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Alice from Wonderland

There's No Business Like Show Business

"We're not on an anti-sex trip. Like we're taking sex, which is probably another half of American entertainment, sex and violence, and we're projecting it, and we're saying this is the way everything is right now. This is the way we are. Biologically, everyone is male and female, so many male genes and so many female. And so what it is we're saying, 'O.K., what's the big deal. Why is everyone so uptight about sex?' About faggots, queers, things like that. That's like making fun of a maniac because his brain isn't completely right, because he isn't in the norm. People don't accept that they are both male and female, and people are afraid to break out of their sex thing because that's making them accept more, making fun that we accept that. The thing is the way we are. We accept that."

— Alice Cooper
Twenty-one-year-old male incipient rock star

Alice Cooper wears blood-red trousers and antique yellow shoes. His eyes are ringed with heavy liner and his lashes are beaded with mascara. Man? Woman? Child? He is bound to be the next rock star and he is sure to be all things to all people — the first Rock sensation of the Seventies.

What are Alice and his drag routine all about? Alice is here to assault you. There are lots of longhaired boys around banging out Rock but how many of them wear a miniskirt? We've all been caressed, we've all been coaxed, but this is the Age of Assault. There's no use complaining about noise. Noise is not going to go away and now we must not only learn to live with it, we have to learn to make noise work for us. Did you ever get stoned? Did you ever notice that pot shuts out that middle-class mommy's voice that tells you to lower the Hi-Fi? Noise pouring out of the speakers can free you, if you let it. And all our old social taboos: the last remnants of a dying Puritanical culture. We must liberate ourselves from them, too; and that's what Alice's unisex image is intended to do.

The practitioners of Acid Art along with their friends from McLuhanland have known for a long time that the senses must be overloaded in order for a new clarity to emerge. The ear must be bombarded by shattering noise and the eye overcome with brilliant bursts of light; the audience should be supplied with unusual things to touch and taste. A successful media-mix will confuse the senses in such a way that perception is forced to become an act of astonishment.

Astonishment: something almost impossible to come by in this jaded age of ours. It has become the task of the practitioner of the rock art to find ways to astonish us.

Alice Cooper has recorded two albums, Pretties for You and Easy Action, both on the Straight-Warners Brothers' label. There are some lovely songs and some enigmatic puzzles on both L.P.'s and both are marked by the heavy bass sound and feedback distortion which mark the work of those groups which are oriented toward the violent. However, these albums are merely the original cast albums which recreate Alice's astonishing show for you. The show is something else.

At the end of an Alice Cooper concert, Alice goes berserk. The music is deafening. Alice throws the audience a boxful of live chickens. The audience by this time is crazy too. People reach up for the birds and rip them to pieces. Blood drips from their hands. Alice attacks a life-size mannequin with a hammer. The hammer, too, is tossed to the crowd, possibly to be used on a neighbor. Alice's band tosses tennis balls to one other. One of them douses the audience with a fire extinguisher. People are soaked with white foam. The strobe lights explode. The music reaches its crashing finale. Alice disappears. There's no business like show business.

Alice tells reporters that he is working on a new finale. He'd like to squirt the audience with a mist of monkey semen (a renowned aphrodisiac), while the music and lighting forces the audience to writhe together uncontrollably. The music would stop suddenly, and a massive shock applied to the floor of the theatre would cause everyone's hair to stand on end simultaneously. Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty has finally invaded Rockville.

Of course, it's obvious that this step forward brings us closer to rock writer Robert Christgau's theory of "totalitarian ecstasy," a group phenomenon which is what one usually experiences at concerts given by performers like Sly Stone who inspire thousands of people to wave their arms and scream "Higher!" at exactly the same moment. Formerly, Alice was content with letting the audience be liberated. (You can decide for yourselves if chicken slaughter is liberating.) Now, Alice wants power.

I'll keep you posted on Alice Cooper's arrival in New York. Rumor has it that he is working his way East. Ours is a transitional age. Entertainment is undergoing changes, violent changes, and it is easy to scoff at the baroque nature of Alice's routine, but anyone who is dedicating himself to liberation demands respect. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing Alice Cooper in New York.

(From the collection of Anders Mossberg)