Music videos weren’t really a thing then. And “Welcome to my Nightmare” was theater as well as rock. I knew a movie of it existed, but I only made an effort to see it as October was slipping through my grip. I have a strange, one-sided history with Alice Cooper. We listened to the radio back when we were kids and we all knew Cooper from “School’s Out,” an unofficial anthem of the seventies. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up (some things never change), but I had a copy of the album Welcome to my Nightmare. I couldn’t recollect how I’d got it until my brother clued me in. We were at Jamesway just outside Franklin one Friday night. My mother, frugal to the day of her death, saw that Alice Cooper’s new album had a song called “Steven” on it and she bought it for me.
Now Mom knew full well that my official name is “Steve” (she named me). There’s no “n” in there anywhere. Yet still, even as I knew this, I found that song spoke to me. Like the Steven on the album, I was prone to nightmares. And the sequence of “Years Ago” and “Steven” on that concept album never left me. Mom would not have approved of the movie version—I found the misogynist parts difficult to watch myself—but it did answer a question I always had: how did he perform these songs in concert? They seemed too big for that. They weren’t the snippets I always assumed rock stars did. (I never attended concerts, so what did I know?) Alice Cooper is still the only rockstar I’ve ever seen in concert, but the theatrics were brought way down and his back probably ached like mine did after that event.
I’d been looking for a horror movie to finish out the month, you see. I keep a list of movies that, apparently, are never free on Amazon Prime or Hulu. It ended up taking nearly all the little time I allot myself for such indulgences to try to find something. Then I remembered Alice. It was raining outside and I had caught up on my emails for the moment. This step into a yesteryear I never knew made me realize just how creative people can be. We have to get someone to pay us for doing something, and if you can sing and strut, well, you might consider sharing your nightmares. Something many of us have in abundance, even in November.