We didn’t see or hear the album until five months later.
Nighttime was scene-making time for me in LA. Nobody would pay fifty cents to see us perform but we were first on party guest lists. Instant celebrities. No fuss, no waiting. Just add recording contract to one rock group and stir. We met literally thousands of people at these parties.
We had, unfortunately, the reputation of being the ultra-gay band in Los Angeles, and there were a few people who took the initiative to find out the truth and get to know us better. People who did, and got to know us and what we were about, often became entangled in our madness, possessed with the concept of Alice Cooper, and wound up deeply involved in our lives for years to come.
I was at one of those parties lurking in the kitchen. Kitchen lurking was my favorite pastime. It was compulsion motivated purely by greedy hunger. Parties were the best place to eat. You could fill up while you were there and usually find something in the kitchen to take away with you.
I was rifling through a pantry, tucking away a can of tuna fish into a tablecloth I wore as a shirt, when I realized a man was watching me. With great bravado I looked up, walked over to a can opener and opened the can. I ate a piece of tuna with my fingers and sized up the intruder: blond, impish face, sleepy and glassy eyes. I offered some tuna to him and he said, “I’m too drunk to swallow.”
His name was Ashley Pandel, and he was not the host but just another interloper making the rounds of Los Angeles parties. He understood immediately what I was doing, went straight to the refrigerator and got out the eggs. “You should always take eggs,” he said. “The protein is good for you.”
“It’s too hard to sneak eggs out,” I said. He seemed baffled by this for a moment, then he belched and stumbled backwards a step. “No, there are lots of places for eggs.” He held two and looked around his jeans and T-shirt for a good place to secret them. The kitchen door opened and we were joined by a couple in their early thirties who busily went to the cabinets and found a supply of paper cups and napkin with familiar ease. Ashley took the eggs and hid them under his arms in his armpits. He stood there blinking at the people with his arms hoisted a few inches away from his sides like he was about to levitate. By the time they left the kitchen we were both laughing so hard that he cracked the eggs, and yolk was running down the sides of his shirt.
Ashley Pandel became a regular at our house on the hill and a close friend of the group. Although we would drift apart the coming year, he would rejoin our group of merry men in 1971. As my personal publicist he became responsible for much of the press and press reception that Alice Cooper was given through 1974, when he retired from rock and roll, richer than ever, to open Ashley’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue in New York, where he nightly throws baccanalian brawls for the rock industry with eggs under his arms.
Shep and Joey finally got us a job, which was a small miracle in its own way. They knew nothing at all about rock and roll. They were learning as they went along, and not quickly either. This first booking was at an army base in Denver. As much as Shep swears he did not get the idea out of Gypsy, he billed us as “Alice Cooper and the Hollywood Blondes.” He actually hired four topless go-go dancers from a strip joint to go out to Denver with us and dance on either side of the stage.
I couldn’t believe Shep and Joey would subject us to the kind of reaction we knew we’d provoke at an army base. We were seething. Shep thought the topless go-go dancers would balance out the show; if the army guys hated us they’d still have tits and ass to look at. I was so drunk when we got to Denver I couldn’t even stand straight. After two minutes of playing the army guys were on their feet shouting, “Stop it! You stink! Go Home!” and I yelled, “What do you want from me? What do you want from my life?” hanging on my microphone stand for support.
Except for an odd club date here and there, we spent our days lolling about the glamorous new house waiting for stardom to pop in on us, or partying at the Landmark Hotel. There was always something extraordinary going on at the Landmark, always a mystery to unravel, an adventure to be had. The Landmark was primarily a rock and roll hotel, a very hip place to live just on the brink of shabbiness and notoriety.
The carpeting in the hallways was worn out, not by people going to their rooms, but by people wandering, stalking the corridors of the hotel like a tunnel of love. Fresh young women would arrive there every day. They were usually from the suburbs, round-hipped girls with ex-husbands and unused passion who wanted to explore the thrilling mile-a-minute world of rock and roll. These girls were sucked into the Landmark like they were being ingested into a huge machine, into the lobby where they checked in, and then, within two months, pulled from apartment to apartment, getting whatever life-force they started with draining out of them by the powerful and magic natives who lived behind the closed doors.
The Landmark was a gold mine if you were postpecting for heavy egos, heavy personalities, heavy drugs and heavy sex. People sold everything from marijuana to cut-rate airplane tickets there. It was scam city. Hustlers row. It attracted all sorts of restless people on the make, by the hotels’ very demands “transients.” Janis Joplin lived and died there. The Chamber Brothers lived there. The Jefferson Airplane stayed there. Somehow, for a summer, the Ohio State football team lived there. (Maybe they said they were the Ohio State football team so they could get laid. It sure did help.) And eventually I lived there, too.
If you did not allow yourself to get drawn into the draining whirlpool of the hotel, if you had no need for any of its attractions except for pure amusement, the Landmark could be fun. Indeed, it was wonderful. Susan Starfucker kept a one-room apartment there where she raised her child. Susan did not like the bedroom I had, down in the dungeon, and even though I had contributed my coffin to the band’s prop department and now slept on a real mattress, Susan wanted me to stay with her, at the Landmark, where her daughter was.
Shep introduced me to Janis Joplin by the pool one day. She had played the Monterey Pop Festival the year before, and was just beginning to face the hurdles of stardom. Janis warmed to me immediately, probably because of my clothes.
“Did you ever see tits like these, man?” she asked me one day at the pool. Her breasts were covered with a layer of suntan lotion and sweat. I told her they were the best tits I had ever seen and she found the hysterically funny. Everybody was so spaced out on drugs at the Landmark that people found strange things very funny all the time.
“You wanna sleep with these tits, Cooper? Maybe these tits and another pair, too? Does that scare you, man?” she hacked out between gales of laughter.
I told her I loved tits. I told her they were my preference.
“You’re kidding. All you guys say you like chicks, but when the lights go out you’re all sucking cock. That’s all right, though. When the lights go out all the chicks are sucking cunt.”
It was two or three weeks later (Janis had been in and out of the Landmark and on the road) when I saw her again, this time very anxious to set her straight about my sexuality.
“Listen, baby, I didn’t mean to upset your ego or anything,” she said.
“It’s absolutely cool with me if you ball other guys, man. I mean after all….”
“No, I mean it. Honestly. All of us are straight. We all like girls. That’s all there was in Phoenix. WE brought the only faggots out there with us.”
Janis eyed my skinny body from behind eyes that looked like the bottom of shot glasses.