8

AFTER THE YEARS OF HARD WORK AND STARVING, the band was seemingly poised to take over the world. Instead, they were slowly falling apart. They scattered themselves around the Galesi mansion and lived separate lives. Alice spent much of his time holed up in the master bedroom drinking Bud and watching TV, while the rest of them complained more and more about falling into his shadow. When we brought in a mobile unit to lay down the basic tracks for Billion Dollar Babies, Bob Ezrin also decided to bring in a session guitarist to play Glen’s parts.

I understood why it upset the rest of the guys that Alice had become the star. They had all gotten into rock because they wanted to be stars. But they couldn’t all be the star. We had agreed that had to be Alice. We were on track to our goal of becoming millionaires. I couldn’t let their bruised egos derail us.

Alice was now an international celebrity, and the guilt by association was working both ways: other celebrities wanted to be seen with him as much as we wanted him to be seen with them. In the art world of the early 1970s no one was cooler than Andy Warhol, or more interested in the workings of fame and celebrity. When Alice and Andy were photographed together at New York clubs like Studio 54 or Max’s Kansas City, it made Alice look more acceptable to the art crowd, and Andy look cool to the rock fans. (For one of Alice’s birthdays, Warhol gave him a silk screen of an electric chair—the same electric chair Alice sat in when he was “executed” in his show.)

For the same reason, we really wanted to get Alice seen with Salvador Dali. Dali’s work had inspired Alice and Dennis when they were still students. Dali was a god to Alice, and Alice was as close to a Dali as the rock world had. Joe had much more to do with hooking them up than I did. He found out that Dali had a manager in Spain, and set up a meeting at the King Cole bar of the St. Regis hotel on Central Park South, where Dali and his wife, Gala, lived.

Gala swept into the room first. She was everything you’d expect Salvador Dali’s wife-manager-muse to be: a gaunt, striking, middle-aged lady in a black tuxedo, black silk scarf wrapped around her head, a black walking cane, trailing in her wake a half-dozen cherubic young boys in black silk outfits. They never spoke, just glided around the room like shadows.

Gala set the ground rules. “He is to be addressed always as The Dali. Money is not to be discussed at any time with him. When I say it is over, you leave.”

She took the elevator back up to their suite, and returned ten minutes later with The Dali. As I recall he was wearing an artist’s smock; at any rate, it definitely had very large pockets. After polite introductions we all sat at a table. The rest of us ordered drinks while Gala ordered a cup of hot water for The Dali. When the hot water arrived, The Dali very slowly and purposefully drew a small jar of honey out of one of those big pockets, placed it on the table, and very deliberately unscrewed the top. It was brilliant theater—you couldn’t not watch. Then he lifted the jar six inches above the cup, tipped it slowly, and a slow-motion stream of honey poured toward the hot water. Meanwhile with his free hand he drew a pair of scissors from his other pocket. He used them to cut the stream of honey. Alice, Joey, and I gaped.

The meeting was very brief. We asked if The Dali was familiar with the new, three-dimensional optical art form, the hologram. A guy named Hart Perry, who’d shot some pictures of Alice for New York’s WNEW TV, had shown us some. We wanted to know if The Dali would be willing to make a hologram of Alice.

The Dali went back upstairs. Joe, Gala, and I went for a walk in Central Park, with the cherubs floating behind us, and talked business. Gala informed us that The Dali would retain all rights to any work he produced, and we’d get two copies of it.

It took six months to complete the hologram. We didn’t see a lot of The Dali during the process. We had a couple of dinners with him and Gala at Trader Vic’s, the restaurant in the Plaza hotel. I loved Trader Vic’s, and its over-the-top Polynesian tiki bar decor seemed a perfect setting. (Sadly, when Donald Trump bought the Plaza a few years later he closed the restaurant.) Gala did most of the talking. For some reason The Dali started calling me Mr. Blemly. From then on, through our whole relationship, I was Mr. Blemly. I had no idea why; I still don’t know to this day. He’d just say things like, “Mr. Blemly, would you pass the egg rolls.” Both times, The Dali paid the bill for us all by signing his napkin. It was how he paid for all their meals. “My friend Picasso, so silly, he had only coffee and biscuits in Paris and he signed the whole tablecloth,” he said both times. “I have whole meals and I sign just the napkin.”

