Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (4 page)

STEFFAN CHIRAZI (journalist):
The Stooges were absolutely vital for the development of metal. They had true raw emotion in spades. [1970’s]
Fun House
is such a violent record. When I listen to that first song, “Down on the Street,” it makes me want to go down the street and smash windows because it really
is
a “fuck you” song.

IGGY POP:
You have this leap from
The Stooges
to
Funhouse
to
Raw Power
. It’s very rare that you hear a band that grows that quickly and with that intensity and complexity in three years. It tends to be something more like, “Oh, that’s Sabbath, and that’s another Sabbath, and that’s a little different Sabbath. I was doing something based on the logical progressions and extensions of the way we live—of architecture, art, sociology, anthropology, fashion, crime, porno. There was a lot going on there before anyone else paid attention to that shit.

STEFFAN CHIRAZI:
I love that famous quote from Iggy that went something like, “I wanted the guy in the front row to want to fuck me, not the girl.” It’s such an outrageously obnoxious, flip comment. But he didn’t care. He wore makeup but would piss on your head at the same time. He was musically very important as well because a lot of the bluesy riffs were given this thoroughly metallic, androidy crunch.

IGGY POP:
[We did] “I Got a Right,” which is a really intense, up-tempo song. It was thrash before anybody was doing thrash. [But when we played it], not
one
person would move. They’d just sit there and fuckin’ stare at us, like “What the fuck is
this?
” When we played, the room would become like a cardboard cutout. After a while, it got uncomfortable; I was putting this stuff out and it wasn’t coming back.

JAMES WILLIAMSON (The Stooges):
At [the New York club] Max’s Kansas City, Iggy cut himself in the chest with a broken martini glass. But we had seen it all at that point. He’s dripped hot wax on himself, and he’s been so stoned he couldn’t stand up, and people thought it was part of the act. The band was kind of desensitized to stuff like that. He wasn’t in any grave danger. It was just flesh wounds. But he got a couple stitches.

BOBBY LIEBLING (Pentagram):
Iggy Pop was my hands-down idol. When I was using a lot of coke and heroin I was into the shenanigans that Iggy used to do in the
Raw Power
days. One night I made a big cross on my torso with this spiked bracelet I was wearing. I took it from breast to breast, and then from neck to belly button, and took my stomach and ripped myself wide open crosswise and just stood there looking at the people and bleeding all over the floor, and kept singing just for shock value.

IGGY POP:
Stooges tours didn’t exist. Nobody wanted to tour the Stooges. People would say, “Don’t ever come back here!” And then we did one actual tour, which was our death tour, which
Metallic K.O
. was recorded from. Everywhere we went there was some sort of major disaster. Clubs closed, theaters would arrest us. We played Memphis and [on] the front page of the newspaper was a big picture of me and it said, “Vice squad to attend concert.” They came to the concert—five uniformed cops, two plainclothes, all with guns. They let me see their guns and said, “You pull any shit, you’re going to jail.” [So] I just got drunk and fell down a lot.

He never created an album that’s entirely or characteristically metal, yet Alice Cooper is essential to the look and mood of the genre. Vincent Damon Furnier dubbed his band Alice Cooper in 1968 and soon after conceived a mesmerizing theatrical stage show that was equal parts Hammer horror film and French Grand Guignol. He allegedly came up with the “Alice” moniker after using a Ouija board to communicate with a seventeenth-century witch of the same name; he changed his legal name to Alice Cooper in 1974. Hendrix may have electrified the flower child, but as Alice says, “I drove a stake through the heart of the love generation.” At the same time, other gender-bending frontmen—such as David Bowie and hell-and-hair-fire man Arthur Brown—impacted the antics of future stars, including Marilyn Manson and the members of Mötley Crüe.

