MTV.com, September 16, 2016
by Simon Reynolds
Forty-four years ago, Alice Cooper ran for President.
Okay, not really – but the singer and his group did release
the single “Elected” in September 1972, timed for the final stretch of the
Nixon versus McGovern race for the White House.
A bombastic blast of proto-punk fury, “Elected” proposed Cooper as the
leader of “a new party, a third party, a WILD party” that would “take the
country by storm”. The single was accompanied with an uproarious promo video,
in which Cooper drives around in a Rolls-Royce glad-handing the voters and
revels in the barrow full of donor cash wheeled in by his campaign
manager, a roller-skating chimpanzee.
The idea for “Elected” actually dated back to the previous
Presidential contest in 1968, which inspired Alice Cooper to write a song
titled “You Shall Be Elected”. That lyrical concept fell by the wayside but the
tune survived as “Reflected”, a track on the group’s 1969 debut album Pretties For You. Flash forward to ’72
and Alice Cooper were now the most infamous band in America, thanks to their
shock-rock concerts involving the dismemberment of baby-dolls and faked but
hair-raisingly realistic executions of the singer by gallows and guillotine. Following
the chart success of “School’s Out,” the group were on the brink of the superstardom
they’d been chasing for four grueling years. So they decided to jump on the election-year
bandwagon and drastically remodeled “Reflected” with the original lyric
restored and intensified. Instead of “You Shall Be Elected”, the hook line became
“I wanna be elected”: a messianic power trip for a singer who justifiably saw
himself as a leader of youth.
Bob Ezrin, the group’s producer, came up with a shrewd ruse
to generate the declamatory demagogue vocal that “Elected” needed. “To get the
performance I had a full-length mirror placed in front of Alice on an angle,” Ezrin
told an interviewer. “That way he could see his entire body in reflection.”
Gesticulating like an orator, Cooper rasped out lines about how the “kids want
a savior, don’t want a fake” and vowed that very soon “we’re all gonna rock to
the rules that I make.” Ezrin added horns suggestive of statesman-like pomp and
distorted bursts of TV newscaster voice-over in the style of Walter Winchell.
After $10,000 of studio time and eighty hours of obsessive mixing, the result
was one of the hard rock classics of the first half of the Seventies.
From its whiplash opening riff through Cooper’s
abyss-plunging scream to the portentous descending bassline in the outro,
“Elected” can also stake a claim to be punk rock four years ahead of historical
schedule. The tone of apocalyptic glee mingled with megalomania anticipates
“Anarchy in the U.K.” (Johnny Rotten was a huge Alice fan and his audition for
the Sex Pistols involved miming to “I’m Eighteen” on a jukebox). There’s a
lyrical preview of punk too: during the fade, Cooper reels off a list of U.S.
cities that have “problems,” then whispers “and personally... I don’t care” – a
glimpse ahead to the taunting nihilism of “and we don’t care” in “Pretty
Vacant.”
Listening to “Elected” recently while working on my new glam
rock history Shock and Awe, I heard
another element of prophecy: Cooper’s
drunk-with-the-promise-of-power performance reminded me of nobody so much as
Donald Trump. Like Cooper, Trump is an entertainer moving into politics, using
showbiz techniques that bypass reasoned analysis and policy proposals and
instead conjure a baseless aura of authority. When Cooper rants about how “you
and me together / young and strong,” it sounds like Trump’s blasts of hot-air
about America being great again, how “we’ll win so much”. There’s Trump Tower-like
bling too when Cooper brags about being “a dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce”.
Long before Trump ever featured in its pages, Alice Cooper
made the front cover of Forbes. In
the financial magazine’s April 15th 1973 issue, the band were held
up as exemplars of “a new breed of tycoon” that had emerged thanks to the Seventies
rock business’s bonanza of platinum albums and mega-grossing tours. Beneath the headline “the rockers are rolling
in it”, an interview with Cooper saw the singer describe himself as a true
patriot: “I’m the most American rock act. I have American ideals. I love
money!” In another interview - with Bob
Greene, a political journalist who followed his Nixon/McGovern campaign
chronicle Running with a book
documenting an Alice Cooper tour– the singer talked about his success in
Trump-like terms as the result of a pure will to dominance: “It was nothing but
positive thinking. I’m very competitive....
