Alice Cooper Scandal

The kid was adamant, ‘You suck!’ he berated Alice Cooper. Alice, who was born Vincent Furnier, a minister’s son from the right side of the tracks (for a change), grinned and could not find it in his heart to disagree. He bent down so that his face was level with the hecklers and began to chant the word ‘suck’ over and over again.

The kit thought for a moment about his rejoinder. ‘You still suck!’ he cried. That was 1970, when the love/hate relationship between America and the phenomenon known as Alice Cooper was at its most ambivalent. Before that they just hated him. Now, even in virtual middle age, they love him. Alice Cooper was a Frank Zappa acolyte, trained in the use of shock tactics and rock n’ roll attrition, which eventually outdid his teacher in the projection of disgusting, unnecessarily gross images. If ever a performer deserved hanging it was Alice Cooper. Realizing this, he brought his own gallows on stage with him.

The decision to offend was probably made early on in Furnier’s life when he saw The Rolling Stones and what they were getting away with. He formed a band of longhaired reprobates that toured the Michigan area to almost unanimous hostility, playing slab-like angst anthems over which Alice/Furnier howled his untutored vocals. The name Alice Cooper, he claimed, came from an Ouija. The spirit they had contacted wanted to speak to ‘Alice Cooper’. When asked whom that meant, the spirit relied that it was Vincent Furnier.

In 1969, they met Shep Gordon, who became their manager. The circumstances give some idea of the seriousness of the concept. Alice Cooper and band—they were bracketed as a collective entity, as though so much depravity could not exist in just one man—had reached Los Angeles and were playing a prestige gig at a club there. When Alice was a few songs into the set, something about the menacing leather gear, the whips, the realistic baby dolls that were slaughtered, the live chickens that got molested, the mock hanging of ringleader Alice for all these crimes, the incessant fondling of a morose-looking boa constrictor and the stage blood everywhere inspired the audience en masse to get up and leave As Gordon put it, ‘When I saw 2,000 people walk out on them, I knew I had to manage them’.

Alice admitted that the act was ’60 per cent’ contrived. His guitarist at the time put his finger on why people were so distressed: ‘Towards the end of the act people start to realize that it’s not going to stay on stage’.

The basis of the act has always been the execution of Alice Cooper for various sins. This execution has come in numerous forms. The gallows became a guillotine, which in turn became the electric chair. ‘And in order for this to work, it is clear that some suitably nefarious deeds have to be perpetrated first, so that Alice is seen to deserve his punishment. ‘Hence, the baby mutilation, the chicken-killing, and the debauchery.

Yvonne the boa constrictor was his slippery partner in crime, casting her beady eyes over her master’s misdemeanors. The Freudian symbolism may have been lost on the less intelligent youth who packed out his shows all through the Seventies, but Alice thought it through. It was inspired theatre and it smacked of danger.

This was because the boundaries of definition between Alice Cooper and Vincent Furnier tended to be obscured once Alice took the stage. Rather than acting out a part—which would have been perfectly acceptable in the bogus glam era—he actually became Alice. The crimes were simulated on stage, but they were real in his mind. And although he invariably about it now, it must have been hell on earth coming off stage and finding oneself back in the real world again. No wonder he became a chronic alcoholic.

The real world tried to catch him out. In 1974 a boy in Canada mimicked the mock-hanging act and died. To his credit, Alice dropped the act. ‘But, Alice Cooper was becoming a threat to the internal welfare of Vincent Furnier, and in 1977 he sought medical assistance to try to keep his liver. He claimed never to have been regularly put away forty cans of beer a day. His dry-out was a resounding of a caricature from that point.

Once people realized that Alice was a put-on the albums stopped doing as well, and Alice was courted as a kind of survivor-celebrity. He was a pretty good golf player, so he got invited to play pro-celeb tournaments. He even appeared on the game show, Hollywood Squares, in full make-up. While the group Kiss—of even less musical know-how and even more schlock appeal—won the appreciation of Alice’s erstwhile armies of teenage fans, the man himself mellowed on vinyl and even got a little introspective. The ironic thing is that, had they thought about it, his admirers would have seen far more outrageous success in playing golf with Bob Hope and annoying the heart of America at source, than in singing some loud brazen music to a few thousand already-converted kids.

