Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!

Not long ago, when I was trying to explain to my thirty-something daughter how utterly mesmerizing the Beatles’ sound was . . . how do you characterize how something so familiar could sound new? My kids grew up with the Beatles being part of what is now called Classic Rock. Classic Rock! I can imagine the jaw-dropped horror of my shaggy-haired peers back in the sixties.

When I saw that one of the Alice Cooper band’s members had written a memoir I had to read it. Though I’d never liked their music—it was way too crazy male-gaze for me as a teen and young adult—I knew the names, and the look, and I also was aware of how their intense theatricality changed the look of rock music, and formed punk, especially the LA Punk scene, which I was a part of in the late seventies and early eighties.

It surprised me to discover that the germinating idea behind Alice Cooper was an experience similar to one I’d shared: a talent show for kids. Dennis and his friend Vince did what I and three girls did: borrow guitars, make up silly songs to Beatles tunes, and pretend to be The Beatles.

In my situation, we four twelve year olds combed our hair in front of our faces, strummed the single chord we’d been taught, and started singing our (kaff) clever parody, “She was just 94, and shaped like a door. . .” and the rest of our amazing lyrics were lost because the entire audience erupted into frenzied screaming.

They shouted and shrieked until to the end. Even months later, kids I’d never spoken to before came up and said, “Weren’t you one of the Beatles in the talent show?” For one day I was famous, and it felt . . . unreal.

Well, the same thing happened to Dennis and Vince, inspiring them to go on to become musicians. The jet-force exhilaration of your music gripping thousands—millions—of close packed humans by flesh and spirit . . . what incredible power, what a rush!

And what a cost to keep fueling it?

Dennis talks engagingly, and with the resonant note of experience, about the pure white fire of creative flow—when it’s flowing, it’s a nerve-jolting, heart-hammering, brain-frying lightning strike. Few can control it, sparking emotional roller coasters accelerated by that step into unreality that fame causes, which can trick the unwary into thinking that the rules no long apply. It’s because that white fire is not controllable any more than lightning is, and so the young musicians would try anything—anything—to get it back.

Here’s the dangerous thing about the white fire, whether you’re high on drugs or not, you believe your every utterance is art, every movement freighted with meaning. It’s only when you’re stone cold sober that you realize that the Magical Mystery Tour Bus— if you are not in control, the drugs are—looks to everyone else like a bunch of loud, smelly, drooling louts hooting like apes.

Jimi Hendrix . . . Jim Morrison . . Janis Joplin . . . they all sought any method or means they could to tame that fire. They were surrounded by smiling hipsters cooing admiration and handing out street stuff like candy—very expensive candy, but money became one of those unreal things—and they dropped, or rushed, or sped, or mainlined, or whatever it took, to find what they thought was the fire, the attempts intensified into semblance of meaning, perceptions that exalted trivia into a tapestry of gravitas that unraveled with the bleak dawn.

Written with the aid of Rolling Stone writer Chris Hodenfield, Dennis Dunaway tells a vividly engaging, often pungent and irreverent, but at heart human and humane story of a bunch of nerdy guys in Phoenix AZ during the early sixties who made it to the top—and then, at the apex of their career, crashed and burned.

Many of the Alice Cooper myths are exploded (like the so-called chicken) as Dunaway looks honestly at the toll the rock and roll lifestyle took on them, made exponentially tougher by the fallout of fame.

As soon as the actual hardcover comes out I’m buying a copy for my drummer son, whose band is just getting going. I’ll bet he’ll enjoy it as much as I did.