Episode 840 - Alice Cooper
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:this is wtf my podcast welcome to it i saw the old man the the source i went to the source and uh he's all right i did about an hour over there that was about all that was necessary i'll get into that in a minute today on the show i talked to alice cooper
Marc:And it's interesting about Alice Cooper.
Marc:You know, I'll tell you about that in a minute, too, because I didn't.
Marc:Of course, I know who Alice Cooper is.
Marc:I know who some of his music.
Marc:I know his reputation in certain ways.
Marc:I know my assumptions about him, but it wasn't until I went back and listened to a bit of almost every record he did before I really got a full picture in terms of who he is musically.
Marc:which I found to be pretty fucking good.
Marc:Obviously, I'm not the first person to say that, but for unique reasons, and I'll get into that in a minute.
Marc:I am up here in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Marc:I am doing the thing that I do sometimes when I come up here.
Marc:I go to this reasonably priced restaurant
Marc:spa situation that is gorgeous it's up in the mountains it's called 10 000 waves you get a little room and then there's a japanese spa with the pools and and tubs and massages and today recording as i am on wednesday the day after tuesday i had for the first time i got shiatsu and i had to get the trump knots shiatsu out of the fibers of my fucking muscles and
Marc:Because that guy infuses himself into your very genetic composition.
Marc:What I started to realize, and look, if any of you are like, no, here he goes again.
Marc:Then don't fucking listen.
Marc:Really, seriously, man.
Marc:Just realize that not only is this guy, this leader, this president, probably pretty mentally unstable, which is not a surprise.
Marc:And some people like that about him.
Marc:He's erratic, whatever.
Marc:The thing is, he's persistent.
Marc:And if you check your phone a lot, what happens is you're just inundating yourself with images of him.
Marc:So, you know, you go to your browser and you start looking at stories and you could put yourself through 20 or 30 pictures of that guy a day.
Marc:And if you are disturbed by what's going on or angered or terrified, keep pounding your brain with those images, which is hard to get rid of the images on your news browser.
Marc:But I think it has somewhat the same effect as posters being everywhere, like Mao Zedong or Stalin or any of the other famous fascists.
Marc:You just like if they constantly put their image everywhere, which they usually do in buildings or they force you to do it in your home or it's constantly it's on your TV to just this image of that guy's mug in varying degrees of of anger and insanity and sort of, you know, false strength poses.
Marc:strutting pomposity poses all of that takes a toll and starts hammering away at your psychic machinery these are psychic terrorism tools and tactics at work to pummel your sense of outrage to pummel your sense of what is moral and right and also to pummel what america is supposed to be don't be pummeled by putting yourself through multiple images of that guy and
Guest:into your head because it does after a while you'll just kind of shut the down which is what happens in authoritarian countries you just sort of like oh there he is again oh my god he's everywhere i'm exhausted uh let me just do my job oh i hope this turns out okay and they don't bother me oh god why am i so sad and thinking about death all the time
Marc:don't do it and if you don't know why it's happening to you it might be the constant input of those images and of course anytime he spins out and goes all shitty hitler on us somewhere in the united states surrounded by you know his cult-like following who enjoy chanting childlike slogans that in addition to you know the constant uh psychic pummeling with photographs will take its toll stay awake stay vigilant push back
Marc:So I went and visited my dad.
Marc:And this is the thing.
Marc:My dad is sort of trying to downsize a bitch, trying to unload some stuff.
Marc:He was sort of a kind of an amateur art collector.
Marc:He never bought too many winners, but, you know, he moved most of it out.
Marc:He used to have a lot of art in his house of one kind or another Native American art.
Marc:Some indigenous art from Alaska.
Marc:He had some paintings from modern painters here in New Mexico.
Marc:And then a bunch of paintings by this other guy that he got sort of hooked into buying an entire collection by this guy, Zerby.
Marc:Some encaustic abstract bits and canvases, all gone.
Marc:But there's one canvas that the old man can unload, and I said, maybe I could help you out.
Marc:Maybe I could help you out.
Marc:Now, I don't know.
Marc:I don't know if there's any nitty-gritty derp band fans out there or how much of a fan you are.
Marc:If you know any nitty-gritty derp band fans out there, I don't think you could know where this is going.
Marc:But my father...
Marc:in his living room has a giant 68 inch by 162 inch canvas.
Marc:And it is the full painting of the album cover of the nitty gritty dirt bands.
Marc:Hold on album.
Marc:OK, it was done by a dude named Steven Rosser.
Marc:You've got the nitty gritty dirt band there and you've got sort of a ghost bucking Bronco rider there with some UFOs on it in the middle of the desert.
Marc:This is a giant piece of art meant for the hardcore nitty gritty dirt band fan.
Marc:Now, if you have any of those in your life, look, when I look at it, I don't know why he bought it, people.
Marc:I don't know at what point in his mind he would make that decision where they're like, here's the album.
Marc:He says, they told me not to open the album, the vinyl record.
Marc:And I'm like, who told you?
Marc:Is that going to add to the value of this particular giant painting that was an album cover for a later version of the nitty gritty dirt band?
Marc:I mean, the album came out, I don't know, in the 80s.
Marc:I don't know anything about the nitty-gritty dirt band.
Marc:I know I did a couple of good ones early on, but what do I know?
Marc:But I don't know why my dad bought this painting, but he definitely stuck with it.
Marc:So I thought maybe there's an outside chance that one of you out there might have this moment like, holy shit, that is my favorite nitty-gritty dirt band album.
Marc:How much is that canvas?
Marc:He's willing to negotiate.
Marc:All right?
Marc:You let me know.
Marc:You let me know if you're interested.
Marc:It's a big painting.
Marc:And if you had that moment, like, hold on by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:I fucking want that.
Marc:I want that painting.
Marc:I'll let it take up an entire wall in my house, which it will.
Marc:And if you have a friend that's sort of like, oh, that's my buddy's favorite Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album.
Marc:Hold on, right?
Marc:I love that fucking cover.
Marc:You can own the painting.
Marc:I don't know why he bought it.
Marc:He's had it for years.
Marc:I never knew why.
Marc:I don't even know if he likes the nitty-gritty dirt band.
Marc:I don't know the story behind it.
Marc:Maybe I should have asked.
Marc:But I'm just putting this out there.
Marc:All right?
Marc:So Alice Cooper.
Marc:Now, Alice Cooper is, you know...
Marc:There are a lot of people who love his stuff and there's a lot of stuff to love but the you know, he's also known he's very out Christian found Christ later in life or refound Christ later in life after years of drugs and alcohol mostly alcohol and
Marc:No problem talking Jesus, no problem talking music, no problem talking booze and drugs and no problem telling stories about his career and show business.
Marc:And I found him to be a completely pleasant, solid, professional dude.
Marc:And one of the reasons I had him on, I met Alice Cooper the first time.
Marc:At Conan O'Brien, I had this moment where I was watching him.
Marc:This was just like last year and he was putting on a show.
Marc:He had a hat on the cane.
Marc:He was doing sort of a stick.
Marc:And I realized like, holy shit, it's all stick.
Marc:This guy is a traditional, almost vaudevillian showman and always has been.
Marc:He's real show business.
Marc:Alice Cooper is real show business.
Marc:And I'm like, I got it.
Marc:I'll talk to this cat anytime he wants to.
Marc:But what I didn't realize is that he's also real songwriter, man.
Marc:I mean, I didn't, and obviously some of you are going like, how did you not know that?
Marc:But what I didn't realize, it's like the songs that some, I mean, he did a lot of great anthems.
Marc:18 is great.
Marc:School's Out for Summer is great.
Marc:No More Mr. Nice Guy is great.
Marc:But what I've started to do
Marc:And this was really the first time I did this.
Marc:And I don't know why I never did.
Marc:It was when I'm dealing with an artist who has a massive catalog, which he does.
Marc:You know, what I can do is I can just go to Apple Music and listen to at least a bit of every album.
Marc:And I did.
Marc:And what kind of blew me away about Alice Cooper was the two songs that when I was a kid.
Marc:which were these slow songs beautiful songs both of them kind of make me cry uh only women bleed and i never cry but those two songs are these sweet they're not sweet they're heavy but they're slow songs i mean i never cried could be a elton john song and it was then you know when i see the arc of where alice cooper comes from from the first kind of out there records through sort of anthemic you know you know teen rebellion records
Marc:to like these like these beautiful i don't even know if they're called ballads but only women bleed and i never cry are if he had just made those two songs those are it which really substantiates him and validates him among other things as this amazing songwriter so like i had a tremendous sort of epiphany with alice cooper before i talked to him i'm very grateful i did
Marc:Cause I entered with the proper amount of respect and not just this idea that like this guy was crazy with the snakes and the, and the guillotine and the electric chair and that shit and killing chickens.
Marc:So I was able to kind of go in impressed and excited and, and, and he was very receptive and it was a great conversation.
Marc:This is me and Alice Cooper back in the garage.
Yeah.
Guest:It's cool, though.
Guest:You know, I mean, it's like going to an old FM radio station.
Guest:I used to love to go to FM radio stations.
Marc:Oh, where they had the records.
Marc:They still have the records up on the wall.
Guest:And they said, what do you want to play?
Guest:You go, oh, Paul Butterfield.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:Paul Butterfield.
Marc:Out of all things, that pops in your head.
Marc:Paul Butterfield.
Guest:That was the best band I ever heard.
Marc:Really?
Marc:When you were a kid?
Marc:Or like when you were coming up?
Guest:Well, we learned Paul Butterfield stuff because every good rock band ever started as a blues rock band.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The Stones, the Beatles, everybody.
Guest:And if you could sit down and play Born in Chicago by Paul Butterfield and learn some of the harp parts and learn some of the guitar, that was a learning process, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, they were, I guess it's interesting about Butterfield because he was like, they were really the legacy of the Chicago blues.
Marc:They weren't British guys that were taking the records and recycling it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:The Yardbirds were the closest thing to Paul Butterfield because they were the British blues guys.
Marc:But when you grew up in, where were you, in Detroit?
Marc:Detroit.
Marc:But who was coming through there?
Guest:Well, I was, you know.
Guest:But you were a little kid.
Guest:But the coolest thing that ever happened to my family was my uncle, my uncle Vince, was a boxer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's like a flyweight boxer, tough little guy, played Telecaster guitar.
Guest:Yeah, good guitar.
Guest:And the first thing he ever brought me was Chuck Berry.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And Chuck Berry was the first thing before Elvis.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I heard Chuck Berry, and I went, the guy just told me a story in three minutes.
Guest:It's pretty crazy, right?
Guest:He was the best lyricist of all time.
Marc:He does not get the credit for being the greatest lyricist of all time.
Marc:Like, you listen, you can't catch me.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Too much monkey business.
Guest:Too much monkey business.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, how many times did Dylan listen to that song?
Marc:I wonder.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And not only that, but if he couldn't think of a word, he'd make one up.
Guest:Sure, why not?
Guest:He says, you know, don't give me no botheration.
Guest:Right, that's great.
Guest:I love that word.
Guest:You got license?
Guest:The Coolerator.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Cool Raider.
Marc:Cool Raider's good.
Marc:So you were like, what was Detroit like then?
Marc:Was your dad in the motor business?
Guest:My dad was an honest used car salesman in Detroit, which means he made no money at all.
Guest:Did he have a second job?
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:And so he made no money.
Guest:My mom was a waitress.
Guest:She was a chewing gum waitress.
Guest:What do you have?
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Really?
Guest:She was great.
Guest:She's still alive, 92 years old.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But my dad finally got to the point of realizing that he worked for nothing but criminals.
Guest:And they finally said, Mick, you can't make any money in this business.
Guest:You should become a pastor.
Guest:He became a pastor.
Guest:A pastor?
