ALICE COOPER: The thing about theatrics is there needs to be a punch line. In a movie, if it just ends, you go, “Oh.” But if it ends with the villain getting his just desserts there’s something really satisfying, even for me. So I knew if I was the villain I would have to die at the end of the show, and that’s when we started coming up with all these different ways to kill Alice.
Back in those days we were doing tricks that didn’t have safety devices on them. We were hanging Alice one time in London in 1974, and the piano wire that was supposed to stop me before I hit the noose failed. If I didn’t have the self-preservation button in my head, it could have hung me. I swung my head back so the rope went over my chin and didn’t catch my neck. We should have cut the noose, so in case my neck did hit it, it would fall apart. But I went right to the floor and right through the slot in the gallows and hit the floor and knocked myself out for a couple minutes. At that point we started replacing the piano wire with cable.
ROB ZOMBIE (ex-White Zombie): When I was little and I was an Alice Cooper fan, there were so many weird rumors and insanity. The show was larger than life, and the rumors become bigger than the reality.
ALICE COOPER: At a show in Toronto, somebody threw a live chicken onstage. To this day, I can’t understand why anybody would bring a chicken to a rock festival. “Let me see, I got my tickets, I got my wallet, I got my drugs, I got my chicken. Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.” So there it was, a white chicken onstage. And I threw it back in the audience and they tore it to pieces. The kicker was the fact that the first five rows were all in wheelchairs. So it was the crippled kids that tore the chicken apart. There were white feathers everywhere. I just figured it would fly away or somebody would get a great pet from Alice, not knowing that I was throwing the chicken to its death. The next day I looked at the paper, and I was as surprised as anybody else. “Alice Cooper kills chicken and drinks blood.” I was like, “What?” But when you have an image like Alice Cooper, anything’s believable.
For many members of Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, MC5, Blue Cheer, Hawkwind, and countless others, alcohol and drugs were a vehicle to creativity, a way to cope with hard times, a source of relaxation, and a pathway to easier sexual escapades. Of course, such escapism was a loaded gun that took the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, and Stooges bassist David Alexander.
JAMES WILLIAMSON: I don’t know of anyone [who was more decadent than the Stooges]. The drugs and decadence weren’t an act: it was the real deal. It’s hard to imagine living a harder life than that and still surviving. And we nearly didn’t.
DICKIE PETERSON: I grew up being told, “If you do marijuana you’ll be a slave for the rest of your life,” and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, “If you take LSD you’ll be a slave for life.” I took LSD, and I wasn’t a slave for life. Then it got to be, “If you take cocaine, you’ll be a slave for life.” There was a time when I thought, “Hey, I’ve been taking heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on the weekends.” I actually believed that you didn’t have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don’t lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don’t tell people it is, because they’ll find out it doesn’t, then when they get to the stuff that really [will], they ain’t gonna believe you.
LEMMY KILMISTER: My view on drugs has always been you can do whatever you like [on] either side of the gig, except heroin. But don’t mess up the gig. When it’s time, you better show up and you better deliver. That’s the only rule I’ve got.
JIMMY PAGE: I can’t speak for the others [in Led Zeppelin], but for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.
CARMINE APPICE: Being on the road back then was pretty wild. Everyone’s heard about the mudshark incident with Led Zeppelin.
RICHARD COLE (Led Zeppelin road manager): I was in Seattle with Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge, and we started to catch sharks out the window [of the Edgewater Inn Hotel]. We caught a big lot of sharks, at least two dozen, stuck coat hangers through the gills, and left ’em in the closet. But the true shark story was that it wasn’t even a shark. It was a red snapper, and the chick happened to be a fucking redheaded broad with a ginger pussy. And that is the truth. [Zeppelin drummer John] Bonzo [Bonham] was in the room, but I did it. Mark Stein [of Vanilla Fudge] filmed the whole thing. And she loved it. It was like, “You’d like a bit of fucking, eh? Let’s see how your red snapper likes this red snapper!” It was the nose of the fish, and that girl must have come twenty times. I’m not saying the chick wasn’t drunk, I’m not saying that any of us weren’t drunk. But it was nothing malicious or harmful. No way! No one was ever hurt. She might have been hit by a shark a few times for disobeying orders, but she didn’t get hurt.
