10

AFTER HIS BAND BROKE UP, Alice and I committed ourselves to making his solo debut the biggest, best, most spectacular thing he’d ever done. And I didn’t want Warner Bros. to get it. My relationship with Mo Ostin was the reason.

For a couple of years after all the back-and-forthing over “I’m Eighteen,” life rushed by in such a blur that I completely forgot that we had never seen the publishing royalties Mo promised me. When it hit me, I called him and asked him for the money.

“I can’t give it to you,” he said. “It’s in escrow. Herbie says it’s his, you say it’s yours.”

“Yeah, but you said you’d take care of it.”

“I am taking care of it, Shep,” Mo said. “But I have to do it the right way. It’s there, you’re covered, don’t worry about it.”

A while passed, and still no money.

“Mo,” I finally said, “you leave me no choice. I have to take it to court.”

“Yeah, you probably should,” Mo replied. “But don’t worry, I got you covered.”

All this time, Mo was becoming more than a mentor in my head, more like a father figure. I don’t think he saw it that way, but I did. I got to be friends with him and his wife. They had me to dinner. In some ways they became a surrogate family to me, since I was so detached from my own. This was all inside me. But it meant that when Mo said not to worry, he had me covered. It felt good and I believed him.

So now I brought my lawsuit against Straight Records, thinking that I had Mo in my corner. And Mo testified against me. It came down to me or his good friend Herb Cohen, and he backed Herb.

I was extremely hurt. It felt like such a betrayal.

I went to Alice and said, “This is personal. But it’s also professional. In the first place, anybody who stabs us in the back like this can’t really think we’re going to have a long-term career with his company. But also, I have to teach this guy that he can’t fuck with us like this.”

Once again: Don’t get mad. Accomplish your goal. I read our contract and saw that it granted Alice Cooper a one-time exclusion to record a soundtrack album on another label, if Warner Bros. was unable to obtain the rights. I knew that if we put out a soundtrack on a rival label—Columbia, say—Warner Bros. would sue. But at that point Steve Ross and his Kinney National company had bought three record labels—Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra—and packaged them under the umbrella Warner Communications. I figured that if we did the soundtrack for either Atlantic or Elektra, Warner Bros. couldn’t sue.

If we had waited around for some movie producers to come ask Alice to do a soundtrack, my idea might not have gone any further. But that’s not how I do things. I decided we would create the show and the soundtrack. I went to ABC TV and said, “We want to do an Alice Cooper special. Alive Enterprises will produce it. I’ll give it to you for costs.”

They jumped on it. Alice Cooper was one of the biggest acts in the world, and they were getting him for nearly nothing.

Then we recorded the soundtrack, working with Bob Ezrin again. Dick Wagner, who had filled in for Glen on guitar, really stepped up as a cowriter with Alice, and they loaded the album with great songs, including the title track, “Department of Youth,” “The Black Widow,” and “Only Women Bleed.” I worked up my nerve and got a meeting with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Jerry was another giant in the industry. They credit him with inventing the term rhythm and blues when he was a young reporter for Billboard. He and Ahmet Ertegun had run Atlantic since the 1950s, making careers for an incredible list of stars from Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett to Led Zeppelin.

“Mr. Wexler,” I said, “I want to be honest with you. One way or the other, Warner Brothers is not getting the next Alice Cooper record. You’d provide me with a great insurance policy if you take it, and you’ll make a ton of money.”

Jerry said, “Play me something from it.” I played him “Only Women Bleed,” and he loved it.

“I’m in,” he said. He went to his bosses at Warner Communications and convinced them it was best to keep Alice Cooper’s next record in house. I’m not sure, but I don’t believe he and Mo ever spoke again.

So Welcome to My Nightmare came out on Atlantic, and went platinum in the United States and double platinum in Canada. Alice was still in a multiyear contract with Warner Bros., and would record five more albums for them before we could finally leave in 1981. But I felt we had made our point. It may have been like a flea biting an elephant, but it must have stung a little because they never messed with us like that again. For his part, Jerry Wexler went on to be a great friend and advisor to me, another mentor.

For the TV special Alice wrote a story around the songs, about a boy named Steven who can’t wake up from his nightmares. We shot it in Canada, with a Canadian choreographer and a Canadian director, Jørn Winther. That way we came under the Canadian content law and got a bit of a government subsidy for it. We were very excited to get Vincent Price to play the narrator. Price was another god to us, like Dali and Groucho. We knew him a little from when he and Alice were both on Dinah Shore’s show. When we did the album he had recorded his part at a different studio, so we didn’t spend time with him. Now I called his agent and got him to come to Toronto for a couple of days to be in the special. Alice and I were in awe. We addressed him only as “Mr. Price.” Then, on our first day of shooting a scene, over the loudspeakers we heard Winther say, “Hey, Vinnie, could you move over to the left?”

Hey, Vinnie? Alice and I practically melted into the floor with mortification. Mr. Price, though, was so cool that he just let it pass. We loved him for that.

I arranged for the Nightmare tour to start in Lake Tahoe, at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel, in December 1975. It was a way of announcing that this wasn’t just another rock concert; this was the new Alice Cooper, putting on a show. It was the first time a rock band played in a major Vegas-Tahoe casino, and the first time an American rock band performed live with a full orchestra. (The British band Procol Harum had done it a few years earlier.) And when Price agreed to be in that performance, it was the first time that I know of that a major film star performed onstage with a rock star.