Guest:My dad was a pastor.
Guest:What denomination?
Guest:Protestant pastor.
Guest:And my grandfather was an evangelist.
Guest:And my wife's dad is a Baptist pastor.
Guest:So you come from pastors.
Guest:You come from the ministry.
Guest:I was the prodigal son.
Guest:I was the prodigal son.
Guest:I grew up in the church, went as far away as I could, and then came back.
Marc:Yeah, because I know you talk about it a lot, and you're pretty public about being a Christian again or coming back around to it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you did have an honest rebellion from it.
Marc:Oh, my gosh.
Guest:And it was very public, I think.
Guest:Yeah, and so did Marilyn Manson.
Guest:Marilyn Manson grew up there.
Guest:You guys getting along?
Guest:Oh, yeah, we get along.
Guest:I mean, not theologically, but...
Guest:We are good friends.
Guest:And the thing about it is on the very last night of the tour that we worked together, I got along with Marilyn really well.
Marc:I hear he's a nice guy.
Marc:But I imagine there must have been some contention initially.
Marc:You spawned a lot of people.
Marc:Well, I sparred with him in the press a lot.
Marc:Was that fake or was it?
Guest:No, it was for real.
Guest:Because he was talking about, oh, I used to really respect Dallas until I heard he was Christian.
Guest:And I'm a priest in the satanic church.
Guest:Anyone can be a priest in the satanic church.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then when I meet him, all we talked about was marriage.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And I met him in Transylvania.
Guest:How's that?
Guest:That's funny.
Guest:A festival in Transylvania.
Guest:I mean, it's like the castle is there.
Guest:And clearly they had a theme in mind.
Guest:A theme.
Marc:and he walks by the dressing room he walks in he said can i come in i went yeah so we sat and talked and all we talked about was marriage i've been married 41 years yeah that lady lovely lady that's good it's a good job you know it's funny because uh in terms of like uh i've been hearing a lot about uh the song you know i'm 18 because people have been emailing me i just had 18 years sober last wednesday
Marc:So people have been sort of like, oh, you got to listen to it.
Guest:Oh, that's your song.
Guest:I'm 36 years now, I think.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Feel better?
Guest:Oh, are you kidding?
Guest:I would have been long gone dead.
Guest:I mean, you have to remember, my big brothers and big sisters, when I came to LA from Phoenix, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, they were like...
Guest:I drank with them, and I was the little guy, little fly on the wall.
Guest:At that hotel?
Guest:At Landmark, you know.
Marc:And that's where you met Shep?
Marc:That's where I met Shep.
Marc:Well, take me there from like, so your dad's a Protestant pastor, which is not hardcore per se, right?
Guest:No, in fact, he could tell you who played bass for the animals.
Marc:Sure, but it's not fire and brimstone, but your grandfather was.
Guest:But they were, and my granddad was pretty cool too, but they all loved music.
Guest:His deal was this, he says, look, I love the music.
Guest:He said, I love the show.
Guest:Will he take you to rock shows?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he saw the stories with me.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:And he says, I have no problem.
Guest:I have a problem with the lifestyle.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I went, okay.
Marc:Talking about your stuff.
Guest:Well, he says the whole lifestyle.
Guest:You have to remember that was right when the hippie lifestyle was, you know, free love.
Guest:When you were starting out.
Guest:I just was getting ready to go to L.A.
Marc:But when you saw the Stones, when did you see the Stones with them?
Guest:Oh, I was 17 years old.
Marc:So they weren't hippies yet.
Marc:No.
Marc:It was still kind of clean.
Guest:It was British invasion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Cool stuff.
Marc:And you saw them when you were 17, so that must have been pretty electrifying.
Guest:Do you remember?
Guest:And it was the real Stones.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was Wyman.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And, you know, Brian Jones.
Guest:Being stored on piano, maybe?
Guest:No, just the five.
Guest:Oh, just the five.
Guest:No lighting.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It was just...
Guest:five guys playing playing blues mixed with a few of the hits all the original songs all the original first two albums so you see the stones so they're in your head how about the detroit guys is mitch ryder around yet or like who's around those guys were on the radio yeah but i wasn't really connected up with them because i was so locked in motown motown was on the radio again but i was living in phoenix now already yeah how'd you get there that quick
Guest:At 10, I had to get out of there because of asthma.
Guest:I had to get out of Detroit.
Guest:You were the one with asthma.
Guest:I had asthma so bad.
Marc:And so your family moved because they wanted you to be able to live and breathe.
Guest:To breathe would be a good thing.
Guest:For the kid.
Guest:Kid's got to breathe, apparently.
Guest:So I'm in Phoenix, and I'm painting the house on a summer, and the radio's always on, and all of a sudden I hear, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I mean, I stopped.
Guest:And I went, what was that?
Guest:Right?
Yeah.
Guest:It can still make you stop, right?
Guest:Really.
Guest:I've never heard anything like that.
Guest:And then about a half an hour later, I heard, please, please me.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I went, what is this?
Guest:You know, honestly, it changed my life.
Guest:I called my Dennis Dunaway, who was our bass player, original bass player.
Guest:We ran track and cross country together in high school in art class.
Guest:And I said, did you hear that?
Guest:And he goes, yeah, what is that?
Guest:Next thing, we saw a picture of him.
Guest:And I said, that's it.
Guest:That's what we're doing.
Guest:We got to do that.
Guest:We got to do that.
Marc:it's it that first album like you know like so good well yeah just got i got chills kind of yeah because i you know i'm i'm a little younger than you about a decade or so but but we had that record and just like you put that on now and you're sort of like what the fuck i tell bands all the time young bands yeah that you know they go uh we'd like you to produce us i said let me hear what you're doing and they got a great image you guys are tough i get it and i like this
Guest:And then they yell at me for about three minutes with a hook and a drum beat.
Guest:And I go, I want you to do three things.
Guest:I said, I want you to listen to The Beatles' first album, The Four Seasons, and The Beach Boys.
Guest:And they look at me like, why?
Guest:And I said, because that's how songs are written.
Guest:Now, write me a song and be just as angry.
Guest:I get it, you're angry.
Guest:But now write a song with a verse, a B section, a chorus.
Guest:And then be angry.
Marc:Yeah, because that's sort of what, like, the weird thing about going through your stuff today, which I did, just, like, I literally went through just to, because I grew up in the 70s, and there's songs in your catalog that were hits that are, like, beautiful.
Marc:They're not hard rock songs.
Marc:They're, you know, like, Only Women Bleed, I Never Cry.
Marc:Like, you know, and I remember, they're dug into my brain, and I'm like, oh, fuck, right, that's Alice Cooper.
Guest:Like that moment.
Guest:We confused a lot of people on those.
Guest:Well, I mean, but those were, you loved those songs, I'd imagine.
Guest:They were great.
Guest:And they were the easiest ones to write.
Guest:Those songs, for some reason, were the easiest.
Guest:Harder to write a simple rock song than a simple ballad.
Guest:But I was working with all the right people.
Guest:Bob Ezrin was our George Martin.
Guest:And is he the guy that Shep hooked you up with?
Guest:The Canadian?
Guest:The Canadian guy, yeah.
Guest:He came out and he was supposed to get rid of us.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he listened to us at Max's Kansas City.
Guest:We played at Max's one night, and he came.
Guest:Jack Richardson said, get rid of these guys.
Guest:We don't want them on our relevant.
Guest:Which label was this?
Guest:It was Jack.
Guest:We just wanted him to produce.
Guest:We didn't care about a label at this point.
Marc:Oh, so you weren't even signed yet?
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:And the next thing you know, Bob Ezrin comes back and he goes, you're going to fire me, but I love them.
Guest:He says, they're the future.
Guest:They're what's going to happen.
Guest:I can take this band, and he says, your punishment is you have to produce them.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That was it?
Guest:Well, seven platinum albums later, it was a good punishment.
Marc:Yeah, you worked with him on and off for a long time.
Marc:But let's go for it.
Marc:So, you're with your track and field buddy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What's his name?
Marc:Dennis Dunham.
Marc:Dennis, yeah, who's in the original band.
Marc:And you listen to the Beatles.
Marc:And now, you know, how do you start out in rock and roll?
Guest:It's a very funny story.
Guest:I mean, you probably couldn't write this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, we're jocks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Four-year letterman.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Track and cross country.
Guest:So you're a senior at this time?
Guest:Track and cross country.
Guest:No, freshman.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So I got four stripes here from track and cross country.
Guest:Dennis has four stripes.
Guest:Our drummer has four stripes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we're walking through this, you know, the school like we own it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now...
Guest:I said, we got these three guys.
Guest:We should do like at the Letterman's Club talent show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We should do a mimic of the Beatles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Put the Beatles hats on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We'll do, I'll beat you.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we did it.
Guest:And we hired girls to scream for us.
Guest:And at that moment, I went, this is what I'm going to do for real.
Marc:And you're just lip syncing at that point.
Guest:We're lip syncing.
Guest:No, we sang.
Guest:Along with it.
Guest:We found the two biggest juvenile delinquents in the school, Glenn Buxton and John Tatum, who were always in fights or always illegal at every point.
Guest:The opposite of jocks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they were our guitar players.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:because they knew how to play they ended up glenn ended up being one of the great yeah rock guitar players yeah he was on all the all the band records right he created schools out you know he created all that stuff he was the only guy that could jam with sid barrett right he got it right yeah yeah so anyways now we've got a band and we're actually pretty good at this point are you like uh are you uh is your faith intact
Guest:yeah yeah but you're not like i go to church still right you know and everything and i'm still running track and so but we're we are in this little band playing at parties in phoenix getting a little better yeah finally we get this job at the vip club right what's that that's that's the big club yeah in thousand people oh yeah you know and we're called the spiders now uh-huh and we were all black
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a web behind us.
Marc:So it's beginning.
Guest:And we start out with the Who.
Guest:And we start out with the Yardbirds and Train Kept Her Rolling.
Guest:Oh, you did Train Kept Her Rolling.
Guest:What Who song were you doing?
Guest:The Yardbirds version.
Marc:Which Who song were you doing?
Guest:We were doing Out in the Street, Substitute.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we were really a good bar band.
Guest:Combo?
Guest:Good combo?
Guest:So we were drawing 1,000 people a week.
Guest:You got hot in Phoenix.
Guest:Now we're not only jocks at the school.
Guest:But you're, yeah.
Guest:Now we're the biggest band in the school.
Guest:Local rock stars.
Guest:I become Ferris Bueller.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:I run the school.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, man.
Guest:Everybody's doing my homework.
Guest:Teachers, I got conned to no end.
Guest:And I just breezed through high school.
Marc:And you loved it.
Marc:You felt it.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:You loved the attention.
Guest:And we were good.
Guest:That's the thing I liked about it was the fact that if we were just phony, it would be different.
Guest:But we were actually really good.
Guest:What was it about the Yardbirds that really floated your boat so much?
Guest:We loved the Beatles.
Guest:The Beatles influenced everybody.
Guest:I don't care if you're a cradle of filth.
Guest:You were influenced by the Beatles.
Guest:The Stones, same thing.
Guest:So when people say, who influenced you?
Guest:That's a given.
Guest:We then went for, what about this band that's got this guitar that sounds like it's out of control?
Guest:Well, Pete Townsend and Jeff Beck.
Guest:Those were the guys.
Guest:We heard those songs and went, oh.
Marc:i still can't wrap my head around jeff beck no nobody can it's like i don't know i think even jimmy page said one time there's all of us and then there's jeff beck yeah and jimmy hendrix said like i talked to billy gibbons who's on your new record yeah who i love yeah billy's great he's great he's great he said when he opened for hendrix in texas on that tour when he was i forget the name of billy's first band it was i was moving sidewalks moving sidewalks that he went and hung out and uh with jimmy and jimmy would have a
Marc:a stereo console brought up to the hotel, and he would just sit around trying to figure out what Jeff Beck was doing.
