Okay, not really – but the singer and his group did release
the single “Elected” in September 1972, timed for the final stretch of the
Nixon versus McGovern race for the White House.
A bombastic blast of proto-punk fury, “Elected” proposed Cooper as the
leader of “a new party, a third party, a WILD party” that would “take the
country by storm”. The single was accompanied with an uproarious promo video,
in which Cooper drives around in a Rolls-Royce glad-handing the voters and
revels in the barrow full of donor cash wheeled in by his campaign
manager, a roller-skating chimpanzee.
The idea for “Elected” actually dated back to the previous
Presidential contest in 1968, which inspired Alice Cooper to write a song
titled “You Shall Be Elected”. That lyrical concept fell by the wayside but the
tune survived as “Reflected”, a track on the group’s 1969 debut album Pretties For You. Flash forward to ’72
and Alice Cooper were now the most infamous band in America, thanks to their
shock-rock concerts involving the dismemberment of baby-dolls and faked but
hair-raisingly realistic executions of the singer by gallows and guillotine. Following
the chart success of “School’s Out,” the group were on the brink of the superstardom
they’d been chasing for four grueling years. So they decided to jump on the election-year
bandwagon and drastically remodeled “Reflected” with the original lyric
restored and intensified. Instead of “You Shall Be Elected”, the hook line became
“I wanna be elected”: a messianic power trip for a singer who justifiably saw
himself as a leader of youth.
Bob Ezrin, the group’s producer, came up with a shrewd ruse
to generate the declamatory demagogue vocal that “Elected” needed. “To get the
performance I had a full-length mirror placed in front of Alice on an angle,” Ezrin
told an interviewer. “That way he could see his entire body in reflection.”
Gesticulating like an orator, Cooper rasped out lines about how the “kids want
a savior, don’t want a fake” and vowed that very soon “we’re all gonna rock to
the rules that I make.” Ezrin added horns suggestive of statesman-like pomp and
distorted bursts of TV newscaster voice-over in the style of Walter Winchell.
After $10,000 of studio time and eighty hours of obsessive mixing, the result
was one of the hard rock classics of the first half of the Seventies.
From its whiplash opening riff through Cooper’s
abyss-plunging scream to the portentous descending bassline in the outro,
“Elected” can also stake a claim to be punk rock four years ahead of historical
schedule. The tone of apocalyptic glee mingled with megalomania anticipates
“Anarchy in the U.K.” (Johnny Rotten was a huge Alice fan and his audition for
the Sex Pistols involved miming to “I’m Eighteen” on a jukebox). There’s a
lyrical preview of punk too: during the fade, Cooper reels off a list of U.S.
cities that have “problems,” then whispers “and personally... I don’t care” – a
glimpse ahead to the taunting nihilism of “and we don’t care” in “Pretty
Vacant.”
Listening to “Elected” recently while working on my new glam
rock history Shock and Awe, I heard
another element of prophecy: Cooper’s
drunk-with-the-promise-of-power performance reminded me of nobody so much as
Donald Trump. Like Cooper, Trump is an entertainer moving into politics, using
showbiz techniques that bypass reasoned analysis and policy proposals and
instead conjure a baseless aura of authority. When Cooper rants about how “you
and me together / young and strong,” it sounds like Trump’s blasts of hot-air
about America being great again, how “we’ll win so much”. There’s Trump Tower-like
bling too when Cooper brags about being “a dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce”.
Long before Trump ever featured in its pages, Alice Cooper
made the front cover of Forbes. In
the financial magazine’s April 15th 1973 issue, the band were held
up as exemplars of “a new breed of tycoon” that had emerged thanks to the Seventies
rock business’s bonanza of platinum albums and mega-grossing tours. Beneath the headline “the rockers are rolling
in it”, an interview with Cooper saw the singer describe himself as a true
patriot: “I’m the most American rock act. I have American ideals. I love money!” In another interview - with Bob Greene, a
political journalist who followed his Nixon/McGovern campaign chronicle Running with a book documenting an Alice
Cooper tour– the singer talked about his success in Trump-like terms as the
result of a pure will to dominance: “It was nothing but positive thinking. I’m
very competitive.... That’s my main life
drive – being better than everyone else.”
