5

SINCE MOVING TO CALIFORNIA I hadn’t been in touch much with my parents. I had written to them occasionally—remember, no email yet—telling them that I was managing a rock band named Alice Cooper, a guy, not a girl. I don’t think it did much to change their expectations that I was going to be a complete failure. Now I swung us a gig in New York—and not just in New York, but at Madison Square Garden. It was in the Felt Forum, the smaller space next to the arena, but still. I had gotten us on a bill with an all-girl group called Enchanted Forest, because their agent, Bob Ringe, was a guy I knew from high school. I was so proud to have a group at the Garden that I asked my parents to come. They drove up from Florida for this big night. Well, I walked into the Felt Forum, and there were fewer than a hundred people in the audience, two of them being my parents. They were civilized about it and polite when they met Alice, but I could see it in their eyes: I was still a failure. It was not a great moment.

Onward and upward.

While I was in Toronto working on the festival, I had gone to dinner with David Briggs, a record producer who lived there. I told him about the failure of Alice’s first album, and he said, “I’m in the middle of producing one now with Neil Young. We’ve been at it about two months.”

I said, “Two months? We did ours in a day.”

“Come on.”

“No, really.” I told him about our one day in the studio.

“You’re out of your minds!” he cried. “That’s not how you make albums. They take months.”

I brought Alice up to Toronto to meet David. It was a real education for both of us. We asked David if he’d produce Alice’s next album and he agreed. Somehow we convinced Zappa and Herb Cohen to let us do it with him—but they put him on an extremely limited budget. Still, it covered more than a month in the studio. Now the band really experienced the process of making a record the right way, how a producer helps to construct songs, take them apart, and put them back together correctly—all the things Zappa did not do. It didn’t really work on this second LP, Easy Action. David didn’t much like the music—he called it “psychedelic shit”—and the band hadn’t really gotten their songwriting down. When it came out in 1969 the critics were harsh again; Rolling Stone summed it up as “nothing that interesting here. The freaky music is sort of freaky, but the pretty stuff sounds like something Walt Disney had the good sense to leave in the can.”

Still, the process of making it was a good education for the band and me. We realized that in terms of commercial success a producer can be almost more important than the artist. A good producer figures out how to frame a song to make it work. This was a giant revelation to us. We knew we needed to find a producer like that. This is when my management skills started to develop, I think.

“Let’s not reinvent the wheel,” I said. “Who makes the best records?”

“The Beatles.”

“Forget that. Who else makes great-sounding records?”

We all hit on the Guess Who, the Canadian band whose “American Woman” was just then topping the charts. They also had big hits with “No Time” and “These Eyes.” They were a band without a giant following, yet making amazing hit records. That seemed like a good model for us.

It was a huge realization for us that you could go to a producer like you went to a dentist and get him to fix your music. This Guess Who producer sounded like the best dentist around. He was Jack Richardson, at a Toronto studio called Nimbus 9. We tried to get to him, but he didn’t return our calls or answer our letters. So we went to Nimbus 9 and hung around in the lobby. We still didn’t meet Richardson, but a young guy named Bob Ezrin, who worked with Richardson, agreed to come to New York and hear the band. We had a gig at Steve Paul’s The Scene on West Forty-Sixth Street, one of the hottest rock clubs in New York at the time. Hendrix, the Doors, the Chambers Brothers, Traffic, Johnny Winter, everybody played there, and when they weren’t playing a gig they hung out and put together late-night jams. All the media in the city went there, the Warhol crowd, everyone who was anyone hip or cool. It was a very big opportunity for a struggling band with two failed records to its name. The only reason we got it was that a good friend of mine in the city was a mobster who ran a protection racket. The Scene was one of the clubs they “protected.” He got us the gig.

Bob Ezrin came. We found out later that Richardson had hired him the very day that we met him; that he had never produced an album; and that Richardson had sent him out to the Nimbus 9 lobby that day saying, “There’s no way in the world I’m going to produce this band. They’re horrible. Go out there and get rid of them.” Instead, he caught a great show at the Scene. The hip New York audience loved everything about Alice Cooper that the Los Angeles audiences had hated. Bob went back to Toronto determined to convince Richardson to produce the next album.