Marc:Everybody.
Guest:Nobody plays as pure as Jeff Beck.
Guest:It's crazy, man.
Guest:And Jimmy's the best rock guitar player.
Guest:Hendrix.
Guest:Clapton is the best, you know, blues player.
Guest:Jimmy Page is right there.
Guest:I'm a big Peter Green fan.
Guest:Peter Green.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:We used to play with him in Detroit when he was with Fleetwood Mac.
Guest:Did you really?
Guest:With Peter?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Savoy Brown, who is now with Fog Hat after that.
Guest:Fog Hat.
Marc:But was Peter Green a heavy cat?
Guest:Do you remember him?
Guest:Yeah, it was cool.
Guest:He seemed like... He wasn't psychotic at that point.
Guest:But was he sad?
Marc:No.
Guest:He was a rock guy.
Marc:Because he felt like... I felt that... The way he sang, man, it was like, whoa.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Sad.
Marc:Well, he was a blues guy.
Marc:I'm trying to get little bits and pieces of Peter Green wherever I can.
Guest:Yeah, he...
Guest:He wasn't as close as some of the other guys.
Guest:We met the Claptons and all those Jimmy Pages, and they were kind of cool.
Guest:In Detroit.
Guest:Yeah, Green was a little out there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It feels that way in general.
Guest:It wasn't like warm.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Jimmy was the best guy.
Guest:Jimmy was the nicest, coolest guy.
Guest:Hendrix was.
Guest:I always found that the bigger they were, the nicer they were.
Guest:The Beatles were the nicest guys in the world.
Guest:The Stones, the nicest guys.
Marc:But you didn't meet them till later.
Guest:Yeah, not till later, but they really, I found something out about Sinatra and Presley and all those guys.
Guest:The bigger you got, the less of a jerk you were.
Marc:Well, yeah, because you really, like, your life didn't enable you to really hang around with anybody that much.
Guest:Well, and not only that, but you don't have anything to prove.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You've done it.
Marc:And you're kind of happy to talk to somebody, especially if someone's introduced you, like, this is this guy, he's a good guy, and you're like, okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're cool.
Guest:He's already got his status.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:He's there.
Guest:It's the guys on the way up that are the jerks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then sometimes you see them fall down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And you kind of push them, push them a little.
Yeah.
Guest:Maybe you put your foot out, trip a little.
Guest:Oh, I'm sorry.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:Maybe you learned a little lesson.
Guest:Write a song about that.
Marc:All right, so how do you get from the Spiders to Los Angeles?
Guest:So now we're the best band in Phoenix.
Guest:And so we think, well, we're going to go to L.A.
Guest:and conquer L.A.
Guest:because now...
Guest:We get to LA and realize that every band from every city, the best band from every city is in LA trying to get in the whiskey or one of the five or six clubs going on there.
Guest:And you're up against the doors.
Guest:Love.
Guest:Love.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:All these great bands.
Guest:It was Albert Lee, right?
Guest:Arthur Lee.
Guest:Arthur Lee, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Arthur Lee's another guy.
Guest:And Buffalo Springfield.
Marc:You know, you're up against... So they were all out there when you went out there.
Marc:Yeah, and they were already big.
Marc:So that's what, 68, 69?
Marc:You're killing yourself to get in any club.
Marc:What year?
Marc:67, 68.
Marc:So you guys go out there, green.
Marc:Starve.
Marc:Just green.
Marc:Just starve.
Guest:But you made the move.
Guest:We made the move.
Guest:Changed the name of the band?
Guest:Changed the... Well, we didn't change the name of the... We were the Naz then.
Guest:N-A-Z-Z.
Guest:But Rundgren had the names.
Guest:Then we found that out.
Guest:And we said, we've got to come up with a name now.
Guest:And the first name that came up, Dennis came up with the Husky Baby Sandwich.
Guest:And I said, that's cool, that's great, but they'll be expecting that.
Guest:Let's do something that they're not going to expect.
Guest:What if you get this notorious band that we were, by this time we were notorious.
Guest:In Phoenix.
Guest:In L.A., too.
Guest:For doing what?
Guest:People just didn't get... We were already very theatrical at the time.
Guest:Like, what was the theatrics at that time?
Guest:Well, anything that we could find.
Guest:If I could find a mop, that was part of the show.
Guest:If I could find a bucket.
Guest:So you're ripping.
Guest:I was kind of carrot top.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:What have I got?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:That was... Anything was guerrilla theater on stage, and we did it.
Marc:And the stuff sounded like... Sort of like psychedelic noise, like Pink Floyd.
Guest:Well, it was songs, but they were not at all...
Guest:what you would normally hear.
Guest:On purpose.
Guest:We were doing Pretties for You songs at that point.
Guest:Which is, I like that record.
Guest:It's weird as hell.
Marc:It is weird as hell.
Marc:Did you find at that time you were being intentionally weird?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:We were art majors and everybody sounded like this.
Guest:I said, if we can just throw a little Yardbirds and then do this.
Guest:And Dennis would bring in these songs.
Guest:When we played them for Frank Zappa, Frank listened and he says, I don't get it.
Guest:Frank didn't get it.
Guest:That's a problem.
Guest:And I went...
Guest:is that good or bad he goes no it's good he says i don't get it and he says what you have five songs yeah that are two minutes long and has 37 changes in each song and it never goes back to one of the changes right i went yeah yeah and he goes i don't get it yeah he said where are you guys from san francisco and i said we're from phoenix he goes okay now i don't get it at all right you're supposed to do cowboy music there you know so he signed us because of that well you were an art school major
Guest:We were all art majors.
Guest:In college?
Marc:No, just in high school.
Marc:Oh, you were just art guys and jocks and rock stars.
Guest:But we were really way into Salvador Dali.
Guest:We were way into really obscure electronic.
Guest:But we were also way into West Side Story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were way into James Bond themes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were the generation that was brought up on TV themes.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So you'd find a little bit of I Spy in the guitar.
Guest:Yeah, I can hear.
Guest:You'd find a little bit of Man from Uncle over here.
Yeah.
Marc:And also, like, I noticed that there is sort of like a... You know, what's the word?
Marc:It's not... There is sort of a cabaret feeling to... Like a burlesque thing.
Marc:Vaudeville.
Guest:Vaudeville.
Guest:Very vaudevillain.
Marc:But did you... But were you conscious of that?
Guest:No.
Guest:We didn't understand it.
Guest:Why...
Guest:To me, why not make the lyrics come to life?
Guest:We couldn't afford it, but why not make the lyrics come to life?
Guest:If you're going to say later on, you say, welcome to my nightmare, you give them the nightmare.
Guest:Don't just say it, produce the nightmare.
Guest:Nobody else was doing it.
Guest:It's like opera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if you're going to be the villain of rock, which I said, you've got all these Peter Pans and no Captain Hook.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, I will gladly be Captain Hook.
Guest:I'll be Moriarty.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You'll be the heel of the industry.
Guest:Oh, I want to be the guy that when I walk in the room, people take a step backwards and they go, it's Darth Vader.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because they didn't have one.
Marc:They didn't have one on purpose.
Marc:Jim Morrison was the closest thing.
Guest:But he was more of a mystic.
Guest:And he was just a mysterious poet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This guy, I wanted to walk into a room and terrify people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On purpose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, did you see Jim and all those guys?
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:We toured with, you know, the first people that ever took us under their wing in L.A.
Guest:were the Doors.
Marc:And this is one, tell me, so how'd you end up, like, what was the scene?
Marc:You come out in 67, where do you live?
Guest:We lived where we finally...
Guest:We met this guy named Doak.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had never met a gay person in our life.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:This guy lived right in West Hollywood.
Guest:He was an actor.
Guest:And he somehow said, you guys can all live at my house.
Right.
Guest:But didn't come on to anybody.
Guest:And we all went, okay.
Guest:So there were seven of us living in the living room of his house.
Guest:At least we had a place to stay.
Guest:And I don't know how we survived that.
Guest:It wasn't that.
Guest:It was just the fact that I don't even know how we got money enough to eat.
Guest:We had enough money, just enough.
Marc:No one was working?
Guest:We were working, but just enough to barely get gas for the car.
Guest:And, you know, eat whatever.
Guest:The idea was at that point, find a girlfriend who has a job.
Guest:Yeah, that's always the rock idea.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:Yeah, we had to do that.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think he invented that one.
Guest:And then when Mike Bruce would take his girlfriend into the bedroom, we would go through her purse, but we were smart enough to only steal $20.
Guest:Sure, right.
Guest:$20 would eat the band for a week.
Marc:From stealing money from your parents.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Guest:Where's dad's wallet?
Guest:And we could rationalize it.
Guest:It's for the good of the band.
Guest:And she'll know that if we get caught.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So if we all had girlfriends, we could live.
Marc:Good.
Marc:You had a real business plan in place.
Marc:So tell me about that hotel where you met Shep, though, and where Jimmy and Janice and everybody took it.
Guest:It's so funny because Shep and I always have different stories on how it all worked because we were high all the time.
Guest:Well, that's what Shep said.
Guest:He was basically a drug dealer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Shep was a drug dealer.
Guest:So, we're living at this point now.
Guest:We're playing in a place called the Cheetah Club.
Guest:And we become sort of the house band there, the Nas does, right?
Guest:And we're playing every night and we finally get a house.
Guest:But we, oh, no, I'm sorry.
Guest:Free house.
Guest:We're living in the Chambers Brothers basement in Watts.
Guest:What?
Guest:Chambers Brothers had a house in Watts on Crenshaw.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We lived in the basement.
Marc:How'd you hook up with the Chambers Brothers?
Guest:They were friends of ours and they just said, hey, look, I know you guys don't live anywhere.
Guest:You can have our basement.
Guest:The Chambers Brothers just happened to be friends of yours.
Guest:Time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And happened to be friends of Shep.
Guest:And we hadn't met Shep yet.
Guest:So... Friends meaning they got drugs from Shep.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so finally, at some point, Jimi Hendrix comes over.
Guest:Because Jimi knows the Chambers Brothers.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Now, crazy as it sounds, in Phoenix, when Jimmy played Phoenix, we met Jimmy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we came up out of the basement like rats, you know, and he goes, hey, I remember you guys from Phoenix.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So anyways, he goes and he meets Shep, buys grass from Shep.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he goes, you know, Shep, you're going to get busted.
Guest:You're a young Jewish guy in L.A.
Guest:You got a lot of money.
Guest:They're going to figure this out, that you don't have any means of support.
Guest:You should be a manager.
Guest:You're Jewish.
Guest:You should be a manager.
Guest:I know that sounds very stereotypical, but that's exactly what it was.
Guest:And he said, I know this band that needs...
Guest:A manager.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's talking about us.
Guest:So we go over to Shep's, knock on the door, and I knock on the door, and it's a fog bank.
Guest:It looks like I can't see two feet in front of me for the smoke.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when I clear the smoke, there's Jim Morrison sitting on the couch, Janis Joplin, Jimmy.
Guest:At that hotel.
Guest:Hey, Jimmy.
Guest:The landmark, is that what it is?
Guest:The landmark hotel.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, we could make a joint last for a week.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because that's all we had.
Guest:Right, and wasn't even that good a pot then.
Guest:Chef goes like this, it takes a handful and just, here.
Guest:And I went, that's our manager.
Guest:I love this guy.
Guest:So that was it.
Guest:Never a piece of paper.
Guest:You know what's interesting?
Guest:Jumping out 48 years.
Marc:Yeah, he's a great guy.
Marc:I really like talking to him.
Marc:But what's interesting about the business in general that I'm always fascinated with in both movies and music is that people, I think, forget how small a community it was.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Then.
