📰 What Makes Alice Run – Feature : Feb 1972

A cover insert and expansive three‑page feature, “What Makes Alice Run,” found Circus magazine diving deep into the rising phenomenon of the Alice Cooper Group at the dawn of 1972. With Love It to Death and Killer igniting national attention, Circus framed Alice as both ringleader and runaway cultural force — a shock‑rock engine tearing through America with theatrical menace, black humour, and a flair for chaos that no other band could match.

The feature explored:

The band’s escalating stage spectacle and its psychological underpinnings

Alice’s growing status as a glam‑horror icon

The group’s relentless touring grind and the machinery behind their rise

The tension between their outrageous image and sharp musical precision

Circus presented the Cooper phenomenon as something volatile, magnetic, and unstoppable — a runaway train of feathers, guillotines, mascara, and mayhem powering straight into the heart of early‑’70s rock culture.

(one page missing)

Alice Cooper’s nightmare fuel exposed – Circus dives into the shock-rock engine!

Alice Cooper's new production, Killer, had its "premiere performance" here in New York recently and, just as expected, it went well beyond spectacular. Alice has always been more famous for his gaudy theatricality than, quite unjustly, for his music; but face it, any rock and roll act that offers a full scale hanging, complete with dense clouds of manufactured demon-fumes, more dealth-cult vibes than the Manson Family, and a super-heavy simulation of an artillery bombardment is not susceptible to mere musical analysis. Although Alice's execution by noose was the high point of the performance, it had close competition in other areas.

The entire Cooper set was a masterpiece both musically and theatrically, and it really seems that A.C. has achieved what they've been aiming at for four years now, to unite the intensity of rock with heroic tableaux, with pageant and with all the visual splendor and tawdriness that their music can carry.

The gallows pole:

The Academy of Music, years and year ago when Fourteenth Street was New York's main drag instead of one of its main eyesores, used to be the High Society opera house, much more fashionable than the newly constructed Met, which was built farther uptown by new-money types unable to find acceptance in turn-of-the-century blue-blood society. Since then the Academy has gone through many incarnations-vaudeville, movies, occasional concerts and several generations of grime and shabbiness-but it never saw anything, I'm sure, on the scale of Alice's hanging. The audience had been tantalized for weeks by advertisements, promotions and posters all bearing the image of Alice Cooper as the hanged man; and although the bill that night included the gris-gris man himself, Dr. John, it was Alice that drew them, and it was Alice who commanded their loyalties. His new album (Killer, of course) is just out and already close to being gold; and from the way the audience cheered many of the new songs it was clear that most of them were already familiar stuff.

Killer was performed with utmost style and precision, Alice's choreography, split-second light-cues and scene changes just kept working things to a higher plane from the time the band appear-ed until they closed with "Under My Wheels," one of the best songs on their extraordinary new album. Alice himself was all over, wearing his now-familiar makeup, tight-fitting leather top and black tights marked by large holes on each thigh through which the fans were treated to Alice's bare, white flesh. Posing here, edging for-ward to the churning mob down front to toss them souvenirs, posters, pieces of the doll he hacked to bits during "Dead Babies," sitting on the apron, modestly, with his legs crossed looking like Helen Morgan on her

piano, crooning the first few bars of his big single, "Eighteen," snake-dancing with his boa constrictor and, of course, eventually making the big plunge on the gallows. Alice refused to confine the fun to the stage and provided, in addition to the baubels he threw to the audience, launched several giant balloons of at least five foot diameter which went wiggling and giggling out over the orchestra and were kept aloft by the vain attempts of members of the audience to capture them.

Rebel rock:

The band has been together, with no changes in personnel for, dig it, seven years! They first got together back when they were all students at Cortez High School in Ari-zona. "The first time we really got together was ," Alice told me as we sat upstairs in his manager's office in Greenwich Village, "I think we were going to a pizza place and we heard 'You Really Got Me' by the Kinks and it really, really got us not the song but the sound of it and it just developed out of that. We had the idea, everybody had the idea, of going into rebellious rock music.

My parents hated the Rolling Stones and they hated the Beatles and so we really enjoyed that, immediately enjoyed the fact that they hated them and so we'd go in and put the Rolling Stones first album on full-blast and then my parents would come in and break it, wham!" Alice offstage is very different from Alice the performer. Without his makeup he looks almost sweet, he has a happy smile and a forthright and unaffected manner which is thoroughly disarming in someone who has made it so big, so young and on such a heavy trip. When we met he was wearing a yellow suit over a T-shirt with "ALICE" branded across the chest in sequins. Unlike many artists who loath trying to ex-plain their performances in verbal terms, Alice is candid about his trip.

