell
to get back to the place where you're 18
and you love it again.
And you can raise
the crutch up and go, "I won!"
So that was Alice Cooper.
You should see his sister,
James Fenimore.
In my heart, I always knew what was right.
I never had a doubt of who God was
or who the devil was.
Because of that, I had a moral compass.
There were things I wouldn't do.
And maybe I created Alice to do those things.
I was the biggest rock star in the world.
But this Alice character nearly killed me.
It's hard to believe I fell so far.
Before I was Alice, I was Vincent Furnier
and I lived a really all-American childhood.
My dad was a pastor,
so I was in church on Wednesday night,
Friday night, all day Sunday.
And I didn't lie, steal or swear.
I was the perfect '50s kid.
But I grew up in Detroit.
So cars, street violence
and rock 'n' roll music was in the DNA.
I was sort of a frail kid.
I had asthma, really bad.
And every winter, I was under an inhaler.
Finally the doctor said,
"Get him out of this cold climate,
get him some place hot."
And that was Phoenix.
My very being here was a miracle.
I had appendicitis so bad, the doctor said,
"I don't know how he's alive right now.
"There's so much poison in his system.
"I can't guarantee he's going to survive this."
My mom and dad were
literally on the floor praying.
The next day, they walked in
and I was sitting up, chewing gum,
and reading an Archie Comic.
After they had done the operation,
I had this huge scar.
God said, "I'm gonna put this mark on you."
Every time I'd look at my scar,
I knew that my life was a miracle.
The story of Alice Cooper really begins
in high school art class.
In school, I was always drawing,
that's all I did.
I just drew, drew and drew.
And that's how I met a character
named Dennis Dunaway,
who immediately became my best friend.
I was in art class,
and here comes this skinny little guy
who is the only one in the class
that seems to be interested in
Surrealism and dada art.
We would go through books and I'd say,
"Look at this guy, Magritte."
And Vince would say,
"Oh, yeah, but check out this guy, Braque."
Who, sir, is the greatest
living painter in the world?
Today, Dali.
Salvador Dali totally piqued our imagination.
We'd sit there and go, "Who is this guy?"
He had this moustache
and he was wearing giraffe skin suits
and Aladdin shoes,
and he did all kinds of insane things.
Dali was outrageously different,
and Vince and I liked that.
We liked any artistic statement
that had impact.
3,000 screaming teenagers
are at New York's Kennedy Airport
to greet, you guessed it, the Beatles.
We were total Beatlemaniacs.
The style, the sound, the look.
They had long hair and
parents were confused,
which was a big part of it.
The school decided to have a talent show.
And I thought of this idea of
doing a spoof of the Beatles.
We decided we were gonna wear Beatle wigs,
so we could be the Earwigs.
Then we realised,
"How are we gonna do these songs?
"We don't know how to play."
Dennis says, "I know a guy
that plays guitar, Glen Buxton.
"He's a juvenile delinquent,
and he's getting thrown out every day,
"and he smokes cigarettes, and he's cool,
and he can play about six songs."
We thought, "This guy's pretty tough,
I don't know if we should approach him.
"He probably wouldn't go for it."
But we went up and told him
what we were gonna do.
And he said he didn't want to wear a wig
but he would play guitar
and play the Beatles songs.
The curtain opened and we just tried to
pretend to do what the Beatles were doing.
Sing into the mic, wiggle your head.
Everybody was excited because
Beatlemania was so new.
We got a big reaction.
All the girls started screaming.
That was the gasoline on the fire.
I wanted that experience
over and over and over and over again.
So that summer, Dennis learned bass,
I learned to sing in tune.
We would go over the same song
50 times a night.
Every day, we got a little bit better.
And then this club opened up called the VIP.
It was a rock 'n' roll teenage dance hall.
Sold Coca-Colas
and hot dogs and French fries.
Vince and the guys came in on
a Saturday afternoon and showed their stuff.
I liked them a lot, and I said,
"I'd like to use you,
"but we've got to do
something with the name."
We went, "Yeah, the Earwigs
is what we started with."
We were ready to evolve to the next bug.
The Spiders in the spider sanctum.
Boy, when they opened, it was instant.
We became the house band at the VIP Club.
We didn't even do Beatles at that point,
we played the Yardbirds,
Rolling Stones, the Who.
Make it loud, make it rock.
We got to actually open for
the Yardbirds and did all their songs.
I remember the Yardbirds
come out for their set
and half the crowd left.
There were even some people complaining
that they were doing our songs.
They'll Blow Your Mind from the sensational
Spiders from Phoenix.
We had a number two record on KRUX
and we're still in high school.
Our senior year, we owned the place.
Every senior girl, every freshman girl,
"Wow. You guys are in the Spiders?"
By now, church was
way down the menu on priorities.
But there was those times when
there was a definite pull back and forth.
"What do you mean you have
a show tonight? You have church."
So if I did do the show, I felt really guilty.
Dad was the preacher, so his obligation
was to go to church on Sunday.
But he would go to church
and people would say, "Look at his hair."
I don't recall too many people
complaining right to your face,
but we knew there was a lot of whispering.
But what can you do?
He was gonna stay in his band,
he was gonna grow his hair.
Everybody in church thought
I was going off the deep end.
