The Harder They Fall (30 page)

Well, Gary, you knew me back then. I was in a band with a bunch of guys that were on the road with a new and successful album. We were sort of pioneers out there. We lived on the road for five years, six years. We didn’t really live anywhere. People would say, “I want to send you a shirt. Where do I send it?” And I’d say, “You can’t. We don’t live anywhere.” We were basically gypsies, playing five nights a week, sold-out shows. You know, you’d get up in the morning and you’re going to get on a plane, so the first thing you do is pop a beer, have a cold beer. That’s a nice good-morning beer buzz.

Nobody even thought about alcoholism. That wasn’t even a consideration. When I thought of alcoholism, I thought of Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend
or Jack Lemmon in
Days of Wine and Roses
. Really out-of-control business guys. You never thought of rock-and-rollers having alcohol problems. They just drank. They just drank beer. It was never a problem.

But it wasn’t medicine then. It didn’t become medicine until later on. Right then it was just fun. We would go through two, three six-packs each during the day. We always thought we were lightweights ’cause everyone else was doing heroin and cocaine and acid and Quaaludes and everything, and we drank beer. We were kind of the lightweights. It was always funny to me that groups like Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath—and groups like that—were beer drinkers, and then you would find out that James Taylor and The Monkees and The Mamas and the Papas were junkies. It was just the opposite of what it should have been.

The beer never raised any flags because I never missed a show. I never slurred my words. I never missed a step. I was the most totally functioning alcoholic on this planet. Maybe more functional than Dean Martin! It became part of my image. Having a beer in my hand was always part of
Alice’s image. The Budweiser. We made it into a joke.

Later on I would say, “Oh yeah, I like hard liquor, but I don’t drink that until after ten o’clock at night.” And then it was, “Well, nine o’clock at night.” And then it was, “Well, eight o’clock is okay.” Pretty soon I was drinking two or three Seagram’s VOs with Coca-Cola before I’d get out of bed in the morning. And that’s when it became medicine. It took about four or five years to get to that point. It was a very slow creep. It wasn’t like all of a sudden there I was drinking that much. I wasn’t aware it was happening, and nobody else was. Again, I didn’t miss shows. I never missed an interview. I was totally functional.

That’s what fooled Shep and fooled me and fooled everybody. If I would have gotten horrible hangovers and been unable to do shows, we would have said, “Uh oh, there’s a problem with alcohol here.” But since I was too professional, even when I was feeling bad, to let alcohol stop me, we just kept ignoring the fact that I was drinking so much. I think if Shep would have realized how much of a problem it was, he would have taken me off the road. But none of us did. None of us understood that. We said, “Hey listen, we’re not into the heavy stuff. Alice is just drinking and having fun and doing his shows.”

But when it became medicine … It got to the point during the Nightmare Tour I would look at my stage clothes, and I would look at the bottle, and I would realize that I would have to drink at least a half a bottle of that whiskey to put those clothes on and get on stage. I would start to cry because I realized that putting my Superman costume on was killing me. My inner self was telling me that every time I go on stage, it’s killing me. And I would think, “Yeah, but there’s an audience out there, so I’m gonna go do it.”

The funny thing was that when I finally did get to a hospital, the psychiatrist sitting there said, “Okay, tell me about the whole thing. How much does Alice drink?” I sat there and thought about it and I said, “You know what? I never drank on stage. The show would be two hours long, and Alice would never drink.” So he said, “Let me get this straight: You’re blaming Alice for the problem, yet Alice doesn’t drink.” And I went, “Yeah, you’re right.” So it really wasn’t the Frankenstein monster. It was the Dr. Frankenstein that
was the drinker. The other twenty-two hours during the day, I was messing up. When I was on stage, I was fine. But I couldn’t stay on stage twenty-two hours a day. So it was really funny, the juxtaposition: that when I was on stage working, I didn’t drink, but all the other time was when I drank.

It got to a point that when I got up in the morning, I’d sneak out of bed ’cause Sheryl was there. I’d have two or three drinks, go into the bathroom and throw up blood, and then get back into bed, have a couple of beers, and I’d be okay. I felt that having a couple of beers was going to make things better. That next drink would make it better. Which was just the opposite. You know, I had pancreatitis, gastritis, I had zero potassium in my system, I was wiped out. And I was dying of it. The doctor finally said, “A month, two months of this and you’ll be dead.” And that’s when I was in the hospital and had to take care of it. I went to the hospital on my own, but this was the crazy thing: Shep and Sheryl took me to the hospital the first time after the Nightmare Tour and checked me in. I could barely sign my name; I had tremors so bad. Sort of like the first three days, and it’s a New York law, they can keep you for observation for seventy-two hours. Well, after seventy-two hours, I was really kind of okay. I got my sea legs back and was feeling all right. I spent about three months in the hospital. When I came out, I didn’t have a drink for a year.

