MUSIC CULTURE
A Man Named Alice
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. This was one
A man with dank hair, heavy makeup and wielding a sword was singing an anti-education rock song on the TV. My dad read the sports pages and my mum knitted a scarf. It was a displacement activity; she often didn’t know what else to do with herself despite knowing she could do so much more.
“She generally gave herself very good advice though she very seldom followed it.”
My parents had the innate ability to tune out those things that they didn’t want to hear or know about. A man with a sword singing rock fitted into the ‘things to tune out’ category. As did a man named Alice.
School’s Out For Summer 1972
But it was Thursday evening and it was Top Of The Pops, the one programme of the week I wanted to watch that ate into their viewing time. And they let me because that’s what parents do.
I also watched The Big Match on Sunday afternoons but that wasn’t ‘parent TV watching time’ so I got the TV to myself anyway. Unless my sister wanted to annoy me which she often did. It’s what sisters do.
My dad’s newspaper headlines were bad news: The Munich terrorist attack, another UK miners’ strike and something called Watergate that went over my young English head.
He would occasionally lift an eye above the newspaper to see what rubbish I was watching on Top Of The Pops. When he saw the man named Alice with the makeup and sword on the screen, his eyebrow raised as if to say,
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
His son’s interests were straying into the ever increasingly bizarre, at least from the eyes of his generation. Did he not know?
“The best people are mad.”
“This is nonsense, a waste of everyone’s time,” he’d say before returning to the cricket reports. It was never a waste of my time.
“If you knew time as well as I do… you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.”
Killer
Alice’s School’s Out performance on BBC Top of The Pops was a defining moment for a 13-year old boy from southeast England. This was showmanship beyond anything else he’d seen before, let alone that incredible rock riff and the voice. His world had changed.
“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
Alice Cooper was instantly added to the list of the greatest bands the world has ever seen since the demise of The Beatles. The other two on the list being, The Faces and the Rolling Stones.
Note: David Bowie hung just outside the list as I couldn’t afford to buy many albums and had to be selective. Anyway, my mate had all Bowie’s LPs so I could listen to them when I went round his house.
This meant that the paper round and Saturday job income was going to be stretched as I needed Alice Cooper’s album, Killer. My goodness, what an album: Under My Wheels, Halo Of Flies, You Drive Me Nervous. I was in another world.
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
I played the Killer album to death on our little record deck while my dad read the sports pages and my mum knitted the scarf. They may have feigned not listening to the tracks about Dead Babies and running someone over but I imagine they were secretly thinking something very different.
“Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day!”
They didn’t understand Alice as I did.
“You have to close your eyes, otherwise you won’t understand anything”
No More Mr Cle-e-ean
“It doesn’t matter which way you go so long as you get somewhere.”
Alice Cooper was getting somewhere and fast. The Billion Dollar Babies album came next and with a fake billion-dollar banknote. It became №1 in the UK and US charts. A thumping Stones/Beatle-esque single flew from the album and assaulted your ears with pleasure. Alice was getting bigger and better.
But Billion Dollar Babies was their peak. In late ’73, Muscle of Love failed to match its predecessor’s success; it just wasn’t as good. The steam had gone out of Alice’s roller, at least in the UK. The album’s single, Teenage Lament ’74, was great but signalled a downward trend into the rabbit hole for Alice.
The band started to have disagreements and when the lead singer next appeared, he’d changed his name from Vince Furnier to Alice Cooper. Alice was solo.
“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours”
It wasn’t the end. 1975 and I’d swapped the paper round and Saturday job for real work and a real job. Real in the sense it was five days a week, work was a looser concept at that time and job meant employment rather than actually doing anything productive.
No matter, I had real money and Alice Cooper was coming to London on his Welcome To My Nightmare tour.
My mates and I scrambled to the front of 16,000 fans at Wembley Arena, slightly to the side and in front of an enormous stage speaker. Alice was great that night, of course, but it was something of a swansong that had swum.
I didn’t know it then but, in just five years, the Arena would rock to another US singer. This time he would not fade or have a swansong. This one was Bruce Springsteen and that’s a whole new story.
“It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
Note: All quotations are from Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
