Alice, Me and a Cannibal Clown Named Cookoo Charlie

“Alice Cooper. You have been accused of mass mental cruelty. How do you plead? Guilty!”

One day in the fall of 1976, I spent the night over my best friend, Kenny’s house. We were watching the American Music Awards hosted by Alice Cooper and Diana Ross. I had heard Alice’s music on the radio but that was my first time actually seeing the Shock Rock King.

At one point, Alice flipped out on the Supreme Diva, jumped off stage, pulled a young woman out of her front row seat and started tearing at her clothes. A couple of security guards pulled the mad musician off the lady. Alice fended and fought them off and as he escaped back stage, we were treated with music and costumed dancers as a sign that read HELL descended from the heavens. The song the dancers were dancing to told me all the reasons I’m going to go to hell and that I “even make my grandma sick”. By the time Alice reenters the scene, he’d changed wardrobe and began singing about “having a hell of a time” and wishing his woman was there. Then out pops up another lady in a sexy outfit and a whip who went after Alice. She and Alice go at it until he finally caught the upper hand, snatched the whip away from her, cracking it at her as she tried to get away from him.

Now to the fifteen-year old I once was, and naïve as he may have been, that looked damn real. Having spent a childhood watching Universal monsters and Hammer horrors, I had found a recording artist who spoke to me as no other before him. In that short five-minute span, I was introduced to an art form that melded a Halloween panorama with Dante’s Inferno. Alice had pulled me into his world and I never left it.

For Christmas that year I received my first two Alice albums, Welcome to My Nightmare and Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. They were actually presents from my sweet grandmother. Soon I knew the words to every song with Nightmare being, and remaining to this day, my favorite Cooper record. Having lost one of my close friends to cancer two years prior, the song Steven held a special meaning for me. Even now, there are times while listening to it, I get choked up remembering my friend, Tommy.

Growing up as a teenaged boy in northeast Ohio living in a house controlled by an authoritative father and, being buck-teethed and stripper-pole skinny, bullied throughout most of my school years, Alice introduced me to a dark defiance that had a total disregard to society’s rules and authoritarian, whether it was parental, academic, governmental or cleric, dominance.

After two unsuccessful albums, the Alice Cooper Group, consisting of Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass, Neil Smith on drums and Vincent (Alice) Furnier on vocals and harmonica, released their third album, Love It To Death, in February 1971. Taking over the reigns of producer, Bob Ezrin guided the band through the sound that would define them throughout the early seventies.

The teen angst anthem, Eighteen (I’m a boy and I’m a man) launched Alice Cooper onto national airplay. Other stand out tracks from LITD included Eighteen’s B-side, Is It My Body, the epic Black Juju (My evil is now and I’m caught up in desire) and my personal favorite, The Ballad of Dwight Fry (I hear the sirens calln’ and so I know I am not free). Dwight Fry taught me I wasn’t free to do what I wanted in my father’s house or in the confines of an institutionalized education. I tried to escape in books, music, movies and soon, the streets. Even now, in my first year of senior citizenship, I know that I am not free, and neither is anyone else in this industrialized world, and I’m waiting to hear those sirens coming for me.

A concert staple, the vaudeville villain front man performs Dwight Fry with mic in hand, while all strapped up in a straightjacket. To this day, I’ve always wanted a straight-jacket. Not wrapped up in one, locked in a rubber room, mind you – just hanging in my closet.

Renfeild’s Black Juju

Hooked on Satan’s dirty tales.

I Love It To Death.

Before moving on to Killer, I want to discuss the album’s artwork. The front cover is solid red with a photo of a boa constrictor’s head, tongue flickering, with the words, written in black, Alice Cooper above its head and Killer below it. Being someone who had loved snakes since a boy and who caught them in the wild (I no longer think any animal should be removed from the wild) that cover may have spoken more to me than even the music inside it.

Not only did Killer’s serpentine front cover slither my spirit, but the fold-out inside of the hanged killer, Alice, filled me with an unhinged fascination. All my life I never could stand anything around my neck (to this day I think my sister, Chris, is still pissed that I didn’t wear a tie for our father’s funeral) and my wrists (my father was pissed when I wouldn’t wear the watch he bought me for my eighteenth birthday). My rationale for this, which remains to this day, was that I was hung in a past life – perhaps I was a slave, pirate or horse rustler. Who knows?