It really angered me because, what is
the difference if I have long hair or not?
I was growing up and I knew
that there was something more out there.
Here comes Salvador Dali,
here comes the Beatles.
When all these elements come together...
I wanted to be sucked into that.
I wanted to get to LA,
and I wanted to play rock 'n' roll
and meet girls and do everything
I could possibly do to be a rock star.
The last thing on my mind was church.
It was 1967 in Los Angeles.
The heart of the love generation.
The whole hippy movement.
They were just everywhere.
I could not believe it.
We were just in this fantasy world.
We walked down Sunset Strip.
The Byrds are over here.
The Doors are over here.
Buffalo Springfield, everything.
And we're like, "Okay we've got to do this."
So you have the hopes and dreams
that, when you get there,
everything's just gonna fall into place.
But you get there and you realise that
there's 10,000 other bands there
from every state,
who were the best band in their state.
And they were all trying to
get into the same clubs.
Now, the one thing about LA
is that it is designed to destroy your band.
There's so many distractions,
so many parties, so many girls.
That's how we met the GTOs.
They were a girl band that lived
in the basement of Frank Zappa's log cabin.
They were professional partiers.
Girls from another planet.
I remember the day we all met the boys.
They were cute,
but they were pretty darn straight.
They were almost like this oddball,
kind of reserved, gentle group of guys
in the midst of a whole lot of
very stoned people.
Vince and I were pretty innocent, really.
But hanging outwith the GTOs,
there was experimentation going on,
that's for sure.
We got turned onto
these little pieces of paper
that would bend your mind extremely.
Not me, I was totally straight.
I didn't drink, I didn't smoke,
I didn't do anything.
But I went to a party one night,
and I just happened to run into
an old friend from church, Judy Jones,
who I had a little crush on,
back in the old days.
She handed me a beer.
This was still maybe a chance to hit on her.
I don't want her to think I don't drink beer.
That night, I was just praying
that Vince would walk in the door.
And I'm talking about a door that would
stretch like it was made out of rubber.
And I'm talking about a room
that wasn't square any more,
and all kinds of stuff like that.
Vince was the only one that would be
down to earth and be an anchor.
That night, I had two beers, maybe three.
And I was just blind drunk.
They had to carry me home.
The door opens up, Dennis is in there.
He's standing next to the drapes
and he goes,
"Who would wear pants this size?"
Who walks in the door?
Vince, who is now plastered.
And I'm like,
"Oh, no. This is terrible. This is terrible."
We were smart enough to realise
that nobody in LA cared about Phoenix.
You had to start all over here.
I said, "The Spiders is really dated,
we've got to come up with another name."
Somebody send, What about 'the Nazi?
It almost has a fuzz tone sound to it. Nazz.
"Or what if we went the other way?
What if we were 'the Flowers'?"
"Or what if we were 'Springtime'?"
"Or what about something really crazy,
like the Husky Baby Sandwich?"
So then, Neal Smith, our drummer,
the Platinum God,
decides to drop acid
and consult the Ouija board.
I asked the Ouija board,
"Did I live in a previous lifetime?
"What was my name?"
And it spelled out a German name.
So I said, "Okay, this isn't working out."
Then Vince sat down to the Ouija board.
And he said, "Did I live in a previous life?"
It said yes.
He said, "Where?" It said in England.
"And how was I killed?"
it said he was killed as a witch.
And he said, "What was my name?"
And it spells out "Alice Cooper".
I said, "Wow, Alice Cooper sounds like
a little old lady that lives down the street.
"Makes cookies for everybody.
"But there's a lot of bodies
buried in that cellar."
So the name stuck
and Alice Cooper was born.
The day that we played as
Alice Cooper for the first time,
I looked around, everybody in all three bands
on the bill were wearing Levi's.
And I said, "We've got to be different."
They saw that there was a need
to be more and more outrageous,
so we helped them out.
We always wore a lot of clothes,
a lot of boas, vests, belts, jangly things.
And we would just put them on the boys.
And they loved it.
The GTOs told us this thrift store
was selling old Ice Capades outfits.
For a quarter a pound.
So we went in and we bought 50 pounds.
This image was now part of Alice Cooper.
But we weren't musically
as good as we needed to be,
so we used a lot of theatrics to get attention.
If I found a watermelon backstage,
that was a prop.
If I found a broom, it was something
you could swing around your head.
You can ride on it.
A hammer, a light bulb.
No matter what it was, why not
incorporate it into the show somehow.
How do you become Alice Cooper?
Well, you create it.
Miss Christine and Miss Pamela,
they went to Frank Zappa
and they said, "Wait till you see this band."
Frank saw a picture of us and he went,
"Wow, how weird is that? A male GTOs.
"I could use that.
Have them here at seven o'clock tomorrow."
The next morning, we showed up,
knock on the door,
knock on the door, the door opens.
Miss Christine is standing there
and goes into shock.
We barge right in, set up all of
our equipment and started playing.
It was so loud I remember
the picture on the wall went crooked.
Frank comes down and he goes,
"What are you doing?"
And we said, "You said seven."
"I meant seven at night."
He listened and he went, "I don't get it.
Where are you guys from?"
I said, "Phoenix." And he goes,
"Phoenix, that's a cowboy town.