I flew to L.A. to tell Herb Cohen and Zappa about it.

“Absolutely not,” they said. “Wrong guy. He makes pop music. We don’t do pop music. We don’t want a hit record.”

“What do you mean you don’t want a hit record? Isn’t that what this is all about?”

“Not at Straight,” they said. “That’s not what we do.” It would ruin the label’s edgy, rebellious, noncommercial image.

I explained the situation to the band. “We can’t continue without a hit record,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

They wanted a hit. They wanted Richardson. It was my job to strategize how to make that happen despite Cohen and Zappa’s opposition.

I had by then formed a couple of relationships with executives at Warner Bros. Records, Straight’s distributor. One of them was Clyde Bakemo. I told Clyde we had gotten Jack Richardson to produce the next LP, but Herb wouldn’t give us the money because he and Zappa didn’t want us to have a hit.

“Are they crazy? They don’t want a hit? What are we working so hard for?”

“If you can just give me the money for four tracks,” I said, “somehow I’ll get Richardson to do them.”

Clyde found the money—I believe it came from a Doobie Brothers’ recording budget. Which is funny, because I’m really good friends with Doobies Pat Simmons and Michael McDonald. It wasn’t a whole lot of money—I think it was thirty or forty thousand. The thought was if we could cut four good tracks and Clyde played them for Herbie, then Herbie would allow it. In other words, Clyde thought it was an artistic problem. I later decided that was not the problem, as I’ll explain.

As it turned out, Richardson did not produce the tracks. Bob Ezrin did. He was excited about the band’s potential after seeing that show in New York. He met us at the gigantic RCA recording studio in Chicago. We had never been to anything like it. This was the big time. And the process with Bob was nothing like our previous experiences recording. The band worked with Bob for a month and a half before cutting the tracks, breaking each song down and building it back up, inspecting every detail, every line of the lyrics, and every lead solo. They constructed each song like you build a beautiful house.

“I’m Eighteen” came out of this process. Bob had worked particularly hard with them on it. It started out a long, rambling jam. Bob got them to toss away the excess and hone it down to a tight three-minute anthem we all thought was a potential hit. I now thought that instead of just playing Herbie the tapes, wouldn’t it be more convincing to get “I’m Eighteen” some radio play? I was showing my ignorance about how the business worked. But I was trying to learn. I was reading Billboard voraciously, reading everything I could get my hands on to educate myself. One of the things I discovered was that there were certain “breakout” radio stations that led the way in putting songs on the air. If they played a record, others followed. The two biggest breakout stations in North America were WIXY in Cleveland and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. Working on the Toronto festival, I had met CKLW’s program director, Rosalie Trombley. Canada had just passed a content law stipulating that all Canadian TV and radio had to play a certain amount of Canadian product. Although we’d cut the tracks in Michigan, we had a Canadian producer, so we qualified. Alice’s road manager, Leo Fenn, engineered putting “I’m Eighteen” in Rosalie’s hands. (Leo was the father of the actress Sherilyn Fenn. We babysat her when she was little.) Leo knew Rosalie’s young son. I don’t remember if we had a test pressing made or just a tape or what, but anyway Leo met the kid after school one day and gave him the song to give to Rosalie.

That’s how “I’m Eighteen” got put on rotation at CKLW. Score one for Alice. In my naïveté, though, it had not occurred to me that if a song got radio play, the record had to be in the stores so kids could buy it. The better the sales, the more radio play it would get. No sales, and radio would drop it. So when I called Clyde and told him “I’m Eighteen” was on CKLW, he said, “You can’t have it on CKLW. You don’t have a record yet. This is a disaster.”