Marc:Everybody knew everybody.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because everyone was sort of around the same place.
Marc:Jimmy knew the Chambers brothers.
Marc:People would come and try to make it work.
Marc:It did or it didn't.
Marc:But there wasn't thousands of people.
Guest:Yes, no.
Guest:And it was a very, we really got into this creative, the people that were really good people.
Guest:The Doors were great people.
Guest:And what did you learn from them?
Guest:What did you glean from these cats?
Guest:Later on, the biggest lesson of my life, Jimmy died at 27.
Guest:Jim Morrison died at 27.
Guest:And I looked at it and I said, what is in common here?
Guest:And what it was was trying to live that image offstage.
Guest:You wanted to make it past 27.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I said, I'm going to have an image even more...
Guest:You know, heavy than theirs.
Guest:And for a long time, I couldn't figure out that I couldn't do both.
Guest:You know, I'm going to go out tonight.
Guest:Well, I've got to get a snake.
Guest:I've got to put my makeup on because I don't want to disappoint anybody.
Guest:Got to a point where I said, that's what killed these guys.
Guest:So it took me until I got sober to realize that I had to play Alice Cooper and be myself the rest of the time.
Guest:But it took you till the 80s?
Guest:Pretty much.
Guest:I mean, I never quite knew where Alice began and that one ended.
Guest:Well, how did you... Because I drank right through it.
Marc:But also, you were not... I mean, Janice was strung out and Jimmy, I don't know what happened there, but he was on everything, right?
Guest:And it didn't seem like those were your... Jim Morrison took pills like you would eat Skittles.
Marc:Yeah, but it didn't seem like that was your bag.
Marc:You were kind of old school.
Marc:It was beer.
Yeah.
Marc:I was beer.
Guest:Beer guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In fact, most heavy bands were beer guys.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Because you could keep drinking it all day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were terrified of the police.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because we were the first perfect target.
Guest:Look at our hair.
Guest:Our hair's down to our waist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, we were the targets in L.A.
Marc:But the idea that you couldn't differentiate or that the line between Alice and you was blurry.
Marc:Because, you know, Rollins told me, I had Iggy Pop in here.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you see them when they came out in 69?
Guest:I grew up with Iggy.
Marc:You did?
Marc:We played with Iggy every weekend.
Marc:But you talk to him, and he's not Iggy Pop.
Marc:He's Jim Osterberg.
Marc:And he's sharp, and there's definitely a line between the two.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I knew Iggy.
Guest:First time I saw Iggy, we played at a pop festival.
Guest:200,000 people in Michigan.
Guest:And somebody says, well, you're going on after the Stooges.
Guest:And I went, who are the Stooges?
Guest:I'd never heard of Iggy and the Stooges.
Guest:I'd never heard of the MC5.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:I knew Mitch Ryder, but I didn't know any of these bands.
Guest:The next generation.
Guest:So I saw Iggy play and I went.
Guest:what yeah i said i gotta go on after this guy i said okay so i brought the alice character up and everybody in detroit saw it and they loved it yeah because it was not just hard rock but it was this yeah yeah and now here was a guy to challenge iggy right in a different way that detroit sound though is certainly in those guys and in in mc5 you know that drive
Guest:I still say it's in our DNA.
Guest:I mean, born in Detroit, cars, motors, black leather, long hair.
Guest:Something.
Guest:I find it's in what I write all the time.
Guest:Even the Nuge back in the day.
Guest:The Nuge, Bob Seger.
Guest:Bob Seger's great.
Guest:Brownsville Station.
Guest:All these bands came out of Detroit.
Guest:And if you were a soft rock band, you were going to get killed.
Marc:Yeah, and some of it had to do, I think, with the Motown infusing into it.
Marc:There was a lot of soul.
Marc:Mitch was a soul singer.
Guest:And those guys would come to the show.
Guest:I mean, we'd be on stage at the East Town or the Grandy with the Stooges and the MC5 and the Who.
Guest:Yeah, hanging out.
Guest:And we'd be up there.
Guest:We'd look down.
Guest:There's Smokey.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And there's this guy.
Guest:And all the Motown guys came down.
Guest:because they dug the rock and roll we would go see them at the rooster tail yeah you know yeah so the detroit scene during the riots yeah if you were a long-haired rock guy you had a free pass right right if you were in a rock band you could go into any black club downtown during the riots and you were fine well that was the 60s yeah and they uh it was assumed that everyone was on the same team the long hairs yeah we were not a threat right
Marc:Well, so what happens here?
Marc:So I want to clear something up.
Marc:So Frank Zappa, he got his own deal through, what was it, Warner?
Marc:Who gave him that?
Guest:It was Warner Brothers.
Marc:And his imprint was called what, his label?
Marc:He was Bizarre and Straight Records.
Marc:So Straight Records was your first deal, right?
Guest:And he signed you for three records.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Frank would come in at the end of the day, and he said, this is how he put it.
Guest:He said, people are not going to believe that you can do these songs live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He says, anybody can layer bass, drums, and make it sound.
Guest:He says, the fact that you can do No Longer Umpire and Tootie Muller and 10 Minutes Before the Worm, which were insanities, he says, the fact that you can do these songs live is what I want to get.
Guest:10 Minutes Before the Worm?
Guest:It was just the weirdest stuff ever.
Guest:And we could play it live.
Yeah.
Guest:You could?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we played it great tight in live.
Guest:He said, anybody can do jam stuff.
Guest:He said, but you guys play these specific little two-minute songs and don't make mistakes on them.
Guest:And he said, the mothers couldn't play that song.
Guest:He said, so that's what I want to get on tape is the fact you guys playing live.
Guest:The good part was that we could do it.
Guest:And you did it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We made the record in three days.
Guest:But Frank wanted that.
Guest:Frank, that's how he put it.
Guest:I think we were a tax write-off.
Guest:That's what I was wondering.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, like it seemed like the whole thing.
Guest:He liked us.
Guest:He thought we'd be fun to be with the GTOs and Wildman Fisher and, you know, on his group, a little group of freaks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We had a whole different thing.
Guest:We were serious about what we were doing.
Marc:Were you a fan of Frank's music?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're Only Enough for the Money, one of the funniest albums of all time.
Guest:Absolutely Free, one of the funniest albums of all time.
Right.
Guest:Yeah, we worshipped Frank.
Guest:Frank was great.
Guest:But we didn't let him.
Guest:He didn't really influence us, though.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Everybody thought that we were influenced by Frank.
Guest:And I said, no, he was really not any influence on us.
Marc:Well, that's what like Shep sort of like thought that, you know, it was sort of a setup somehow.
Marc:It felt to me that, you know, that it was the tax write-off idea.
Marc:But you don't really feel that way.
Guest:I feel that it was a little bit of each.
Guest:But I think the tax write-off thing came from Herbie Cohen.
Guest:I think the Cohen brothers in there, we were really nothing to them.
Guest:We couldn't make money.
Guest:There was no commercial potential coming out of us.
Marc:So how did Alice Cooper, the name, come up?
Marc:We kind of dropped that.
Marc:There's no Ouija board.
Marc:There's no mystical element.
Guest:Let's do something.
Guest:Let's come up with a name that is like a little old lady that lives down the street that makes cookies for the kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But she may have bodies buried in the basement.
Guest:So what name is that?
Guest:The very first name that came out was Alice Cooper.
Guest:Betty Crocker was kind of in my head.
Guest:But Alice Cooper sounded like that.
Guest:And it stuck.
Guest:We kept coming up with names and everybody kept coming back to Alice Cooper.
Marc:So at the time then, so like you guys, like it wasn't unusual.
Marc:People were, you know, it's the 60s.
Marc:So they're not there.
Marc:People are outfitting themselves in a big fashion.
Marc:So like the spectacle of rock was starting to evolve in a way that involved characters.
Marc:It was happening.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you chose to be the bad guy.
Marc:Chose to be the band that, if your parents hated us, we were just fine.
Marc:So that was the point.
Marc:Now, was that your idea?
Marc:Was Shep involved in that?
Guest:Just naturally.
Guest:Shep, I think, Shep caught on to it.
Guest:He would see why people liked Elvis, because parents hated Elvis.
Guest:Why do people like the Rolling Stones?
Guest:Because the parents hated the Rolling Stones.
Guest:My parents weren't crazy about the Rolling Stones when they first saw them.
Guest:Suddenly, the Beatles were fine.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:So taking that little nugget, all of a sudden, Alice Cooper was going to be this super mega villain,
Guest:that was going to really upset everything.
Marc:And Shep's learning, too, as he goes along with you guys.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Because he's a former drug dealer turned manager.
Guest:Yeah, and not only, but it wasn't a day of internet.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Everything was built up on, if we did a show with a snake, a two-foot snake, the next day it was a 14-foot snake.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:And that worked.
Marc:And he said he released the chicken, right?
Guest:Didn't Shep plant the chicken?
Guest:To this day, he will never tell me that he planted the chicken.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:I thought he said he did.
Guest:But the chicken story was so brilliant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, after I think about it, we're on stage.
Guest:The very last thing we do is we open up.
Guest:It's in Canada?
Guest:You're in Canada?
Guest:In Canada at the Toronto Peace Festival.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:60,000 people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're on between The Doors and John Lennon.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So we're on the very last piece thing.
Guest:We get up there and we play pretty for you.
Marc:Are you dressed up?
Marc:Totally.
Marc:We look like something out of Barbarella.
Marc:But not eye makeup yet.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Not that one.
Guest:Oh, just stuff.
Guest:Lots of makeup.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Lots of...
Guest:we really did look like dress yeah i wouldn't wear a dress but all vinyl with the you know lightning bolts all over it and everything yeah and everybody else was kind of glam right yeah yeah everyone's foking out oh there was no such thing as glam at this point not yet we were glam yeah right yeah and at the very last thing we open up pillows yeah and co2 cartridges and it fills the place like a snowstorm yeah and then i look down and there's a chicken
Guest:No, I didn't bring the chicken.
Guest:And I'm going, I'm thinking, okay, I'm kidding the audience.
Guest:Okay, I got my wallet, got my tickets, got my chicken.
Guest:I'm ready.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where does this chicken come from?
Guest:You don't know.
Guest:When you narrow it down, it had to be shut.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I take the chicken, being from Detroit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The fact that I'd never been on a farm in my life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's a bird.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It has feathers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It has wings.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It should fly.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Logically.
Guest:So I take it and I loft it into the audience, figuring it'll fly a little bit.
Guest:Somebody will catch it, take it home.
Guest:What a great souvenir.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:Well, it plummets into the audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the audience tears it to pieces.
Guest:And that's where it's at.
Guest:The Peace Festival.
Guest:The Peace Festival.
Guest:And throw the parts back on stage.
Guest:And now there's bloody chicken parts, all these feathers.
Guest:And the next day in the paper, Alice Cooper slaughters chicken, drinks the blood and everything.
Guest:Frank calls me up and he goes, did you kill a chicken on stage last night?
Guest:I went, no.
Guest:He said, well, don't tell anybody.
Guest:They love it.
Guest:He said, it's great press.
Guest:They love it.
Guest:Now I'm the geek of all time, right?
Guest:No, the kicker to the story is the first five rows are all in wheelchairs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They put all the people in wheelchairs.
Guest:They're the ones that killed the chicken and maimed the chicken.
Guest:The wheelchair people.
Guest:The wheelchair people.
Yeah.
Marc:The ones that probably have a right to have a chip on their shoulder.
Marc:Or a chicken on their shoulder.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And to me, all of it didn't... I kept going, I didn't really... The chip goes, don't kill.
Guest:You killed the chicken.
Guest:Stick to it.
Guest:Stick to it.