"Now I really don't get it."
And that's when he said,
"Do you have a manager?"
And we said, "No."
We may have even said, "What's a manager?"
I don't know, at that point.
I moved out to California from New York.
My life was completely fucked.
I worked as a probation officer,
quit the first day.
Drove up to LA,
saw the Hollywood Landmark Motel.
Checked in, got friendly with
a whole collection of people living there.
Arthur Lee from Love,
the Chambers Brothers,
Jefferson Airplane.
It was just crazy.
I, in college, had done a little dealing,
so I started dealing to all the guys.
And then Lester Chambers said,
"if the police come and ask you
how do you pay for your hotel room
"what are you gonna tell them?"
I told him, "I don't know."
And he said, "You Jewish?"
And I said, "Yeah."
He said, "You should be a manager."
"Great, who do I manage?"
And Lester said, "We have this group
living in our basement called Alice Cooper."
Lester brought us over to
the Landmark Hotel,
we knock on the door, open the door,
and it's like a wall of fog.
When you got through the fog,
there's Janis Joplin, there's Jim Morrison,
and there's Jimi Hendrix,
just all getting high.
We're standing there in rock royalty
'cause Shep had the grass.
Clearly, he knew what he was doing.
So we signed with Shep Gordon that night.
The next day, we go to Frank Zappa
and he says, "Who's that guy?"
I said, "That's our manager."
And he goes,
"You didn't have a manager yesterday."
And I went, "Yeah, we met him last night."
So we all shook hands
and we made a deal with Zappa.
That started the journey.
We were on Frank Zappa's label.
That was the biggest thing
that ever happened to us.
When we went into the studio,
Frank said,
"I don't want to do layer upon layer of sound.
"The charm of your band
is that you can do this live."
Frank says, "I want it to sound like
I'm driving by a garage
"and the band is practising."
So we just start tuning up,
adjusting the amps and stuff.
"Okay, Frank, I think we're ready to go now."
He says, "We got them. We got the takes."
"What, we didn't even play yet."
He says, "We can fix it in the mix."
Frank looked at his watch,
"Okay, I'm gonna be back at five.
"Anything more that you guys record,
that's the album."
Then he came back at 5:15,
and picked up the tape,
and that was Pretties For You.
Lester Bangs reviewed Pretties For You
and said,
"This album is a tragic waste of plastic."
Even though we had the stamp
of approval of Zappa,
we were kind of the joke of the town.
People were just like, "Alice Cooper?
"Look at these guys,
I'm gonna throw a beer at them."
One time, we played a show for 6,000 hippies
that were freaked out on acid.
And when we came out,
it was like a nightmare.
The place just emptied,
people were running for the doors.
It was like somebody yelled, "Fire!"
Bill Graham, a promoter, he said,
"You tell these fucking assholes
"either they play fucking music
or they fucking act.
"They're not doing both
on my fucking stage.
"Get these motherfuckers out of here."
Alice Cooper was really hated
in Los Angeles.
We basically left Los Angeles
with our tails between our legs.
It was a tough time.
We were completely desolate.
But we just put our heads down
and kept going.
And our mantra was we would move into
the first city
where we got a standing ovation.
There was a long period of time
that we were stray dogs without a home,
just wandering around,
playing wherever we could play.
We were living out of suitcases
in cheap hotels.
Bouncing cheques, blackballed by clubs.
"Look out for these guys."
But Vince and I had
that long distance mentality.
There's no rear-view mirror.
If something fails, it's behind us.
At one point, Shep says, "I got us a gig
at a big pop festival worth $2,000.
"2,000 could keep us going for quite a while."
So we played the Saugatuck Pop Festival
in Detroit.
Detroit was the antithesis of LA.
Every band was up there for blood.
The MC5 were like a full-out show band.
They were like Ike & Tina Turner
but with a bad attitude.
And I went, "Wow. Where are we?"
Then Iggy comes on and then,
"Bam! impact."
Iggy literally drained the audience
of their energy.
I don't want to go on after that guy.
I'm used to going on after a blues band.
We couldn't follow the Stooges
by trying to out-power them.
We would have to be much more dramatic.
The band came out and I just thought
they were fucking great.
There seemed to be a contest in the band
for who could have the longest,
most feminine hair.
I think the drummer won.
It was great theatrics,
everything was odd or weird.
And nobody was doing anything
quite like that at the time.
What they were doing was Salvador Dali
with electric guitar.
And Detroit was open to that.
All they care about is, "Do you produce?
Do you sweat? Do you entertain the people?"
And if you do that, they'll love you.
That night, we killed them.
Finally, an audience got it.
We got our standing ovation
and it felt like coming home.
Shep knew people.
They wanted to do a big concert called
the Toronto Rock Revival.
Shep spent a month
helping them put that thing together.
And they get John Lennon.
Shep says, "You don't have to pay me.
"The payment's gonna be Alice Cooper
goes on right before John Lennon."
The stadium was absolutely full, packed.
The crowd is getting very antsy.
There was tons of excitement.
There was a Beatle gonna be going on
next to us and we're a no-name.
I knew that was a moment
where we had to do something.
You don't get to play with John Lennon
too often.
Alice Cooper!
We get on stage
and the audience is a little bewildered.