We hired a 727 to fly some celebrities up to Tahoe for it. Of course we did that Alice Cooper–style. Our leading celebrity was a dog—the German shepherd from the new movie Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, a takeoff on the old Rin Tin Tin movies. The studio paid for the jet because they were having trouble getting press. We loaded everyone else on the dog’s flight.

The morning of the show we arrived for a rehearsal with the orchestra. The band had never played with an orchestra before. The conductor came over to me and said, “Can I get the charts from you?”

“What charts?”

“For the orchestra.”

As a former trombone player, I should have expected that they’d need charts of the songs.

“We don’t have charts.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just have one of the guys write out the chords. We’ll listen to the record and work it out.”

These were rock musicians. None of them could read or write music. I asked the conductor to give me a few minutes. In the dressing room I put five hundred-dollar bills in an envelope. I handed the envelope and a copy of the album to him and said, “Just make me look good.”

We worked it out that I conducted the orchestra for the rehearsal, while he observed and took notes, and then he did it for the show. Another first—me conducting an orchestra.

Since Won Ton Ton paid for the flight I figured he should have VIP treatment. I reserved him a table in the front row, with a dog bowl. As we were getting everything set up, security called me.

“We have a big problem, Mr. Gordon. It’s Won Ton Ton.”

I said, “Listen, I worked this all out with hotel management. The dog’s allowed in. I need him here.”

“No, no,” they said. “The dog’s fine. But the trainer’s drunk and vomiting in the lobby!”

I had to get the hotel to find two dogsitters to be with Won Ton Ton during the show. Add to my manager’s resume: Obtains dogsitters.

To enhance the sense that this was a big event, I had an assistant start calling the hotel an hour before the show. For an hour you kept hearing over the loudspeakers, “Paging Mick Jagger . . . Paging Frank Sinatra . . .” So everyone in the hotel thought all these celebrities would be at the show. Who’s a star? Someone who attracts other stars. Guilt by association. Early on I used to hire people to crowd around the band in public, pretending to be paparazzi. Flashbulbs would be popping off all around them, but there was no film in the cameras. Film and processing were very expensive. This was just for show, to attract actual photographers. Who’s a star? Someone who has flashbulbs going off around them all the time.

One of the great Fleet Street figures Carolyn introduced me to, Terry O’Neill, totally understood guilt by association. Terry was the king of Fleet Street. He shot iconic portraits of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and on and on. When Welcome to My Nightmare was coming out, I called Terry and said I wanted to get Alice in Newsweek.

He said, “Do you have a pool?” When I said yes, he said, “Buy an inflatable shark. I’ll be out there tomorrow.”

I didn’t ask him why an inflatable shark. It was Terry. I trusted he knew what he was doing. I called Alice and said, “Come up here tomorrow and bring a swimsuit.” I sent a kid to the toy store to buy the shark.

The next day Terry had Alice get in the pool with the blowup shark and started shooting.

“Terry,” I asked, “why are we doing this?”

“There’s a movie coming out this week called Jaws,” Terry said, “and it’s going to be the biggest thing ever. The day after it opens, we’re going to send these pictures out.”

And it worked. Pictures of Alice and the shark hit every magazine and newspaper in the world. That was Terry’s genius. Whenever we needed press, I’d call Terry. We’d fly to London and arrive at the airport with, say, a guy dressed up in the cyclops costume from Alice’s show. In those days security at airports was far more lax than it is now. The cyclops from the Nightmare show would go through the passport checkpoint, and Terry would be there to take the shots. We’d turn right around and fly back home. Terry’s photos would be in all the papers the next day. Win-win. You couldn’t work with American photographers that way. You had to go to Fleet Street.

Alice hit the road for Nightmare in March 1975 and toured it all over the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for the next two years. Australia originally banned him in 1975 for being a “degenerate,” but a new government got elected and let him come in 1977. He did two hundred shows during those two years and they all sold out. The show was even closer to a Broadway musical this time. The set was huge and elaborate again, basically a stage version of the sets used in the TV show. There were dancers, the giant cyclops, a giant spider, and all sorts of props. Alice was entirely the star now—the set hid the band for most of the show.

Nightmare was a triumph, for Alice and for me. We proved that we were right. We never got mad, we just reached our goal of being millionaires.

As for the other guys in the band: Sadly, Glen passed away in 1997, just short of his fiftieth birthday. We all miss him. He was the James Dean of the band, always with a cig and a buzz going. The rest of us remain good friends to this day. Alice and the guys help each other in any way they can. They play and record together occasionally, and it’s always special. They were all there to be inducted together into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

After Nightmare, there was no star in the world bigger or brighter than Alice Cooper. All sorts of other acts, like KISS and Elton John, were imitating Alice now, putting on lavish theatrical productions. But there was still one dark cloud. All through this period, Alice’s drinking got worse and worse. Periodically I would read him the riot act, and he’d clean up for a while, only to slip back into it. When the Nightmare tour ended, his wife and I staged an intervention, though they weren’t called that yet. We made him go to the Cornell Medical Center in White Plains, New York, where they locked him in for two months. It wasn’t the worst place to be shut in for two months. It even had a golf course. I still owned my house on Lake Copake, maybe an hour’s drive from the clinic, and stayed there so I could visit him almost every day.

He came out clean and sober, and stayed that way for a couple of years before falling again as hard and far as before. Eventually he’d have to hit rock bottom, the way they say true addicts do, before he really quit.