With Killer Alice Cooper left their rock contemporaries under the wheels and slaughtered the peace and love generation, leaving its rotting corpse beneath a ‘halo of flies”. Like LITD, Killer had an epic song, the just mentioned, Halo of Flies (Glimmering nightgowns, poisonous cobras), the anti-child abuse tune Dead Babies and concluded with the murderous title track, Killer (Someone handed me this gun and I gave it everything).

You wouldn’t catch me out ridin’ fences for long to come up with my favorite Killer track. According to Alice, Desperado was written for Jim Morrison and painted a picturesque Peckinpah western tapestry into a three and a half minute cut (Step into the streets by sundown, Step into your last goodbye, You’re a target just by living, Twenty dollars will make you die).

At the time, in my later teens, I wouldn’t have dreamed the lyric, “I’m a killer and I’m a clown” would have relevance for me in later life - more on that to follow.

Nervous dead babies

Killer clown desperado

Got you on the run

After the Killer tour, Alice Cooper proudly sung “we got no class and we got no principles” as they went back to school for their fifth album, School’s Out. Even though I was like damn near every other kid, at least the ones I hung out with, in wanting school to be out forever and delighted in the blood drenched tracks, Luney Tunes (I’m swimmin’ in blood like a rat on a sewer floor) and Gutter Cat VS the Jets (I couldn’t get the blood off my hands), I was more drawn to, like a dog being led by a bloody steak, Public Animal #9.

Public Animal #9 begins with a rousing “hey, hey, hey yeah” from the band, followed by Alice defiantly singing “Me and MG, we ain’t never gonna confess, we cheated at the math test, we carved some dirty words on our desk”. For me, it was a testament to their loyalty in the face of authority and they wouldn’t ever think of turning on each other.

Although I was, as I am now, an introvert keeping much to myself, there were times when I took a stance in “simple disobedience”. One of those times occurred when I stood up for a friend of mine in my junior year of high school. An act that left me in a classroom with only myself and four others: two friends and two principles. At one point the principle doing all the talking told me that he could expel me for what I had done. I looked at him in defiance and ambivalence. He said, “You don’t give a damn, do you?” Cobra-like, I locked eyes with him and replied, “No, I don’t.” He had to understand that no one messed with my friends.

During Public Animal’s second verse, Vincent sings, “She wanted an Einstein but she got a Frankenstein” and the song comes to a crescendo with him repeating “public animal #9” gutterally twisting the word “nine” until he’s growling. It’s positively primal.

Luney tune gang fights

A Frankenstein holocaust

School’s out completely.

After the grand finale of School’s Out, Alice Cooper graduated from “gutter cats” to “billion dollar babies”. Billion Dollar Babies dropped three hit singles: the title track, Billion Dollar Babies, No More Mr. Nice Guy (I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing) and Elected (We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make). Elected was John Lennon’s favorite Alice Cooper song.

A couple of other stand-out tracks for BDB were Sick things (You things are heavenly when you come worship me) and I Love the Dead (I have other uses for you, darlin’). For a backwards teenager who hadn’t even kissed a girl yet , a song about a guy banging a dead chick painted all kinds of images in his impressionable mind.

But it wasn’t the perverted nasty necrophilliac sex nor the possibility of getting my bones jumped by a woman in Chihuahua, Raped and Freezin’ that got me all excited and left me “foaming like a dog that’s been infected by the rabies”.

No, it was Neil Smith’s rapid fire skin beating that opened the title track, Billion Dollar Babies, coupled with the image of dancing with someone in an attic with the terrifying thought that their head “might come off in my hands’ that did it for me. And of course, Vincent’s scream a minute and fourteen seconds into the song. Man, I still love that scream.

Elected sick things

No more necrophilia

Billion dollar babe

Following the commercial success of Billion Dollar Babies and its record breaking tour, Alice Cooper went back to the studio to record their next and what would be the last album of the original band. Arising artistic differences between Bob Ezrin and Michael Bruce over Bruce’s arrangement of Woman Machine left the group without their star producer. And it showed. Although Muscle of Love ended up being a good album, it paled in comparison to its four Ezrin-helmed predecessors.

On nearly half of the album, the band was lamenting on sex. They offered us a prostitute ditty, Never Been Sold Before (I’m sick of streets, chicks and dicks), the aforementioned Woman Machine (She’ll do it all, just change the tubes) and the masturbatory title track, Muscle of love (Lock the door in the bathroom now, I just can’t get caught in here). Now I never came across any girly mags my father may have possessed, but I did find an x-rated deck of cards in his sock drawer. It made for some titillating hands of 5 Card Stud for Kenny and me.