The most time we spent with The Dali was a very long photo session, probably six hours, shot by our friend Hart Perry. Alice had to be photographed meticulously from every angle for the 3-D hologram to work. The finished piece was a rotating, almost-life-size, three-dimensional image of Alice sitting cross-legged in a white silk outfit, wearing a million-dollar diamond tiara that the jeweler Harry Winston’s store loaned us for the shoot—complete with security guards. Alice is holding a small Venus de Milo statue, looking like he’s either about to sing to her or bite her head off. Behind him, The Dali suspended a plaster sculpture of Alice’s brain with a chocolate éclair in the middle, covered in little black ants—a signature Dali image. He called it all First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain.

Alice was overwhelmed by the experience of working with and just being around his idol. Every now and then when we were with The Dali he’d catch my eye and give me a look that said, Oh. My. God. Remember, we were just a couple of kids in our twenties, and this was one of the greatest living artists in the world. What was most awe-inspiring for us was that The Dali didn’t seem to make art only when he was painting or sculpting; he seemed to make his entire life, every minute of it, every word and gesture, art. That was the point of the scissors and honey. It was a living Dali painting. That was exactly what Alice Cooper had been trying to do onstage. Once I went up to the apartment in the St. Regis, rang the bell, and The Dali answered the door sitting in a wheelchair, even though he could walk perfectly. He was wearing the skin of an entire bear, from head to claws and tail, and holding an open umbrella. Another living Dali painting.

What Alice and I always wondered—and we never really got close enough to The Dali to get the answer—was what happened when the apartment door closed. Was he the same in private as in public, or did he and Gala just become a normal couple behind that door? Were there two Dalis, the way there were two Alices?

I got one chance to find out. When the Chromo-Hologram was completed, we arranged a major press conference in New York for Alice and The Dali to unveil it. We got all the print there, but we were really interested in TV for this one. This was 1973, and there weren’t a lot of TV news outlets. No cable to speak of, no YouTube, just the three major networks, their local affiliates, and a handful of prestigious TV “newsmagazines” like 60 Minutes. We were very excited when 60 Minutes and all three networks said they’d come.

The print reporters and 60 Minutes crew arrived. Then we were told there’d been a fire or a shooting somewhere in the city. The network and local news crews wanted us to delay the conference forty-five minutes so they could go cover that and then come to us. I had a choice to make. Do I let 60 Minutes leave, or do I try to stall them until the others arrive? I figured there was only one thing I could do that 60 Minutes could not walk out on—have The Dali speak.

I said to Alice, “I don’t know who lives behind the curtain, but I think we’re about to find out.”

Joe and I went to The Dali. I said, “The Dali, may Mr. Blemly speak to you?” I always had to ask permission.

“Yes, Mr. Blemly?”

We explained the problem. The Dali, who understood the importance of the media and celebrity as well as Warhol did, calmly replied, “The Dali will take care.”

He went out there and spoke for forty-five minutes. It was not possible that the newspeople understood much of what he said. It was kind of a Surrealist poetry.

“The Dali, the greatest artist. The Coo-per, the greatest artist. New York City, the greatest city. The hologram, the greatest art form. The Dali, The Coo-per, the world’s two greatest artists meet. . . .”

He rolled on that way until the news crews came in. The second they did, he said, “And thank you.” And left the stage. For me, it was a sign that he could in fact turn it on and off as needed, the way Alice did. It was certainly beautiful theater, and it worked. 60 Minutes stayed through the whole strange thing.