Guest:Own it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So after this stuff, so you're hanging out with John Lennon too, and that's where you meet John Lennon?
Marc:John loved what we were doing.
Guest:John and Yoko at this point, they saw this art that was going on stage.
Marc:So he was under the influence of Yoko and there was real art going on, right, performance art.
Guest:The Doors knew us from when we were little kids, you know, basically.
Guest:And they went, yeah!
Guest:Jim Morris was, yeah, man!
Guest:So we had people that saw what we were doing and they loved the fact that it was doing something different.
Marc:And how did you feel like, you know, intentionally as a showman doing it different, but what was your feelings about the counterculture and the hippie movement or like, because you were separate.
Marc:We were not connected to it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:We were not hippies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I mean, we were in this for Ferraris and blondes and all the right reasons.
Guest:We were in the rock and roll business for that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, we were not, we could care less about Vietnam.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I mean, it was not political.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was just, we were fun.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Good, dark, weird, fun.
Guest:Yeah, that's what was missing in rock and roll right then was fun.
Marc:But also, I imagine that somehow or another because of the news that was happening in the world that the extreme take that you guys were having resonated because there was a certain pervasive darkness going on.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We were called satanic, all this.
Guest:There was nothing satanic, especially for me.
Guest:I'm coming from a Christian background, so there's nothing satanic going on up there.
Guest:It wasn't- There was no upside down crosses.
Marc:But there's no backstory to it necessarily.
Guest:That's when I realized it was basically vaudeville.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was basically whatever you could get away with and make- They laughed great.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If they were shocked, even better.
Guest:Right.
Guest:so right so like as it evolved into you know guillotines mannequins electric chairs the snake pure vaudeville right you were like what what else can we do and but it but it was the great thing was you had to do it with this really straight face like you really meant it and to this day i still do it that way right and when you do that people i think know they're buying into a character
Marc:Well, I mean, it seems that a lot of your stuff throughout the years spoke specifically to a kind of adolescent isolation and anger.
Guest:We were outsiders.
Guest:Gaga's doing the same thing right now.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I just saw Gaga the other night in Vegas, and it was all about...
Guest:Be yourself.
Guest:Be the outsider.
Guest:Be accepted.
Guest:Don't let them bully you.
Guest:You're perfect the way you are.
Guest:And I went, yeah, I get that.
Guest:We represented the great disenfranchised.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:All the kids that didn't like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were our guys.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right, and you sort of set the table for what metal became in a lot of ways.
Guest:And punk.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's right, you're pre-punk, right?
Guest:Yeah, very pre-punk.
Guest:Even actually, without knowing it, I think Iggy Pop was easily the punk master.
Marc:No, definitely.
Guest:There was nobody like that.
Guest:And it only could have come out of Detroit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because that was the real, they were the real deal.
Guest:Yeah, they're great, man, those Ashton boys.
Guest:And nobody ever said punk.
Guest:They just said...
Marc:Well, it didn't really show up for another like 69, that first Stooges record.
Marc:So by 72, the three of those records are done and then they kind of disappear and then not until 76.
Marc:Well, they always give the Ramones that hunk.
Marc:Yeah, but that's 76, 77.
Guest:The Ramones were feasting on Iggy and the Stooges.
Marc:Well, I mean, I realized today that like, you know, I want to be elected and I want to be sedated or pretty close.
Marc:Very close.
Guest:Joey told me that.
Guest:He did?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He says, you know, I want to be sedated.
Guest:He says, yeah, elected.
Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Oh, that's hilarious.
Guest:Yeah, because I called him on it.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:You know, when I heard it, I was laughing.
Guest:I was in New York.
Guest:I said, I want to be sedated.
Guest:And he goes, yeah, I know.
Guest:I know.
Guest:That's so nice that he copped to it.
Guest:He seemed like a sweet guy.
Guest:Oh, he was one of the coolest guys.
Guest:And, you know, he says, yo, you guys, all we listen to is you and the Stooges and the MC5.
Guest:And that's how we became the Ramones, you know?
Yeah.
Marc:He copped to it.
Marc:I was listening today and I'm like, wait a minute.
Marc:And today, this morning, I cross-checked the dates and I want to be elected and I want to be sedated.
Marc:And I'm like, hmm, yeah.
Guest:And that was Lennon's favorite song.
Guest:I want to be elected?
Guest:Elected.
Guest:He used to come to the office in New York.
Guest:He'd come in and he'd listen to the acetate.
Guest:I want to be elected.
Guest:And he'd leave.
Guest:He'd come back the next day.
Guest:Let me hear that again.
Guest:He'd leave.
Guest:Shep would play it for him.
Guest:Finally, he's leaving the third day, and I'm coming in.
Guest:And he goes, great record.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I said, oh, thank you, man.
Guest:And he takes about four steps, and he goes, Paul would have done it better.
Guest:And I went, well, yeah.
Guest:He's Paul.
Guest:I said, well, of course he would have.
Marc:And at that point, Lennon was on his own, and Shep, I guess, was the Harry Nelson, John Lennon, and that whole scene.
Guest:And in L.A., that was the Hollywood Vampires.
Guest:That's your group, your gang?
Guest:That was our drinking club was, we lived in LA then, go to the Rainbow every night and it would be, Harry would show up, bring John, if John was in town, Keith Moon, Mickey Dolenz, Bernie Taupin, myself and whoever else
Marc:To me, that's an interesting alignment that I don't think I put it together until this morning.
Marc:I mean, you did a record with Bernie Taupin.
Marc:Bernie was my best friend.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's just like, in my naivete before really looking at the overarching view of your career, I would never associate you with Elton John.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But so many of the songs are like... Even the couple albums ago where you played with...
Marc:With Bon Jovi's guys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Most of the great Alice Cooper songs are very accessible songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A lot of that has to do with a guy named Desmond Child.
Guest:Desmond Child.
Guest:When that 80s thing happened...
Guest:We had already been established.
Guest:Disco Plague was already kind of in motion.
Guest:You're talking about the ballads.
Guest:They would only play ballads from rock bands.
Guest:Kiss, Beth, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper only would- Dream on.
Guest:And they would only play our ballads.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So it was necessity.
Guest:yes we wanted still needed to be on the radio the rest of the album was all rock exactly right so all of a sudden there's bon jovi yeah and there's motley crew right and there's warrant and all these and coming along right with mtv yeah right exactly what mtv and what are they doing
Guest:great shows yeah and what do they got great image yeah really swagger yeah you know and all of them are making great records yeah and i'm listening to these records i'm going wow good and you'd already had one life yeah and this is sort of like i'm looking at it and going okay uh i get what they're doing and and finally somebody's doing big shows right with production right and rock and roll is fun again
Guest:yeah you know yeah and guns and roses i mean you know there's some real swagger on stage now you know yeah which was desperately needed and that's still is right now the 80s the roxy that whole scene right so everybody had glam yes going on and these bands and i kept saying what is the common denominator with these songs and it was desmond child he was the one producing and writing these songs that every one of them i heard on the radio what is that yeah
Guest:You give love a bad name.
Guest:Great record.
Guest:And it all came back to him.
Guest:So I got in touch with him.
Guest:I said, I want to do the same thing, but I want it darker and sexier.
Guest:And I want it to be Alice Cooper.
Guest:And that's when we did Poison.
Guest:Biggest hit of our career.
Guest:I mean, Schools Out was a huge hit.
Guest:Poison worldwide was even bigger.
Guest:Yeah, so that was trash.
Guest:That was the big resurgence.
Guest:That was kind of me raising my ugly head saying, oh, by the way, guys, you still have to deal with me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think the beautiful thing about that period, it seems to me, is that all those guys that grew up on your music was like, you need any help, Alice?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:They were all accessible and they were fun.
Guest:They're good guys.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:And I really, I was very respectful of how good they were.
Guest:Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:yeah richie could play anything man and ryan roxy used to play in my buddy's band in uh candy that's right yeah roxy is one of those guys that glam is in his blood he's a good sound man i mean that there's like he played with so many great guitar players and the bass player the uh winger he went on to do his own thing i don't like that's not my music per se but they all sort of trained with you that's it yeah and uh and and all of them brought their own thing to it yeah
Marc:But going back, like, you know, when did you – so you hit the wall in L.A.
Marc:and then ended up back in Detroit.
Guest:Well, this was at the very, very beginning.
Guest:When we went around – this was pre-all that, you know, 68, 69.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Finally, we got a gig at the Whiskey and Go-Go.
Guest:And I look up at the thing, and it says Alice Cooper and –
Guest:Who's Led Zeppelin?
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I'm not kidding you.
Guest:Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin at the whiskey.
Guest:And nobody had ever heard of either one of us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you saw Zeppelin?
Guest:We played with him.
Guest:And Jimmy Page walks in, and I go, that guy was in the Yardbirds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were royalty to us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I went, we open for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they said, okay, tomorrow night, we open for you.
Guest:Really?
Yeah.
Guest:The very next night we go to the Cheetah Club and we finally got two gigs in a row.
Guest:Alice Cooper and some guy named Pink Floyd.
Guest:I don't know what he wears.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I'm not kidding you.
Guest:So it's the original Floyd with Sid.
Guest:With Sid.
Guest:And we got to be very good friends because we connected up really close.
Guest:But that was all these bands were all just trying to make it.
Guest:But those are the rock bands.
Marc:It's hard to imagine them playing clubs.
Guest:And everybody's starving.
Guest:I mean, literally starving.
Guest:So then I got Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd in one house.
Guest:What year is this?
Guest:And this is about 1968, something like that.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:So we're all living in a house.
Guest:I get up one morning.
Guest:And I walk in the kitchen, and there's Sid Barrett.
Guest:And he's sitting there, and he's still got his velvet clothes.
Guest:I probably slept in everything.
Guest:And there's a box of cornflakes in front of him.
Guest:And he's watching the cornflakes dance.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he's going...
Guest:He's looking at me, he goes... You watching this?
Guest:And I'm going, yeah, okay.
Guest:And I go to the other room, I go, Sid is watching the Corn Flakes box the way I would watch Looney Tunes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he was already...
Guest:And it wasn't just a drug show.
Guest:No, he was schizo.
Guest:He had all kinds of things going on that didn't really show up badly until later.
Guest:But one night we played with him.
Guest:He hit one chord at the beginning of the show, got a little shock, and just stood there the rest of the show.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Didn't play anything.
Guest:Just stood there.
Guest:So, I mean, he was... Out there, yeah.
Marc:But, like, so you have these huge hits, you know, like Killer and School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies do great, right?
Marc:Those are the big three.
Marc:We're now the king of the hill.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I'm 18, kills it.
Guest:The most dangerous thing about us was that we had hit records.
Guest:Now here's this band that is pretty much hated by not just the press, but by other bands because we were the future.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And we were going to make them work now.
Guest:We were going to make them do a show.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The worst thing that could happen would be us to have a hit record because now you have the Willy Wonka ticket.
Guest:You're right, right.
Guest:Nobody can deny you now.
Guest:And you can sell tickets.
Guest:And you can sell tickets and you're generating money.
Guest:So all the guys up on top, all the suits and the record companies are going, that's all they're looking at.
Marc:That's all they care about.
Marc:You don't make money until you make other people money.
Marc:That's it.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And here we were generating money.
Guest:And now we don't just have one hit.
Guest:Now we have schools out.
Guest:That's huge.
Guest:Gigantic hit.
Guest:Still huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's still big.
Marc:You must be getting checks for that song now.
Guest:It's the national anthem.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then after that, he said, well, lucky, lucky.
Guest:And then Billion Dollar Babies comes out, goes to number one.
Guest:Now we are there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people have to swallow what we're digging out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And of course, now we have money.
