50 years ago tonight, on Tuesday, March 25, 1975, Alice Cooper came to town.
A sold-out crowd of 6,400 saw his “Welcome to My Nightmare” stage show at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin, just two weeks after the album of the same name had been released.
What they saw “proved to be a grisly extravaganza, a surrealistic musical, a rock theater,” according to Mark Moran, who reviewed the show for the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
Alice’s reputation preceded him. In 1969, while playing the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival, he’d picked up a live chicken that was strutting around on stage. And then? Last year, Alice told People magazine the rest of the story:
“I threw it out there, and it fell straight down into the audience. The audience tears it to pieces. It was the peace and love festival. They tear it to pieces and throw it back up on the stage. So there’s blood everywhere. Feathers and blood.”
Alice didn’t kill that chicken, but letting people believe what they wanted helped him sell tickets and records for years.
“My reputation was just insane. I didn’t have to do anything. They were inventing their own Alice Cooper myth.”
Alice Cooper myths were strong in Green Bay. The folks who ran the Arena said they’d gotten a half-dozen calls from people who didn’t want a seemingly evil and decadent show like that playing here. A teacher talked about starting a petition to stop the show, but nothing came of it.
In a letter to the editor published the week after the show, a Green Bay mother of four lamented:
“Alice Cooper is barred from going to Australia. Why couldn’t we bar him from coming to Green Bay? We could have set a good example to other cities, but who wants to set good examples today anymore?”
Barred from Australia? Not exactly. Australia’s immigration minister said he’d heard Alice’s act included the mutilation of dolls, birds and animals. “This sort of performance is sick,” Clyde Ameron declared four days before the Green Bay show. However, Alice hadn’t asked to enter Australia. (By the time Alice toured there two years later, they waved him right in.)
If any of the old folks had been paying attention, they’d have known Alice — then just 27 — was becoming an entertainer with whom the mainstream was becoming comfortable.
On March 1, singer Andy Williams — square and wholesome as they came back then — introduced Alice as a presenter at the Grammy Awards on national TV. While in New York for the Grammys, Alice visited Rodney Dangerfield’s nightclub. Rodney’s line: “You don’t expect me to call you Alice with a straight face!” Chicago writer Bob Greene was on PBS’ “Book Beat,” hyping his book “Billion Dollar Baby,” written after he spent time on an earlier tour with Alice.
So it shouldn’t have been all that shocking when Mark Moran — one of two Press-Gazette reporters sent to cover the show — added this detail about Alice’s performance:
“It wasn’t all that shocking.”
“If the tales be true, the tales that horrified a million mothers and united a million kids, then Alice has mellowed out or perhaps he is concentrating more on the grand production aspect of rock music,” Moran wrote in his review.
“If the 6,400 Cooper troopers … expected maimed dolls, hangings, snakes or the slaughter of the other generation’s sacred cows, then they don’t know Old Mascara Eyes. … The nightmare that evolved last night was loosely patterned around the nocturnal wanderings of a boy-man named Steven.”
A theatrical production inspired by a concept album, in other words.
Moran’s colleague, Warren Gerds, dispatched to keep an eye on the mostly high school- and college-age crowd, was blown away by two things.
“First,” he wrote, “was the $400,000 production itself. Its excesses were awing.”
A short video showed Alice walking in a graveyard, then attacked by creatures who try to put him in a coffin. Alice escaped the coffin, then burst through the movie screen, breaking the fourth wall. Alice tossed around a mannequin and pulled its hair. A huge spider web was hoisted over the stage. Alice battled three spider dancers, then fought and beheaded a 10-foot cyclops.
“Second,” Gerds wrote, “was the frenzy. The ultimate came at the close as the arena rocked with roars and stomping, the likes of which it has never experienced. Cooper fed the roar with an encore. (Likely “School’s Out” and “Department of Youth.”) Another roar. ‘More! More!’ But the lights came up … and the roar stopped instantly. Then they went home, sated.”
By March 1975, Gerds had seen and heard shows at the Arena and around Green Bay for almost eight years. Neither he nor Green Bay had ever seen or heard anything like that.
(The excellent photos accompanying this post were taken by Orvell Peterson of the Press-Gazette and published the day after the show. Orv was 55 then. I would have loved to have heard his take on the show.)
Alice was just getting warmed up. Green Bay was only the third stop on the “Welcome to My Nightmare” tour.
If there was any doubt that Alice was going mainstream, “Welcome to My Nightmare” also spawned an hour-long ABC-TV special in April 1975 (featuring horror film star Vincent Price, seven years before he so memorably narrated Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video) and an 84-minute concert film released in November 1975.
The tour ended in December 1975 with a six-night engagement at the Sahara Tahoe in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It wasn’t quite Vegas, but close enough. Vincent Price was Alice’s special guest on opening night.
Finally, an odd little coincidence.
Five days before Alice Cooper came to town in March 1975, Mrs. Howard Kraemer died at her home in Elkhart Lake, a resort town about an hour south of Green Bay. She was 62.
From 1934 to 1941, Mrs. Kraemer — then in her 20s and the former Alice Kuberth of Milwaukee — had been one of the most popular singers in Green Bay, performing with a big band led by her husband. Her stage name?
Alice Cooper.