That was the last we saw or heard from The Dali. It was one of the highlights of Alice’s career. Today there are two Dali museums, one in St. Petersburg, Florida, and one outside of Barcelona, Spain. The hologram is on display at both. In 2013, when Alice had a concert in Tampa, he went to the Florida museum to help them celebrate the hologram’s fortieth anniversary. I was recently in Spain with Jerry Moss. We went to the museum and saw the hologram there. Wow.

The money kept pouring in. I did what young men did with money in the 1970s: I bought a lot of drugs. I did acid, cocaine, Quaaludes, pot, you name it. Yet the money kept piling up. We had almost a million dollars in the bank between us. Then Joey started to drift away. He was still my fifty-fifty partner, but things got very strained between us. Finally I said, “Obviously we should not be partners anymore. So why don’t we flip a coin. We’ll put the money in one pile, and we’ll put the business in another. Whoever wins the flip takes his choice.”

He won the flip, and he took the money. I kept the business. And that was the end of our partnership. We had been the best of friends, followed the same path together for so long, started the business, and made it work together. I can’t give him enough credit for how much of our early success with Alice was Joey’s doing. And now we were going our separate ways. It was very tough. From here on out it was just me.

Despite the interpersonal problems they were having, too, Alice and the band wrote and recorded their best album yet while they were at the Galesi estate. Billion Dollar Babies was their satirical take on their own fame and fortune. Everyone agreed it was the best collection of songs they’d ever put on an album. The baby on the cover wearing Alice makeup was Carolyn’s baby Lola. The album came out in February 1973 and went straight to number one in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other places around the world.

The band left the Galesi estate and went in all directions. Four days after the last of them moved out, leaving only Ron Volz in the apartment over the garage, the mansion burned to the ground. Holy shit. We were still on the lease. I got a call that Francesco Galesi wanted to meet with me at his Manhattan apartment. Alice says he has never seen me more scared. I put on a suit and tie. Galesi sent a car for me—a black Mercedes with darkened windows. The driver looked like Cato from the Inspector Clouseau movies. He did not smile or say one word to me as he drove me to Sutton Place on the East Side. The elevator opened right into Galesi’s giant apartment. I waited around for a while, then a beautifully handsome man entered the room. He looked like a mafia don from Central Casting, very smooth, in a suit that had to cost twenty thousand dollars. And he was not happy. He was more or less convinced that we had burned the house down, probably doing drugs. I didn’t get the vibe he was going to hurt me. I did get the vibe that he could harass me for the rest of my life if I didn’t make him happy in some way.

Then his son Jesse came in the room. Jesse was a musician. I got out of hot water by saying I would help him with his career, which in fact I did for years.

We decided that the Billion Dollar Babies tour had to be spectacular, and now we had the funds to do it right. Joe Gannon had produced Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night concerts the year before, the first pop concerts ever to use a full Broadway-style production, with moving stage parts and theatrical lights and effects. I thought that sort of really grand theatrical approach was perfect for Alice at this point, and I paid Joe $25,000—a ton of money in those days—to make it happen. He constructed it on a soundstage at Warner Bros. in Burbank. It was incredible. Nobody in rock had done anything remotely like it. It had big steel towers and multilevel platforms and a Busby Berkeley–style staircase where each step could light up as Alice went up and down. Every available surface was covered in mirrors and metalflake glitter, so that when the big Super Trouper lights hit the set it was almost blinding.

The only problem was, we had not really thought through what it was going to be like hauling this massive production from city to city for weeks on end. Every night it had to be unpacked from the two semi-trailers we rented for it, loaded into the building, constructed, then torn down after the show and packed back onto the trucks, which had to haul ass to make it to the next city. It was a logistical nightmare and exhausting work. Early on, Joe and I were helping the crew lug the giant steel frames into the trucks after a show one night. I looked at him, both of us huffing and puffing, and said, “What the fuck did you get me into?” Alice loved the set, but the band didn’t particularly like having to work on and around it. They were constantly bumping into things or ripping their outfits on the metalflake-encrusted edges.