But the energy behind the band, they dug.
At the end of the show, the idea was
to open up three feather pillows,
CO2 cartridge, so it looked like snow.
For some reason,
there was a chicken backstage.
And when the feather pillows went out,
I threw the chicken up.
The next thing, I looked down
and there's a chicken.
I went, "Okay.
It had feathers, it had wings, it should fly."
It's a bird, right? A chicken's a bird.
So I picked up the chicken
and I chucked it in the audience.
It came down
and people grabbed the chicken.
Let's just say
it wasn't healthy for the chicken.
The audience tore it to pieces
and threw it back up on stage.
It was just blood, head, feathers.
The crowd was totally shocked.
This whole stadium was dead quiet.
We killed a chicken in front of 70,000 hippies.
All of a sudden, we were
the most notorious band on the planet.
And everybody wanted to know
about Alice Cooper.
At that point,
the whole group was Alice Cooper.
But the PR lady said she didn't know how to
make five people called Alice Cooper stars.
But if we could pick one person,
that she knew how to do.
This is Alice Cooper and anybody
can have what they want out of Alice Cooper.
I'm not trying to press or push anything.
The whole theme of the thing is to attack,
just to have fun.
I get off just scaring people.
It's almost like a sexual thing.
To go on stage and completely expose
myself as far as my inner personality,
my whole Mr Hyde type of personality.
Even though we were notorious,
we still didn't have anything on the radio.
People were dying to love this band,
but what was missing?
A freakin' hit song.
So we looked at bands
that had a nice string of hits.
And the Guess Who kept popping up.
So we did our research and found out
that a company out of Toronto called
Nimbus 9 made their hit records.
I went to Toronto
and waited and waited in the office.
And I think the second day,
this young guy came out.
My boss said,
"Whatever you do, get rid of Alice Cooper."
He took one look at the picture of the band,
these five creatures of indeterminate sex,
and he didn't want to be in the same county
with them, never mind in the same studio.
But Shep is irascible
and wouldn't take no for an answer.
So finally, I agreed to go to New York
and see them play.
New York heard about this half-girl,
half-guy, half-alien band that killed animals.
So everybody that was anybody
in the underground hip world was there.
And our attitude was,
"Let's just kill 'em with Detroit rock 'n' roll."
The show opened up with Alice at the lip
of the stage with bloodshot red eyes
and blood-red gums and gleaming teeth,
scowling right in front of my face
as this band of monsters hit the stage.
It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
There were no T-shirts, there were no jeans.
It was sets and props and lights.
I said, "This isn't rock 'n' roll.
It's the beginning of a cultural movement!"
After the show, I came bounding up
the stairs into the dressing room,
had my hand in the air,
and I said, "We'll do it!
"We'll produce you
and you will make hit records!"
We're like, "Yeah, right, kid."
Glenn's like, "I'd buy him a drink,
but he's not old enough."
When we went into the studio,
Bob and I talked about Alice Cooper
in the third person.
So I could play Alice and be as insane
as I wanted to be behind this mask.
I saw Alice Cooper
as all kinds of different crazy characters.
So each song got dealt with theatrically.
Dwight Fry was cut with a straightjacket on.
So when he was singing,
"I've to get out of here,
"I've to get out of here,
"'l've got to get out of here."
He really meant it.
This character that we created
was coming to life right in front of us.
Doing it live was one thing,
we could project it live.
But with Bob Ezrin, we were able to
capture that in the grooves on record.
Which meant that now we're gonna do
something dramatic musically.
We had this song
that we used to warm up with.
It went on for 10 minutes.
And Bob kept saying,
"What are you singing there, 'I'm edgy'?"
"No, 'I'm 18'."
Bob saw that as the song
that would put us on the map.
But he would say,
"That's not a song, that's a whole album."
Bob said, "Just make it 'Bam! Bam! Bam!'
"So it keeps coming at you
all the way through the song."
Which is what a good single does.
All right, this is the new 45
from Alice Cooper, Eighteen.
On our way to rehearsal,
the radio was always on
and all of a sudden, we heard Eighteen.
It stunned us.
We pulled the car over
and I went, "That's our record!"
So we just started 24-hour-a-day
calling the hotlines of every radio station.
I had my mother doing it, my brother.
Everybody had every relative doing it.
Please may I hear
I'm Eighteen by Alice Cooper?
Eventually, they moved it
in the heavy rotation.
So, it would be I'm Eighteen,
then the Beatles, the Stones, and Hendrix,
and then I'm Eighteen.
We just went, "What?
"You can't say Alice Cooper
and Rolling Stones in the same sentence.
"That's sacrilege."
It's like, "What if they find out
that we're Alice Cooper?"
We were an overnight sensation.
All of a sudden, we were in limousines.
All of a sudden, we were in airplanes.
To us, it was so much fun.
We just drank beer all day
and just said, "What's next?"
With a hit record, we didn't have to
bite the head off of a chicken.
We play I'm Eighteen
and 5,000 people would go crazy.
His name is Alice Cooper,
the latest superstar to hit the rock scene.
His father was a preacher,
so was his grandfather.
They hoped he would be, too.
Instead, he became a rock musician.
Our audience was a new audience.
It was not
the Crosby, Stills and Nash audience.