IGGY POP: I think it was the combination of marijuana and alcohol, which makes you very sensual—and the pill. For the first time, [girls] were all gettin’ really free. And a lot of them were goin’, “Well, let me try this guy, let me try [that] guy . . .” because they could try it!
WAYNE KRAMER: We were in San Francisco once and we met this girl who was a total freak and ended up with the whole band—fucked us all to death. We had a friend who was a photographer and he was hanging out at the hotel, and he happened to come into the room while some of the guys were in the middle of getting it on with this girl. And the Berkeley Bar published them. When some of the band members’ wives saw the photos, there was hell to pay.
CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER (groupie, penis sculptor): I got Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson [from MC5]. Wayne wasn’t at his biggest. It wasn’t his fault at all. It was a mold failure on my part. I only captured his head and a teeny-teeny bit of shaft. But there was more to come. Actually Dennis came in the mold, speaking of coming. That’s only happened twice.
LEMMY KILMISTER: Hawkwind was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a band. Sometimes we’d do three hits of acid before we got onstage and sometimes five, because everybody said it doesn’t work two days in a row, but we found out that if you double the dose, it does. But I got busted on the Canadian border, and they fired me. The most cosmic band in the world fired me for getting busted. Can you believe it? But the police had to let me go because they charged me for cocaine, and I really had amphetamines, so I was only in jail overnight. The longest time I’ve ever been in jail was for four days. That was also a bust, but it wasn’t me, it was the chick I was going to screw that night. We ride home, and they opened the trunk of the car and it was full of her pills. I’ve never been sentenced for anything.
JIMMY PAGE: [Zeppelin tour manager] Richard Cole ran into one of the air hostesses on the [Led Zeppelin private plane] the Starship, and she told him, “You know I made a lot of money off of you guys,” and Cole asked her how. “Well,” she explained, “when people on the plane used to sniff cocaine they’d roll up hundred-dollar bills to use as straws. Then after they were high or passed out, they’d forget about the money. So we would go around and grab all the money that was laying around.”
NEAL SMITH (ex-Alice Cooper): I’d fuck a groupie and kick her on the floor. I had more groupies sleep on the floor than on my bed, I guarantee that.
ALICE COOPER: The very first time the band went to Paris, we felt we had to buy prostitutes, because that was what you would do. We’re all from Phoenix, and here we are at the Hotel Arc de Triomphe, and French prostitutes seemed like the right thing to do. They showed up and they were all, like, forty-seven years old, and none of us wanted anything to do with them, but we couldn’t get rid of them. When I pictured prostitutes, I pictured something a lot better than that. But these girls were almost like World War II prostitutes. It was disgusting. Then we realized that we really didn’t need prostitutes. The Hotel Arc de Triomphe was the SS headquarters during the occupation of France. So this place was just as decadent as could be. But the traffic of girls coming in and out was
a blur and I honestly don’t remember much of anything.
NEAL SMITH: There were twins—a brunette and a blonde—in Zurich, who came up to Alice and my room at the Atlantis Hotel after our show in the fall of ’72. The blonde was knockout gorgeous. They follow us into our room, the blonde took my arm, the brunette took Alice’s. I was having great groupie sex, but even though I was in the next bed, I don’t know what Alice was doing because they disappeared under their covers. Not a word had been spoken by the girls. Eventually, Alice and I both emerged and these two gorgeous girls start speaking to each other in Swiss. They didn’t speak a word of English. So Alice and I look at each other and just start talking in English. It was the most bizarre, yet in some strange way, wonderful evening that we’d had on the road. But, of course, there were many. I was with two girls several times in the same room.
GENE SIMMONS: Making and playing music is very exciting but it’s not a goal in and of itself. Everyone who’s ever picked up a guitar did it to get laid. And if they say, “No, I did it just for the love of music,” they’re lying to your face.