While the semis hauled the set and equipment from city to city, we flew in the Starship, the chartered Boeing 720 that all the big acts toured in at the time. The Starship is the jet in the background of rock photographer Bob Gruen’s iconic image of Led Zeppelin from the same year. All the conventional seats had been stripped from inside. When you walked up the ramp, you entered a lounge, with shag carpeting, a piano, and a full bar with a butler/bartender standing behind it. The main body of the plane was all plush couches and easy chairs, equipped with seat belts, and some private hideaway cubicles. There were TV monitors and a library of videocassettes, everything from Alice’s old black-and-white movies to Deep Throat, which had come out a couple of years earlier and launched the notion of “porn chic.” Alice felt uncomfortable watching porn and would usually turn away when the other guys had it on. In the rear were a small library-study and a private bedroom with a king-size bed and full shower. He spent a lot of time back there. I had hired the magician James Randi, aka “the Amazing Randi,” to play Alice’s executioner in the climactic guillotine scene. He loved touring with the band and kept up a constant burble of jokes and card tricks on the plane.

The tour went throughout Canada and the United States from March to June. Alice Cooper was the top-performing act in the world in 1973. We played to more than eight hundred thousand audience members, who together paid $4.5 million at the box office. When you added record sales, merchandising, and other income, Alice Cooper grossed $17 million that year. Considering how they started out, and what a very long shot their amazing success was, the guys in the band should have been ecstatic, but the bad feelings only grew worse. They were exhausted, they were sick of the stage show, and they resented Alice’s star treatment. Even Alice was getting bored with the routine.

In November of that year, Warner Bros. released the next Alice Cooper album, Muscle of Love. It was their second album in less than a year. That was how it was done back then: a constant treadmill of touring, writing songs, recording them, and touring some more. Recordings made the big money, not touring. The touring was to promote the records and boost sales. Tickets to rock concerts were priced to pack the hall—five dollars was tops. So depending on the size of the hall, after all the expenses, after everyone else got their cut of the proceeds, the band might make a few thousand dollars. This is a major reason bands started touring to larger and larger venues in the 1970s. It was an economic necessity.

We put together the Alice Cooper Holiday Tour, beginning in Nashville on December 3 and winding up in Buffalo on New Year’s Eve. It was all stadiums, coliseums, and arenas now. As we were getting the tour ready, a very good journalist with the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob Greene, who’d been writing about the band for a few years, got in touch with me. He was not a music critic but was very interested in the way rock was evolving from the soundtrack of the hippie counterculture in the sixties to the global corporate business of platinum albums and arena tours in the seventies. Since Alice Cooper had so much to do with that, Greene was especially interested in us. He approached me with the idea of going along on the tour—not just to observe but as part of the band in some way, so he could get the full inside experience. I cooked up a role for him: he would come out toward the end of the show as Santa Claus, and Alice and the band would beat him up.

It turned out to be the tour that broke up the band. Bob describes it in detail in the book he ended up writing, Billion Dollar Baby, one of the best books written about seventies rock. The band was truly sick of the stage show by this point and close to mutinying. Alice was drinking constantly as a buffer, which was ruining his health. Winter weather made moving the band and the equipment from city to city nerve-racking. Meanwhile, I was busy dealing with threats from parent groups and city councils in various cities to ban us. Again, to me this was gift-from-God publicity, as long as they didn’t actually go through with their threats. The most serious came from the city of Binghamton, New York, where the band was scheduled for December 29. The city fathers of Binghamton were especially concerned about our beating up Santa Claus. They sent a four-man commission eighty miles to the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse on December 15 to judge for themselves how evil the show was.