Kids on the lunatic fringe of society,
the ones that were left out,
they finally had a rock star
that represented them.
I was wondering
when you started to adopt the theatrics.
Some of the outrageous things
that you do on stage
to provoke people
and to shake them up a little bit.
Well, there's such an enormous lack
of entertainment in rock music.
It got to the point where,
if you go to a concert,
all you're gonna see is a guitar solo,
a drum solo.
And how far can that go?
You wanna see something
that you're gonna go home and talk about
and scare your parents with.
So if some 14-year-old boy goes home
wearing eye make-up, saying,
"Alice Copper wears it, why can't I wear it?"
Of course, his parents are going to say...
We knew chopping up the baby dolls
would really drive parents crazy.
Then we thought,
"Well, is Alice wearing a snake on stage,
"something that parents would hate?"
"They'd just cringe."
"That's perfect. Then let's use a snake."
Alice with this snake and the make-up!
This is going to blow it right off the map.
Especially, when they hang me.
The sadomasochistic exploits
of West Coast mass murderers
are now acted out on stages
across the country.
For it appears, America's children
are turning on to a new message.
The message of sex, death and violence,
as portrayed on stage by Alice Cooper.
How are we gonna outdo this?
That's all I ever thought about.
We picked up ideas like sponges.
You never know
where inspiration's gonna come from.
On the road,
the television was our constant friend.
Two cars!
Let others wallow with Watergate.
We're gonna do our job.
Skinny!
Hey, Skinny!
Hey, hold your horses, Mugs, I'm comin'.
Relax, Skinny.
School's out!
Did he just say, "School's out"?
We thought Eighteen was our anthem.
We didn't know that
School's Out would be even bigger than that.
In the music business,
if you have a hit record, you are in.
Giving Alice Cooper a hit
was like the lunatics running the asylum.
So I said let's put panties on the album.
The mothers would go crazy.
This is the last straw.
No more Alice Cooper!
So then, Shep goes, "Alice Cooper
is gonna take over the Hollywood Bowl,
"where all the classy acts play,
and turn it into Hellzapoppin'."
Alice Cooper programmes!
Free record in the back!
I've seen him three years ago,
a real small concert in Michigan.
And I followed him out here.
He just does freaky things on stage
that are just really out of sight to watch.
His music, man.
I like the way he presents himself
and performs up on the stage, man.
It gets in me. I don't know. I just freak out.
Well, see, I'm this perfectly normal guy.
I'm not a freak and I like Alice Cooper.
It's the Alice Cooper show
and how many here feel it,
they want to to get it on?
Wolf man Jack, one of my all-time idols,
he comes out on stage
with a camel, an elephant and harem girls,
and introduced the band.
"All right, everybody!
Wolf man Jack, Alice Cooper, yeah!"
I'm going, "That's the Wolf man!"
The legendary Alice Cooper!
You're on stage, you're playing,
you've had the camel,
you've had Wolf man Jack,
so what are you going to do next?
Shep was like, "We're gonna pay
these helicopter guys to fly over the crowd."
And then here comes
all of these panties, different colours,
falling down on the audience.
And I'm ready to just burst
because I am so excited
about how cool this idea is.
It was a show I'll never forget.
I remember the helicopter coming over,
and me fighting people in the crowd.
I so desperately
wanted a pair of these panties.
For me, it was the perfect rock 'n' roll show
of that time.
Alice had this incredible ability
to be a ring leader.
And he wrapped that audience
around his little finger for two hours.
Stop!
You know what?
A lot of people say
me and my boys are funny boys.
Isn't that just a little bit silly?
Goodbye, everybody in Los Angeles.
School's out! Now!
I was inspired, I was moved by
what Alice put together as a showman.
You couldn't help but just love this guy.
Alice Cooper!
Alice. I love him.
- Do you think he's sexy?
- Yeah.
- Do you wanna have sex or fall in love?
- Yeah.
I feel so excited and everything.
Just seeing him in person
on stage is just great. it really is.
- He's better than Mick Jagger?
- Yeah.
- What would you do if you met him?
- Everything.
- Parents hate him, though.
- Yeah.
All of a sudden, Alice became
more in the fish bowl than the rest of us.
I'd walk in Alice's room
and it would be Alice staring at a television
and all of these people staring at Alice,
watching him watch television.
If Alice said, "Can somebody get me a beer",
everybody would scramble.
It wasn't a world of reality.
This character had to be
constantly fucked up, really out there.
And it wasn't necessarily his nature.
But the alcohol really drove him.
I got lost in the character.
Why would I wanna go back to being Vince
when Alice was so successful?
"Hey, everybody loves Alice. I'll be Alice.
Vince is fine, but who needs him?"
I was on fire with this Alice character.
The most musical act to be playing
on pop radio. Alice was so much more.
We're able to manufacture moments
then spread them out
to every corner of everything.
We got a call from Salvador Dali's people
that he wanted to meet us.
I said, "This is gonna be great."
He's the guy. It's like meeting the Beatles.
We go to the St Moritz hotel,
Salvador Dali walks in and he goes,
"The Dali is here".
Then he went into this speech about
"The Dali, the greatest artist.
"The Cooper, the greatest artist."
He wants to do this moving hologram.
