Dunaway Dennis - Snakes! Guillotines! Electric chairs!: my adventures in the Alice Cooper group

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Dedicated to my two wonderful daughters, who urged me to write this book, and my beautiful wife. They are my true loves.

In fond memory of Glen Buxton

19471997

I WAS CURSED with the gift of a vivid memory. Its so funny now to sit with fellow road warriors and hear them recounting some epic, razzle-dazzle story of our rock-n-roll years, while I holler, No, no, no, thats not how it happened! There are, of course, a lot of reasons for my buddies to suffer memory slippage. We were pursuing the amusements, and there were a lot of ear-splitting screams in the fun house.

Early on, Alice gave me the nickname Dr. Dreary. It was for my habit of getting lost in deep thought. This was during our days together as art students. When it came to conceptualizing projects, we were like mad fiends. Art was our true calling, and it seemed to spring from the habit of observing people. An artist just sees things. I began faithfully keeping dream books and diaries. Even during the roller-coaster years, I always wrote letters home. It meant a lot to me to remember things right, especially as my artistic ventures went rocketing into Bizarro Land.

When I was a teenager, I got the idea to apply the weird inventions of my art world to a rock band. My best friend shared my enthusiasm for the notion, and we got together to talk others into joining us. Some people got it right away; some people wanted to punch us in the face. Still, we were driven to share our mission with the whole wide world.

Our collective dream came true. That is the essence of Alice Cooper.

You might be here to read about your hero, Alice, or to learn of some injustice that detoured the original group. Im here because Im proud of what my closest friends and I accomplished. Blame is not important. Blame does not override the memories of how goddamned great it was to be a fast-moving rock-n-roller in the 60s and 70s.

Hold the tragedy. We had cubic fun.

Being stars then and making it through that era was a monumental miracle. The choices we made were done while shooting through deep space and dodging in and out of a massive meteor shower. Were poor choices made? Everyone makes his share, and some choices get heavier amplification than others. Want to hear more? Im here to tell you about it as I remember it.

And I do remember it. Some of the events in this recounting have been combined, and the order of things may be slightly askew, but its as close to real as I could get. If you were a fan of the Alice Cooper group, you might have sharp-red recollections of seeing Alice hang from a gallows while we blasted Killer at you. Our specialty was the creation of glaring, graphic shows designed to send you out to the sidewalk reeling.

Sometimes our own doom seemed imminent. This is what happens when you come up playing penitentiaries, air force bases, and cowboy bars with a dangerously high hostility content. We liked getting in peoples grills, but sometimes the audience was ready to put a razor in our faces.

Then there was So Paulo, a concert that really sticks in my brain, and not just because it was our last together. It was huge. You just dont expect to see 158,000 people inside a venue. It was, in fact, the largest indoor concert ever, according to The Guinness Book of World Records . I just know that when I looked around the curtain at the crowd, it was like staring into the Milky Way.

For the Alice Cooper group, reality was not a given. We always made sure it was going to get stretched, as the saying goes, like a weary snake. And from our earliest days, we had to accept the reality that our fans were going to honor us by getting seriously weird themselves.

For that So Paulo gig, it seemed that every freak in the Southern Hemisphere had come to lay on a big helping of Brazilian crazy. All the trashed-up, sexed-out regalia made us feel right at home, too. Unfortunately there was a kind of heaviness in the air.

The police, for one, had put us right on edge. Brazil was still in the throes of being run by a military dictatorship, and the police were glad to show they were unstoppable. That afternoon, for the sound check, wed been stuffed into military vehicles that bulldozed through the crowds on the streets. We were sure we saw a kid get run over. Alice pleaded with the driver to slow down, but he only yelled back in Portuguese, laughed, and drove faster.

That night, we looked out onto the crowd and there they were, right up front, clutching automatic weapons and looking as antsy as meth heads, the very same itchy-fingered cops. These were going to be our protectors !

On top of all the cops, there was a strange emotional weight hanging over the group. We couldnt talk about it, because that wasnt our style. But it was there. It was like wed lost control of the dream. Wed constructed this powerful locomotive, and now the brakes were shot, the wheels were coming off, and up ahead the bridge was out

Michael Bruce caught my eye and gave me the disgruntled nod that said, Can you believe this? He had his guitar over one shoulder while his other arm was around a captivating Brazilian girl from the opening band. Michael was tireless in his pursuit of the beauties. He always had some sort of scheme going offstage, but onstage he was as reliable as a Mack truck. In his hardened face, though, I could see his sense of disillusion. We had sold-out crowds everywhere, a No. 1 album in the racks, stories in the magazines proclaiming us the highest-grossing band in the worldbigger than the Stones, bigger than Zeppelinbut where were those kinds of checks? No wonder Michael often looked aggravated.

Our other guitarist, Glen Buxton, wore the same expression hed had for about a yeara distant look. His gaze had a sinister depth. Glen had been the first to see something was wrong in the group. His response, though, was just to party it out. In Brazil, the purest bad substances came to him piled on silver trays. Just two nights before, Id seen him crawling down the hallway of the Copacabana, loaded into a world beyond recognition.

This book is dedicated to Glen, clearly one of lifes sterling originals. He only had to walk into a room and the inflammatory wisecracks would be scorching the earth. We expected this, just as we knew, as musicians, to expect him to deliver a blast of jagged guitar from the planets beyond. But now Glen was just more interested in getting blasted.

Towering over him was Neal Smith, our flamboyant, golden-god drummer. No, wait. Gold wasnt good enough for himhe was the Platinum God, always entertaining us, always carrying us to some higher, more explosive level. Neal and I had formed a tight bond, and not just because I was sleeping with his sister Cindy. My bass and his drums had found some unaccountable connection that went way beyond our being the rhythm section. My rolling bass lines fed off his primal drumbeat, and we would get totally locked in, creating more thunder than bombers in the sky.