This attractive quality that made little girls have the hots for me and little boys no longer able to contain their homosexual feeling, drove adults crazy with fear. Some people were sincerely concerned — those that kept their heads about it — about why the kids were rallying around an ambiguous sexual figure. Was this the sum total of what they were learning?
In a way, yes. I wasn’t as calculated as everyone thought I was. I did many things on whim because I thought it felt right. I took the snake out on stage not because I thought it would get press, but because I was drawn to entertaining with the snake. I wore makeup because I liked the way it looked. I had a girl’s name and dressed funny because instinctively I recognized this is a bisexual world. I was everyone’s secret fantasy. I said to the kids, “I’m a boy, I’m a man. I don’t know what I want.” I released their sexuality, and I was a catharsis for their violence. I did it for them. After I went to see A Clockwork Orange the last thing I wanted to do was see or be in a fight. (Even though boxing has nothing to do with my life. Now what does that mean?) Most important, I was honest with the kids.
A very important thing about being honest with kids: if I manufactured anything I did the kids would feel it. Kids are very sensitive about honesty and what’s natural. The most base, honest, common thing I could do on stage was to touch myself. I touched my athletic cup a lot on stage in those days, much like Joe Namath does in every football game. The kids related immediately to that. All of those kids out there touched themselves every day. I guarantee you that every single boy and girl in my audiences masturbated the very day they saw me. And everything they saw me doing on stage rang true, rang honest.
I believed in absurdity. I didn’t make any sense then and I don’t plan to in the future. The best things in life don’t make any sense. Sex is like that. When was the last time you had sex and really got off? Did it make any sense to you? At the time, when you had an orgasm, did it make any sense the way you felt? That’s what I am. I felt good to people, but I was unexplainable. I was an enzyme. I digested the public and returned themselves back to them in another form.
The journalists that understood this were able to accept it at face value and judge me on those artistic terms. There were some who could never do that, though, and I found myself the subject of gigantic personal criticism, some that really hurt me.
I’ve made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine three times in my career, and we’ve finally come to pleasant terms, but back in 1971 to 1972 that was far from the case. At the time they suffered from some sort of inverse snobbism. They wanted every rock star to be some sort of transformed prince to the young. They wanted me to be political. Christ, it was a great shame to them that I was totally apolitical. They were still steeped in that 1968 philosophy and they just couldn’t understand the fact that I was a happy kid who wasn’t cool and didn’t want to be. I handled my newfound fame no better than the kid next door who wins a lottery. But I was not a mean person. I was never nasty. I never hurt anybody. I was never egotistical. I shared my success with everybody around me, wined and dined and treated the press royally all around the world, and still some of them were rotten to me. So what if I never voted in a presidential campaign or read Castaneda? Well, that wasn’t good enough for Rolling Stone.
In March of 1972 they ran a major story on me, “Gold Diggers of 1984 — wanna see my snake, little girl?” We were characterized as a group of stupid, wisecracking, spoiled, sex-obsessed kids, and maybe that was one side of us. I was in the midst of an alcoholic stupor at the time, trying to live up to a lot of expectations people had about me. In the middle of the article they inserted interviews they had done with my parents — most of it over the phone — and to anybody reading the article it sounded like they were along with me while I was cursing and getting drunk and exposing myself.
The neighborhood mailman in Phoenix was also in my father’s church, and when he spotted the story in a copy of Rolling Stone he was delivering, all hell broke loose in the church. There was talk of removing my father from the ministry. The whole community was outraged, and my parents took a big chunk of anger that people were really directing at me. I felt very bad for them because I knew how difficult it was to put up with a hostile community. That incident and similar ones have hardened my parents to the outside. It made two very warm people retreat for protection so as not to get hurt any further. It’s only recently, since people found out I was a clown and not a devil, that they can tell people who I am with pride.
I wrote “No More Mr. Nice Guy” a week after the Rolling Stone story ran, and it gave me a rush of satisfaction to be taking a swipe back at the press for a change.
We had known for several months that the theme of our next album would be School’s Out. I heard the phrase used in a Bowery Boys movie in the same way someone would say, “Get smart, Satch.” Now was the time for Alice to change again, this time away from the ghoulish character. This Alice was crazy, too, like all Alices, but he was a zany, lovable school kid. A wise-ass. A screwball. In short, me.
The album jacket, designed by Pacific Eye and Ear, was a school desk with the band’s initials carved on it.It opened like a school desk, too, and was filled with exam papers and report cards of a student, one Dwight Frey. Each album was encased in a plastic sleeve and a pair of pink panties.
The panties gave us the biggest headache. U.S. Customs officials seized 500,000 of them on their way into the country because they didn’t meet the guideposts of the Flammable Fabrics Act. Warner Brothers fenced for us, saying they weren’t panties at all, but packing material. The government told Shep, “You mean to say those freaky fans of his weren’t going to try these things on when mama isn’t looking?”
I said, “Okay, but who’s going to light a cigarette down there?” If anybody is that hot they should be wearing asbestos panties. Isn’t all this silly! Absurd! And the UPI and AP jumped on the story.
“School’s Out” was such a dynamite single it just couldn’t have missed. We broke it across the country just in time for summer vacation madness, and propelled it to the number-one single in the nation. The album followed close behind the single, leaping up the national charts in an awe-inspiring pace: from 116 to 51 to 17 to 14 to number two. And it sat there, for weeks and weeks, the second-biggest-selling album in the world and the biggest-selling single in the history of Warner Brothers. We even made it to number ten on the Singapore Hit Parade.
CHAPTER 14
I can’t begin to explain how badly I feel when an album doesn’t sell or tickets to see one of my concerts don’t sell. It has nothing to do with money at this point — it’s a matter of rejection, of being jilted. I know it’s not a logical way to feel, but then again I’m not exactly living in a logical world.
Take Wembley Pool Auditorium for instance. There was no apparent reason that we shouldn’t have sold out Wembley Pool Auditorium. We just couldn’t figure it out. We hadn’t played a London date in six months and “School’s Out” was the number-one single in Great Britain that June. Wembley Pool only held 8,000 people, and we had sold less than half three days before the concert.
Shep and I went to Warner Brothers’ London headquarters to try and figure out what was wrong at Wembley with Derek Taylor. Derek was in charge of special projects for Warner Brothers and had long been a rock and roll legend for his publicity work with the Beatles. He and Alice Cooper were great lovers from the start. He delighted in a project he could really sink his teeth into, and the urgency of the concert being only three days away made selling 4,000 tickets all the more exciting for him.