He said, "I want you to sit in the middle
and wear four million dollars in diamonds."
And he has this brain with him.
And he goes, "This is the Alice brain."
It's got ants crawling all over it,
and the ants spelled out Alice and Dali,
and a chocolate clair
running down the back.
Alice being with Dali
was as significant as a record.
'Cause it defined who he was.
Alice was becoming a real icon.
I wasn't even told that it was going on.
The band had been sent one place
and Alice went to the unveiling.
Here's something that's symbolic
of our achievement of our vision,
and then I was excluded.
That really hurt me because,
even though I was happy for Alice,
I just felt like I was left out of something
that him and I should be sharing.
Things started changing with success.
The band became treated like outsiders
and barely a step above any fan
that would try to get into Alice's room.
We always had two limos.
And one time, I got in one of them
and somebody came out to me and said,
"You can't sit in there. That's Alice's car."
All the shit that this band
had ever gone through together as one unit.
I had a switchblade,
and I was ready to stab this motherfucker.
Alice needed his own car because
Alice would have to go to radio stations,
Alice would have to go to red carpets,
Alice would have to attend all these parties.
Everybody else would go into town,
take a nap, go to the pool,
but Alice never had a minute.
Even though touring was hard,
it didn't ever feel like work.
But now, six or seven years of it
was catching up with me.
"Okay, wait. I got to take a breath."
Look at me.
Would you buy a car from this man?
I needed a break from the band,
I needed a break from touring,
I needed a break from Alice.
But you can't stop.
You got to put another album out
that was gonna be a number one.
The band had decided
we wanted to get back to being a band,
not just the vehicle for Alice.
We're going to get back to our roots
and we're gonna work up this song
that we had had for a million years
called Woman Machine.
We're feeling really good about this,
and then Bob showed up.
"Bob, we got this new song. Listen to this."
We didn't even get past the intro
when Bob stopped us and said,
"Wait, I think you should play
something different on that."
"What are you talking about?
We didn't even play the song yet."
Ladies and gentlemen,
it's a privilege and pleasure
to introduce the world's greatest singer,
Alice Cooper.
The band really felt
like Alice and I had too much control.
They had a vision
and they wanted to see that vision through.
For the first time ever in our relationship,
they just go,
"No, that's not the way we hear that.
"We would rather do it this way."
I had a little meeting with Alice
and I just said, "it's obvious that they don't
really wanna work with me any more.
"And if you ever decide
to go out on your own, let me know.
"'Cause I love you
and I love working with you."
I always believed in the sure thing.
And I know that Bob was the only one
that understood Alice Cooper.
But I'm still in the band,
I'm going, "Okay well, if Bob's not in,
we're still gonna make a record, right?"
So we flew to Los Angeles
and did the next album without Bob Ezrin.
I went and lived in Malibu
while we were recording.
It probably was one of the first times
that I ever avoided the other guys.
We were fracturing and this album
just didn't have any cohesion.
We didn't have Bob to hold it together.
Everybody was frustrated
and the band wanted to do solo albums.
Other bands have done it,
but we were sort of warned by management
that it's not a good idea to take a year off
and do a solo album.
I don't know if it's a warning or a threat.
My attitude was,
if you do solo records then Alice
does his and you're fucked.
'Cause he's the only one people care about.
So please don't do it.
But if you do it,
then we better do what we do.
Shep was smart enough to understand that,
if there is gonna be a solo career,
I should own the name.
I walk down the street,
nobody says, "Hey, Vince."
Everybody goes, "Hey, Alice."
I was the character of Alice Cooper.
Could any of the rest of us
have carried off that character?
I don't think so.
So when Alice became the solo artist,
then I realised,
"Okay, Alice Cooper the band
is definitely over."
It was very, very tough.
The separation from the art.
But mostly, the separation of friendship.
Dennis was the first one that encouraged me
to become something other than myself.
For the Vince part of me,
it was hard to leave Dennis behind.
But now I was Alice.
And Alice had a life of his own.
Of course, coming through and the
photographers are snapping this,
- Alice Cooper...
- I just left my drink over there.
And I don't have anything in my liver.
- Tell me, are you working on an album?
- Yes.
Name of the album is
Welcome To My Nightmare.
That sounds interesting.
I'm the murderer and I will be murdered.
You're gonna murder yourself?
Very possibly, that could happen.
I was scared to death to go on my own.
How many lead singers broke away
from their bands and became successful?
Especially with him separating
from the group,
I wanted to make a statement.
This was a new beginning.
Everything we could get,
we threw into that show.
It was like a big Broadway play.
We had Vincent Price, we even had dancers.
There was this one girl that was
the most beautiful dancer you've ever seen.
She just floated out there.
I was 18 years old,
and the very first day I met Alice,
he comes waltzing in the room
all dressed in white.
Flowing black hair,
these gorgeous blue eyes.
I remember getting lost in conversation
with Alice about childhood.
We found out that we're both pastor's kids.
Every night, there were
very romantic moments with her.
And I started looking forward more
to those moments than anything else.
I was best man at Alice's wedding
and life was fantastic.
We actually pulled Nightmare off
and it actually worked.
Everybody loved the show.
My solo career was a success.
So I was in my glory.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the debonair and adorable Alice Cooper.
