ME, ALICE: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Alice, the rock 'n' roll nightmare, tells how it all happened from the days when he was Vince Furnier, son of an ordained minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to the stardom built on ""Dead Babies"" and ""Raped and Freezing."" Wouldn't you know it, Alice with his whips and chains, spiked heels and mascara, guillotines and electric chairs, boa constrictors and dismembered dolls is just a sweet, nutty American boy. He knows exactly why he went into the rock business: ""For fame and sex."" He didn't fit the Sixties at all (""Communes? Drugs? Sharing Everything? How dumb"") but the kids of the Seventies just ate him up, all 98 lbs. of him. He says that he recognized that it was a bisexual world and provided a catharsis for the violence. Trouble was, it scared Alice a lot of the time, wrecked his body, upset his mother. Eventually he had to change the act to make sure people understood ""I was a clown and not a devil."" The book is a good record of the non-stop madness of the rock world, less pretentious and funnier than Bob Greene's biography Billion Dollar Babies (1974). Neither Greene nor Cooper is willing to think much about what that satanic, sadistic stuff really means, but Vince/Alice himself is, well. . . ugh, lovable.