I met with them backstage before the concert and put on a real show myself. Bob Greene describes the hilarious scene in his book. Four middle-aged guys in jackets and ties sat in a row of folding chairs while I addressed them in my most polite and persuasive manner. Bob writes that I reminded him of a minister giving an Easter sermon. I introduced Bob to them as a highly respected gentleman of the press. When one of them asked Bob what he thought of the Santa Claus part of the show, I pounced: “Gentleman, Mr. Greene is Santa Claus in the show.” Then I introduced them to the Amazing Randi, a middle-aged man like themselves, who told them he found the show entirely respectable and professional. After that I introduced them to Alice himself, who was also at his most polite. He explained to them that part of the purpose of the show was to introduce the young audience to the cultural significance of Busby Berkeley–era spectacle, and that rather than promoting immoral behavior, the show was in fact “a morality play” in which the evil figure of Alice Cooper is punished in the end for his misdoings.

Then I went into my routine. I explained to them that the Alice Cooper group were all serious, hardworking young men who would never jeopardize their careers by promoting violence or immorality. Yes, they depicted it onstage, but only to entertain and educate young people, not to incite them. I told them that I had written the show myself, and as a former probation officer (I didn’t say for only about four hours) with a degree in sociology, I cared deeply for America’s youth.

“They say that you can’t get young people to care anymore,” I somberly told them. “But we do it.” I told them that when they saw the show, they’d see young people laugh, cringe with fear, and applaud with delight. We were an outlet for them, a release valve. I told them how hurt and indignant we all were about some of the terrible things written about us in the press, and that I completely understood how that press might have given them a false perception of the show.

I went on like that for thirty minutes. Then I escorted them to the stage, where they watched the show from the wings. After that I met with them again for another hour.

In the end, Binghamton canceled the show. I protested to the Binghamton press, but I wasn’t surprised. I had already gotten our agent to book a replacement gig in Utica for that night.

That was the last tour of the original band. The bitterness and resentment toward Alice and me had made things too difficult. For a year, a year and a half, on more occasions than I can remember, I had to have very heavy conversations or they would refuse to go on. They hated that Alice was the star and focus of all the attention, on stage and off. They hated all the theatrics of the show. They wanted to go back to T-shirts and dungarees.

I would take the position, “That isn’t what we agreed upon. That isn’t Alice Cooper.”

“Well, people are laughing at us,” one of them would say. “They don’t think we’re good musicians.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I’d say. “We’re sharing equally. You don’t get paid any less than Alice. I can’t help it if your ego is suffering. I can only do what I know.”

Now, after the holiday tour ended, they called a group meeting. That had never happened before in all our years working together. Group meetings only happened if I called them. I went expecting nothing good, and that’s what I got. They wanted no more theatrics. They wanted time off to record solo albums. They wanted the world to know they were great musicians, not just some anonymous flunkies playing for Alice Cooper.

“Listen, we all made a deal,” I said. “We agreed to do this until we were all millionaires. We’re not millionaires yet. If you guys break this deal, I hope you understand that leaves Alice free to use the name to do what he wants, and it doesn’t mean he has to come back. Once you break this deal and let him out of the cage, he’s free. And I’m going with him. I can’t work with you on solo projects after you’ve broken your word to me. I have killed myself to make this thing happen. We’re right there. We’re the biggest group in the world. What do you mean you want a year off? I am not taking a year off. And if you let me out of the cage, I may never come back, either.”

A few of them countered by saying that they wanted to make solo albums. That left Alice free to make one of his own.

So that was it, the end of the original Alice Cooper group. I feel bad about the way history subsequently played out, because none of them managed much in the way of commercially successful careers on their own, but it was their decision. We were all on the gravy train together, and it was just about to pull into the station, and they jumped off.

Now Alice and I had to reinvent the wheel. If his next project was his first solo one, it had to be huge, bigger than anything we’d done before. We came up with Welcome to My Nightmare, which meant taking every dime he and I had in the world and reinvesting it. Luckily we won. But it’s not how we had wanted to do it.