Article Database

Two Insiders View the Wild World or Rock

A ROCK-AND-ROLL tour is an event that's unlike any other kind of rock show. When 40 or 50 young people assemble to zig-zag across America with a million-dollar caravan of equipment, props and a superstar or two, you know that a fascinating journey is about to take place.

Although a tour is a gold mine for a journalist, books on them tend to be shallow and gossipy. If you've read "STP (Stones Touring Party)," you know what I mean. The book is filled with descriptions of hallway conversations, how Mick Jagger pouts, and what Lee Radziwill said what made Truman Capote laugh. The reader feels like an intruder.

Now so with "Billion Dollar Baby" (Atheneum, $10.), a new book by Bob Greene about the last Alice Cooper Holiday tour. For those of you who are not Alice Cooper fans, don't groan. You needn't be enamored of the Coop's music or stage show to be mesmerized by "Billion Dollar Baby."

Greene, a 27 year-old writer from Chicago, accepted an invitation from Alice's manager, Shep Gordon, not just to travel with the group, but to be a member of the band. The book takes us one step further into the working of a big-time tour and the personal lives of a superstar rock band.

I must tell you that Alice Cooper and the members of his band are probably closest friends in rock music. At first I was wary of Greene's observations about people I knew so well, but Greene is perceptive and sharp-witted. He not only captures the mercurial personalities of the five Coopers but he also understands them well and with kindness.

Greene enters the recesses of a studio in New York and he dons a set of headphones along with Alice to try and sing background vocals on the "Muscle of Love" album. In front of the microphone he suffers with a funny fit of self-consciousness. (He doesn't sing very well, it seems.) Throughout his recording session Greene is sure that visitors in the control room are hysterical with laughter at his amateur performance.

The Grande Finale

On the tour itself Greene gets the role of Santa Claus. Outfitted in a red suit and a bag of gifts, which he throws to the audience, Greene emerges onstage at the finale of each show and is beaten by the band. It's onstage, picked out by the warming light of the super-trooper spotlights, that Greene gets bitten by the rock bug and falls in love.

There's also a shocking and frightening description of the notorious Toledo concert where Alice's sick fantasy almost became a deadly horror show. The Toledo audience wsa hostile and thirsty for blood. The stage was showered with bottled and sharp objects, and finally an enormous explosion shattered the lighting fixtures above the stage. Alice called it quits after only two numbers, and the description of his terror and desperation exposes a side of this rock star that many wouldn't guess existed.

Most rock musicians tend to be spoiled, and as America's premier rock band Alice and his friends are pampered and treated as royalty. They fly around on a private jet and have limousines and servants at their disposal all day. But Alice, in this book, turns out to be a funny, retiring 25-year-old kid caught in a silver web. His passion for whisky and golf, not spotlights and superstardom. While the other members of the group are out smashing up the hotel or scoring groupies, Alice is always locked up in a hotel suite with a bodyguard watching TV. He loves what he's doing, but he hates it, too.

"Billion Dollar Baby" is one of the best books written about life within the bubble of rock, and it bursts right in front of your eyes, with an urgency and glamor I've rarely found in other books about the same subject.

(Originally published in the New York Sunday News, December 8th, 1974)