Life on Planet Rock Page 8

  “You know, Lonn,” he said, “you have to get empty.”

  “Get empty?” I replied.

  “That’s right, empty,” he fired back, pulling a six iron from his Callaway golf bag for the 180-yard approach shot to the green.

  “What happens after I get empty, Coop?” I asked.

  “You get filled up,” he grinned, whereupon the godfather of shock rock stroked it pure and sweet, landing his pill on the soft green pillow five feet from the pin. Like his golf swing, Alice’s life appeared to me then as effortless. The golf swing requires two things: faith and agility. If you lack either, you’re in trouble. Alice Cooper was having no trouble with this round or this life. There was something more in that big black bag than just funny-looking sticks with numbers on them.

  “Hey, Coop, after the round, let’s do an interview. I’ve got my tape recorder in the car. We haven’t had a good on-the-record rap in years. I’ll write it up for the Web site.”

  “Sure,” he responded without hesitation. “Why not? But first we’ll go to Cooper’s Town for dinner.” That’s Alice’s restaurant, his very own Hard Rock Cafe, so to speak, a bastion of memorabilia located across the street from the two sports venues where the Diamondbacks and the Suns play. A joint business venture between Coop and his pals—Shep Gordon, baseball legends Ryne Sandberg and Randy Johnson, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine, and legendary Arizona concert promoter Danny Zelisko—the lively eatery had become a destination for anyone who wanted to get some good eats and feel the spirit of the incomparable Alice Cooper. That spirit, incidentally, was driving this entire day.

  With a stuffed belly and two nice Cooper’s Town-logo golf shirts in possession, we rolled into the parking lot of the Pointe. All afternoon, I’d been feeling extremely fortunate to have a friend like Alice. And when I began to roll tape, I let go of all expectations. I’m not sure I had any to begin with. What resulted was not just the most honest interview of my entire career but also an illustration of one artist’s fearless devotion to truth. Alice revealed to me—and to the world for the first time—that he was a devout, practicing Christian. Like his golf swing, the confession was effortless.

  “I was pretty much convinced all my life that there was just one God, and there was Jesus Christ, and there was the devil,” he said. “You couldn’t believe in God without believing in the devil. I always tell bands that the most dangerous thing you can do is to believe in the concept of the devil or the concept of God, because you’re not giving them full credit. When you believe in God, you’ve got to believe in the all-powerful God. He’s not just God, he’s the all-powerful God, and he has total control over everyone’s life.

  “The devil, on the other hand, is a real character that’s trying his hardest to tear your life apart. If you believe that this is just mythology, you’re a prime target, because you know that’s exactly what Satan wants: to be a myth. But he’s not a myth, of this I’m totally convinced. More than anything in the world, I’m convinced of that. So, here we are. We have God pulling us one way and the devil pulling us another, and we’re in the middle. We have to make a choice. And everybody, at some point in his or her life, has to make that choice. When people say, ‘How do you believe this? Why do you believe this?’ I just say nothing else speaks to my heart. This doesn’t speak to my intellect, it doesn’t speak to my logic—it speaks right to my heart and right to my soul, deeper than anything I’ve ever thought of. And I totally believe it. That being said, I’m not a very good Christian. I mean, none of us are ever good Christians. That’s not the point. When you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be good, it means you’ve got a harder road to pull.”

  Alice inspired many in his long and illustrious career. There are pieces of him in acts ranging from Nine Inch Nails, Twisted Sister, Poison, and Mötley Crüe to Adam Ant, Hanoi Rocks, and W.A.S.P. But no one morphed and mangled the Cooper mystique with more arrogance or eloquence than ‘90s shock rocker Marilyn Manson.

