In Waterloo Records, Austin's fine independent music store, I bought Love It to Death, Alice Cooper last Friday. I'd never found it on CD before; but I'd only renewed my search last month, when my own children became fans after listening, on the drive to school, to Welcome to My Nightmare and The Eyes of Alice Coo-per. For those who don't know him-which probably includes everyone in Trinidad apart from me, Jona-than Ali and the members of jointpop and Orange Sky, Alice Cooper made the mould from which this year's model, Lady Gaga, and an earlier incarnation, Marilyn Manson, were cast. The son of a preacher, he adopted a female stage name, which was also the band's name.
My children, ages 13 and 11, who had lead roles in Bridgetown's top production last Christmas, took to the dramatic aspect of Alice Coo-per at once. The records, I explained, were soundtracks for the stage shows, which, from 1971's Killer, ended with spectacular executions of the singer (by hanging in the early days and, later, when they could afford the gruesome, bloody, realistic wax replicas of his severed head, by guillotine). Two very scary songs especially wowed them, This House is Haunted and Steven, which could have been the theme for The Exorcist. Even for a grown man, they're chilling. In daytime. Cooper's first song about lunacy appears on Love It to Death, Alice Cooper-a very Peanuts-ish title, like, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The Ballad of Dwight Fry recounts a madman's attempt to escape from an asylum; on Wednesday this week, listening to it with me, my son, whose imagination appears to be as vivid as his old man's, was so scared, he had to climb into my lap. In 1978, Cooper released a whole album, From the Inside, 10 songs, including The Quiet Room and Inmates (We're All Crazy), about being locked up in a madhouse.
My father's reaction to my liking Alice Cooper was very different from my own to my children do-ing the same. My father, very much a man of his times, a time when men didn't tie their children's umbilical cords for the very good reason that they were not standing by their wives' side in the delivery room, but by the bartender's in the nearest rumshop, could not comprehend why, at age 14, I would be enthralled by a man named Alice who wrote songs with names like Halo of Flies, I Love the Dead and Dead Babies. (Of course, he was considerably less put out when I discovered Frank Sinatra.) If my father hated Alice Cooper, I often wondered how Alice Cooper's dad, the Reverend Ether Furnier, felt about his son, Vincent, writing songs called Devil's Food and Only Women Bleed. Could Rev Furnier appreciate a song his rebel son wrote, the way my father, somehow, liked The Ballad of Dwight Fry?
One night in 1977, I think, he'd made his nightly stomp to my room but, before he could yell, "You gotta turn that damn' thing down!" (a quote from Teenage Lament '74 off Muscle of Love, for those from the inside), he was stopped in his tracks by the third verse and chorus: "I think I lost some weight there/ And I'm sure I need some rest/ Sleeping don't come very easy/ In a straight white vest.... See my lonely life unfold/ I see it every day/ See my lonely mind explode/ When I've gone insane." I looked up from my bed, saw him standing in the doorway, and automatically began getting up to turn that damn' thing down when I noticed he was listening. He heard the whole song-and then left without a word.
On Wednesday, 34 years after it happened, 18 years after his death, I understood why. When my own son climbed into my lap for security while listening to the same song-an act I could never have tried with my own father, or I would have got a tap on my head and a demand that I mix a scotch-and-water to prove I had a use-a memory floated up; which caused me to explain to my son the etymology of the word "lunatic," its roots in the Latin "luna", for "moon", and the old belief that mental illness varied with the phases of the moon, intermittent mania occurring and full-blown insanity worsening exponentially at full moon. And I remembered the only time I ever saw my father openly emotional.
One night, a couple years before, I had something for him-a message from my mother, a scotch-and-soda, an excuse for yet another failure at school-and found him on his bedroom balcony overlooking the St Ann's valley. He was trembling. "What's wrong?" I asked. He bit his lip for several moments before replying, "Can't you hear them?" I, age 15 or 16, heard nothing that was not said by the Shadow, VS Naipaul or my girlfriend. I listened again. And heard them: the lunatics of the St Ann's Psychiatric Hospital, where electroshock therapy was still in vogue-a practice my father explained in detail. (Scientific discourse, which involved no emo- tional threat, he was fluent in.) "It's full moon," said my father, almost choking on the words, "so they're feeling their madness more. So they're giving them stronger shocks."
We looked at one another steadily in the quickening dark; it was the closest I ever got to seeing my father cry without an empty bottle of scotch in the background (or, more often, foreground; another of his favourite statements: I'd rather a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy). "It's not fair," he said. "They can't help it."
Alice Cooper, who invented the term "shock-rock", the man famous for biting the heads off (candied) kittens, is now a golf-playing George W Bush supporter. The man who wrote the near sacrilegious Second Coming-"It would be nice/ To walk upon the water/ To talk again to angels at my side"-is increasingly more open about his acceptance of the God his minister father represented.
If you live long enough, you become your father. Unless you take the best, not the worst, from him.
BC Pires is the Anti-Cooper.
Read more of his writing at www.BCraw.com