U n d e r w h e l m e d

A lot of people find it a little strange when they visit my London penthouse here on the banks of the Fleet. I don't mean all the guns and knives I have lying around all over the place or even the underage girls draped languidly across the furniture. The thing that seems to puzzle my guests most seems to be the lack of any recorded music in my possession.

It's true; I don't posses a single CD or any form of equipment on which to play one even if I did.

I guess it was when I started making music myself that the habit faded. When you're wrestling around with a guitar riff, reshaping it, bending it this way and that and trying to find words that not only rhyme but make some sort of nonsense in a poetic way the last thing you want do is to listen to   some other fuckers stab at glory.

Listening to music in a recreational way just didn't work anymore. 

Instead of grooving along to your favourite songs you'd find yourself analysing the sounds, wondering about gated reverbs and bpm's, string arrangements, drum samples and guitar effects, all the boring shit that never used to trouble you when you just used to play along with your air guitar. That fantastic one with the strings that never broke and that never went out of tune, the one that seemed to know all the notes even to Frank Zappa solos.

The phrase a busman's holiday springs to mind. 

 It wasn't always this way, way off in my pre Zodiac days I wouldn't say I ever owned a vast collection of records, not in the John Peel, mental illness, obsessive compulsion kind of way, but it did fill up a good couple of shelves.

The usual early seventies rock collection, Purple, Sabbath, Zeppelin, the pioneers of heavy blues influenced rock stuff, lyrically anyway, especially Zeppelin. I mean you could barely recognize those old blues riffs beneath all the distortion and reverb but they were there. The lyrics however really gave that blues game away, and that was where the problem lay for me. I didn't know what the fuck they were on about. All that hanging around crossroads, squeezing lemons till mojos fell out of your arse. And as for Zeppelins Mr Plant himself, wanting to be my backdoor man? What the fuck was that all about? 

Of course all these sexual innuendos which confused me at the time seem pretty obvious now, well nearly all of them, I'm still a little unsure about all those backdoor men sniffing around but to a barely pubescent lad back in the seventies it was just as well that the riffs were great because the lyrics were far too disturbing.

Then along came Alice with some healthy murder and violence.

 Alice threw off all those blues chains that proved the stumbling block to really digging all those groovy riffs; here were lyrics that didn't increase my frustration and confusion.

Sex and all its perturbations were too damn close to home for a pubescent lad struggling with all those weird hormonal things, songs illustrating these discomforts and frustrations just made things worse.

 Alice's songs were escapist, fantasy stuff, and horror movies, anything except that hideous monster that plagued your trousers every waking moment.

Of course I didn't realise at the time that Alice's songs were actually far worse, involving all kind of Freudian sublimation crap, the sex had just gone weirdly under cover.

Only when the great man himself decided to cover one of my own songs did I realise this. I mean, Feed my Frankenstein, come on, how more subliminally freako sex pervoid can you get, Meet my libido, he's a psycho, Freudian baby or what?

But enough of this, analysing ones own songs is far too dangerous, besides that's the job of the analyst and the rock critic and I wouldn't want to put those valuable contributors to society out of a job.

I'll just get down to what people generally want to know about the whole Alice thing. How did he get to cover the song? What was he like etcetera?

I only met Alice the once, his producer Pete Collins had come across the song on the Hoodlum thunder Album and thought it would be ideal for the grand old ghoul himself, what with the scary monster angle and everything.

It was quite weird when I heard Alice's version. Alice Cooper imitating me imitating him, very odd. I wasn't too happy about the lyric being changed, the surrealist references to Rene Oppenheimers fur teacup   for instance. Maybe Alice's people thought it might have been a bit over Johnny Rocks head or something, or maybe they just thought it was too dirty, I mean it was a pretty blunt muff diving metaphor, and this was still in a pretty pre internet time where record companies were still bending a little too far forward for radio stations. "Greasy fingers down, your dirty spine, ice cream cone…" No Alice, no! I would never have written such banalities.

But those petty quibbles aside I was genuinely thrilled when Alice decided to record it, even more thrilled when it appeared on Wayne's world.

As far as I was concerned that was it, job done, something to tell the grandkids, Alice Cooper the Grandfather of ghoul rock had recorded a classic record penned by your very own ghoulish grandpa' kind of thing.

I didn't particularly want to meet the old bastard.

More than that I didn't want to upset him, I mean I was obviously going to be under whelmed and I didn't want my childhood hero to register the disappointment that would inevitably be in my eyes.

I'd been on the receiving end of that one far too many times and I don't know, it just kind of bums you out.

Some young kid comes backstage to meet you and it's always squirmingly embarrassing, the poor bastards are invariably let down.

The larger than life character they imagine you to be turns out to be just some four-eyed cunt sat there dishevelled in his underwear.

Fortunately Alice wasn't quite as bad as I usually am.

I was led backstage at Wembley to meet his Grimness where I was introduced to some late middle-aged guy in leather trousers about to go onstage and do his job. We shook hands mumbled pleasantries, he offered me one of his cucumber sandwiches and that was it.

Pretty much as I expected really, so I wasn't too disappointed.

Except I must admit there was a part of me that had been hoping he would be back there shagging dead bodies, out of his gourd on Jack Daniels with half a dozen dead babies skewered all over the place, but you know, you cant have everything.

Maybe next time some little kid in a wheelchair comes backstage to meet the Love Reaction and get some autographs I'll arrange for a bunch of strippers to be hanging around sucking us all off or something, offer the kid a dig of smack and a toot on the crack pipe, make the little fuckers day.