LEMMY KILMISTER: I don’t care what people say. They’re in it for the pussy. The music’s important too, but it’s more about the pussy. Chasing women is my biggest hobby. Actually, no, that’s the career. The music is the hobby. I’ve always liked the strip club. Sure, having a lap dance is a tease, but you can sometimes talk them into it, you know? And you can only talk them into it if you have a lap dance. You can’t convince them to go home with you from the bar. I’ve been with five porn stars over the years. It sounds very glamorous and sexy, but they’re just the same when they fuck as anyone else. Then again, I’m not as good in bed as the people I usually fuck, so I suppose it evens out.
TED NUGENT: I toured for the girls. I mean, I toured for the music, but if it wasn’t for the sexual adventure you couldn’t have got me on the road with a gun to my head. I would have taken it away and shot you with it. If all I had to do was look at those unclean heathens in the front row with their lack of personal hygiene and stenchy leather blue jean material, I’d take up crocheting.
CARMINE APPICE: Sometimes there were these mother-daughter situations. The mother was probably my age at the time—thirty-five to thirty-eight—and the daughter was seventeen. It was the kind of thing where you get a vibe, like you’re in the room and you’re hanging out with the daughter, then you can see the mother acting weird, like she wanted to be there, so you just sort of play it. You play the cards and it just sort of happens. But in those days, there was no AIDS, so anything went.
LEMMY KILMISTER: One time a chick just climbed up onstage and blew me. I was singing—well, I couldn’t stop, could I? But that was in the seventies, when women were more liable to do that.
IAN GILLAN (ex-Deep Purple): I had a fantastic experience in Lebanon. I was working in Beirut in a casino with a band for about three months. There was this dancer, Angelo Manchenia, who tried to kill me one night. We were staying at this house in the mountains. Sounds romantic, but it stunk to high heaven. After we finished at the casino we used to party every night. Manchenia would come home and kick the bottles off the table and start dancing. I was sharing a room with [bassist] Roger Glover, and Manchenia was with this super-tall dancer girl with long red hair. The bathroom was not usable, so we’d stand under the moonlight and do what we had to do. I was doing that one night, and Manchenia pulled a big knife out of his boot and said, “I kill you [because he thought I was having sex with his girl].” Then he realized I couldn’t be in the room doing what Roger was doing to his girlfriend and outside by the rocks at the same time. He said, “Ah, I’ve insulted you, now I have to kill myself.” I said, “Is there some way out of this?” He said, “Yeah, we can become blood brothers.” So we did. We slashed our hands and let the blood mingle, and we went back in and he forgot about his girlfriend being with Roger and we danced the night away and drank more wine.
Some proto-metal icons liked to push taboos even further than sex and drugs, dabbling in occult or Satanic rituals they viewed as a natural evolution of an uninhibited mind.
NEAL SMITH: [Guitarist] Glen [Buxton’s] girlfriend was a friend of [guitarist] Robby Krieger and [drummer] John Densmore from the Doors, so we were going to have this séance. It ended up it was the five of us. This is a rental house, and we paint a pentagram on the floor and all sit around the pentagram. It was Glen, Alice, [guitarist] Mike [Bruce], [bassist] Dennis [Dunaway] and me, and [Doors producer] Paul Rothschild, Jim Morrison, and David Crosby. This chick is trying to conjure up spirits on the other side. Believe me, even though everyone had been drinking or smoking, it was embarrassing. She was screaming and moaning and groaning, and everyone was like, “What the fuck is with this woman? She needs some serious medication.” She’s probably still fucking crazy.
RITCHIE BLACKMORE: I don’t believe in any organized religion. But one of my main passions in life is in communication with entities and spirits. I hear from idiots in the business, who go, “Oh, he’s a Satanist. He lights candles in his dressing room.” I’m not a Satanist. The reason I used to light candles was to have a little bit of meditation before I went on stage, and I hate the lights that you have in those dressing rooms backstage at, say, Madison Square Garden. But people were convinced that I had an altar in there or something, and I was sacrificing chickens.