Marc:to do production right so now these productions are getting more insane than ever and it's weird because billion dollar babies when you listen to it in in and you've sort of lived through many different lives in in heavy metal and rock is not it's not it's a hard rock record it's a heart we were never metal right and it was just sort of like i mean the song hello hooray is like just that's it's a beautiful song big song there comes
Marc:Completely accessible.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And Bob Ezrin was the one that said, your image is going to be so strong.
Guest:You're going to do hard rock.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We're going to make it very palatable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I read an article.
Guest:So that was the plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Make hit records.
Guest:We wanted to make hit records.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I read an article that McCartney did and he was, it was conversations with McCartney.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he says he was, had the radio on and he heard No More Mr. Nice Guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he says, it scared me.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Really?
Guest:He said, I realized that rock could be dangerous.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He says, it literally scared me.
Guest:That's funny.
Guest:He said, that song was a threat.
Marc:That's funny.
Guest:And I said, well, you know, School's Out was the most subversive song ever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, blow the school up and everything.
Marc:It's weird because it's hard for me to imagine, I guess, because we've had so many years of just no boundaries with music, that at that time was really menacing.
Guest:Oh, yeah, because that record was up against Sinatra.
Guest:It was up against The Supremes, Simon & Garfunkel.
Guest:Oh, in 73.
Guest:It's 73.
Guest:All the really commercial records were out, and all of a sudden, here's this record that's a total anthem that's saying...
Marc:the joy of blowing the school up right yeah yeah and it's a major hit and that's it's interesting because mccartney took it like he listened to it as a songwriter yeah yeah this is a great song right but it was threatening yeah what album was only women bleed on it that was on nightmare i needed a i needed a ballad i needed something that was going to offset all the insanity well i'm a kid so it's at 75 so i'm 12 and in that you know that song was everywhere yeah and
Marc:And it's a heavy-hearted, beautiful song.
Marc:Like, I listened to it this morning.
Marc:I'm getting a little choked up.
Guest:Yeah, it's, oh, no, 15 different women recorded it and had hits with it.
Guest:I mean, Tina Turner, Etta James, people like that did that song.
Guest:Heavy, heavy.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I went, wow, that's pretty cool.
Guest:But at the time, they were thinking, of course, I was talking about the woman's monthly woman bleed.
Guest:And I was going, no.
Guest:I said, I needed this for the nightmare.
Marc:Well, they didn't listen to the fucking song then.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I needed the... And I wanted a ballet.
Marc:Yeah, that was a concept record.
Marc:The nightmare was... Oh, yeah, pure concept.
Guest:It was little Stephen couldn't wake up out of his nightmare.
Guest:He could hear his mother calling, but he couldn't wake up.
Guest:That was the nightmare of not being able to climb out of it.
Guest:But that's where you start when you're writing a song?
Guest:You pick a story?
Guest:The concept was that.
Guest:And I walk into my nightmare, Bob Ezra, and I said, Bob, here's the idea.
Guest:I said, now we have to write all these songs that connect into this nightmare.
Guest:And we have to then produce it on stage as a nightmare.
Guest:And what were the props for that tour?
Guest:It was a bed that came out at the very beginning.
Guest:We had dancers, but we didn't have rock dancers.
Guest:We had Broadway dancers.
Guest:I said, I don't want rock dancers.
Guest:I want a ballet.
Guest:I want this, this, this, this.
Guest:So that when people see this, it's going to be something they've never seen before.
Guest:It's a Broadway show, except on our terms.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you were thinking Broadway.
Guest:That's funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the bed comes out and Alice is on the bed singing, welcome to my nightmare.
Guest:I hope you like it.
Guest:And all of a sudden dancers come off from under the bed because that's where all the monsters live.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And they're...
Guest:yeah and they're really good and people are just sort of like what's going on how is this and is this post guillotine post oh yeah we didn't i think in that show yeah we did the guillotine but we had a you know 14 foot cyclops that came out we had that you killed yeah they actually pretty much killed me i finally pulled his head off and stabbed him with it but this was iron maiden sort of months iron maiden owes you a thanks too oh yeah absolutely
Guest:We were using Eddie way before they were.
Guest:But there was no, see, there was no limits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had a budget of whatever we wanted.
Guest:I said, I want David Winters from West Side Story to choreograph it.
Guest:We got him.
Guest:Really?
Guest:We got Disney to build the characters.
Guest:We got everything worked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Shep and I looked at each other and said, I put every penny I have into this production.
Guest:So he said, so did I. It's better work.
Guest:But we had Bob Ezrin.
Guest:And that was the Welcome to My Nightmare tour?
Guest:And it, bam, it worked.
Guest:Killed.
Guest:We couldn't do enough shows.
Guest:It sold out months in advance.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:And how did you choreograph this stuff?
Marc:Did you have to hire somebody specifically so you didn't kill yourself?
Marc:Yeah, that was basically David Winters.
Guest:And then we brought in certain people for special effects, like we bring in Amazing Randy, the magician.
Guest:He came in and I said, how do we do this guillotine so it looks exactly right?
Guest:I want the head and I want blood to splatter into the audience.
Guest:If you're wearing white in the front, I said, you're going to get covered.
Guest:Perfect.
Guest:He figured it out.
Guest:I said, how do I get out of this?
Guest:How do I show up here after they see me here?
Guest:And we did all that stuff.
Marc:I just remember, wasn't there some sadness?
Marc:You used to hang yourself, too.
Marc:They did the hanging.
Marc:That didn't work one night.
Guest:And you almost killed yourself.
Guest:Well, it's a wire that connects to the back of your thing.
Guest:And I said, how do you do this?
Guest:The stuntman came in, showed me how to do it.
Guest:Very safe thing.
Guest:it stops you an inch before, right?
Guest:Every night when that floor dropped in, I was going, it would just stop right there.
Guest:Just one night, the wire breaks.
Guest:And so as soon as I feel this, and I can feel this more tension than I snap my head back and it goes up over my chin.
Guest:If I were Jay Leno, I'd be dead with the chin.
Guest:But luckily, and I went down and knocked myself out and had a burn right here.
Marc:But it must have broken in enough time to where it didn't snap your neck.
Guest:It didn't snap my neck because I felt the pressure.
Marc:But the drop, it must have dropped and then boom, and then broke.
Guest:It couldn't catch me.
Guest:It didn't catch me under here.
Marc:It would happen very quick.
Marc:Catch me under there.
Guest:Holy shit.
Guest:But you know, you can't believe how fast your brain works to save your life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Boom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this wire that was only this big piano wire now is this big.
Yeah.
Guest:oh you still do it well if we do it yeah you know we we always have it and you're shit faced on top of it i'm on top but never on stage no that was the crazy thing when i went in for my alcoholism right to the to the the first time to the uh yeah to the um uh it was in uh up in cornell university and the guy says 77 so he says how much does alice i blame everything on alice of course he says how much does alice drink on stage yeah
Guest:And I went, well, when I'm playing Alice, I never drink.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he says, well, when you're doing a movie or like that, how much do you drink?
Guest:And I said, well, I never drink.
Guest:And he says, so the monster's not the problem.
Guest:The doctor's the problem.
Guest:He says, you know, the two hours you're on stage, you're fine.
Guest:The other 22 hours, you're the monster.
Guest:And I went...
Guest:Yes, I never thought of it.
Guest:I always thought it was Alice that caused the drinking.
Guest:It had nothing to do with Alice.
Guest:Oh, so you were blaming Alice.
Guest:In fact, it was the only time that I wasn't drinking was when I was working.
Guest:Because you were out of view.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I was on stage, I was clear.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when you first have that, like, before we get into the recovery, like, how did you have these relationships with, like, you know, you talk about Elvis, you talk about Sinatra.
Marc:I mean, obviously, you know, Nielsen, who, like, who I got into real heavy a couple years ago.
Marc:Oh, Harry was great.
Guest:What a fucking voice.
Guest:Yeah, and what a writer.
Guest:The Beatles called him the best writer in America.
Marc:You can hear a lot of, in Lennon's solo work, you can hear a lot.
Marc:And McCartney, some of the honky, I mean, some of the show tune kind of things.
Marc:And even the production a little bit.
Marc:But how did you have relationships with Elvis and Frank Sinatra?
Marc:I know Shep told me you and Groucho were buddies.
Guest:Groucho and I were, well, Groucho came to the show out of curiosity somehow.
Guest:What year are we talking?
Guest:Probably, well, let's see, when did he?
Guest:He was 86 years old.
Guest:It was when we were doing, well, it was always vaudeville.
Guest:Didn't matter what era it was in.
Guest:But he comes to the show, and they said, what did you think of Alice Cooper?
Guest:And he says, Alice is the last hope for vaudeville.
Guest:that's that's how it got started and i said that's the greatest compliment now groucho and i are buddies buddies shep ends up managing him yeah because from what i understand it was possible mismanagement going on right oh then they did that live record right yeah yeah yeah and shep could yeah and shep never got paid he said i don't want to get paid he told him right up front i said i don't want to get paid for anything i just want to balance your books
Guest:yeah and I want to make sure you're okay yeah make sure you're okay so we got to be really good friends yeah he'd call me up two in the morning Alice can't sleep come on over okay yeah so I'd come over he'd be in bed he'd have his beret on and a cigar yeah you know and there'd be a chair next to his bed yeah six pack of Budweiser uh-huh and he'd say we'd sit and watch movies oh really movies oh that's sweet and this guy would ride up on the horse yeah like this you know and he'd say see that guy I go yeah he says gay
Guest:And he goes, no, he wasn't.
Guest:He never knew if he was... He was telling all the stories.
Guest:He says, see that nurse there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Catholic nurse?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, Harpo and Chico both nailed her.
Guest:And I'm sitting there and I'm going...
Guest:I could believe this, but I know what the source is right now.
Guest:Yeah, but he's probably telling the truth, though, right?
Guest:He ended up being... I got along with Groucho better than I got along with most rock guys.
Marc:It was so funny, because I think one of the Ashton brothers had a relationship with Larry from the Stooges.
Marc:He used to go out and visit him, you know, from their namesake.
Guest:I saw him at a park bench on Hollywood Boulevard, and we walked by, and I went, Larry!
Guest:He goes, hey, what are you talking... Hey, it's good to talk to you, man.
Yeah.
Guest:It was so great because we loved those guys.
Guest:We worshipped the Bowery boys, Muggsy.
Guest:Those guys were our guys.
Guest:That's sweet.
Guest:So when we got to meet those guys, that to me was, I think I was the only rock star that was a friar.
Guest:oh really because groucho he brought you and and and all the guys you know everybody had to have tuxedos on and i'd have all black leather and i was totally accepted yeah i still work at the comedy store you're friends with mule deer right yeah oh gary's one of my best buddies yeah yeah i mean i i was there i was a doorman there back in the 80s doing blow and then i you know i cleaned up i came back i still work there it's beautiful that's great man and gary's one of you know yeah how much fun is that guy yeah he was like so you can imagine you walk into a room
Guest:I've not talked to him.
Guest:I should talk to Gary Mule, dear.
Guest:You walk in, you sit down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Between Jack Benny and George Burns.
Guest:At the Friars.
Guest:Steve Allen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody.
Guest:And you're Alice Cooper.
Guest:And you're Alice Cooper.
Guest:And they treat you just like you're one of the guys.
Guest:It's show business, buddy.
Guest:It's the coolest thing in the world.
Guest:Well, that's the one thing I realized about you is you love show business.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I love these guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I never tried to make a joke.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because they were always... But you see yourself as a showman.
Guest:The great thing was they all sat there...
Guest:When one guy would walk in, everybody would be quiet.
Guest:Jonathan Winters.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:When Jonathan Winters walked in, they'd all go, watch this.
Marc:Because he was... I talked to him before he died.
Marc:I went to his house.
Marc:Good actor, too.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:He was just a really sweet, beautiful guy.