ALICE COOPER:
I was a fan of Hendrix and a lot of bands, but I knew I didn’t want to be anything like them. For instance, I love Paul McCartney, but I can’t compete with Paul McCartney on his level. So I thought, “Let me create a character that
he
can’t compete with.” I loved drama and I loved horror, and I said, “Well, nobody’s doing that in rock and roll. Rock doesn’t have a villain. Rock has a lot of heroes, but it doesn’t have that
one
villain.”

KING DIAMOND (ex–Mercyful Fate):
I was totally inspired by the makeup of Alice Cooper. It’s not that much makeup, but it totally changes his look and the way he came across to an audience. It felt like he was not of this world. If I had reached up over the stage and touched a boot, he’d probably just vanish in thin air. Right there in my mind I went, “If I’m ever going to be in a band I’m going to use makeup” because of what a strong feel it put across.

ALICE COOPER:
When the Beatles walked into a room, everybody wanted to be near them. I always said, “When Alice Cooper walks into a room, I want everyone to take a step backwards.” So we created this villainous character. I went to see
Barbarella
. The Black Queen, she had all the leather on and switchblades coming out of her hands. I went, “Oh, that’s what Alice should look like. There should be a real dangerous sleekness to him.” Then I saw
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
, and there was this old woman trying to look like she’s five years old again with the smeared makeup and all the wrinkles. I went, “Oh,
that’s
Alice, too.” So if you combine the two you get something that’s really creepy and just unearthly.

RITCHIE BLACKMORE:
From the beginning, I thought theatrics were really important to this music. I started incorporating pyro into the show in 1968. At the California Jam [in 1974], I wanted to do something sensational. People had blown the guitar up. So I said, “I’ll blow the amp up.” I told my roadie, “Just pile some petrol on the dummy amplifier and throw a match to it when I point to you.” So he did that, and put too much petrol on there, and, of course, not only did we blow a hole in the stage, one of the cameramen went temporarily deaf. [Drummer] Ian Paice’s glasses blew off and half the stage caught fire. It looked great—like it was well in control—but it wasn’t. The police came after me, and I had to jump into a helicopter to be rushed out of the area.

ALICE COOPER:
The thing about theatrics is there needs to be a punch line. In a movie, if it just ends, you go, “Oh.” But if it ends with the villain getting his just desserts there’s something really satisfying, even for me. So I knew if I was the villain I would have to die at the end of the show, and that’s when we started coming up with all these different ways to kill Alice.

Back in those days we were doing tricks that didn’t have safety devices on them. We were hanging Alice one time in London in 1974, and the piano wire that was supposed to stop me before I hit the noose failed. If I didn’t have the self-preservation button in my head, it could have hung me. I swung my head back so the rope went over my chin and didn’t catch my neck. We should have cut the noose, so in case my neck did hit it, it would fall apart. But I went right to the floor and right through the slot in the gallows and hit the floor and knocked myself out for a couple minutes. At that point we started replacing the piano wire with cable.

ROB ZOMBIE (ex-White Zombie):
When I was little and I was an Alice Cooper fan, there were so many weird rumors and insanity. The show was larger than life, and the rumors become bigger than the reality.

ALICE COOPER:
At a show in Toronto, somebody threw a live chicken onstage. To this day, I can’t understand why anybody would bring a chicken to a rock festival. “Let me see, I got my tickets, I got my wallet, I got my drugs, I got my chicken. Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.” So there it was, a white chicken onstage. And I threw it back in the audience and they tore it to pieces. The kicker was the fact that the first five rows were all in wheelchairs. So it was the crippled kids that tore the chicken apart. There were white feathers everywhere. I just figured it would fly away or somebody would get a great pet from Alice, not knowing that I was throwing the chicken to its death. The next day I looked at the paper, and I was as surprised as anybody else. “Alice Cooper kills chicken and drinks blood.” I was like, “What?” But when you have an image like Alice Cooper, anything’s believable.

For many members of Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, MC5, Blue Cheer, Hawkwind, and countless others, alcohol and drugs were a vehicle to creativity, a way to cope with hard times, a source of relaxation, and a pathway to easier sexual escapades. Of course, such escapism was a loaded gun that took the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, and Stooges bassist David Alexander.