You're not exactly what I expected.
I kind of expected that grotesque make-up
and those weird crazy costumes
and a snake and a coffin
and all those things that drive me crazy.
- You know.
- Well...
Well, I'm trying to change my image.
I was becoming a real celebrity.
I would sit down next to Jack Benny
and he would be like,
"Alice, everything I see
has got your picture on it, it's ridiculous."
George Burns had watched the show
and he saw it as vaudeville.
"Yeah, I remember 1923, the great Momar
cut his head off and he had a snake."
My mom didn't really consider me a star
until I had a picture taken with Frank Sinatra.
Frank would call me Coop.
Coop, pretty cool.
Would you welcome, Alice Cooper.
- Hey, big fella.
- Hey, baby, what's happening?
- What kind of a snake is this?
- This is a boa.
- Is this a boa?
- This is actually not a...
Alice Cooper was good TV.
And that's when Alice became
more than a rock star.
Almost woven into the fabric of America
was this Alice character.
Alice Cooper organised a big clean-up
at Riverside Park today.
People accuse you
of doing this whole thing for publicity.
What's wrong with that?
Alice was so big and so on
that he played Alice all the time.
And Alice drank all the time.
None of us ever really thought
about the consequences to him
for being this character.
And it started to consume him.
There was no time for Vincent.
He got lost somewhere in the shuffle.
It was just a slow disintegration.
And somebody had to intervene.
I had a house in upstate New York.
So we found a hospital right by the house,
and it was bizarre.
It was a lock-up place
for people with real mental disorders.
And the people were really scary.
Everybody was whacked.
This was tough, my best friend
is in this place with lunatics.
And I put him there.
I remember them closing the door
and realising that I wasn't
gonna come out again.
That was it.
And I went, "Wait a minute.
Get my manager on the phone.
"Get my wife on the phone. How dare you?
"I'll buy this place and tear it down
and build a bar out of it."
There was not one person in there
that one time ever said,
"Alice Cooper, rock star."
They were so involved in their own insanity
that I was just another guy.
I was away from the responsibility
of being Alice Cooper,
away from the parties.
And every day I felt a little better.
Finally. Maybe I'm not gonna die.
I'm not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist,
but do you think you're cured?
Yeah, I can't even think about drinking.
Do you think that you could turn back
to alcohol as a crutch?
No, I don't think so.
I've got a second lease on life on the thing.
And to me, it's real exciting.
And you've now linked up
with Bernie Taupin?
Yeah, we've been threatening
to write together for years
and finally, we got a chance.
When I got out of the hospital,
I was totally serious about it,
I said, "Now I wanna write."
And he still thought
it was one of those things.
"Yeah, let's go get drunk and talk about it."
My association with Alice
was based on pure friendship.
We were two people who
really liked being together.
And when he came out of the sanatorium,
he approached me with the idea of
doing an album based on his experiences.
- The album starts...
- And I'll sing the bits I can sing.
Alice had a pool house at the back.
We would just hang out in there
and he would talk to me
about these characters from the sanatorium.
We just wanted to do something together
and be able to say it was our project.
I like to think that was a help to him.
This album was a total confession.
The audience has been through
my alcoholism with me.
So let's let them be
through the cure with me.
I was sober.
What if you don't love me like this?
Hello, anybody there?
All right. Well, listen,
everybody who makes music
feels that they're kind of out of sync
as the years go by.
But I never meant the Pistols
to be a challenge to Alice Cooper.
More like a compliment, thank you.
He had an influence on us.
I think anything that Alice has ever done
is good enough for me.
Except golf.
Alice, lay off the golf.
It was a new period of time,
there's new kind of bands coming out.
I was totally sober
and not fully armed to fight them.
But there was something called cocaine.
Personally, myself, at the time,
who had a drug problem.
It's the old thing of "I'll be right back."
Go to the bathroom and I'd be doing coke.
And Alice, he's not a stupid guy,
he's catching wind of something here.
I kind of thought, "Well, I quit drinking.
"I can probably allow myself
to do something like this."
And I started, like everybody else,
"One little hit of this, a little hit of that."
Just that little push over the cliff.
All these punk kids thought
they were faster than me.
I am going to destroy you all.
For those of you unfamiliar with Cooper,
you could say he's the forefather
of some of those punk rock groups.
When Cooper and his entourage
arrived this morning,
I found him minus his make-up
and perfectly calm and sober.
How has it changed your music?
Well, now the great thing about it
is I lost 20 pounds.
The energy is so much up,
it's like my old running days
when I was a miler.
I've got that same kind of energy.
Hello.
You have been chosen to take a glimpse
at the first galaxy tour.
We're now travelling through outer space.
For Alice, it's easy
to get caught up in something new.
I remember freebasing with him,
which I'd not done before.
And I said, "But coke's okay, dude."
But when you start smoking that shit,
it's like smoking your home.
He sunk into an abyss that was way, way
more tragic than any of the drinking.
And it broke my heart,
because this was my buddy.
Galaxy tour.
It's one of the hardest things I ever did.
But I remember leaving that pool house
and just going,
"I can't stay here,
because I'm gonna go down, too."
We're very sorry. Alice Cooper is ill.
Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
I remember saying, "I am not gonna get up
at six in the morning
"and work till twelve at night
to make you money to go kill yourself with."