  “Manson has a lot of style, I’ll give him that, and I have never criticized him for anything he has done onstage theatrically,” Alice observed. “The only thing I’ve had a problem with is his view on Christianity. He’s very vocal about it. I believe Antichrist Superstar was pointed right directly at me. I didn’t volley the first shots in this whole thing. His whole anti-Christian thing, and I’m like ‘Hey, I’m Christian, and I’m not going to denounce what I believe.’ I can be a rock ‘n’ roll star, a Christian, and Alice Cooper. But like we were talking about before, Marilyn Manson spends most of his time in character. I’ve never met one person in the world that could be their character all the time. You paint yourself into a corner when you say, ‘I am Marilyn Manson,’ or ‘I am Rob Zombie,’ or ‘I am this guy’ all the time. They’re not! You know, how could Manson be Manson when he takes his girlfriend to dinner or goes Christmas shopping for his mother? The Marilyn Manson rock-star dark character doesn’t go Christmas shopping, and he wouldn’t be caught dead in a restaurant, you know what I mean? So you paint yourself into a corner when you say, ‘I’m going to wear this mask all the time.’ ”

  That’s when I posed the question, “Christianity has always been a very private issue with you. You’ve rarely preached to anyone in song, except for perhaps ‘My God’ off Lace and Whiskey, which was still far subtler than, say, Stryper tossing Bibles into the audience during their late-’80s concert performances or, more recently, Creed’s pretentious proselytizing. What do you think tweaked Manson about the church?”

  “I think Marilyn had a really bad Christian experience when he was younger,” he replied. “My guess is he got involved with some less-than-Christian Christians, and that really, forgive the expression, nailed him. You know, he’s one of the greatest button pushers I’ve ever met. And I know that game because I invented that game: how to push buttons and piss people off. Manson clicked because he found a whole new set of buttons to push—he even pushed my buttons, which is pretty impressive since I was pushing buttons before he was born. I’d really love to sit down and talk to Marilyn, not just about religion, but about anything. I’ve read interviews with him. He’s very bright and quite funny, too. I’d probably get along with him very well.”

  The entire, exhaustive Q&A ran on the KNAC.com Web site under the title “Alice Cooper: Prince of Darkness/Lord of Light.” Faith-based author Mark Joseph cited the published exchange as the inspiration for his second book, Faith, God, and Rock and Roll, an enlightening examination of the connection between spirit and music.

  That’s what that moment in the desert was all about: connection. There we sat, the hero and the fan, the rocker and the writer, the Christian and the Jew, friend and Friend, in a parking lot in Phoenix, talking about God.

  4

  Chicken Soup for the Rubber Soul

  THE FURTHER ONE TRAVELS, THE LESS ONE KNOWS.

  —Lao Tzu

  I emerged from my mother’s womb July 29, 1956, but I was born on February 9, 1964, the day the Beatles first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. If you were in front of the television or anywhere else in the world within earshot of that event, you unwittingly became part of the miracle. Our collective musical consciousness was born. We learned what it was to love music, to love a rock band, to love … period. I love music and have observed, composed on, and examined it both personally and professionally my entire life for two reasons: I am the son of a piano player, and I was born with the Beatles.

  The first time I ever experienced the intangible buzz came during the days leading up to that big bang in popular culture. I can recall with surreal clarity how everyone on the schoolyard that Friday afternoon was talking about this band (“Band? What’s a band?”) from England (“England? Where’s that?”) who played rock ‘n’ roll (“Rock ‘n’ roll?”). I was seven years old, a class clown with a four-year-old little brother and a mother fresh from divorce.

  It was 1964. No VCRs, no TiVo, no Internet, no DVDs. All we had was television, and if you missed a show, that
was it. My brother Rick and I planted our prepubescent butts down on the living-room floor of our $120-a-month duplex at 7:45 P.M. My mother was oblivious to the event that was about to unfold before her and the rest of civilization. She was still grieving over JFK and the departure of my dad.

  We sat on the floor in front of our black-and-white set. As showtime approached, our toes started wiggling. Then the screen went black, and boom: opening shot, that odd-looking old man with the hunched shoulders, tacky suit, and high voice is on camera. He starts talking about the craziness that’s been taking place around the TV studio ever since their plane touched down. The introduction was brief because the audience was screaming so loudly. “Here they are … the Beatles!”