Alice returned to the stage, with a show that lacked all the menace of the early ones but intensified the humor, Yvonne had been put out to grass ‘so, her place was taken by Arnold (the boa constrictor), if anything an even more natural performer.
And every time he tours all the ingredients are still there. They just seem funnier now (are we all getting older?). The audience knows when to scream in ecstasy and when to scream in terror. There is no trouble. ‘But perhaps Alice thinks back to the days of 1969, to the skin-of-the-teeth getaways.

‘A motorcycle gang rushed the stage in Michigan and tried to kill us,’ he told a reporter in ’69. ‘It was great but we felt we had to get out of there’.

The premature death of Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Make no mistake—if there had never been an Elvis Presley, this blog would not exist. Which is not to say that Presley’s increasingly odd behavior leading up to his premature death at the age of 42 can be entirely explained by the pressure which he felt as the King of Rock, but the expectations of others clearly contributed to his tragic belief that he was infallible, immortal and in a word, Godlike.
When Elvis made his first records for Sam Phillip’s Sun label in Memphis, he was a truck driver without prospects, living in a house that was little more than a shack. His father was a convicted criminal who was charged with forgery after altering the figures on a cheque he was given from $4 to $40 in 1937, when Elvis was two years old. This resulted in an initial sentence for Vernon Presley of three years at the infamous Parchman Farm prison (later the title of a celebrated R&B song written by Mose Allison), although Vernon probably served less than one year of his term. Gladys Presley, Elvis’ mother, was thus forced to work at menial jobs to earn a pittance in her attempts to provide the necessities for her baby, especially since she actually gave birth to twins when Elvis arrived, although his brother, who was 35 minutes older than Elvis, was stillborn, which made Gladys almost unnaturally protective of her surviving child.
Elvis led a very sheltered life—for many months, his mother took him school and met him at the school gates afterwards, and he reportedly accompanied her everywhere, which almost certainly embarrassed him as he grew older.

Then came his meteoric and totally deserved rise to fame in the mid-Fifties, when he forged a blueprint for rock n’ roll from which the world continues to reverberate, The records Presley made before his two years in the US Army between 1958 and 1960 remain the yardstick by which everything which has subsequently occurred in rock n’ roll is measured. By the time he went into the Forces, he had acquired a manager in the shape of the Machiavellian self-styled ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, previously a carnival hustler who had earned a living in earlier times with his celebrated sideshow featuring dancing chickens—any chicken in a cage whose floor was an electric hotplate would dance, and probably squawk!

Parker shrewdly decided when Elvis call up papers arrived that any application for deferment might affect his meal ticket’s credibility as the archetypal All American Boy, but made sure that enough recordings were available to satisfy public lust for new Elvis material during his stay with Uncle Sam, and even arranged for film footage to be shot in Germany to be used in Presley’s fifth feature movie, G.I. Blues, his first film after a two year gap following the release of four commercial blockbusters in under two years prior to his induction as Private US53310761.
The fatal mistake, artistically speaking, was Parker’s only partially successful attempt to make Elvis the hillbilly cat into Elvis the all around family entertainer. It became clear that Presley lost control over the material he was told to sing and especially over the movies in which he was obliged to appear, probably because demand for more and more Elvis was insatiable—some years later, an execrable LP of Elvis’s between songs dialogue with dubious title Having Fun with Elvis On Stage was released, which contained no singing To his credit, Elvis was less than keen for this pathetically banal artifact to reach the market, but since by the time of its release, he only had three years to live, and was some distance down the road to self-inflicted oblivion, his protests were over-ruled, as they had been a year earlier, in 1973, when the rights to his back catalogue had been sold by Parker to RCA Records for a reported five and a half million dollars, of which Presley himself only netted $750,000. This must have been one of the shrewdest investments ever made by a record company, as the Presley catalogue continues to sell to the point where the company must have recouped its investment many times over.
At some point, probably around 1970. Elvis seems to have given up worrying about the quality of his output, and mat even have begun to despise the fans who, lemming-like, consumed everything marketed with his name on it—dollar bills with his face in the place of that George Washington have become very popular curios, and it is easy to purchase in gift shops in America facsimiles of Elvis’s last will and testament. His marriage to exceptionally photogenic Pricilla Beaulieu (who later appeared in a leading role in the TV soap opera, Dallas) ended in divorce apparently because Elvis preferred the company of the ‘Memphis Mafia’, a group of bodyguards and hangers-on, many of whom were reportedly prone to agreeing with Elvis, however outlandish and unreasonable his behavior became. Accusations have been made suggesting that such people’s spineless strongly contributed to Presley’s downfall, and it is hard to deny that a rather more strong-minded approach might have prevented his self-destruct mechanisms from extracting the ultimate toll. On the other hand, he was so convinced, rather like a religious zealot, that everything he thought and did was beyond reproach that he would simply have fired anyone who dared to suggest that he might be human, then there’s the possibly apocryphal story about Elvis playing scrabble— to ensure that he had a better chance of winning, other players were restricted to five tiles (or letters) from which to construct words, while Elvis alone was allowed seven.