Guest:I bought a couple of his paintings.
Marc:Oh, you did?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He did surrealistic paintings.
Marc:Yeah, he was a painter.
Marc:Yeah, it was a real honor.
Marc:I drove up, and I got the opportunity to talk to him.
Marc:It was just a couple years before he passed, and it was wild to be at his house.
Marc:We went out to lunch.
Guest:Do you remember the time that him and Robin Williams...
Guest:He did sort of the improv off.
Guest:Robin Williams put a white flag up.
Guest:He said, I give up.
Guest:I give up.
Guest:He said, I can't stay with him.
Marc:They're very similar.
Marc:I talked to both of them before they died.
Marc:It was very interesting, the similarities and the darkness in their brain.
Guest:And Frank Sinatra?
Guest:Sinatra, yeah.
Guest:I got along with him.
Guest:I never saw the dark side.
Guest:How did you meet him?
Guest:How did you end up having a relationship with Frank Sinatra?
Guest:It was a baseball game in Vegas, a celebrity baseball game.
Guest:And our team was Kenny Rogers, the Carpenters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, myself, like this, okay.
Guest:So when we're playing the police department or whatever in the afternoon, and there's this kid trying to get in the games, about 12.
Guest:He wants to get in like this, and I finally go over and I say, let him in.
Guest:I put him on the bench.
Guest:And he sits there, I gave him my hat, and oh, this is great.
Guest:I'm walking to the casino that night, and this guy says, hey, so what?
Guest:He says, the boss wants to see you.
Guest:The boss, I went, who's the boss?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I go over there and Sinatra.
Guest:And he's sitting there and he says, Coop.
Guest:First one to ever call me Coop.
Guest:And he says, Coop.
Guest:He said, I owe you one.
Guest:And I went, Mr. Sinatra.
Guest:And he said, Frank.
Guest:I went, okay, Frank, but I have no idea.
Guest:He said that kid was Jilly's son.
Guest:Jilly's son.
Guest:Jilly was his best friend.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You did a solid for him, man.
Guest:He said, I mean, you did a solid for me.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And I went, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I said, well, you know, just a kid wants to see a baseball game.
Guest:He said, yeah, yeah, but he said, oh, you won.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So, yeah, we met a couple times, you know.
Guest:But anyways, two years later.
Marc:You never took him up on the favor?
Guest:Well, Bernie Topper and I both get invitations to the Hollywood Bowl.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:For Sinatra?
Guest:Yeah, for Sinatra.
Guest:I said, oh, how cool.
Guest:Sinatra remembered that and got us tickets.
Guest:How was it seeing him?
Guest:Yeah, it was great.
Guest:So we sat there, you know, this is great.
Guest:Hey, yeah, boss wants to see both of yous.
Guest:Yous.
Guest:So we got out.
Guest:There's Frank.
Guest:He's got a tie undone.
Guest:He's got a martini and a cigarette.
Guest:And he said, I'm going to do one of your songs tonight.
Guest:Get out of here.
Guest:He did You and Me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went, what?
Guest:And he says, yeah, good song.
Guest:You keep writing them, kid.
Guest:I'll keep singing them.
Guest:And he said, Bernie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, I'm doing one of Elton's songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he did your song.
Guest:Yeah, he did.
Guest:And that's how he paid me back.
Guest:That's fucking.
Guest:And I just went, I said, you can't.
Guest:I said, that's more than I could ever think of.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:And he says, I just do songs that are good songs.
Guest:He says, it just happened to be yours.
Guest:Yeah, that's amazing.
Guest:And then I got to know him better afterwards, you know, in the Friars Club and everything.
Guest:And I always got along with him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Peter Sellers was another guy.
Guest:You never saw the dark side of him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was always just, he was Clouseau sometimes and he was this guy.
Guest:Yeah, he was in it.
Guest:But I never saw the dark side of him.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Well, they didn't see the dark side of you.
Guest:Yeah, no.
Marc:They really never did.
Marc:I mean, it means like in retrospect is something you completely understand.
Guest:No, they got it.
Guest:They got the fact that I played the character.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They were all actors.
Guest:They got it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you didn't quite get it sometimes.
Guest:Sometimes I was a little bit, yeah.
Guest:Who am I today?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's amazing that you're sort of, like, when I saw you at Conan just, like, what was it, less than a year ago, and I was watching you, you know, with the cane, and I'm like, this guy's a showman.
Marc:I'm Fred Astaire, man.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:All right, so let's go into the middle, and, like, you know, because obviously we could talk all day, but, like, you know, when you do hit the wall with alcohol, because you're just drinking beer, did you not really know that you were...
Marc:Beer and whiskey at 10 o'clock.
Guest:Whiskey at 9 o'clock.
Guest:Whiskey at 8 o'clock.
Guest:Pretty soon it's whiskey at 8 in the morning.
Guest:Shaking and everything?
Guest:No.
Guest:I was Dean Martin.
Guest:Did you come from it?
Guest:You come from alcohol?
Marc:No.
Guest:I had no idea that alcohol was running me.
Guest:I just figured, hey, it's part of the thing.
Guest:I was never drunk.
Guest:I was always on this golden buzz.
Guest:Which is dangerous.
Guest:Because you don't realize what's going on in your body.
Marc:And you're not realizing it takes a lot to feed that buzz.
Guest:It keeps getting more and more.
Guest:I get up in the morning and throw up blood.
Guest:And that was the alarm.
Guest:For the first time.
Guest:My wife says, let's go.
Guest:And Shep says, let's go.
Guest:And they checked you in?
Guest:I did.
Guest:They checked me in.
Guest:Hardest thing in the world for them.
Guest:They both cried their eyes out going back to New York, but boy, did I need to be in there.
Guest:And you didn't withdraw?
Guest:No.
Guest:I didn't.
Guest:It was funny.
Guest:The first three days, I felt like my nerves endings were on the outside of my body.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If somebody did.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:But I never went through the kind of DTs, this, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But four days in?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I started feeling really good.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And I started feeling really, really good.
Guest:And I went, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is kind of really strong.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I was in for a month, over a month, maybe six weeks.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I came out dead straight.
Guest:Straight for a year, I had one sip of white wine, and I hate white wine.
Guest:And just it triggered it.
Guest:And that night, I had three bottles hidden in the house.
Guest:That quick?
Guest:That quick.
Guest:I had no idea I was that much of an alcoholic.
Marc:Were you doing the thing?
Marc:You know, the secret meetings?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Never went to AA.
Guest:I was totally fine.
Guest:Ended up almost ruining my marriage, ruining my career.
Guest:The second time.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But you did a record in between though, right?
Guest:No, I did three records.
Guest:But when did From the Inside come out?
Guest:Was that right after you got out?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That was about the hospital.
Guest:When I was finally, the first time when I came out, I said, Bernie.
Guest:Bernie and my best friend, we're both lyricists.
Guest:And I go, I got to tell you about these characters in there.
Guest:And when I start telling them about Jackknife Johnny and Millie and Billy and Nurse Rosetta and all these people, we just started writing.
Guest:It was just flowing out of us.
Guest:Might have been the best musical record we ever did.
Guest:Yeah, you like that record?
Marc:Different producer too, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But, you know.
Guest:Then you realize.
Guest:When I fell, I was so surprised when I fell back.
Guest:I couldn't believe it was that much of a trigger for me.
Guest:And clearly, it was worse than before.
Guest:Yeah, because now, you don't just gradually get drunk again.
Guest:You're right back where you were.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so, somehow, got into Phoenix.
Guest:I finally had enough.
Guest:My parents, my wife's parents, my wife finally said,
Guest:You know, the whole intervention, you're going.
Guest:And I said, okay, well, now.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:I went to the Camelback Hospital.
Guest:When I came out, this is one of the great, you know, sky opens up things.
Guest:And one of the reasons I became Christian again is...
Guest:I came out, and I went right to a bar, and I had a Coca-Cola, and waited for that craving.
Guest:Waited for it, because I'm gonna be around alcohol all my life, so I'm gonna... You wanna deal with it?
Guest:Sat there, sat there, nothing.
Guest:Okay, tomorrow's gonna be hell.
Guest:Wake up in the morning.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:No obsession.
Guest:35 years later, never once a craving.
Guest:And the doctor said, that's insane.
Guest:You were the classic alcoholic.
Guest:How many meetings do you go?
Guest:I said, I've never been to a meeting.
Guest:And they said, well, you're willpower.
Guest:I said, I have no willpower.
Guest:I have zero willpower.
Guest:I said, God took it away from me.
Guest:I said, I truly believe it was a miracle as much as parting the Red Sea was God said, it's enough.
Guest:And I never had another, never had another, never fell back, never had another drink.
Guest:It never occurred to me to have a drink.
Guest:Hosting the Grammys, I'm going, oh my gosh.
Guest:Never occurred to me to have a drink and calm down.
Guest:The obsession was lifted, as they said.
Guest:Yeah, it was gone.
Guest:It was totally gone.
Guest:And even the doctor said...
Guest:We have to write that down as a miracle because you should be hiding things all over the house.
Guest:You should be watched at all times.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Considering your past and everything like that.
Guest:And I said, it's gone.
Guest:I said, it's as if it never existed.
Guest:You could put a drink in front of me and I, what?
Guest:And I wouldn't even think a drink of that.
Guest:Is that weird?
Guest:Yeah, it is weird.
Guest:It's biblical.
Guest:And I started realizing that that was from a higher source.
Guest:It was not from a doctor.
Guest:I wasn't a cured alcoholic.
Guest:I was a healed alcoholic.
Guest:And that told me something.
Guest:I said, wow, there's something more important than rock and roll to me.
Guest:So that was it.
Guest:That was the white light moment.
Guest:But it didn't mean I had to quit rock and roll.
Marc:Right, but it was just a moment that you realized that some power greater than you.
Marc:Had a better plan for me.
Marc:Yeah, and you were wired with Jesus, so why not let it be Jesus?
Guest:Absolutely, and it got to the point where when I did become Christian, I really got into it and realized that there was no such thing as Jesus saying, oh, by the way, you can't be a rock star.
Guest:He said,
Guest:be a rock star yeah just be a good person but represent me yeah and i went do you do any do you do you find it do you when you look at your records are there jesus records no but there are references there's a lot of references in there to anti-satanic things yeah there's a lot of little references in there to to if you think hell is going to be getting high with jim morrison yeah you're right where he wants you uh-huh right
Guest:There was a great line in Usual Suspects.
Guest:The devil's greatest trick was getting you to believe he doesn't exist.
Guest:When I heard that, I went, oh, that's a song.
Guest:That's a great song right there.
Guest:But again, it never dissuaded the fact that Alice Cooper was this character that I played.
Guest:And he was a fun character.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There was never a time that just my lifestyle changed.
Marc:And also like that character, however it's interpreted, does let a little steam, a little pressure out of the dark side.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Sort of like the weird evil clown.
Guest:I had no problem injecting a little Clouseau.
Guest:into this character.
Guest:I mean, every once in a while, I want Alice to slip on a banana peel when he's really trying to be arrogant up there.
Guest:I love that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And let the audience in on it.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:So there's like a tongue-in-cheek kind of fun.
Guest:Well, it'd be shock.
Guest:You can't shock an audience anymore.
Guest:Audiences are shockproof.
Guest:I'm sure.
Guest:CNN's more shocking than Marilyn Manson, myself, and Rob Zombie put together.
Guest:In the 70s, it was easy to shock an audience.
Guest:Now, I get my head cut off every night.
Guest:You won't turn on CNN.
Guest:They're really getting their head cut off.
Guest:So how shocking could what we do be?
Marc:And did you change your life in terms of doing charitable things?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It just came natural.
Guest:When that was now part of my life, and now I was following him, I went, it just came natural.