With Muscle of Love, not only were things getting hard in gold lame’ jeans, hearts were getting hard too. Hard Hearted Alice (Mind, scrambled like eggs, get bruised and erased when you live in a brainstorm) is pure dark poetry and, for me, the highlight of the album.

Crazy little child

Woman machine sick of dicks

A muscle of love

Two years after MOL, the group known as Alice Cooper had disbanded and Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to the name he originally came up with back in the late sixties and embarked on a solo career. Backed by new musicians and with Bob Ezrin returning as producer, Alice went into the studio to record a nightmare that still haunts my dreams to this day. And that’s a damn good thing.

“Welcome to my nightmare, I think you’re gonna like it”, sang Alice, inviting us into his first concept album of macabre rock. Sorry, Alice, I didn’t like it. I freakin’ loved it. Still do.

After the opening opus, Alice offers us a bite of Devil’s Food (Get ready for the lady, she’s gonna be a treat, simmer slightly to ready, make her soft too make her sweet). Listening to that song in the late seventies, I had no idea that it would prove to be more meaningfully relevant to the cannibal clown I would create over thirty years later than it ever did for me. Then again, since Cookoo Charlie came from my mind, what does that say about me?

Devil’s Food ends with an arachnid monologue from horror icon, Vincent Price praising the black widow spider and gives his own “personal philosophy” invoking the supremacy of the eight-legged beauty (I feel that man has ruled this world as a stumbling demented child-king long enough! And as his empire crumbles, my precious black widow shall rise as his most fitting successor).

Since I was a boy, “years ago”, I’ve always preferred animals over people, even though humans are part of the animal kingdom – they tend to forget this. I’ve also loved animal horror flicks – from Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis to Arachnophobia and my all-time favorite, Jaws- where nature strikes back at the “child-king” who continues his murderous reign over this planet and its inhabitants. There was a time when man was the prey before they became the dominant predator; I honestly think the tables will turn and man will find himself in the same position as his Paleolithic ancestors. Even if all that remains are insects and arachnids.

Moving on. After Mr. Price finishes his spider soliloquy, The Black Widow leaps in with Alice informing us “These words he speaks are true, we’re all humanary stew”. Again, the human animal was made to be eaten, whether it was from an extinct Smilodon and cave bear, a present-day tiger and crocodile or a cannibal clown called Cookoo Charlie. Disagree with me? Read the book Deadly Powers by Paul A. Trout.

Alice had always been a social commentator and that remained true with his first ballad, the domestic abuse classic, Only Women Bleed (Black eyes all of the time, don’t spend a dime and clean up this grime). During the WTMN tour, Alice and his future wife, Sheryl Goddard beautifully and poignantly brought the song to life on stage. On an aside, throughout his solo career, Alice has recorded several ballads, almost one per album, and I think the best of them should be collected for an album entitled, Alice Cooper’s Bloody Ballads. A Valentine’s Day release would seem fitting.

Four years prior to WTMN’s release, I lost my maternal grandfather. He dropped dead from his third heart attack fifteen days after my eleventh birthday. Two years after that my good friend, Tommy lost his fight with brain cancer at the ripe old age of thirteen. The following year claimed the life of my best friend, Kenny’s mother. For whatever reason, Death had moved into my living space.

I think that’s the reason Steven affected me so deeply and still does. “I don’t want to see you go”, Alice sings, “I don’t even want to be there”. During the service at Tommy’s funeral, the priest broke down and cried right along with us. When Tommy’s grandmother threw herself on her grandson’s casket, wailing, like Steven, I didn’t want to be there. Alice continues, “I didn’t want to see you die… you’ve only lived a minute of your life”. Sharing Steven’s nightmarish journey helped me get through my nightmarish teenage years. In some ways, Alice was a shock rock shaman guiding me through Death’s domain, helping me to deal with and escape from the pain and loss.

Black widow devouring

Women bleed some folks

Welcoming nightmare

A year later Alice went to hell and dragged Steven along with him. And that brings us back to the beginning of this essay and how I became an Alice fan.

