I was hung, actually, from a piano wire that clipped securely onto my leather harness and it took me a month to learn the effect from a professional stunt man. There was only one accident, when the clasp slipped through the harness and I actually fell five feet, knocking myself out cold when my chin slammed into the trap door. They woke me up underneath the stage and I went right back up and finished the show.
The Killer album included the hit single “Under My Wheels,” about a boy who fantasizes running over his girl friend in his car. “Desperado,” one of my favorite songs and a tribute to Jim Morrison, was immediately examined and dissected by rock critics, who thought it was a statement about Alice as a gunslinger. The title cut, however, actually summed up my position in life:
We had Kachina photographed for the album cover by Paris Vogue photographer Peter Turner, and inside the cover there was a foldout calendar, with me as the calendar girl, hanging from the noose with blood pouring from my mouth.
Needless to say, I was no hero with mothers and fathers. As the album rose up the charts and we toured the country there was an outcry of alarm from teachers and psychologists, the same teachers and psychologists that put King Lear or Macbeth on the required reading list in schools. Shakespeare would have been my biggest fan. But they said this was by far the most disgusting display anyone had ever imagined would be presented in the name of entertainment. And the fact that it was successful, that the children responded to it, even worshiped it, drove adults crazy.
The rumors the kids started about me were worse than anything I was actually doing. In Atlanta I was almost arrested as soon as I got into town because the story was circulating that I bludgeoned kittens to death with a hammer. When the police questioned me in my hotel room before the show I said, “It’s not a bad idea, but I didn’t think of it.” They also accused me of filling large balloons with earthworms and intestines and bursting them with a BB gun as they floated over the audience.
In the beginning of November 1971, not even eight months after the initial release of “Eighteen,” we left for our first tour of Europe. On the way out to the airport we had the limousines stop at record stores to make sure Killer was in the racks.
That’s what the sign said at the airport, but you could have fooled me. We tooled into Heathrow and did a fifteen-minute press conference in front of a hundred and fifty people. Then I stayed in a hotel for two days doing interviews before we took off for Copenhagen, Bremen, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris in what felt like four hours. Then back to London for two live shows and the taping of “Old Gray Whistle Test” and “Top of the Pops” for the BBC.
As far as getting to see Europe, I never got to see more than the back seat of a limousine, or two old prostitutes I had sent to my room at the Hotel des Croyons. (I didn’t have old ones sent, that’s the way they came.) I don’t even remember driving past the Eiffel Tower, and all I remember about Germany is the inside of a pub where I passed out and slammed the back of my head on the bar. Or was that Zurich? Anyway, I didn’t see Big Ben in daylight. Or Buckingham Palace. I spent the days doing interviews and photo sessions. We never turned down a journalist in those days. We figured that if a reporter wanted to speak to me, no matter how unimportant they were or how small their circulation, I could use the press.
In Paris we originally wanted to play the Olympia Theater, where all the top musical acts gigged, but our reputation for chickens offended the sensibilities of the management, and they wouldn’t even let Shep past the front door to talk about it. We wound up getting booked into the Pierre Cardin Theater, a chic little auditorium of plush red velvet used for designer fashion shows. Pierre Cardin was delighted to have us there, although I’m sure he didn’t have the faintest notion what we were going to do. We were billed all over Europe as “Transvestite Rock.”
The Parisian kids were pissed as hell that we booked into such a tiny place. On top of a seat shortage a lot of tickets had been given away to celebrities who were curious to see me, including Omar Sharif, Bianca Jagger and Alain Delon. At least a thousand kids who couldn’t get in were milling around in front of the theater in angry little groups when we arrived in a line of limousines. They booed us and yelled “Bourgeoisie” at us, making it all look very political.
They waited outside during the show, and when feathers began to drift into the lobby during the finale they couldn’t bear it any longer. They got so excited that a group of them drove Omar Sharif’s white Rolls Royce right through the plate glass windows of the theater and into the lobby. They had to lock me in a closet until the fighting stopped. Everybody had to leave through the fire exits. Cardin hosted a party for us afterwards, much of which is a drunken blot in my memory except for Glen Buxton smashing Bianca Jagger in the face with a pastry and a free-for-all food fight erupting. Omar Sharif was sitting next to me, and as his hair got splattered with pate, he looked at me very confused and said, “Why do you do such thing?”
By the time we did the last European show at the Rainbow Theater in London, the press was uniformly outraged and in love with us. The British in particular loved us because they had a wonderfully dry sense of humor and we were naughty enough to make them want to chuckle. Peck’s Bad Boys.
There were still a few hard hats to convince in the crowd, however. A fifty-six-year-old labor MP, Leo Abse, moved to the secretary of the foreign office to have me banned from Britain. On the floor of Parliament he said I was “peddling culture of the concentration camp and attempting to teach our children to find a destiny in hate, not love.” The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals even investigated me to find out “whether unnecessary suffering is caused to poultry by terrifying them.” They tried to ban my songs from the radio, too, because the National Viewers and Listeners Association said I had a “known propensity to involve young people in hysteria and violence.”
Two short years later the BBC asked me to do an anti-drug commercial for them — that’s how much of a clean-cut hero I had become. I sent them a tape in which I said, “If I ever catch any of you kids using drugs I’ll personally come to your homes and slit your puppies’ throats.”
That winter I played fifteen to twenty dates a month, grossing nearly half a million dollars each month. The figures were unprecedented: Pittsburgh Civic, $91,000; Toronto, $125,000; Ottawa Civic, $61,000. My fan mail reached several thousand letters a week, completely out of proportion to the amount of mail a recording star receives. When the teen magazines picked up on me there was an explosion. They had tremendous selling power, and I, in turn, sold their magazines, reviving the circulation of two of them in the process. I was the new hero of the young. The leader of rebellion. The all-American boy who made good.
One fifteen-year-old boy sent me a small plastic envelope filled with white fluid. He said I was the first man to turn him on sexually. He kept the picture of me hanging from a noose tacked to the inside of his bathroom door. He looked at it while he jerked off in the mornings before leaving for school, and he was writing me this letter in his English class and enclosing a sample of his friendship.