Welcome To My Nightmare: The Alice Cooper Story by Dave Thompson

Author:Dave Thompson [Thompson, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Music Sales
Published: 2012-06-25T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Can’t Think Of A Word That Rhymes

The band hit the road as slickly choreographed as ever, but with an eye on the slickness more than the choreography. “We change it a little bit every night,” Alice told Rock Scene magazine. “It really depends on what people throw on stage. Like if someone throws a baseball hat on stage, that’ll change my whole way of moving around.” Recently, they had seen a flurry of sex toys, vibrators and dildos, appearing amid the nightly rain, “so I’m still inventing things to do on stage. I get excited by the music, I really like it. By the time we get to New York at the end of the tour, the show will have really developed. It’ll be so smooth.”

Not everything that landed on stage was welcome, however. Violence was becoming commonplace at gigs, both in the audience and in the audience’s reactions; as though the challenge that Alice Cooper had once thrown down, of appearing the biggest, baddest, meanest machine in town had drawn from the audience a need to be even bigger and badder. And meaner. By the mid-point of the tour, Neal Smith once said, the musicians were seriously considering wearing football helmets on stage.

Fireworks became an occupational hazard, including several that came close to doing serious damage. Massive M-80s exploded on the stage in Canada; another night, a smaller but potentially equally deadly firecracker landed in Michael Bruce’s hair and it was fortune alone that ensured it was a dud. In Seattle, Alice was hit by a flying bottle. In Chicago, Neal Smith was struck by a dart.

Logistically, too, the tour was a nightmare. With Shep Gordon declaring it one of the highest-grossing tours in rock history, ticket sales in excess of 800,000 grossed some $4.5 million across 56 nights – a million or so less than Three Dog Night claimed their 1971 workload accrued, but they did not need to factor in the sheer cost of the extravaganza. Joe Gannon, a stage and lighting designer who had previously worked with Tiny Tim in Las Vegas and Neil Diamond in New York produced a Hollywood Squares-like set that weighed eight tons, soared 25 feet into the air and cost $150,000.

The tour covered 28,000 miles in the US alone, and featured around 70 press conferences in front of some 2,000 journalists. The band travelled aboard the Starship, a chartered four-engine, 48-passenger jet; their equipment was carted aboard two trailer trucks capable of holding 40 tons of stage gear.

A dentist’s chair, a surgical table, 14 bubble machines (and 28 gallons of soapy water), 400 pints of fake blood, 2,800 spare light bulbs, 6,000 mirror parts, 23,000 sparklers, elevated risers for the band members, mannequins and statues, a succession of props and costume changes. “It’s definitely more Alice Cooper stylised than ever before,” a gleeful Alice boasted to Circus that May. “It’s Alice Cooper theatre at its most intense.”

There were other changes. A new snake, Eva Marie, was introduced for the sibilant

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