I remember this so distinctly. We were driving to Vegas and Sheryl had a glass of white wine, and I hated wine. I said, “Let me have a sip of that.” I had one sip of her wine, and by that night, I had three bottles of whiskey hidden around the house, and I was drinking again. It wasn’t like I slowly started drinking again. I was right back to where I was. It wasn’t gradual at all. So anyway, I went to the hospital a second time. This time I went in there with a purpose to stop. I think any alcoholic better get that idea into their head, that if you’re going into a hospital, you’re not going in to slow down. You’re going in there to stop drinking. When I came out, as much of an alcoholic as I was—you never saw me without a drink—I came out of the hospital and went to a bar, sat down, had a Diet Coke. I knew I was going to be around alcohol, and it never dawned on me to have a drink. I never went to a recovery program, never went to a psychiatrist. I just never had another desire to drink. It was as if I never had a drink before in my life.

To this day, when I’m on tour, people around me drink beer or whiskey, and it never occurs to me to have a drink. Never in twenty-two years have I had a craving for alcohol. It’s like I had cancer one day, and the next day didn’t have it.

I’ve been married to Sheryl for twenty-eight years, and I’ve never cheated on her. And I quit drinking twenty-two years ago, and I never cheated on that.

I became as addicted to being straight as I was to being drunk. I can admit one thing: I love the taste of beer, cold beer. But I won’t even tempt myself by having an O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer. Why would I do that? Maybe just lighting that wick that doesn’t need to be lit.

Looking back at my drinking days, I don’t even recognize that character. It was another lifetime ago. And I look at the character of Alice Cooper, and when I was a drinker, Alice on stage was a victim. He was a character that was always getting beat up, always getting killed. He was the brunt of every joke and the outcast. I look at my posture on stage and I was always bent over. Always the whipped dog. And that was Alice Cooper.

The very first time I went back on stage as Alice Cooper—the very first time playing Alice Cooper sober—can you imagine that? I got four platinum albums as Alice Cooper, three number-one albums, all while I was drinking. The alcohol was part of the formula. Now, I’m standing there ready to do a show in Santa Barbara, and it’s the first time I’m ever going to put on the Alice makeup sober. I’m thinking, “What is going to happen? What if I walk out on that stage and Alice doesn’t show up?” I’ll tell you what, I wore a path in that dressing room rug. All day I walked in a circle going, “What’s gonna happen tonight? What if I get up there and nothing happens, and I’m just me, and Alice doesn’t show up? And I’ve got an audience in front of me.” That was the most afraid I ever was in my life.

I got up on stage. I’m covered in leather. All of a sudden, I thought that Alice is not the whipping boy but Alice was going to go in the opposite direction. He was going to be the arrogant villain. The super villain. Which means he stood straight up. He was Captain Hook now. He was going to be the elegant, arrogant bastard. I stood up there. My spine was straight. I had a riding crop in my hand. I looked at the audience and said, “You’re
mine!” It was an entirely different Alice. This Alice was in total control, whereas the other Alice had no control. I created a new Alice in one night! I never saw this Alice coming at all. All of a sudden, this Alice stood there and said, “I feel great. I own this audience.” And they loved it. That’s how I play Alice now. Now the character wants total control. Before he didn’t want any control. He gave into the alcohol and said, “Okay, I’m at the mercy of everything,” whereas this Alice says, “Everything is at the mercy of me.”

I really enjoy playing Alice now. I can’t wait to get on stage. Off stage, I’m just the nicest guy in the world, talking about my family, talking about baseball, but the moment I go in front of that audience, the moment Alice is standing there, the spine straightens. The whole attitude is different. It’s like, “Okay, you’re mine.” People love the character.

The transformation takes place totally because of my sobriety. Now Alice has more ego than Mick Jagger. The character looks at the audience and thinks, “You are so lucky to be here tonight.” Which is just about the opposite of the way I think. Alice became completely fearless—bigger than life.

Sheryl and Shep were the two people I cared most about, and they both went through it with me. But Shep only saw the fact that everything was fine. He was never there in the morning when I was throwing up blood. I never let him see that. Sheryl was the person that picked up that I was sick: “He may not come off as being sick, but he’s sick. We have to get him to a hospital.” Shep was saying, “What do you mean?” and Sheryl was telling him, “You don’t understand, he’s throwing up blood in the morning.” And of course Shep was like, “Are you kidding me? He never told me that.”

Looking back now, I was probably the most gregarious drunk around. Me and Keith Moon of The Who, we were probably the nicest, funniest drunks there were. Neither one of us was destructive, except to ourselves. We were the life of the party. But you never saw Alice when he was in a dark, black mood.

And the party was continuous. Sheryl and I had been married five or six years. We went to dinner every night with Bernie Taupin, Rod Stewart,
and Elton. We were living the Beverly Hills life, which entailed drinking every night. But when I got to the point that I couldn’t get out of bed anymore—for three or four days at a time—Sheryl said, “That’s not you. I don’t know who this is.” At the beginning she just thought I was sick—the flu or something. Then she realized that I hadn’t eaten in about a week but that I was drinking every single night. Yeah, she went through it with me, but she believed in me the whole time. Although there was nothing to believe in for a while.

Then when I went to the hospital and came back out, I said to her, “It’s over. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but let me prove it to you.” Now, twenty-eight years later, we have never been happier.