When I woke up two police cars and an ambulance were by the side of the road, and a policeman was holding up the back of my head asking me what my name was. I told him I was Alice Cooper.
We were all unconscious for about fifteen minutes, then one by one we began to come to shivering and vomiting from shock. None of us was badly hurt (Neal’s cast had actually saved his foot from getting crushed, and Dick had a gash across his forehead that took eighteen stitches to close up) but the van and most of the equipment were wrecked. Later that night lying in the darkness on the floor in some cheap motel in Hollywood, Dick made a confession. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think I died,” he whispered.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Neal yelled from the other side of the room. “Is this another one of your crazy faggot ideas for the Alice Cooper band?”
“No, I’m serious,” Dick insisted. “When I passed out in the van I had a strange sensation, like my spirit leaving my body.”
Glen was making “woooo” noises of ghosts, but Dick went right on, insisting that his spirit rose above the freeway, and he could see the van laying on its side and other spirits rising up from the cement. He hovered at a certain height, waiting for them to join him, knowing they were friends, when something started to push him back down. He didn’t want to go back down though. He felt free, movable, released. But there was pressure, something literally pushing. Then he woke up.
Although I didn’t tell the other guys until later, when it came out in an interview, I had experienced the same thing. I was sure that we had all died, and that this life was really a reincarnation. I actually had become Alice Cooper.
It took all the cash we had earned in Phoenix to buy another van and rent a place to live, this time a little crooked house that was sliding down the side of a hill, thirty miles outside of LA in Topanga Canyon. Topanga was the easiest place to find a house. While Laurel Canyon attracted nouveau riche rock stars and Beverly Hills the ones who already had been around for a few years, Topanga was filled with hippies and people on the way up. The house we rented was so slanted that people got dizzy inside. We rearranged all the furniture (a few sticks of chairs and a rotting sofa) so they, too, tilted down the mountain, like in a fun house. We hung a five-foot poster of Lawrence Welk that we found in a store room at the Cheetah above the fireplace and stuck rhinestone earrings in his eyes.
We almost had our own rooms in the Topanga house. Mike, Dennis, Neal, Mike Allen and Dick shared rooms. Glen slept in the basement, where we also rehearsed, but in order to get to the basement you had to out side the house and enter from a rear door. So we just cut a large round hole in the floor of my bedroom and lowered ourselves into the basement from there.
When the people in the neighborhood heard that a strange rock and roll band had moved into the house we were treated to the hippie welcome wagon of free drugs. Most of our visitors were from nearby communes who came by to say hello and share a joint. I used to sit in front of the house in an old dirty slip pulled over a pair of jeans and hold court. I had a passion for old dirty slips cut off like T-shirts. They still look terrific. When I first started wearing them they just hinted at femininity, but it was enough to make people think I was a transvestite.
One day I was polishing off a bottle on the front steps when a big white Cadillac with a white Russian wolfhound in the back pulled up. At first I thought the driver was Troy Donahue. It was Troy Donahue. He had heard there was a bunch of weirdos in the neighborhood and wanted to see what was up. What attraction I offered for Troy Donahue I’m not sure, but he came by to see me practically every day. He was generally as drunk as the rest of us and he loved to listen to us rehearse, which was odd, because most people couldn’t stand to hear us play when they paid for the privilege. Troy would get ripped out of his skull on Ripple, hook his feet in my bedroom closet door and hang upside down through the hole in the floor for hours, like a bat. A few times he slipped right through, wrecking Neal’s drum kit in the process.
When Merry Cornwall saw my new hair and pseudo-drag costume she was no longer interested in managing us. “Now,” she said, “you look as bas as you sound.” Yet out of loyalty she continued to book us in the Cheetah just the same. The audience as the Cheetah despised our new image and couldn’t stand our new sound. The first time I actually got booed on stage was at the Cheetah that May. I booed right back at them. Every time I heard somebody yell “faggot” at me from the audience I swished more and gave them a limp wrist. That drove them even crazier. I got the feeling they wanted to hurt me, punish me somehow for being so outrageous. Still, this was the most audience reaction we got in a year.
People began to remember us, even if only to say they didn’t like us. We were no longer another faceless band opening at the Cheetah. Overnight we had found inverse fame. We were the band it was hip to hate. I hated right back. I was so drunk most of the time I didn’t even know what I was doing. I ran around the stage with a toilet seat and sang a song through an open window called “Nobody Likes Me.” Our biggest problem was the music. To say that it was atonal was a compliment. There was no melody line, no pattern to the notes we played. By our sound you would have thought we were spaced out on acid when we played. Yeet that was it. Either we played English blues and somebody else’s tunes, or we played our own stuff, which sounded, well, experimental.
During the show somebody yelled at me, “You suck!” I said, “That’s right,” and lay down on the stage and chanted, “suck, suck, suck,” until I thought the crowd would rip me apart. They called me a fag rock star. Rock Star! Who cared it they thought I was a fag., if they hated me. Everybody noticed me.
I finally lost my virginity in the house in Topanga Canyon. One day Troy Donahue brought a stack of unused lumber over in the back seat of his car, and Mike Allen helped me build a massive coffin with all the accessories you’d find in a Cadillac. It was painted black enamel, and there was a glass window in the lid so I could see up. I padded and lined the insides in an old satin ball dress and wired the top with two car speakers for stereo music. There was even a tiny light that went on whenever you opened the lid, just like a refrigerator. Curiously, although I can close my eyes and see every nail-head in that coffin, I don’t remember the name of the girl I bedded there. That’s probably because our lovemaking session fell far short of the expectations I had come to have from my pillow and right hand. It was, however, not much different than balling a jelly doughnut.
I appeared at the Whiskey A-Go-Go that fateful night, opening third on a bill to Led Zeppelin their first time around in America. I came prancing out on stage in pink pajamas and a garbage can. When the show was over there was a rush of groupies, one of whom, a strawberry blonde with pert tits and wide ass, kept tellingme, “You’re so adorable,” squealing out the word adorable with a little pelvic thrust. This was not the age of glitter groupies, mind you, but the prehistoric era of California hippies. Not that this girl was from California. She was from Denver, actually, and had to leave early the next morning to drive back there. But everyone seemed to look the same then in California: beads, long natural hair, sandals and jeans or short dresses that were no more than wide belts.