A Night of Rock and Roll and a Wild Childhood
My older brother and I were pulling into our gravel driveway after morning football practice when we heard the news on the radio. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man said, “the king of rock and roll is dead.” At first, I thought it was Alice Cooper. It wasn’t, of course, much to my relief. It was Elvis. But it’s no wonder Alice first came to mind.
Three nights earlier, my friend Greg and I had seen Alice Cooper in Oklahoma City. We were just shy of our 14th birthdays. The fact that we had gone to the concert by ourselves may have been a sign that we were growing up. More likely, it was a sign of the times.
This was the tail-end of the free-range childhood era. Parents would push their kids out the door and tell them to disappear until dinner time. So, the kids got on their bikes, rode across creeks and through alleys, snuck into movie theaters and pool halls, played baseball with sticks and rocks, started fires and threw snakes at one another. Kids were feral. They ran wild. If you shot your buddy in the thigh with a pellet gun when you were trying to kill a squirrel, well, he shouldn’t have been standing there.
My parents never seemed concerned that we would slice off a finger with a hunting knife, or get abducted by a motorcycle gang. They taught us to make good decisions and figured we would eventually get home intact. Somehow, we always did.
In the career arc of Alice Cooper, this was near his mid-‘70s peak. His teen anthem “School’s Out” had been released a few years earlier. In the span of two years, Alice had released "Welcome to My Nightmare," "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell," and "Lace and Whiskey" — a trifecta of albums perfectly suited to spook parents, church ladies and Anita Bryant. Alice’s shows were like B-movie horror pictures: decapitated baby dolls, boa constrictors, leggy women, a giant cyclops, an electric chair, scenes from an asylum. If parents were nervous about turning their boys loose into this crowd of people wearing capes and black snake-eye makeup, who could blame them?
Maybe Greg and I should have been anxious about being unattended by someone older, who could help us navigate the scene. We weren’t. We didn’t know better. Greg’s parents dropped us at the front door of the Myriad, a 13,000-seat arena in downtown Oklahoma City. Tickets in hand, we wandered in like it was a junior-high basketball game. “Excuse me, sir. Where is Section 324?”
Alice was on a two-year North American tour dubbed “King of the Silver Screen.” The name fit. The stage featured an enormous screen framed with Hollywood lights. The prelude to the opening number, “Under My Wheels,” was a film of Alice running toward the audience, as if being chased. Right on cue for the vocals, the real Alice busted through the screen — top hat, a crop whip, black eye-makeup — and the show commenced. The screen served as a kind of curtain for the entire show, from which a variety of ludicrous characters and props emerged: giant spiders, gallows with a hanging rope, a guillotine from whence Alice’s head was chopped. Maybe there were chickens and bats involved, I don’t know.
A week later, two of his shows in Las Vegas were recorded for the live "Alice Cooper Show" album. It bombed — most of the performance on record was lifeless — and Alice later said he hated it. He was exhausted from travel and alcohol. If he wasn’t at rock bottom, he was near it. He later called “I Never Cry,” which he performed regularly on this tour, “an alcoholic confession.” The following year he checked himself into a sanitarium and got sober.
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None of that came through during the show in Oklahoma City. We ate it up. It wasn’t scary or creepy or sad. We saw it for what it was: good, campy fun. Alice Cooper owes more to vaudeville than to witchcraft, more to Ed Wood than "The Exorcist."
Afterward, Greg and I walked out the north doors of the Myriad, into the downtown streets with thousands of long-haired fans. We were probably the only ones looking for our parents. Neither of us recalled instructions about where to meet them. Just, you know, “find us afterward, somewhere.”
Amid the revelry and the traffic, we looked toward the corner of Sheridan and Robinson, and Greg pointed. “There they are,” he said. Indeed, there were his parents, idling in their giant Ford LTD, cigarette smoke rolling out of their windows. They didn’t have a care in the world. How did they know when the show would be over? How did they know we would find them? Where did they go while Greg and I were at the concert? I’m envisioning a couple of Crown and Cokes at a dark, wood-paneled restaurant on the city’s west side, or a little beer joint that played George Jones on the jukebox.
“How was she?” Greg’s dad asked.
“He,” Greg said. “Alice Cooper is a ‘he.’ He was good.”
I once read an interview with Alice Cooper about him seeing The Who when he was young. He couldn’t help thinking that the huge stage was a waste, like an unused canvas. That’s when the persona of Alice Cooper was born. He knew that if he could spook the parents, the kids would come. He dangled a couple of macabre images in front of the media and — presto! — the game was on.
Lucky for us, some parents knew the score. They knew we would return unharmed from kidnappers, motorcycle gangs, giant spiders and Alice Cooper. Let them go out and seek adventure, they said. Let them explore, stumble around and develop survival skills. Let them wander a bit in the wilderness. The world wasn’t a guillotine waiting to fall.
Russ Florence lives and works in Oklahoma City. His column appears regularly in Viewpoints.