“Road rats we’re a pack and the roads are home,” sang Alice in the chorus of Road Rats, a roadies tribute, from his 1977 album, Lace and Whiskey. At Fitch High School my friends and I weren’t roadies, but we were a pack, the streets were our home and the townspeople labeled us The Wedgewood Rats. Of the time I spent with The Rats, there were actually two, no make that three, Alice Cooper related events that I still remember with a smile.

The first event occurred when I first started hanging with The Rats. Kenny’s parents went away on vacation for a week – who leaves their teenaged son alone for an entire week?- and he threw a party. I brought Welcome To My Nightmare with me.

At one point, during the night, I popped Alice on the stereo and, having drunk a few beers, started jamming. When the scream that’s on Devil’s Food came on, I let wail. I had that scream down pat. Needless to say, my friends wanted to hear that scream multiple times. I swear my vocal chords were never the same since that party.

The second time I was walking with a friend on Wedgewood’s backstreets at night. I was drunk, he wasn’t. After a while a pick-up pulled up beside us with two or three of our friends inside. No room inside the cab, we jump in the bed.

As we’re cruising around the neighborhood, I started belting out I Love The Dead at the top of my lungs. “I love the dead before they’re cold. Their bluing flesh for me to hold.”

Not long after that, we were pulled over by the police. They separated us, putting two to a squad car. Then they took us down to the station. It had nothing to do with my singing.

The last event was a year after I graduated from high school. I took my good friend Rusty to see Alice during the Coop’s Flush the Fashion tour. At under thirty minutes, Flush the Fashion remains Alice’s shortest record, but with songs like Clones (We’re all), Grim Facts, Nuclear Infected and Pain (It’s a compliment to me to hear you screamin’ through the night) it’s one of the highlights of his eighties’ releases.

Sadly, I can count the times I’ve seen Uncle Alice in concert on two hands. (I wish there could’ve been more). Of those times, three shows stand out for me. The first show was during the King of the Silver Screen tour in 1977. Not only did I break my Cooper “unfinished sweet” cherry at that show, it was the first concert I had ever attended. I was 16 and my mom, wanting to make sure I made it out alive and unscathed, decided she would drive me to the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, along with my sister, Chris, who was three years my junior.

Upon arriving at the coliseum, my mom found out there were still tickets available for the show. Instead of waiting outside in the car, she figured it would be more reasonable to purchase a pair of tickets and see what her son was getting himself into, not to mention getting out of the cold.

Those tickets found them directly on the left side of the stage; my seat was about two-thirds distance away from it. From where they were they couldn’t see the entire show, but when they could, they actually had a better view than I did. Later, my mom informed me how impressed she was with the costume changes and theatrics of the show.

As for me, while people were getting high around me and, according to my mom, screwing in the rooms above us, I had my eyes on the stage. From my position, I was trying to make out the dancing teeth, black widow spiders, cyclops and the guillotine action. I had a blast.

The second concert was during the Special Forces tour in 1981. Alice came to The Tomorrow Club in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, my hometown. It was cold and snowing and I was as sick as the proverbial dog. But I didn’t give a damn how sick I was, there was no way in hell I was going to miss Alice in my hometown. The show was general audience and when I arrived I left my girlfriend, Sherrie, also an Alice addict, and made my way to the front of the stage. At one point during the song Pain, Alice asked, “Who am I?” Placing my hand on the shoulder of the guy in front of me, I yelled, “You’re pain!” Alice shot his head in my direction and I swear, to me, he looked me right in the eyes and sang out, “I’m pain!” For me, that was the ultimate Alice Cooper moment.

The last show was during the Rock and Roll Circus tour in 1997. I went with my girlfriend, now life partner, Judy, our friend, Bandana Bob and his date, Wendy, who was a friend of my sister, Maureen. Small world. The concert was along Cleveland’s riverfront and the forecast was calling for thunderstorms. What more could you ask for when you had the Coop thunder-rocking on stage and mother nature giving you a spectacular light show – and we were sitting on metal bleachers!

The first time I dressed up as Alice was during my junior year at high school. For our Humanities class we had to do an oral report on one of our heroes. There I was a shy, insecure kid sitting at my desk, putting on Alice Cooper eyes with my mom’s eyeliner. To end my report I lip-synched Nightmare’s title track. During the instrumental bridge, I recited an original poem I wrote consisting primarily from Cooper song titles. I hung onto that poem for the longest time but misplaced it among my many moves.