MICK WALL (author, journalist): I think Zeppelin’s mystical interests were more earnest and sincere than most people’s. In the case of Black Sabbath, it was slightly more sci-fi. But for Jimmy Page, [who purchased English occultist and author Aleister Crowley’s house], magic was something to be taken seriously.
JIMMY PAGE: It’s unfortunate that my studies of mysticism and Eastern and Western traditions of magic and tantrism have all come under the umbrella of [Aleister] Crowley. Yeah, sure, I read a lot of Crowley and I was fascinated by his techniques and ideas. But I was reading across the board. It wasn’t unusual at that time to be interested in comparative religions and magic. It was quite a major part of my formative experience as much as anything else.
BOBBY LIEBLING: I was practicing all kinds of black arts and occult and Satanism, and I was a member of the Satanic church in the DC area. I did a lot of incantations and was in an actual coven. One night I was at my friend’s house. We always kept a couple of copies of Anton LaVey’s original Satanic Bible around, and books on witchcraft and spells and the occult. It was July 4, and we were completely sober. We were sitting in the basement and reading from the Satanic Bible, and all of a sudden I started to blow a little fog out of my mouth. I was into the reading and hadn’t noticed that the room had gotten ice cold. All the pipes in the entire basement formed droplets of water that became icicles. The basement windows were covered with frost and the entire room was about 25 degrees. And this was in a matter of 10 to 20 minutes. I got so scared. I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life. To me, it was a sign saying, “You’re fucking with the wrong thing, man.” It scared me so badly that I just dropped that idea and threw all the artifacts away that came along with the game.
JOE HASSELVANDER (ex-Pentagram, Raven): Bobby conjured up something that scared him to death and he ran out of the house and never came back. Of course, you’re supposed to close those doors, but they never did. And I think that’s part of why he has had so many problems in his life with drug addiction and a lack of financial success. I really believe that, because something like that happened to me. I found these tarot cards dating back to the Salem witch trials that were at a house in New York where we lived with Raven, and they were coated in human blood. They were horrifying. I took about ten of them and they almost destroyed my life. A spirit was found in two of these cards, and the person who was bound to them had invoked demons and was probably responsible for the Salem witchcraft hysteria. He made people go nuts by sending his cursed objects out to them. It caused an incredible poltergeist outbreak in my house and I had to move. I was in Virginia, and that’s why I’m in Massachusetts today. The toilets f
lushed black, there was an infestation of flies. Objects were flying off the counters at us. The house smelled like Rosewater Lavender, which was an old cologne people used in the 1600s. We would tell the spirit to leave, [but] it would go to another room. I was someone who didn’t believe in any of this, and in two weeks I had to become an expert or it would have killed me and my son. Finally, I found out who it was, what it was, and I had to return it to Salem, which I did. Since then it’s still been a process getting rid of the residual effects. I had an exorcism done—a cleansing of my house—several times, and I was finally able to leave and put miles between me and it. I’m a very religious person because of it today. I won’t go into it any further, but I will say that Cliff Burton from Metallica had the other half of the artifacts that I had, and I really believe they killed him.
ALICE COOPER: I was never Satanic. In fact, I’m a practicing Christian now. But when I was at the prime of my Alice Cooper notoriety and I was drinking, there was a big gray area where I started and where Alice ended. I had no idea. I was hanging out with Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, and Jimi Hendrix, and I thought I had to be Alice all the time. Those were times I was so drunk I don’t remember anything. One night I was in a Rolls Royce, I was driving, [Aerosmith singer] Steven Tyler was in the car and we had a gun. The next day I don’t remember if we knocked over a 7-Eleven. We could have done anything. There were many, many mornings that I woke up after parties with all the wrong people, where I went, “Please don’t let me read about something in the paper that I did.” Because when you’re drunk and you’re Alice, you feel like you have the license to do anything. There were times when people said, “You and Jim Morrison were hanging from a balcony to see which one could hang the longest.” I don’t remember any of that.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 3
