Rumors quickly turned into legends, and our next was the snake. My first snake was named Kachina. She was a nine-foot-long boa constrictor, not very big as far as they go, and she was the sweetest snake you’d ever want to meet. A girl gave her to me as a gift in a hotel in Florida. Using Kachina in the act didn’t seem to be a more important idea than any of the other props at first. One night I brought her up on stage with the feathers and fire extinguishers. When I took her out of her box and held her up in the spotlight I thought a bomb had gone off in the audience. There was an explosion of sound. Kachina whipped her body around, clutching to me, reeling from the vibrations of the noise. The crowd surged forward, hypnotized. She was so powerful up there!
I never understood what the big fuss was about snakes. I always liked them. They were common in Arizona, and I grew up thinking of them as nice, clean pets — you know, they look slimy but they’re so clean you could eat off their backs. Kachina liked being up there on stage with me. She was very docile and friendly. She never once even gave me a little squeeze. She did however pop herself into my open mouth one night, right in the middle of a note. Instead of spitting her out I just closed my lips and sucked on her head. I could feel her little tongue darting across the roof of my mouth, French kissing me back. It was a friendly, warming experience.
Kachina ran away one day in Nashville. She disappeared in a hotel. We missed two planes looking for her but she had vanished in thin air. Two weeks later the manager got a complaint about a stuffed drain in the bathtub. The plumber found poor Kachina, who had crawled down the drain. It was a wonder she didn’t come back up when somebody was taking a bath.
After I started using the snake and electric chair there was no stopping us. I never turned down an interview. The press were playing sixty-nine with me and we ate each other up. I faced dozens of reporters a day. They all started off being very cocky and hostile. There was a distinct air of being out to get me back then, and I thrived on that approach. I’d spend the entire interview trying to win them over, show them that I wasn’t so bad in real life. When they left they were really confused. Most of them liked me, Vince Furnier, but hated the Alice character. A few didn’t like either one of us at all.
They called me degenerate, not questioning that society was degenerate and I was a reflection. They said I was money hungry, and I was, I had starved. In the July 1971 issue of Life magazine, Albert Goldman said I was a “shrewd operator,” “a frightening embarrassment,” and “You react less to the horror of the image than to the sickness of the act.”
Wow.
CHAPTER 13
The “Killer” show was written in a bar at O’Hare Airport during a three-hour layover in August of 1971. “Killer” totally captured the imagination of the public and embodied everything we had been working toward up until then. It was a moralistic, dramatic statement, a masterpiece of shock and revenge, the first dramatized rock and roll show with a story concept.
We conceived “Killer” as starting before we even arrived at the auditorium. A newspaper with the headline KlLLER and my picture on the front page was placed on every seat. Only this was a picture of a new Alice, a blacker, darker Alice. Not Alice playing Dwight Frey, but Alice who was a murderer himself. There were no longer little Twiggy eyelashes running down my cheeks. Now there were two dark sockets where deranged little eyeballs gleamed. My new costume was torn black tights and a leather harness that laced up the front like a vest and strapped around my legs and body with chains. I even stopped washing my hair, and it got dirty and stringy on the road. I looked like your most goulish nightmare. The epitome of the crazed boogeyman who comes to eat you up in the night. The problem was, who would I murder?
A chicken again? No. Dennis suggested I kill my mother. Not bad. I was sure the kids would identify with it, but so would my own mother, and I didn’t want to lay that on her. What was worse than killing your own mother? An old lady in a wheelchair? Do it by stuffing the spokes up her ass? Killing somebody defenseless?
How about a cute, cuddly, helpless little baby? With an ax.
Why not? What a laugh! A baby killer! We could splatter the whole stage with little arms and legs!
And the song that came with it was so perfect, so off the wall….
People suggested we use real infant cadavers during the show, but I thought that was going too far. Naturally word got around that I would be using real baby parts and it caused us a huge headache. There was no way to convince people it wasn’t true until they saw the show. It’s a good example of the way things get out of hand all the time. That’s what people wanted to believe and that’s what it became in their heads. Actually, I used rubber dolls filled with stage blood. In all reality I hated dolls when I was a kid. I didn’t hate babies, even though babies are ugly little things. (Every baby I’ve ever seen looks like Winston Churchill.) I don’t know why I hated dolls so much. Ask my psychiatrist.
I lurched around the stage hacking at the dolls with a saber. It thrilled the audience, released their tensions in some strange way. I tossed the bloody pieces into the audiences and the kids took them home as souvenirs. But they were all in on the joke; it was only dolls. It was a black sense of humor, a sense of humor that people slowly got familiar with through Monty Python and M*A*S*H. The parents thought it was serious, but the kids just laughed.
“Killer” was a morality play, and now Alice had to be punished, put to death. The band left their instruments and pretended to beat the hell out of me. They kicked and punched at me, tied my hand behind my back and pulled a black executioner’s hood over my head. At one point we did a whole West Side Story knife fight parody, using breakaway bottles and chairs.
I could always feel the tension rise in the auditorium as the gallows were rolled out on the stage. Warner Brothers was kind enough to have their film prop department build a realistic gallows for me, some fifteen feet of ominous rough lumber bolted together. A coarse manila rope and hangman’s noose swung back and forth in the spotlight. The band dragged me up the back steps as I kicked and cried out, trying to escape, but they held me tight, punching me in my sides and groin, doubling me over with pain. As Glen Buxton put the noose around my neck a respectful silence fell over the auditorium. At the last moment before the trap door opened, Glen pulled the mask off my face, giving me one last glimpse of life, one last look at the spotlights and the crowds before I dropped four feet, my head snapping to the side as my neck broke, blood splurting from my mouth.