Deranged kids: "When my folks came down on us like that I really enjoyed it. There's quite a rebellion in it. That's the main basis for our whole group anyway," he said between slurps at his breakfast can of Bud, "that's the main idea: rebellion. We get letters all the time saying, 'My parents won't let me listen to your albums, and, 'My parents won't let me see you.' They're so funny... some of them are really deranged, those kids are, but they really look to us as their anti-heroes because their parents hate us so much. We're their defense. That's what we want most of our audience are fourteen and fifteen year old kids and they want to be derang-ed." Alice is twenty-three now and enjoys some perspective on derangement.

He's done a lot since those days in Cortez High, in addition, to playing music. Alice and the other band members all managed to go through college and pick up bachelor degrees. Alice has also been a cross-country runner and a professional boxer. "I weighed more than I do right now and I was a lightweight boxer cross-country running is a form of concentration. A complete.." he paused and took a hit off a joint pass-ing through, "whew it's like a meditation type of thing, it really is. Total endurance. Like, we used to run approximately ten miles a night to practice ... you get down to a point where, well, that's where we wrote a lot of our songs." The birth of Alice: At first the group was known as the Spiders, then later as the Nazz (not the Nazz from Philadelphia) and, four years ago, they became Alice Cooper. "That's when we made the theatrical change to what we're doing now. Our first gig as Alice Cooper was in Santa Bar-bara, we were with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Blue Cheer and we came on and were louder than Blue Cheer.

We came on and deafened everybody and then Blue Cheer came on and they sounded this much lower than us, you know." Since then Alice has been immensely successful but the criticism they encountered, the suspicion that their act was too showy and not good musically, has left them somewhat defensive about what they do. "For some reason," said Alice, "people can't conceive the idea of doing both music and theatre. I always told them... I said, 'Listen, if the Jefferson Airplane came out on stage completely chrome, naked or some-thing, with bows tied to their penises and played what they do, that would be theatrical and they'd still be playing music. I don't know," he said with some exasperation, "why they try to separate the fact that we can be both."

Baby blood:

I asked Alice whether they used improvisation games or some similar technique to set up their stage routine, "No, we just sit back and think about it. We take a song like 'Dead Babies' and what would you use on 'Dead Babies' to make it work?" Simple? "So we use a doll, you know, and we have blood capsules taped to its back and I cut it to pieces with an axe. But the thing is... it's not just doing it, the idea is really making it look psychotic. It's all done with the eyes you know, the way you project to an audience. The lighting's im-portant and they know exactly when to hit my face so when I look at the axe and then look at the baby they can immediately see what I'm thinking, you know. Then when I chop it up the people get a great relief, you know, when I chop the baby up and throw the parts into the audience they love it. I get a great kick out of it too!"

"Dead Babies" is on the new al-bum but like much of Alice's material, it's been kicking around for awhile, "That song was written about six years ago, it was really written. a long time ago, all of us in the troupe used to work putting songs together... everyone's warped in different ways, you know. That song is the natural Alice Cooper song, it's one of those things you don't plan, it's just there." The same is true of their stage act, "It's natural, it's just natural, the boys in the group are all very theatrical and when they went onstage they just naturally went into it, you know. And after that we said, 'It works!" you know. At first it didn't work, but it worked because people laughed."

Menacing hands: Stirring up an audience is the key but it also can be dangerous. Alice was still complaining of back pains from a recent session with his fans. He digs it when they throw jewelry onstage. He pointed proudly to an armful of bracelets, each different and some uniquely distinctive, and maintained that all his bracelets and rings, except for his Cortez High graduation ring which he still wears as do the others in the band, were thrown at him by fans. But sometimes it gets hairy, "Oh hell the other night I was almost killed onstage. We use these bubble machines, you know, we have thousands of bubbles onstage and when they break they leave a film was pretty slippery onstage.

I was doing a thing where I was throwing money out to the audience, you know, like I was feeding the piranha fish, and somebody grabbed my foot and pulled it out from under me and I went down and hit my back, right where the spine starts, on the corner of a metal light box. It still hurts like hell, a metal box, you know, and I was lying there like that... I couldn't move for about a minute because I thought I had broken my back, and they were pulling me into the audience! Finally someone came onstage, grabbed me back and propped me up, and I was just lying there afraid to move because I thought I was paralyzed. It was in South Bend, Indiana. Out there in the Mid-West, they're the most ornery crowd.

They don't throw things at you so much but if they can get a hold of you,