His drug intake, perhaps resulting from extreme hypochondria, was said to be immense, and eventually was a major contributory factor to his death on 16 August 1977, when his heart finally gave up the unequal struggle against the weight of increasingly powerful chemicals which were, as far as can be ascertained, prescribed for him by three doctors who were prone to writing out prescriptions if Elvis asked them to. Once again, had any of these medics been sufficiently intrepid, Presley’s life might have been extended, but, as in the case of the Memphis Mafia, [to kill the goose which laid golden egg would have resulted in banishment from the kingdom of plenty—] Elvis was extremely generous with gifts to his close associates—and almost definitely someone else would have emerged who would be prepared to do precisely what Elvis wanted.
The subject of Presley ranks with that of the The Beatles as the one about which most books have been written in the annals of rock music, simply because his popularity and influence have never been surpassed. In the world of the cinema, the equivalent figure was Marilyn Monroe, and it is no accident that the legends of Monroe, The Beatles and Presley continue to make headlines decades after the deaths of Elvis, Marilyn and John Lennon—each of the three lived a life which was subject to microscopic scrutiny from the media. Only an extra-terrestrial might be able to survive such pressure, and Elvis Presley, sadly, was a mere mortal.

Boy George Scandal

The story of how Boy George went from being unequivocally the smash hit of 1983 to the tabloid stooge of 1986 to the sad cabaret artist of 1988 is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale in media manipulation.

George Alan O'Dowd trod the usual path of the true rock 'n' roll rebel/victim. Expelled from school for insubordination, he drifted into an underground London society of drag artist. He was by no means the most outrageous of them, but he was easily the most talented. His voice was assured and soulful, and he made the transition from merely going to clubs to actually appearing at them when he was snapped up by Malcolm McLaren as co-singer for the band Bow Wow Wow. This was not just a safety measure against the band's teenage singer Annabella quitting, but also a testament to George's striking looks and voice. While he was in Bow Wow Wow he called himself 'Lieutenant Lush'.

Worries over McLaren's influence led to his departure from the band. Besides he had ideas of his own, and soon, with the addition of Jon Moss, Roy Hay and Mikey Craig, an interesting multi-coloured funk-toting four-piece. Culture Club was conceived. The end result was probably nowhere near as cynical as it looked. But the happy mix of colours and images, to say nothing about the rumours concerning exactly who if any in the band was gay, got the world around. After a couple of minor hits they had a huge number one success in 1982 with the song ' Do you really want to hurt me'

The music press had been courting him for years, since his arrival on the club scene, but when the daily tabloids were faced for the first time with the unashamedly and rogynous George, the results were predictable. Is it a Her? A Him Or Is It Neither? ..... "Mister (Or Is It Miss?) Weirdo'. . . He even won the nauseating Nina Myskow Wally of the Week Award.

When they found out that he was nor a freak and indeed had not only a mind of his own but the vocabulary to express it, their claws retracted a good idea. The tabloids even began to interview George, drawing supposedly outrageous quotes from him about how he preferred a cup of tea to sex. He was hardly ever out of the pop gossip columns. The greatest tribute a singer can receive - the Daily Mirror Personality of the Year Award - adorned his masterpiece for two years in a row.

And all the while hordes of lookalikes- mostly girls, for some reason - followed him in every conceivable fashion style. The records he made with culture Club - 'Time (Clock of the Heart)','Church of the Poison Mind','Karma Chameleon'- outdid each other on the dance floors and in the charts, and his got-it-flaunt it style even provoked comments from Princess Margaret ('Who's that over made-up tart?")

The problem only started when the hits stopped, when George ceased to be the charming vamp in flagrante delicto and began to look vulnerable. By 1986 Culture Club were finished. A string of mediocre records and a blatant lack of number one singles convinced the fickle teenage armies that more exciting thrills lay elsewhere, and George went the way of the Bay City Rollers and Adam Ant before him. Forced to rely exclusively on musical content, he was found wanting. The tabloids hissed a little and sat back waiting for the first mistake.