That’s my main life drive – being better than everyone else.”
“Elected” was the
taster for Billion Dollar Babies, the
1973 album that propelled Alice Cooper to mainstream megafame. A brazen celebration of money-making, the
album stomped on the last vestiges of hippie idealism still lingering on from
the Sixties: instead of sticking it to the Man, why not become the Man? Billion Dollar Babies’s packaging was
styled as a snakeskin wallet bulging with cash; inside, fans found a facsimile
of a billion dollar bill. The accompanying tour was the most spectacular and
lucrative (raking in a then astronomical $4,000,000 for 64 concerts) that rock
had yet seen. The group travelled between cities in a private jet with a dollar
symbol on the plane’s tail.
In interviews Cooper described the album and the show as a
celebration of decadence – then an in-vogue concept because of the movie Cabaret. “It’s happening in the States now, all that German thing
of the Thirties,” Cooper told Circus
magazine’s Steve Demorest. “There is so much money in the U.S., and everyone
has as much sex as they want. All we’re doing is reflecting it. I like the idea
of the American Seventies producing a cabaret of over-opulence.... I’m a
nationalist. I know the States is the best place in the world to live in.” Indeed
Billion Dollar Babies concerts ended
with the band unfurling the Stars and Stripes to the sound of “God Bless
America”.
Dismayed pundits at the time took the commercial success of Alice
Cooper’s sick-humor and cynical worldview as proof that the assumed link
between rock and progressive politics had proved illusory. All those benefit
concerts for McGovern played by rock bands had done nothing to forestall a
landslide reelection for Nixon, self-proclaimed champion of the silent
majority. Some critics outright identified Alice Cooper as Nixonian rock. In truth, the singer had not even voted in
’72 – something he professed to feel ashamed about. But Cooper did say that “I
wouldn’t have voted for McGovern”, mainly because the candidate was too
wishy-washy and changed his mind so often.
Generally, Cooper professed to find politics “so boring”,
quipping that “if elected, I would impeach myself”. But while the finale to the
Billion Dollar Babies concerts involved a Nixon lookalike bounding onstage only
to be roughed up and bundled off by the band, in interviews Cooper expressed
sympathy for the President, embroiled
in the Watergate scandal shortly after his reelection triumph.
“I think Nixon’s
got a rough job,” Cooper told Greene. “And if he’s guilty of anything, I don’t
think it’s anything new. He’s just the first one to get caught. I think Nixon’s
a star... He’ll go down as one of the biggest personalities ever to come out of
the United States, just by being so notorious.... I would love to spend some
time with him. I’d probably sit down and talk about golf.” That never happened
but Cooper did get to play golf alongside Nixon’s VP and successor Gerald Ford
in a celebrity tournament. In further bizarreness, one of the singer’s four
homes was right next door to the Phoenix, Arizona residence of Barry Goldwater,
hero of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and a failed Presidential
candidate in his own right.
Like the acting profession, rock has continued to lean left
and liberal for the most part. But the
existence of right-wing rockers – Ted Nugent, Johnny Ramone, Kid Rock, Gene
Simmons, Avenged Sevenfold, and Alice Cooper himself, who’s been described as a
“quiet” supporter of George W. Bush but whose intentions in 2016 are undeclared–
shows that there is no innate and irrevocable link between rock and progressive politics. Indeed rock’s
combination of populism and individualism arguably inclines more logically with
a libertarian agenda than with socialism.
When you look at the “rock star” version of rock - the model
for misbehavior and excess that’s recently been so influential in rap – it
becomes obvious that it has far more in common with Trump’s worldview than,
say, Portlandia values. “Rock star” rock
runs on ideological-emotional fuel like vanity, wasteful splendor, and
alpha-male display. There’s a reason why Trump soundtracks his
stadium-concert-like rallies with songs like “We Are the Champions” and “I
Won’t Back Down”, and why he could plausibly
add “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” to the playlist
too. Magical thinking, vacuous self-aggrandizement,
an appeal to gut feeling and irrational uplift, us-versus-them postures: if not
the rock candidate, Trump is at least the hair metal candidate.