  Rick and I were bouncing as Paul McCartney’s face filled the screen and the first notes of “All My Loving” poured out of his smiling mouth and into the Milky Way. It was like tasting a Her-shey’s bar for the first time. For the next two minutes, the camera darted back and forth between Paul up front on bass, John Lennon on rhythm guitar, the frail George Harrison on lead guitar, and the silly, happy man named Ringo banging the drums. Intercut with shots of screeching females who’d lost all sense of decorum, whipped into momentary madness by this magical new music, the scene represents a snapshot of the earth knocked off its axis.

  I’m not sure that I’d ever heard a song before “I Want to Hold Your Hand” exploded off the radio a few days before the Sullivan show. A song. My father was a traveling musician, but memories of seeing him perform before my parents split up are nonexistent. For all intents and purposes, music came into my life via the Beatles. And from the very first notes I was hooked, and have been for more than four decades.

  Sitting in the here and now, a half century after the doc slapped me on the ass and I wailed my first “yeah, yeah, yeah,” I trace my time on this planet, trying to make sense out of why things occurred the way they did, the decisions I made, the mistakes, the successes, the failures. Throughout it all, crazy as it may seem, there is one constant: the Beatles. Through thick and thin, wherever I roamed, I have always depended on them, on their songs, to lift me when I was down or to reconnect me when I was falling apart. I know them all by heart because they are a part of my heart.

  The Beatles were in love with life, fame, women, spirit, drugs, heaven, hell, earth, sea, and sky. But mostly, they were in love with love. They journeyed in and found melody’s holy grail. “Michelle,” “In My Life,” “Wait,” “If I Needed Someone.” These were psalms from the right ventricle delivered in three-minute harmonious ooo-la-la-la tones. Musical poetry, warm butter on hot biscuits. Mmmm. So good that my first kiss came as a result of singing “Girl” from Rubber Soul.

  My mother, brother, and I resided on a suburban avenue where not much happened. Carol lived across the alley behind our stucco two-bedroom dwelling. She had short black hair and chalk-white skin. There was a playhouse in her tiny backyard. The inside was dark, cloudy, gray, like the sky on this particular day. Her mom was in the house. We were playing Mr. and Mrs. John Lennon, way before Yoko. I was eight years old.

  The rain was falling, a rare occurrence in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. She shut the door of the playhouse and grabbed me, wrinkling my sweater. And then, the magnificent moment, eternal as the song. Her lips were cold, wet, and wonderful. She pressed them so hard against mine. It must have lasted a minute. I came up for air and immediately went back for more. Ambrosia. Ecstasy. An early glimpse of what the boys were singing about. Love. Wow.

  You rarely discover music on your own. There is usually a friend or sibling who’s getting the message along with you. With Rick three years my junior and not quite as sophisticated in the early ways of rock as I, Ron Meyers emerged as my Beatle “brother,” right from the start. That’s where our long and winding friendship began. But Ron didn’t just listen to the Beatles; he dissected them. While I drifted away into the melodies, my bespectacled friend examined the construction of the songs, the meaning in the lyrics, and the development of the personalities of the band members.

  His sister Leslie had a record player in her room. She got home from school two hours after we did. One day, she burst through the front door as we were cranking the new single “I Feel Fine” “She’s a Woman.” L.A. AM radio stations KHJ and KRLA were playing the songs virtually every hour, but that hadn’t been enough. We’d bought the disc. Did the same thing when “Hey Jude” “Revolution” came out.

  “Guess what, boys?” shouted Leslie over Paul’s vocals.

  “What?” we said.

  She reached into her purse and whipped out two small, rectangular pieces of paper.

  “What’s that?” we asked, momentarily breaking our musical hypnosis.

  “Read ‘em and weep, suckers!” Leslie had the goods and she rubbed our faces in it. The Beatles, live at the Hollywood Bowl.

  “No way!” we screamed. The roar illustrated both our elation that someone we actually knew was going to see the Beatles in concert, but also our extreme pain and frustration that it wasn’t going to be us witnessing what history would prove to be one of the very few live performances the Fab Four would ever permit their massive American fandom.

  The Beatles hated their debut touring adventure of the States. It was just too big, too insane. The fans were out of their minds; stadiums full of psychopaths so loud, John, Paul, George, and Ringo could barely hear themselves. They did thirty-five minutes at Shea Stadium. That was enough.