Over the years, several times I had also dressed up as Alice for the only holiday I give a damn about, Halloween. There were two years that were monstrously memorable. The first was when my daughter, Lea, was 10 years old, give or take a year. For that Halloween season, Mother Nature decided to give central Ohio trick or treaters a chilly trick: an ample abundance of the white stuff. With one hand holding Lea’s hand and the other holding the hand of Nicky, my daughter’s new friend, I trudged through the snow in my black leather jacket, black leotards and black combat boots.

The second time was for a Halloween Party thrown by Judy’s co-workers at Ajax Magnethermic. Since I was going as Alice, Judy decided to go as Nurse Rozetta. There’s still a photo from that night floating around somewhere.

Flash forward: Halloween 2009: At the time, I was working for Kepler’s Books and Magazines where one of my many duties was taking charge of their horror section. For Halloween that year, I joined forces with John Ray Gutierrez, who produced book trailers and other computer wizard wonders, to do a Halloween Special video where I reviewed two horror novels that I had read. Creating my own character, Cookoo Charlie, the cannibal clown, I wrote a script and starred in the video. John Ray directed and edited it.

Not only did Alice influence Cookoo Charlie, combining horror with humor, we used Welcome To My Nightmare’s title track as background music for the first two and a half minutes of the video. I also mentioned Uncle Alice in the opening sequence.

John Ray and I had a lot of fun with that video and I must admit I loved being in front of the camera. So we followed that video up a year later with another Cookoo Charlie book review offering. We did this one on our own, with no ties to Keplers Books. The book was called Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough and it was about an alien spider invasion. Of course being an arachnid nightmare, we had to use a clip of Vincent Price from The Nightmare tv special in 1975. Cookoo followed Vincent by mentioning Alice and quoting lyrics from The Black Widow.

After that second Cookoo Charlie excursion, I sat around contemplating how I could expand Cookoo Charlie’s universe beyond book reviews. How do I evolve this character whom I fell in love with almost instantly upon creating him and who was a part of me? By combining my passion for horror with my conviction as an animal activist.

While I wrote the script for our third Cookoo Charlie video, Cookoo Charlie’s Rattlesnake Roundup, a shockumentary about the atrocities of rattlesnake roundups throughout the country, I began thinking how I could also evolve Cookoo Charlie’s look. For the first two videos I had used a mask; now I wanted my cannibal clown to have his own original image. Working with John Ray’s wife, Jen, a make-up artist, we came up with a wicked winner.

Cookoo Charlie had a white pasty face, a red, almost cat-like nose, Cooper-inspired eyes and the word MEAT painted in red on his right cheek. To top off his appearance, I purchased an orange clown wig and shark-like teeth. It was a look that impressed Erich Grey Litoff, co-founder of Stan Winston school of Character Arts and horror author, Joseph D’Lacey said, “I’m a big fan of clowns, especially creepy ones. Cookoo Charlie makes Captain Spaulding look like a Chihuahua.”

Of course I had to have Alice in my shockumentary about snakes, even if he just popped in for a clip. Near the end of the video, Cookoo Charlie asks the serpent slayers, “And you have the nerve to call me sick?” Alice responds, “You’re sick, you’re obscene.”

What was up next on the plate for the cannibal clown? Perhaps some humanary stew? No, that’d have to be a bowl, not a plate. I had my sights on an actual Cookoo Charlie horror short film.

.

I wrote not one, but two scripts starring the festivally funny flesheater. The first was entitled Cookoo Charlie: A Stray Bullet. Once again, I wrote Alice into my script. In one scene, Cookoo Charlie taunts a character with words from one of my favorite Cooper tunes, Ballad of Dwight Fry. At the end of the second script, Cookoo Charlie: Hunter of Hunters, during a rant, Cookoo Charlie plugs Alice’s song The World Need’s Guts.

Deciding on shooting Hunter of Hunters, we held auditions, picked our cast and were searching for possible locations. Unfortunately our two attempts to secure funds for our clown’s first authentic film appearance proved to be unsuccessful. To date, it has yet to be filmed.

Sadly, another unfinished project of mine is the script I wrote for Cookoo Charlie’s Alice Cooper Tribute. Perhaps one day all my visions will become a reality.

In closing I have to say: Alice, I love ya, man. You have been a part of my life since I saw you standing side by side with Diana Ross back in 1976 and you continue to inspire me and your music, more than anyone else’s, has been the soundtrack of my life. I hope one day we will meet and, who knows, get to work together. After all, one of my dreams is to say to you, “Welcome to my nightmare.”