Although a Top 5 smash in the U.K., “Elected” did not repeat
the success of “School’s Out” in America, stalling at Number 26. Let’s hope
this is an augury for November.
Alice Cooper
The Guardian, June 12th 2014
by Simon Reynolds
Alice Cooper is reminiscing about the days when he killed
himself for a living. “Any time you have moving parts onstage, you are asking
for Spinal Tap,” he says of the gallows and the guillotine that were climactic
fixtures of his tours of the early 1970s. “And when it doesn’t work, you have to play it
for comedy. “ But that time the gallows
broke in England was no laughing matter. “There was a wire connected to my back,
it stopped the noose from hitting my neck, and we’d done the trick one hundred
times, never thinking ‘maybe that wire is getting brittle’. And then it snapped
and the noose grabbed me for real.” Cooper was quick-witted enough to tilt his
chin up and slip through the noose. He
was lucky to escape with a nasty rope burn down his throat.
41 years after this close shave, Cooper sits placidly in a
downtown LA hotel suite directly opposite the Grammy Museum, where the previous
night Super Duper Alice Cooper, a
rockdoc about his life and exploits, made its West Coast debut. Amongst the invitation-only audience were
legendary groupie Pamela Des Barres (a friend of the Alice Cooper band during
their phase of living in LA as Frank Zappa protégés) and sundry
Cooper-influenced metal performers such as Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider.
Wearing white jeans with an excess of zips, a plain black
T-Shirt, and a vaguely sepulchral medallion nestled in a thicket of chest hair,
Alice looks much the same as he did in his Seventies heyday, give or take a few wrinkles
and some paunch. But then when you watch the old footage spliced into Super Duper, it’s striking that he never
really seemed like a young man. From his
swarthy, crow-like countenance to his scrawny body, Cooper was never going to
become a rock star through sexual magnetism, nor from the strength and beauty
of his voice.
Instead he became one of the best “bad” singers rock’n’roll
has ever known, his haggard rasp equally suited to the proto-grunge snarl of “I’m
Eighteen” (his break-through US hit) and the megalomaniacal bombast of “Elected”. Abandoning “erotic politics” as
a faded relic of the idealistic 1960s, Cooper based his act around death, with LPs
like Killer and Love It to Death, and the necrophilia anthem “I Love the Dead”. The band’s hard-riffing tunes and grand
guignol theatrics drew a vast following of “sick things”: young kids looking
for something definitively Seventies, a nihilistic new sensibility as repellent
to older rock fans as to their parent’s generation.
For a while Cooper was even huger in Britain than in America. His infamy was boosted by a campaign to ban
his concerts launched by the Labour MP Leo Abse, and by Mary Whitehouse’s
efforts to stop the BBC showing the group’s #1’s single “School’s Out”.
“Boy, we could not have bought that publicity,” laughs
Cooper. “They couldn’t figure out why we were sending him cigars and her
flowers. But every time they spent an
extra hour trying to ban us in England, they helped us so much. “ Abse and
Whitehouse formed an unlikely alliance, given that the Pontypool MP had been an
architect of the permissive society, by pushing for legalization of
homosexuality. But at a time of anxiety about rising levels of youth crime,
Cooper’s disturbing image and gory theatrics were easily connected in the
popular imagination with A Clockwork
Orange and the copycat ultra-violence that Kubrick’s movie had allegedly
inspired. “When I saw the film, I thought, there’s an awful lot of Alice in
Alex,” Cooper says of Malcolm McDowell’s delinquent anti-hero. “Like me, he’s
got a snake, he’s wearing eye make-up. And later McDowell actually told me, ‘there’s
a few Alice references in there’. So I
totally related to A Clockwork Orange
– not the mindless violence, but the fact that violence has its place in
theatrics.”
British rock always was more theatrical than its American precursor,
and often this involved destruction or apocalyptic gimmickry: The Move smashing TV sets, Arthur Brown and
his flaming helmet, Screamin’ Lord Sutch making a grand entrance from inside a
coffin. “That’s why most people thought
we were British at first,” says Cooper.
Another affinity with U.K. rock was the art school genesis of the band.
