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.