On the brink: the near-death experience that cancelled Alice Cooper’s 1976 tour
By 1976, the only person standing in the way of Alice Cooper’s rise and rise was Mr Vincent Furnier himself.
The latter being his real name up until the previous year, at least. It was a pivotal moment for the shock rocker. Across some stellar glam records, the Alice Cooper band had become a spent force, eking out 1973’s Muscle of Love before disbanding. Eager to protect his creation, Furnier legally adopted his alter-ego’s name to avoid any legal implications while kicking off his solo career in earnest.
Depending on who you ask, 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare is the peak of Cooper’s golden era, or the moment he lapsed into a toothless vaudeville spookyman suited to The Muppet Show than his Detroit garage scene. Either way, Cooper’s first solo LP shot to number five on the US charts and shifted over 50,000 copies that year alone. A new lease of life seemed all but assured as Cooper embraced his theatrical direction after the band era.
Trouble was, Cooper had developed a mammoth booze habit. At its nadir, the ‘School’s Out’ singer would reportedly down two boxes of beer and a bottle of whiskey daily, ravaging his health and resulting in intoxicated live shows. Drink had been in his life back when he was a psychedelic straggler at the tail-end of the 1960s, later founding the hard-drinking Hollywood Vampires club in Los Angeles’ Rainbow Bar & Grill, but it was during the take off of his solo venture that mortality finally began to catch up with him.
It was on the eve of 1976’s scheduled Alice Cooper Goes to Hell Tour. Another high production extravaganza to promote the namesake sequel to Welcome to My Nightmare, the extensive 30-date arena tour was set to stand as Cooper’s most ambitious spectacle yet, boasting multi-level staging, grand props depicting a disco-flavoured underworld, and a meticulous level of choreography involving his ghoulish dance troupe.
Strike one occurred on June 10th, when Cooper spent a night at UCLA Hospital for exhaustion. Then it got serious. Just two days before official rehearsals, the singer collapsed and was rushed straight back to UCLA, the doctors diagnosing him with acute anaemia. According to eyewitnesses, Cooper looked utterly drained, as if he’d yet to recover from the previous years’ gruelling touring schedule.
A workaholic routine may well have played a part, but the underlying problem was the booze. Alcohol was so frequent and voluminous that it was disrupting the healthy creation of red blood cells in his system. It was desperate, the medical authorities ordering a minimum of four weeks’ rest and a total overhaul of his diet, scuppering the plans of his upcoming tour.
Despite some frantic efforts by management to reschedule, it became clear that the technical demands of the live show were impossible, forced to scrap the Alice Cooper Goes to Hell Tour for good. He wouldn’t tour again til 1977, but drink would continue to blight Cooper’s life until finally knocking alcoholism on the head in 1983 alongside rekindling his Christian faith.
Even in the throes of his booze dependency, Cooper was able to grapple with his demons directly, penning Alice Cooper Goes to Hell’s ‘I Never Cry’ as a softer ballad in his oeuvre, exploring his battle with the sauce later dubbed “an alcoholic confession” by the shock rock veteran.