“Me and Dennis Dunaway, our bassist, were both art majors and probably the two
strongest forces as far as the image and the staging. We were Salvador Dali
fans.”
As Super Duper Alice
Cooper relates via its well-executed interweaving of photographs and
voice-overs, the group started out in Phoenix, Arizona as a high school Beatles
parody act the Earwigs, before evolving into the more serious punkadelic garage
band The Spiders. By 1969, they had moved to LA and hooked up with manager Shep
Gordon, a young man with no music industry experience but an instinctive grasp
of the Andrew Loog Oldham Principle: not only is there no such thing as bad
publicity, but the manager’s job is to engineer outrage, propagate rumours,
incite hysteria.
It was Gordon who blagged the band a prime spot at 1969’s
Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival,
playing just before the headlining John Lennon, and who most likely arranged
for a chicken to find its way onstage mid-set.
Thrown by Alice into the audience, the poor fowl was torn to shreds. “It seemed to upset the whole world,” recalls
Alice. “That’s when I realised rock was looking for a villain, somebody that
would have done that on purpose. That
spurred me to create the Alice character to be darker.” It was Gordon also who conceived a stunt that
ratcheted up Alice Cooper’s notoriety in Britain. A flatbed truck carried a giant billboard of
Alice, nude except for his pet snake, through London, only to mysteriously
break down in Piccadilly Circus, where a bevy of reporters and photographers
just happened to be waiting to document the ensuing traffic jam and police
fracas.
Billion Dollar Babies,
the 1973 album that spawned two of Alice’s biggest UK hits (“Elected” and
“Hello Hooray”) was the band’s peak. The massive tour of America raked in so
much money Alice made the cover of Forbes
as emblem of a new breed of rock tycoon. But in reality, the band were
funneling most of the proceeds back into their increasingly spectacular stage
production. Frustration with this situation, says Cooper, is one reason the
group split up.
Alice Cooper went solo with Welcome To My Nightmare. The 1975 album/tour/TV special was his
most extravagant production yet, the
consummation of his driving intuition that ultimately rock was just another
branch of showbiz. A fan of Hollywood
and Broadway who was influenced as much by
West Side Story and Hellzapoppin’
as by The Who and The Doors, Cooper thought of himself as “the Busby Berkeley
of rock”.
In the second half of the Seventies, he became an
increasingly mainstream figure: palling around with the likes of George Burns
and Groucho Marx, appearing on TV shows such as Hollywood Squares and The
Muppets, even playing golf with President Gerald Ford. Privately, he battled alcoholism. Alice drank
Budweiser from breakfast to bedtime, sustaining what he calls “a golden buzz. I
was the most functional alcoholic there ever was. “ But when he graduated from
beer to whiskey and “started throwing up blood in the morning”, Cooper
realised, “I’m really killing myself.”
Drained and distracted, Cooper was poorly placed to maintain
his relevance in a changing rock scene.
As so often happens, the very people who idolized and emulated Cooper
now eclipsed him. Punk made his exploits seem tame by
comparison, even though Johnny Rotten was a huge fan, auditioning for the Sex
Pistols by miming to “I’m Eighteen” and decades later penning gushing
sleevenotes for an Alice Cooper box set. In the Eighties, Goth, industrial and
extreme metal took death-tripping even further.
Cooper also influenced hair metal outfits like Mötley
Crüe and Twisted Sister. In Super
Duper, Dee Snider pays tribute: “We came from this man’s loins. He
ejaculated - and glam metal was born”
After overcoming his addictions and renewing his Christian
faith (both his father and grandfather were Protestant pastors), Cooper
returned in the late Eighties as a revered elder of metal in much the same way as
Ozzy Osbourne. But in the process, he says, he underwent a persona shift. The original, alcohol-era Alice was a victim
as much as a violator. “He was always in a straitjacket, getting his head cut
off. He represented kids that were
bullied, the artistic kind of outcasts.” The post-comeback, sober Alice, who’s
sold millions of records and continues to play large concerts worldwide, is
more like a cartoon bad guy. “Alice had to be reborn as an arrogant villain. Now
he wasn’t the one who was beaten, he was the one who was going to beat. He was the dominatrix, he wasn’t the trick”.