Showing a gigantic set of cojones, Clyde got “I’m Eighteen” pressed as a single on Warner Bros. Records, not on Straight, and rushed it out to stations and stores. Warner was Straight’s distributor, but Straight was an independent, separate label, so what Clyde did was not exactly legal. We were under contract to Straight. If Straight didn’t want to put our record out, technically it shouldn’t have been put out. Clyde did it anyway and let the chips fall where they may.

Now that there was an actual record, we got on the phone twenty-four hours a day calling the request lines of every radio station in the country. I had my mother, my uncle, all my relatives calling radio stations. “Please play ‘I’m Eighteen’ by Alice Cooper.” Stations around North America started playing the single. And now Straight sued Warner Bros. over it. As a result, the second pressing of the single went out on the Straight label.

I freaked. I did not want the song on the Straight label. They had treated us so shabbily before, I didn’t want them profiting from us now that we had a hit. More than that, our contract with Straight, which we had signed in our inexperience, gave them the song publishing rights to any of our music they put out. Publishing royalties for a hit song could be significant, and I didn’t want Zappa and Herb Cohen to get them.

I went right to the top this time: Mo Ostin, president of Warner Bros. Records. Mo was an industry legend. He had started out at Verve, working with all the great names in jazz, then moved on to Reprise and now Warners. He had signed everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Beach Boys to the Kinks and Jimi, whom he signed after seeing his famous Monterey Pop performance in 1967. I had tremendous respect for him, and felt that if anyone at Warner Bros. would do the right thing by us, it was Mo.

He didn’t disappoint. When I aired my complaint to him, he said, “Shep, I got you covered. But you got to do me a favor. Don’t press the issue. I will get you publishing. You have my word on it, one hundred percent.”

So we were back on Warner Bros. And then it went back to Straight. I called Mo, and Mo said, “I got you covered.” We were back on Warners. Then we were on Straight again. It was ridiculous. But every time I spoke to Mo, Mo said, “Shep, I got you covered.” And I believed him. The more I dealt with him, the more he became, in my head at least, one of those mentor figures I sought out. I trusted that eventually we would see those publishing royalties.

All this time, “I’m Eighteen” was climbing the charts. Kids loved it. Alice, who wasn’t much older than eighteen himself, was speaking directly to the confusion and dissatisfaction a lot of young Americans were feeling in that era of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. Lines form on my face and my hands, / Lines form on the left and right, / I’m in the middle, the middle of life, / I’m a boy and I’m a man. It wasn’t specifically an antiwar or antidraft song, but a lot of people, adults and kids, heard that in it.

Warner Bros. executives still weren’t behind us, though. They seemed to think “I’m Eighteen” was a fluke. I had to fight to get the money to finish the album, with both Richardson and Ezrin producing.

Love It to Death came out in March 1971 and was the band’s breakthrough LP, their first gold record. Along with “I’m Eighteen” it included another track destined to be one of Alice’s signature songs, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Bob Ezrin worked a lot with Alice to develop his character so it wasn’t just part of the stage act, but integral to the songs. For instance, this is when Alice started singing “Dwight Fry” in a straitjacket. Bob had him do it in the studio when they recorded the song, so that when he sang “I gotta get out of here,” he really sounded like he meant it.

Warner Bros. was finally behind us. They told me they would pay for a big press party for it in L.A. if I organized it. For the first time, after years of scrambling, I had real resources, power, and some semblance of control. I knew it at the time—and it felt good.

“Absolutely I’ll organize a party,” I said to them. We had been to some record company parties. They were terrible bores. Some executive would give a speech about the record to a roomful of other record execs, publicity people, and press.

I said, “But it’s got to be an Alice Cooper party.” They asked me what that meant. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll figure it out.”

Somehow we found out that July, the time for our party, was the point in the year when the debutantes all had their coming-out parties. If Alice Cooper was a good, clean, all-American girl, she’d have her coming out then, too. Where do coming-out parties happen? In hotels.