“Elected” was the
taster for Billion Dollar Babies, the
1973 album that propelled Alice Cooper to mainstream megafame. A brazen celebration of money-making, the
album stomped on the last vestiges of hippie idealism still lingering on from
the Sixties: instead of sticking it to the Man, why not become the Man? Billion Dollar Babies’s packaging was
styled as a snakeskin wallet bulging with cash; inside, fans found a facsimile
of a billion dollar bill. The accompanying tour was the most spectacular and
lucrative (raking in a then astronomical $4,000,000 for 64 concerts) that rock
had yet seen. The group travelled between cities in a private jet with a dollar
symbol on the plane’s tail.
In interviews Cooper described the album and the show as a
celebration of decadence – then an in-vogue concept because of the movie Cabaret. “It’s happening in the States now, all that German thing
of the Thirties,” Cooper told Circus
magazine’s Steve Demorest. “There is so much money in the U.S., and everyone
has as much sex as they want. All we’re doing is reflecting it. I like the idea
of the American Seventies producing a cabaret of over-opulence.... I’m a
nationalist. I know the States is the best place in the world to live in.” Indeed
Billion Dollar Babies concerts ended
with the band unfurling the Stars and Stripes to the sound of “God Bless
America”.
Dismayed pundits at the time took the commercial success of Alice
Cooper’s sick-humor and cynical worldview as proof that the assumed link
between rock and progressive politics had proved illusory. All those benefit
concerts for McGovern played by rock bands had done nothing to forestall a
landslide reelection for Nixon, self-proclaimed champion of the silent
majority. Some critics outright identified Alice Cooper as Nixonian rock. In truth, the singer had not even voted in
’72 – something he professed to feel ashamed about. But Cooper did say that “I
wouldn’t have voted for McGovern”, mainly because the candidate was too
wishy-washy and changed his mind so often.
Generally, Cooper professed to find politics “so boring”,
quipping that “if elected, I would impeach myself”. But while the finale to the
Billion Dollar Babies concerts involved a Nixon lookalike bounding onstage only
to be roughed up and bundled off by the band, in interviews Cooper expressed
sympathy for the President, embroiled
in the Watergate scandal shortly after his reelection triumph. “I think Nixon’s
got a rough job,” Cooper told Greene. “And if he’s guilty of anything, I don’t
think it’s anything new. He’s just the first one to get caught. I think Nixon’s
a star... He’ll go down as one of the biggest personalities ever to come out of
the United States, just by being so notorious.... I would love to spend some
time with him. I’d probably sit down and talk about golf.” That never happened
but Cooper did get to play golf alongside Nixon’s VP and successor Gerald Ford
in a celebrity tournament. In further bizarreness, one of the singer’s four
homes was right next door to the Phoenix, Arizona residence of Barry Goldwater,
hero of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and a failed Presidential
candidate in his own right.
Like the acting profession, rock has continued to lean left
and liberal for the most part. But the
existence of right-wing rockers – Ted Nugent, Johnny Ramone, Kid Rock, Gene
Simmons, Avenged Sevenfold, and Alice Cooper himself, who’s been described as a
“quiet” supporter of George W. Bush but whose intentions in 2016 are undeclared–
shows that there is no innate and irrevocable link between rock and progressive politics. Indeed rock’s
combination of populism and individualism arguably inclines more logically with
a libertarian agenda than with socialism.
When you look at the “rock star” version of rock - the model
for misbehavior and excess that’s recently been so influential in rap – it
becomes obvious that it has far more in common with Trump’s worldview than,
say, Portlandia values. “Rock star” rock
runs on ideological-emotional fuel like vanity, wasteful splendor, and
alpha-male display. There’s a reason why Trump soundtracks his
stadium-concert-like rallies with songs like “We Are the Champions” and “I
Won’t Back Down”, and why he could plausibly
add “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” to the playlist
too. Magical thinking, vacuous self-aggrandizement,
an appeal to gut feeling and irrational uplift, us-versus-them postures: if not
the rock candidate, Trump is at least the hair metal candidate.
Although a Top 5 smash in the U.K., “Elected” did not repeat
the success of “School’s Out” in America, stalling at Number 26. Let’s hope
this is an augury for November.
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