Guest:Here's a bunch of kids in trouble.
Yeah.
Guest:Wow, what can we do to help them out?
Guest:I'm in such a perfect situation here.
Guest:I watched a drug deal go down, and it was two 16-year-old kids.
Guest:One kid's getting the money.
Guest:And I said, how does that kid not know he might be a great guitar player?
Guest:He's never had a guitar in his hand.
Guest:The other kid might be the best drummer in town.
Guest:And I got the idea opening a place where any teenager could come in and learn guitar, bass, drums for free, all for free.
Guest:All we had to do was raise the money.
Guest:And so that's for the last 20 years I do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we get 100 kids a day in there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And some of them are cutters.
Guest:Some of them are gang related.
Guest:But here's a 16-year-old kid now that's playing guitar instead of selling meth.
Guest:It works, huh?
Guest:So his whole life changes constantly.
Guest:You know, that's sweet.
Guest:And but it really is a cool thing to do.
Guest:And it's fun watching these kids develop into good players.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:You know, and Wayne Kramer does a thing to another ex junkie and Detroit guy.
Guest:He does the guitars for jails.
Guest:You find you find that the guys that have gone through it and have been on that side and and survived it.
Guest:Always try to find a way to help kids out.
Guest:Yeah, and you help other rock guys too, right?
Guest:Well, if they, you know, I have people always come to me and they say, you got to call my brother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he's an alcoholic.
Guest:And I go, I can't do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If he calls me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's halfway home.
Guest:That means he's admitting I got a problem.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I've had some pretty big stars call up at three in the morning and say, hey, where do I go?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and I go, okay, you're halfway home.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I had to call you, it's just another finger wagging in your face.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And you could bite it off.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Attraction rather than promotion.
Guest:But if you call me, you're saying, I'm at the bottom of the rung.
Guest:I need help.
Guest:Okay, now I can direct you somewhere.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And it's public knowledge that you helped Mustaine out, Dave Mustaine, right?
Guest:Dave Mustaine.
Guest:I just saw Dave.
Guest:And we played in Budapest together.
Guest:He's a hell of a player.
Guest:He looks great, man.
Guest:He looks great.
Guest:But he had a real problem.
Guest:And I just finally just, back of the neck, gruff of the neck, come here.
Guest:But you know, the guys that had the worst problems are the guys that usually end up being the most charitable because they're thankful that they're not there anymore.
Guest:And now they go, well, how can I help some other kid not to get to that place?
Guest:Right, so your last fucked up record was the Dada record?
Guest:dada was there was the the the blank the blackout period records which my fans always say are my best records really yeah they love those records which one like zipper catches skin uh special forces yeah uh dada dada dada was a little more control flush the fashion yeah yeah you know well that's got a hit on it a lot of people did had hits on it yeah but
Guest:I cannot remember writing any of that stuff.
Guest:You really can't.
Guest:No.
Guest:I don't remember recording it.
Guest:Dada's trippy, dude.
Guest:But that was Bob Ezrin, though.
Guest:Bob was, I was fairly okay at Dada.
Guest:He knew you.
Guest:Yeah, and we pretty much knew what we were doing on that record.
Guest:But Zipper Catcher Skin?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, God.
Guest:And now I listen to it and I go, wow, that song is great.
Yeah.
Marc:Good.
Marc:So some part of you was still working.
Guest:Some part of me was working.
Guest:Alice was still working.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I listened to the lyrics and I go, there was a song called Zorro's Ascent.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It says, I don the cape, now I'm Don Diego.
Guest:And I went, Don, Don.
Guest:Oh, that's really good.
Yeah.
Marc:So you can appreciate what you did in another time zone.
Marc:My subconscious was writing pretty good lyrics.
Marc:So you took three years off, and then Trash turned everything around again, and a whole new generation of metal guys, hard rock guys, and a lot of guys that you influenced came to your sort of side, and you made this great record.
Guest:Yeah, and I think at this point I was trying to prove the fact that I was still in the game, and I was still...
Guest:something to be dealt with and you could still sing and still write songs i mean i mean that's what you did and now i was working with people that were really good and i was on a roll up i was rolling you're working with a new kind of guitar player yeah like the actual style of guitar playing changed yeah in those three years almost that you were gone these guitar players were good guitar players man yeah i mean they weren't just you know schlock players they were good
Guest:yeah and and i was surrounding myself with all the best people i was always around the very i when i picked a guitar player it was because he was the best guy at that sure kane roberts yeah and kip winger kip winger was the best best bass player around yeah yeah and they all wanted to play with you that was it and you kept working you keep well that's the thing you keep working and then like i listened to welcome to my nightmare the second one
Marc:And that's another one of these.
Marc:It's the funniest record ever made.
Marc:It's a good record, man.
Marc:But it's comedy.
Marc:It's all comedy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:There's country.
Marc:You got Vince Gill on there.
Guest:Vince Gill's on it.
Marc:Laying it out.
Marc:That solo, he lays out on that song.
Marc:It's like, holy shit.
Guest:When I brought that into my band, they listened to it, and they all pointed to each other.
Guest:You play it.
Guest:No, they couldn't.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's an amazing guitar player.
Guest:I just handed him a Telecaster, and I say, here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pretend like you're in a rock band.
Oh.
Marc:no problem that guy just unbelievable we had like patterson hood on there too right from the drive-by trucker everyone's on that record yeah but i always look at it as like they're they're they're honored to work with you it's nice to be in that position yeah and the same with this one you've got uh you've got some good guest stars on panel larry mullins jr was one of those things where bob said the drummer for utah
Guest:yeah I started out saying let's not do a concept album right let's just not do one let's do 13 great records yeah great rock songs yeah that you can't deny yeah okay we wrote the whole thing and Bob says how about this yeah change the whole bottom of the sound I said what do you mean Larry Mullins Jr.
Guest:on drums I went wow would he do it
Guest:He goes, big fan.
Guest:He says, you know, you two were all big fans of yours, you know.
Guest:And I went, if he'd do it, that would be amazing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then, you know, we did that one song, I've fallen in love and I can't get up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a Texas roadhouse boogie song.
Guest:And I went, we were looking at Billy Gibbons.
Guest:There was no doubt.
Guest:And I sent it to him, you know, and he goes, I got the flu right now, but this song makes me feel better.
Guest:yeah you can feel it you can hear his riff he did oh it was there was no two ways about who had to play on that song yeah yeah you know and he sent it back did two takes and it killed it just killed it yeah and you've worked with guys who work with lou reed you work with some swedish guys wagner and hunter uh were probably two best guitar players on the planet right then and i was and i both of them in my band yeah they just love playing with you yeah
Marc:It's a great record, and I'm happy you're still working.
Marc:You seem fucking healthy as hell.
Guest:I'll be 70 next year, and I'm the only one not breathing hard on stage.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And the show is physically as hard as Nightmare.
Guest:Do you do anything to stay in shape?
Marc:No.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Now, one thing before you go.
Marc:Can you tell me what's so great about golf in a few sentences?
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Golf is an addiction.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:And I'm feeding an addiction, and I understand it.
Marc:But it's also a meditation somehow.
Marc:The guys who love it, there's a relationship that's almost zen with the thing.
Guest:It is.
Guest:Lou Reed.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I lived with Lou Reed at the Chelsea Hotel in the worst of times.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Those times in New York where you walk by.
Guest:The Andy Warhol times?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you see those guys with just their key in the door because they couldn't get it open.
Guest:So you open the door and push them in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Close it.
Guest:Those times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Lou Reed, the last time I saw Lou Reed, he says, hey, Alice, you know, yeah.
Guest:Hey, man, how you doing?
Guest:Good.
Guest:Good.
Guest:He says, I'm pushing the ball to the right.
Guest:He said, and I'm, you know, I did like a triple take.
Guest:And I went, you play golf?
Guest:And he goes, oh, yeah.
Guest:I play golf every time.
Guest:I said, I love it, man.
Guest:I'm addicted to it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Dylan plays golf.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Neil Young plays golf.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Stephen Stills, Iggy Pop, Roger Waters, big golfer.
Guest:So they all got in common.
Guest:Okay, I get it, right.
Guest:They were all guys that survived the drugs and booze.
Guest:The drinks and drinking thing, and all of them got addicted to golf.
Guest:I read a thing one time that didn't surprise me.
Guest:Fred Astaire was talking about W.C.
Guest:Fields one time in the prime of their career.
Guest:He said, what is this golf thing?
Guest:And W.C.
Guest:Fields, come on out.
Guest:Fred Astaire hit one ball and was addicted.
Guest:And he says, it almost ruined my career.
Guest:First time it's always free.
Guest:He hit it down the middle.
Guest:And it felt so good to watch that ball just disappear down the middle.
Guest:That little click.
Guest:And he says he started missing rehearsals.
Guest:Oh, he couldn't get off.
Guest:And pretty soon he said, I had to stop playing because I was literally, my career was suffering from it.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It gets so addictive.
Guest:If you hit six good shots, it's like taking six good hits.
Guest:You'll chase it all day.
Marc:All right, I'm sold.
Marc:I'm going to try it.
Marc:I'm going to try it.
Marc:And I also wanted to say sorry for your loss with Glenn Campbell.
Guest:Yeah, Glenn was, you know, he could hang with the Rat Pack or the Sex Pistols.
Guest:But you guys were tight.
Guest:We were tight.
Guest:We had a lot in common.
Guest:We were both alcoholics that weren't alcoholics anymore.
Guest:We were both Christians.
Guest:His guitar playing was great.
Guest:He was another Vince Gill guy.
Guest:Yeah, great.
Guest:Beyond anybody.
Marc:And Jerry Reed, too, is another one of those guys.
Marc:Another guy.
Marc:But yeah, I watched that documentary.
Marc:It was just heartbreaking.
Guest:And funny as hell.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Funny as hell.
Guest:And our families grew up together.
Guest:Our kids grew up together.
Marc:It was definitely time, though, huh?
Guest:Yeah, it was merciful.
Guest:He got to a point where he couldn't remember anything, you know, and it was just, that disease is so vicious.
Guest:Alzheimer's terrible.
Guest:Because you just go away and you can't, pretty soon you just disappear.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, it's terrible.
Marc:Well, God damn it was, I mean, not to use that, it was great talking to you.
Guest:It's all right, it's Father Marin.
Marc:You're the other Father Marin.
Marc:Good, good.
Guest:It was real fun, and I'm glad you're doing well.
Guest:We've got to come to the show tonight.
Guest:Where is it?
Guest:We're at the Greek Theater.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's us and Deep Purple and Edgar Winter.
Marc:Edgar Winter.
Guest:Edgar Winter.
Marc:What time does that start?
Marc:I think we're on at 8.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Maybe I'm supposed to do comedy.
Marc:Maybe I'll do it.
Marc:Oh, if you have a show.
Marc:I understand.
Marc:It's great, man.
Marc:And, you know, I've got family in Phoenix.
Marc:So, you know, I'm out there a lot.
Marc:My ex-wife was from there, but my brother lives there.
Guest:Oh, great.
Marc:And so I used to hike up Camelback.
Guest:I live right off of Camelback, the nose of Camelback Mountain.
Marc:Maybe you get... Well, I'd just annoy you if I went on a golf course with you.
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Marc:Well, I'll get you out.
Marc:I'll get you addicted.
Marc:Don't worry.
Marc:All right, buddy.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:What?
Marc:What?
Marc:Lou Reed was a golfer?
Marc:What?
What?
Marc:What a great conversation.
Marc:I really enjoyed it.
Marc:And I hope you did as well.
Marc:I'll talk to you when I get home.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I hope you're hanging in.
Guest:And I don't have a guitar.
Marc:That's just quick improv.
Marc:Mouth trumpet.
Guest:Boomer lives!
you