So that’s what we planned, a coming-out party for Alice Cooper. On acid. We took out ads in the society pages of the L.A. papers, announcing the coming out of Alice Cooper along with all the real debutante’s announcements. We rented the elegant, mirror-paneled Venetian Room in what we thought was the most appropriate hotel in L.A., the giant old Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard. It had a lot of history, some of it glittering and some of it grim. In the 1920s and 1930s it was the home of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where every movie star and celebrity of the time hung out. In 1968 it was the site of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In the three years since then the hotel had not been able to revive its once-glittering reputation. Still, management did not want to rent rooms for record company parties, so Bob Regehr, a hip publicist at Warners, and I told them we really were booking a coming-out party for a debutante from Pasadena named Alice Cooper. They were delighted. They didn’t find out we’d tricked them until guests started arriving on the night of the party and it was clear they weren’t there for any debutante. They were really angry but it was too late.

The affair went off on July 14, 1971, Bastille Day, and it was wild. Rolling Stone called it “the party of the year.” We had mailed out formal invitations, and five hundred guests showed up. Mo was there with his wife, a really nice lady who was celebrating her birthday. Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun was there. Celebrities included Richard Chamberlain, Donovan, Rod McKuen, Randy Newman, some of the Beach Boys, and John Kay of Steppenwolf. Reporters for the society pages came, thinking it was a real debutante affair. At the entrance to the Venetian room, they were greeted by old-fashioned cigarette girls. Only they weren’t girls, they were the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe, wearing glitter in their mustaches and beards. They offered cigars, cigarettes, and Vaseline. When you entered the room, the card with your table number was handed to you by a person in a gorilla suit, wearing a bra and panties. The hotel, thinking it was a real society affair, had provided their resident four-piece band, who looked confused as they played standards like “Somewhere My Love.”

When everyone settled at their tables the festivities began. “You could tell right off,” Mo later said, “even from the preliminary entertainment, that either the world was just about to come to an end, or good taste had simply been thrown to the wind.” A six-foot-tall cake with Happy Bastille Day Alice Cooper written on it was wheeled out. Miss Mercy of the GTO’s burst out of it and threw handfuls of cake and icing at the people at the front tables. We’d hired an enormously fat black stripper named TV Mama and her husband. I asked him if there was any way I could pay her to take her top off and show her gigantic breasts. “She may be TV Mama to you, but to me she’s TV dinner,” he said. “That’ll be five hundred dollars.” I paid. She slapped the people up front, including Ahmet Ertegun, with her tits. The band played a short set, including “I’m Eighteen” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Alice wore a silver lamé bodysuit, and put on the straitjacket for “Dwight Fry.” As people left, the Cockette cigarette girls offered dildos.

It was a great success. Everybody had fun and it got tons of press. It was the start of a grand tradition. Over the years Alice Cooper became famous for the great parties we threw.

There’s still the question of why Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa were so adamantly against having a hit record in the first place. I don’t think it was really to maintain Straight Records’ edgy, rebellious integrity. I think it was a strategy right out of The Producers. I’m not one hundred percent certain about some of this, and neither Zappa nor Cohen is around anymore to ask. Not that I’m so sure they’d give a “straight” answer. But this is what I think was going on, and it’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

We found out later that Warner Bros. gave Straight a large advance to deliver four artists (four albums). Out of that advance, they had to pay the cost of producing the albums. A typical album in those days cost $150,000 to produce. The artist earned about a dollar in royalties for every record sold, but the record sales had to earn back the initial recording costs before the artist saw any of those royalties.

So Straight got $150,000 from Warner Bros. to make Alice Cooper’s album. They spent $10,000 making it, and banked the other $140,000. The only way they’d have to pay Alice Cooper any of that would be if the album really sold. For instance, if Alice Cooper sold 100,000 records, Straight would owe the band $90,000 ($100,000 minus the $10,000 production costs). So, of that $140,000 Straight put in the bank, they would be left with only $40,000.

Obviously, then, the fewer records Alice Cooper sold, the better for Straight. That’s why the very last thing Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa wanted was for Alice Cooper or any Straight artists to have a hit record. I think that’s why Herb went ballistic and tried to scare me away at our very first meeting, and it’s why they wouldn’t let us record with Richardson.