  Between 1966 and 1969, when the Beatles escalated into their creative psychedelic run the likes of which popular music had never seen (and will never see again), we were in that room every day, holding court with our four shamans, friends, saviors. We were morphing into adolescents. The Who’s Tommy had come out and blown our minds. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was in reruns on KTLA Channel 5, and we watched it every afternoon. Our childhoods were ending, and so, as we would soon discover, were the Beatles.

  The ‘70s birthed free-form, guitar-driven, progressive, out-there, punk, and funk musical exploration that expanded upon everything that the Liverpool quartet had created in the scant seven years prior. The decade was born with the death of the Beatles. Ron and I found out about the catastrophic breakup where we got most of my rock ‘n’ roll news: Moby Disc. The first Moby Disc was straight out of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity. There was a guy who worked there named Dana, the accidental model of Jack Black’s character in Stephen Frears’ beautiful film adaptation of the book.

  Overweight and overly critical of each LP that entered the store, Dana knew what was going on with every band from Van Nuys to Vancouver. Ron and I went out to buy the new LP, Let It Be, but had no idea that the band had broken up. Paul McCartney had announced to the press on April 11, 1970—a month before the release of Let It Be—that he would not record with John Lennon again.

  “Yeah, it’s over,” said Dana flatly. “This is the last record. They had a nice run. Still think it’s been downhill since Sgt. Pepper’s.” We weren’t paying attention to Dana or his judgmental babble. We walked out of the store clutching Let It Be like we were holding the Bible.

  The ‘70s was the decade I discovered live music and marijuana. Ron went on an exploratory mission to Santa Cruz and I went to UCLA. I saw him once, on my wedding day in June 1986. He showed up in a black overcoat. I couldn’t see his eyes, he was wearing sunglasses. We talked about the Beatles, the days in his sister’s room, how lucky we were to have been there as it was happening, living the moment together. He told me he loved me and disappeared out the front door of the restaurant just as the reception was kicking into gear. I never saw Ron again, but every time I hear “I Am the Walrus,” I think of him.

  Running RIP magazine, I started to live the dream, getting paid to travel the world with rock stars. I was meeting the men who made the music. KISS, Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and Aerosmith, those were RIP’s bands, the fans’ bands, my bands. I never got to write a
bout the Beatles—at least I never got paid to write about them. But as my fly-on-the-wall professional experience began to manifest, I did find myself buzzing about a Beatle on two occasions. The first time, I swatted myself. The second, I flapped my wings.

  It was New Year’s Eve, 1994. Joyce, Megan, and I were vacationing on Maui, where Alice’s manager, Shep Gordon, was holding his annual soiree on the beach. Shep owned a spectacular property on the Kihei side of the island, and on this particular evening, the place was electric with human energy. More than a hundred guests, locals and mainlanders, common folk, movie stars, chefs, and notables mingled. Alice Cooper’s daughter Calico was making a beaded bracelet for my daughter when I looked up and saw him, six feet away, engaged in conversation with my billion-dollar golfing buddy.

  “Look, Lonn, a Beatle,” observed my wife matter-of-factly “Here’s your chance. He’s talking to Alice. I bet he’ll introduce you.” It was George Harrison all right, sipping a Coke on Shep’s patio, on a rock in the middle of the Pacific, a world away from L.A. and Liverpool.

  I can’t explain, even in hindsight, why I simply could not talk to the Beatle George that evening. Alice walked up to me and said, “You wanna meet George?” But I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. I’d never been shy about meeting anyone who’d ever wielded an axe, no matter how famous, but something told me that this was not the right time or place to introduce myself. It was seven years later, five thousand miles from Maui, in the wake of September 11, 2001, that I got another shot at meeting a Beatle.

  Anthrax’s Scott Ian and I were attending the afterparty of the VH1 Concert for New York, a noble, star-studded event devoted to raising money for the Big Apple and the spirits of its battered residents. We were holding court in a roped-off VIP enclave, chatting with friends, actors, and rockers. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora were by my side when he passed by, just two feet from me. The Beatle Paul. I remembered New Year’s Eve, Maui, 1994, and the lost opportunity with George.