George had made anti-drug statements in the past and had persuaded most people that he was much too happy in the high life to mess with narcotics. So it was a genuine shock when the story of his heroin addiction broke in the pages of the Daily Mirror in June 1986. The George-as-junkie headlines were given more lurid life by the fact that the information came from his brother. George had also given an interview to John Blake, writer of the Mirror's pop column, in which he let slip a few indiscretions. Now there was not only a George-on-heroin scandal, there was an O'Dowd-family-at-war scoop as well.

Sam Cooke's Horrible Death

Sam Cooke's death in 1964 was one of the most violent ever suffered by a musician or singer, and was completely and tragically at odds with the gentle soulful strains of his music.

He sang melodic gospel-tinged songs for black audiences and for them he was a hero just as daunting and just as real as Elvis was for the whites. His hit songs - "You Send Me", "Wonderful World", "Cupid" to name just three - perfected the style of commercial soul music. The fact that it worked spectacularly must have been a decisive factor in Berry Gordy crank- starting the Motown operation. Later singers, including Otis Redding, testified to Cooke's influence and his singles still send a lucrative shiver down the public's spine even today.

The sheer enormity of this influence suggested that his death might not have been an accident. The bizarre circumstances which led to it would seem to lend support to this argument. There are so many unanswered questions regarding the Cooke shooting that a conspiracy theory is almost inevitable.

Cooke had married his childhood sweetheart and was known as a clean-living family man. So it was almost incredible to hear of his being shot while trying to rape a girl he had picked up at a party. Evidently he had persuaded this girl, Elisa Boyer, to get into his car, saying that he would give her a lift home. Instead he drove to a Los Angeles motel and, although she says she was forced into going, she seems to have stood silently by his side while he signed the register, 'Mr. and Mrs. Cooke'. She says that she then demanded to be taken home but, after Cooke assured her that he merely wanted to talk for a while, she followed him to the room. There he tried to undress her and she resisted. Fears that he would try to rape her made her snatch up her clothes as well as Cooke's and dash across to the motel office. Once inside she found a phone and called the police.

Cooke followed her to the office and began pounding on the door, demanding to talk to her. The motel manageress, a certain Mrs. Franklin, told him that Elisa Boyer was not there. Cooke appeared to believe her and got in his car to drive away. But then he returned and resumed pounding Mrs. Franklin testified that Cooke then broke down the office door in a state of rage and proceeded to attack her. She managed to fight him off and get hold of a pistol, with which she shot him three times in the chest and abdomen. He did not die at once. Instead he leapt at her in a even greater rage whereupon she struck him with a stick. The stick broke but she kept hitting until he lay still.When the police eventually arrived he was dead.

Hearing this evidence, the inquest court ruled that the killing was justifiable homicide. Nevertheless the questions will not answer themselves. In an effort to find out what really happened that might Cooke's Manager later hired a private detective to work it all out. He never came up with any satisfactory conclusions.

Sam Cooke's funeral was a tempestuous affair, with almost 200,000 people turning up to pay their respects. Many of them were hysterical, most were crying. Hundreds were crushed in the desperate attempt to take a look at his body for the last time and the local Chicago press ran stories on the pandemonium.

A week later another 5,000 people attended a funeral service for the dead singer in Los Angeles.

Janis Joplin and her Blues

"I wanted to smoke dope, take dope. lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope anything i could lay my hands on i wanted to do it... Hey, man, what is it? i"ll try it. How do you do it? Do you suck it? No? You swallow it? I'll swallow it" - Janis Joplin, 1970 a few months before her death.

Janis Joplin had the blues, and didn't she let the world know about it. If pain had a singing voice, it would sound a lot like the Joplin howl. Straight from the gut she sang, via her tortured soul and her broken heart. Even a line like, 'Oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz' scorched in tones of raw hurt, symbolic of all the fine things in life Janis could not have - simple things like a pretty face, a loving husband, and maybe a couple of kids to make tomorrow something to look forward to.

In the 27 years of her life, tragically curtailed when she became yet another victim of heroin, she proved beyond any doubt that Sophie Tucker was in no way the last of the red hot mammas.