"You wanna kill yourself? Be my guest."
it was apparent that Alice
had an addictive personality
when I can see that he went
through that stuff.
Either way, it was gonna be
a very fast slide down.
We're back now with Alice Cooper.
Now, is Alice somebody else?
Yeah, well, Alice is the character
that performs, really.
- And...
- And then who are you?
I'm just Ozzie Nelson.
You're a family man I understand.
- Yes, I have a little girl.
- Well, how are you at home?
When this little baby came along,
my primary concern was her well-being.
So I was not so focused on
what was going on with him at the time
until it spiralled out of control.
Whatever happened to good old
Vince Furnier back there on the trail?
- What happened to him?
- He's still around.
- Yeah?
- He was fun and everything like that.
I'm still Vince a lot of the time. Vince.
I look like Vince to you?
Hi, I'm Vince.
I was raising our daughter and I was
watching my husband die before my eyes.
And I was powerless to make any difference.
We will continue with Alice Cooper,
with more conversation and more music
right after these announcements.
I had begun divorce proceedings saying,
"Can't do this.
Won't continue to raise our child with this.
"And I'm moving to Chicago.
"And I hope you get through this."
Mommy, where's daddy?
He's been gone for so long.
Do you think he'll ever come home?
I blamed all this on Alice.
I said, "None of this would have happened
if it wouldn't have been for my success.
"I worked too hard, I should've stopped."
I should've this, I should've that.
And there was a million should'ves.
And now, I was by myself.
Just me and Alice.
I had been up for about three days
and I was locked in my house up there
with a rock the size of a baseball and a gun.
I had all Sheryl's dresses
around the windows.
I didn't want anybody around
to see what I had turned into.
I remember I got up and I went...
I looked in the mirror
and my eyes were bleeding.
And then I realised
that was what my make-up looked like.
And I had that one second of
"What insanity are you in right now?"
I took the rock that I still owed money on,
put it in the toilet and flushed it.
And I Went, "What did I just do?"
And I went back to bed and I laid in bed
and I slept for about 14 hours.
Finally, I woke up, I went in the other room,
opened the doors up,
there was sunlight outside.
It was like a point where I realised
I was either gonna die right there
or I was gonna live.
I had done a hundred million miles
since I left Phoenix,
and ended up coming back to start all over.
My husband and I,
we just went and picked him up
and helped him out as much as we could.
His condition was very bad.
He couldn't hardly function.
I believe that the only time
that God can help you,
is when you have no fight left.
All you can do is just go, "Help! I'm done."
My husband and I were fasting and praying.
We just had to trust
that the Lord was gonna be with him.
We had seen another time
when he came through a miracle.
This was his second miracle.
When I finally came out of the hospital,
I called up Sheryl and said, "it's clone."
She said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "I'm over it.
"No craving for alcohol, for drugs."
Of course she's going,
"Right. Gonna take a little more than that
"to make me believe this."
I said, "Well, I'll agree to counselling,
"but you got to arrange it
and I might show up."
God saved me, so I'm here now.
Let's see what happens.
I think that's when God can go,
"Okay, now you're ready?
Ready to start this?"
Alice Cooper raised us.
He raised a bunch of
sick motherfucking little kids.
Children of the '70s who became
the sick motherfucking '80s rock stars.
We came from this man's loins.
He ejaculated and glam metal was born.
This metal thing snuck up on me a little bit.
There was these bands now
that were show bands.
They're image bands
and they wrote good songs.
Once again, the world had moved on
and now Alice Cooper fit in.
I kind of felt like I can take my crown back.
But I wasn't a rock star any more.
I was a dad and a husband.
Could I become that Alice character again?
After five years away,
my return to the stage was Halloween night
in my hometown Detroit
for a concert broadcast live on MTV
to millions of teenagers.
I was terrified.
I remember walking
for about two hours in a circle.
When that music starts,
I don't know what's gonna happen.
What if Alice doesn't show up?
I'd never played him straight.
What if I go out there and I'm just Vince?
Soon as the band started, I said, "This is it."
My back was rigid. When I walked out there
and I looked at the audience, it was, "Yeah!"
I finally figured out that this character
didn't wanna live in my world.
He only wanted to be on stage.
As soon as he walked off the stage,
the curtain came down, he was gone.
Because Alice didn't wanna live
in the house I lived in.
He didn't wanna be married.
He didn't wanna play golf.
He wouldn't do any of that stuff.
He just wanted to perform.
I think it was so amazing after being
almost dead and near the bottom
that he could sell out Joe Louis Arena
in Detroit, where the first spark really started,
and have Alice live as Alice
with a healthy Vincent behind him.
Friends in high school, dreamy-eyed kids,
clawing their way all the way
to the glittery top of the rock pile.
I love what we did,
despite the way that the band had broken up.
Here's this vision that began in art class.
And now the Alice character
is known worldwide.
I'm very proud of that.
When I first got on stage and sang,
"I'm eighteen and I like it",
I was close enough to eighteen
to believe that.
And then you go through this incredible hell
to get back to the place where you're 18
and you love it again.
And you can raise
the crutch up and go, "I won!"
So that was Alice Cooper.
You should see his sister,
James Fenimore.