JAMES WILLIAMSON:
I don’t know of anyone [who was more decadent than the Stooges]. The drugs and decadence weren’t an act: it was the real deal. It’s hard to imagine living a harder life than that and still surviving. And we nearly didn’t.

DICKIE PETERSON:
I grew up being told, “If you do marijuana you’ll be a slave for the rest of your life,” and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, “If you take LSD you’ll be a slave for life.” I took LSD, and I wasn’t a slave for life. Then it got to be, “If you take cocaine, you’ll be a slave for life.” There was a time when I thought, “Hey, I’ve been taking heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on the weekends.” I actually believed that you didn’t have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don’t lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don’t tell people it is, because they’ll find out it doesn’t, then when they get to the stuff that really [will], they ain’t gonna believe you.

LEMMY KILMISTER:
My view on drugs has always been you can do whatever you like [on] either side of the gig, except heroin. But don’t mess up the gig. When it’s time, you better show up and you better deliver. That’s the only rule I’ve got.

JIMMY PAGE:
I can’t speak for the others [in Led Zeppelin], but for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.

CARMINE APPICE:
Being on the road back then was pretty wild. Everyone’s heard about the mudshark incident with Led Zeppelin.

RICHARD COLE (Led Zeppelin road manager):
I was in Seattle with Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge, and we started to catch sharks out the window [of the Edgewater Inn Hotel]. We caught a big lot of sharks, at least two dozen, stuck coat hangers through the gills, and left ’em in the closet. But the true shark story was that it wasn’t even a shark. It was a red snapper, and the chick happened to be a fucking redheaded broad with a ginger pussy. And that is the truth. [Zeppelin drummer John] Bonzo [Bonham] was in the room, but I did it. Mark Stein [of Vanilla Fudge] filmed the whole thing. And she loved it. It was like, “You’d like a bit of fucking, eh? Let’s see how your red snapper likes this red snapper!” It was the nose of the fish, and that girl must have come twenty times. I’m not saying the chick wasn’t drunk, I’m not saying that any of us weren’t drunk. But it was nothing malicious or harmful. No way! No one was ever hurt. She might have been hit by a shark a few times for disobeying orders, but she didn’t get hurt.

IGGY POP:
I think it was the combination of marijuana and alcohol, which makes you very sensual—and the pill. For the first time, [girls] were all gettin’ really free. And a lot of them were goin’, “Well, let me try this guy, let me try [that] guy . . .” because they
could
try it!

WAYNE KRAMER:
We were in San Francisco once and we met this girl who was a total freak and ended up with the whole band—fucked us all to death. We had a friend who was a photographer and he was hanging out at the hotel, and he happened to come into the room while some of the guys were in the middle of getting it on with this girl. And the
Berkeley Bar
published them. When some of the band members’ wives saw the photos, there was hell to pay.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER (groupie, penis sculptor):
I got Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson [from MC5]. Wayne wasn’t at his
biggest
. It wasn’t his fault at all. It was a mold failure on my part. I only captured his head and a teeny-teeny bit of shaft. But there was more to come. Actually Dennis came in the mold, speaking of coming. That’s only happened twice.

LEMMY KILMISTER:
Hawkwind was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a band. Sometimes we’d do three hits of acid before we got onstage and sometimes five, because everybody said it doesn’t work two days in a row, but we found out that if you double the dose, it does. But I got busted on the Canadian border, and they fired me. The most cosmic band in the world fired me for getting busted. Can you believe it? But the police had to let me go because they charged me for cocaine, and I really had amphetamines, so I was only in jail overnight. The longest time I’ve ever been in jail was for four days. That was also a bust, but it wasn’t me, it was the chick I was going to screw that night. We ride home, and they opened the trunk of the car and it was full of her pills. I’ve never been sentenced for anything.