As she grew up, her fate was gradually sealed. Completely lacking the demure, cleavage-clenching prettiness of your average Southern belle ( and possessing a terrible complexion), she became the focus for horrible abuse at her school. That and a tendency to hang out with the boys, would shape her life. It would be a major heartbreak for her that men were perfectly content, willing even to be seduced from the safe distance of a stage when she sang, but once the show was over, she went home alone while they retreated into the arms of girls designed with more conventional ideas of beauty in mind.

Displaying a serious alcohol problem as early as the age of 17, she was admitted to the local hospital and subsequently saw a psychiatrist. It was clear that flight was necessary.

So off to Loas Angeles she went, then to Venice Beach, and on her return to port Arthur it was noticed by everyone that Janis was now a fully-fledged wildcat, combining a manic, head-on hard drinking charm with a Californian inspired beatnik lifestyle.

The Phonomenon Groupies Band of 60's and 70's

The groupies scene was a phenomenon of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and various threatening social diseases have effectively put the mockers on groupiedom in the eighties, much to the chagrin of some straggling leftover rock 'n' rollers who remember the good times.

It was at its height in the late Sixties havens of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. In 1969 the groupies knew they had arrived when the influential magazine Rolling Stone dedicated an entire issues to groupies their philosophy, their quirks, their motivation and - in a few cases - their regrets.

What is/was a groupie? A groupie is a girl who hangs out with rock 'n' roll groups simple as that. Except that gradually the behavior of certain of the groupie sorority got the more socially-minded ones a bad name, and groupies became a by-word for sex objects.

The whole question of following a rock musician to a hotel room and then inquiring about the possibilities of having sex with him and/or any of his friend and/or the road crew and/or anyone else who may be involved, however tenuously, with the rich and reckless world of rock 'n' roll seems like an amazingly ephemeral, not to say thankless, way to go about one's life. But there were those who had it down to a fine art. and for them the rewards were just as meaningful as, say, an auditorium full of screaming fans would be for the rock stars they pursued.

Not that a groupie existed as a mere sexual gift. There was the matter of entertainment, of company, of fun, of help around the house, of -well, what the hell- of love. As Jimmy page of Led Zeppelin put it. The sex angle is important. But no more important than girls who are also good friends and make you feel like family.

Prince

Nothing can be said with any degree of finality about prince Rogers Nelson. His legend is as tricky as one of his guitar solos, his image as carefully applied as his make-up. Only two things are sure: he is small, and he is strange.

Prince has been recording since 1977, when his first album, for you, was the subject of mild amusement by virtue of its lyrical content. A credit to God on the sleeve seemed pretty out of place among some fairly blatant tributes to the sexual acts. However paradoxically, sex and religion appear to have no problem co-existing on a Prince record. Between them they have constituted nearly all of his inspiration and a peek at his stage show will confirm that he draws equal pleasure from both.

His present superstar status -the only two non-political black Americans as famous as him are like Mike Tyson and Michael Jackson - is not the transient affair that most rock stars enjoy. There seems no question of Prince ever becoming obsolete. There is probably no way he'll even be out of date. And one look at his prolific output since 1983, when the double album 1999 opened the commercial floodgates, suggested that he isn't even close to running out of ideas. What seems much more likely, if he is to fade from limelight, is that internal traumas and massive self-doubts will be the causes. For, at the moment, prince-quite simply- seems to believe that he is God.

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin. Jimmy page once said "is a stag party that never ends. If ever a band a band was born to party until one or all of its participants keeled over it was Zeppelin - a rocking, rolling, careering orgy spiced with stories of black magic rituals, shotgun weddings and wakes.

Page was the frail former child prodigy guitarist who put Led Zeppelin together after his band, the Yardbirds, fell apart in 1968. Linking up with sessions bassist John Paul Jones and a brace of midland neanderthals, Robert Plant on vocals and drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham, he set about re-interpreting the delta blues in a hard rocking context. Zeppelin played at deafening volumes to record breaking audiences. For a while in the seventies they were outselling the Rolling Stones at the radio of three albums to one.

Through all this success they made merry, causing all sorts of astonishing rumors of backstage perversions to reverberate round Europe and America. Tales of massive orgies with willing female participants abounded.

The two stories that began to circulate like dogs on acid during their first American tour in 1969 (the Brits had rejected them as blues pilferers without talent of finesse) were sordid and thrilling, respectively.

The first was that never in the history of human conflict had so much semen been implanted in so many by few.