Ezrin even directed me in my vocals, which opened a whole new world of interpretation and styling for me. I was no longer just another rock and roll singer, I was an actor, a song stylist developing a technique. We approached each cut like it was a role in a play. “Sing this like you’re Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and you’re horny,” he’d suggest; or, “Pretend you’re desperate for a drink. Sing like a sponge.”
The song of ours that fascinated him the most was one he called “Edgy.” Ezrin never understood the lyric when he heard me rehearsing it. He thought I was singing, “I’m edgy and I don’t know what I want.” The song was “Eighteen” and without even realizing what we had created we picked it as our first release. It took us six weeks to get four tunes ready: “Eighteen,” “Is It My Body?” “Sun Rise,” and “Nervous.” When Warner Brothers heard the cuts they refused to believe it was the same group. They even suggested to Shep and Joey that it was a hoax, that we had found another group to do it. The four cuts turned them on so much they rush-released “Eighteen” without an album to back it up.
In February the lights, gas and electricity were back on at Pontiac, and we returned to find the place a little cleaner. Most of our pet animals had either died or run away and the piles of rotting food we left in the house had been cleaned up for us by wild animals.
Warners suggested that if “Eighteen” had any initial impact at all we return immediately to the studio and lay down more cuts to fill up an album, still not sure at the time whether it was worth it to spend the money recording and pressing. We needed to make “Eighteen” into a hit, and that was Joey and Shep’s work in New York.
They had opened up a small office in a Greenwich Village brownstone on West Thirteenth Street, a brownstone we would eventually buy along with several others and an apartment building or two. At the time, though, it was a barren office with five telephones and three desks, and Joey Greenberg sat there, on the phones, selling the record.
Everybody wants to know the scoop on the music industry with payola, and I’ll tell you the truth, it doesn’t exist. Not anymore. You can’t even take a disc jockey out to lunch these days. In the old days, long before I was around, I guess it happened all the time. But in the late 1970’s you just can’t buck the system of play lists.
A station plays a record these days because the listening audience wants to hear it. If they play enough records the public wants to hear, they get a larger listening audience and more money. Before I release a single now I send it to a listening laboratory and have it analyzed for public acceptance. Tod Storz, some guy in Milwaukee, invented the play-list formula, which says to play the least number of songs the most amount of times to build up an audience. His father owned a brewery along with a radio station, and Storz collected beer money from bars every day. He noticed the same records were playing in every juke box, and that people played the song over and over. Using the same method Storz turned his station into a huge success. So now almost every radio station in the country is playing the same thirty or so hit songs. You can’t get on the play list unless you already have a hit and you can’t get a hit unless you get played. So how do you get on the list in the first place?
You beg. You promise. You lie. Especially lie. Joey Greenberg stayed on the phone ten hours a day for the next three years. He got to the Alive offices in New York City early in the morning and started calling program managers in stations on the East Coast and worked his way west as it got later in the day.
“Betty? (Syd? Dick?) This is Joey Greenberg from Alive in New York. How ya doing? Alive? It’s Alice Cooper’s management company. No, no chicken killing. Listen, Betty (Dick, Ira), all that chicken stuff is just publicity, honestly. Did you hear the kid’s new single? It’s a smash, a monster. A real killer. Of course they know how to play. Listen, Bob Richardson chased Alice all over the midwest to get him to record this one number with him. Honest. Richardson says he’ll put his reputation on the line for ‘Eighteen.’ Have you heard it? It’s an anthem. Betsy, it’s going to be the biggest song of the year. I know it’s right for your station. How? We listen to it when we’re in the area. It’s Alice’s favorite station in the midwest. I swear! Oh, yeah? But the song doesn’t have makeup on it. You wouldn’t know the kid was wearing makeup if you listened to the song. Mike (George, Peter), they’re getting hundreds of requests every day for it in Virginia. Just call Joe (Peter, Stan) at WHAR. People are adding it to play lists by the dozens. I know you need this for your station, Ralph (Jeffrey). It’s gonna pull the kids in by the thousands and you’re going to be the last one to go on it. Don’t embarrass yourself. It’s got smash written all over it.”
Sometimes you have to go down to the station in person. Disc jockeys and station managers are so touchy about payola and bribes they didn’t want them near them, but Shep and Joey kept on knocking on doors and forcing people to listen to it. Just play it once. With a fistful of Ziggy plane tickets and a lot of energy Shep scoured the country looking for stations to play “Eighteen.” CKLW went on it first. They broadcast on a powerful 50,000 watts from Windsor, Canada, and were heavily influenced by the audience in Michigan, where we were already well known from our stage act. Shep brought “Eighteen” to them and they believed in it immediately.
We were loading equipment in downtown Detroit when we heard it played for the first time. It had been four years since I was washing my car in Phoenix that I heard myself over the radio. But that was FM in Phoenix. It was AM in Detroit. That was the boner right there. AM radio means everybody is listening. We were right up there, with Simon and Garfunkel and the Carpenters. The time had come for Alice Cooper. We rushed to the nearest phones and deluged the stations with requests to play it again, but we didn’t have to. Thousands of requests were already coming into the station. By February “Eighteen” was fifteen on the CKLW play list and hundreds of other stations picked up on it. It was like Christmas and winning the World Series mixed together.
We rushed back into the studios with Ezrin, determined to blend any new music on the rest of the album with a concept for a new stage show. The black Alice, the next Alice the public came to know, was developed during those sessions. Before we went back to finish what turned out to be an album I was a trashy-looking transvestite on stage. I made people feel uncomfortable because I looked and acted strange, but I hadn’t yet made them feel I was dangerous. Ezrin especially enjoyed the dangerous element in me and helped nurture it. He and I both felt it urgent for Alice not only to be strange, but this time to be scary.
Scary to me means crazy. The most frightening thing in the world to me was insanity. The unpredictability of insanity frightened me. When I was a child and I first watched the classic Dracula with Bela Lugosi, the most frightening scene in the film was when they open a ship’s hatch and find Renfield, the real estatebroker, gone mad, eating insects and babbling wild-eyed up into the camera. The actor’s name was Dwight Frey, and Ezrin and I began to develope him in to a character on “The Ballad of Dwight Frey.” There was a lot of Dwight Frey in the original Alice character. He started out fairly sane and wound up so nuts it scared you half to death.
The lyrics I had originally written for “Frey” was about a man whose wife blows herself up by swallowing a stick of dynamite: “See my only wife explode right before my eyes.” With Ezrin’s encouragement I changed it to “See my lonely life explode right before my eyes.” The song went on about a man in a mental hospital who had been there for days and hadn’t eaten a thing. The plan was for me to do the entire song in a straightjacket and break out of it in the end as I screamed, “I gotta get outahere! I gotta get outahere, I gotta get out!” It actually made the audiences grit their teeth out of tension. If you weren’t crazy ahead of time, Frey could drive you crazy. Very few people experienced the feeling of having a straightjacket on. Everybody should strap themselves into one once in their life. Anyway, we called the completed album Love It To Death and it-shot right up the record charts and hung in there for months.