Hello Hooray!

Hello Hooray!

This was an interesting period of time for me. Just about everything that shaped me happened here. This was early spring 73 and it was the Billion Dollar Babies tour. I had seen Alice cooper in 71 or so. It was around the time that I met Daniel Elsberg. I’m going to add a small comment here regarding that incident. What occurred wasn’t a random act by one individual. If you watch the videos and there are a few of them (First link below) This was brilliantly coordinated at a high level. Politicians had escalated the war and then made it unwinnable. This was the way out. The media smeared the Pentagon Papers all over Nixon. That was my first lesson regarding trusting the media.

Now back to 1973 and the Billion Dollar Babies tour. As I got to know some of the people surrounding the band I learned some interesting things. Their head electrician asked me if I had seen the red headed girl out there. I said I hadn’t and he went on the explain what he meant. He said there’s this young woman with unrealistically red hair that is present at just about every show. Nobody has any idea who she is. I didn’t see her the next two nights they played, but later in videos about the band I caught glimpses of her. She was such a fixture she actually was included in a couple of videos. I had told my wife about her before and stopped the video to point her out a few times.

The day after my wife and I were married we were heading to Catalina Island for a few days. As we traversed the parking lot to the boat I glanced down and found a backstage pass to the Alice Cooper concert the night before. I stuck it in my pocket and glanced over at my bride. “A good omen!” She rolled her eyes.

What had always interested my about the band was his ability to latch onto things to work with and capitalize on. He had an honesty about him that was pretty rare. They were trolling the media when they wrote Dead Babies. That song was about a neglected child and the consequences of that neglect. He noticed that a little bad press can go a long way to making you famous and you can work on the image after the fact. When he went into rehab he did an entire album about it. The media was always trying to figure out who he was. My favorite was him claiming to be Eddie Haskell from leave it to Beaver. There were many other names that he used for that purpose. I believe it was Salvador Dali who painted him as a Chicago gangster with a brown suit and his feet on a desk. When Tipper Gore started the push to censor music videos he did a song called Freedom.
(Second link below) The original band broke up early because of drug problems with one member. That led Alice to create “The Solid Rock Foundation” to help kids with drug problems. It was Christian inspired and like true Christianity his organization didn’t try to jam their views into every opening they could find. It worked as it always does. (Third link below is to his foundation)

As you can see I really enjoyed watching as he grew to be who he is. He’s been married one year long than I have. Both he and his wife are PK’s preachers kids. My wife and I saw them in New Orleans and I really enjoyed this one time when there was a father with his daughter sitting to my left, and that fourteen year old knew the words to every song.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve seen the Royal Russian Ballet do Swan Lake at the Kennedy center and loved it. I also saw a concert there that was Queen’s first tour with Kansas, Mahogany Rush and I think it was Aerosmith. I preferred the latter. I also in glee club sang in Beethoven’s Ninth in Colorado at a school that’s probably been renamed recently. I preferred singing Eighteen and School’s Out with my wife that girl and her father. It was a snob free evening.

This is the John Paul Vann video. The links to the rest in the series are in the description.
https://rumble.com/vi1f3l-john-paul-vann-he-gave-it-all.html

This was the official video done by Alice Cooper called Freedom. It was in response to calls from Tipper Gore and others to stat censoring music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL1kQQbhmY8

Alice Coopers Solid Rock Foundation.
https://www.alicecoopersolidrock.com/