AC/DC once said it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll. Alice Cooper knows the truth in that statement. His new autobiography Devil On My Shoulder documents his journey from infamy to icon, documenting the band’s climb up the greasy pole and the truth – or at least, his truth – behind the outrageous tales that have followed in his wake for the last 50 years.
As Cooper puts it: “In the beginning Alice Cooper was the name of a rock group. Then my stage name. And then a monster. Now I’ve written a book that tracks Alice’s evolution, how he and I became almost fatally intertwined, and how I’ve tamed him at last.”
In this exclusive excerpt, Cooper recalls the band’s first grimy residency in New York, the city that never let them sleep, in 1969. They went hoping to take a bite out of the Big Apple – but ultimately it took a bite out of them.
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Expect big knives, drag queens, horrible dining habits, and a gear nightmare that drove guitarist Glen Buxton to the brink. Over to Alice…
America was opening up for us, a little. Shep [Gordan] and Joey [Greenberg] worked the phones from a brownstone in Greenwich Village in New York, booking us everywhere they could – Denver, Colorado Springs, Portland, Passaic, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Toledo – mostly Midwestern venues so we could drive from town to town, but also occasionally flying places.
Shep would ostentatiously slap his Louis Vuitton executive briefcase and wallet on an airline ticket counter and write out a check that would only bounce after we’d got off at the other end. We rifled through more than a few groupies’ handbags across the country and skipped out on a lot of motels.
Band on the run! We had nothing you could call a per diem, but we made do. I remember Glen [Buxton, guitarist] complaining one morning that his breakfast doughnut was stale, then dunking it in beer, and voilà, fine dining! Sleeping sometimes in the car or six to a room, our personal hygiene must have been off the charts horrible – but it was a joy because for the first time we were almost making ends meet.
And then there was New York, which was a revelation to us Phoenix homeboys. It was a different world entirely. We knew Arizona. We knew Hollywood. We knew Detroit. But we were not prepared for New York.
We tramped the streets in the broiling heat in awe of the din, the jackhammers pounding and yellow cabs honking, the street vendors hollering, the odor of garbage piled high on the curbs, the brownstones bristling with ironwork, the neo-Gothic churches with their blackened spires and the gleaming skyscrapers curving over the horizon, the sidewalks dotted with dog poop, the peep shows and grindhouse theaters, the touts and hustlers working the corners, the games of three-card monte there one moment and gone the next, the steam hissing up from the subway grates like a whiff of Gotham City or the underworld.
We reckoned we were kindred spirits with bands like the Velvet Underground who were writing about sadomasochism, drag queens, and paranoia instead of hippie optimism and utopian slogans. But when we got there, they and their cooler-than-thou fans were not impressed.
We went onstage at Steve Paul’s The Scene, a short-lived but legendary dark, cramped kind of basement speakeasy room near Times Square for the rock elite, and beat each other up and turned on the fire extinguisher. I brandished my sword with dollar bills skewered on the blade. I stood on the tables and kicked the glasses to smithereens and all that. And they didn’t raise a single eyebrow. They were so jaded, so tragically hip, it was like, go home, little boys.
Our first night in town, Neal, Glen, and I went to check out The Scene, where I think Jimi Hendrix was sitting in, and as soon as we arrived, this drag queen pulled me into the women’s bathroom and stuck something up my nose. I go, “What was that?” And he goes, “Mexican heroin.” Welcome to New York!
Then on the way out, we hail a taxi, and a turtle- shaped cab driver snaps at us, “Get in.” Then a big Black guy comes over and says to us, “This is my cab.” The driver says, “I got somebody,” and the big guy pulls out a knife. Then the little guy pulls out a zombie knife and says to us as we cower in the back seat, “That cocksucker, I’m gonna cut him down the middle.” This is our first night. We looked at each other and went, like, Wha? We thought we were tough guys, but maybe not so much.
I tried to cheer him up: ‘Somewhere in Manhattan there’s a wino with green velvet pants and a pink Les Paul’
We checked into the Hotel Earle near Washington Square Park, where a band from Denver called Zephyr let us share rehearsal time in the cellar with them, the rats, and the roaches. The Earle had once been a natty residential hotel where luminaries like P. G. Wodehouse, Ernest Hemingway, and Bob Dylan had stayed (Joan Baez too; she refers to it in Diamonds & Rust), but by the time we got there it was seriously past its prime.
We took a room with six or seven beds and a cot, the walls wallpapered with grimy oilcloth; we got in so late that we just piled all our stuff there and crashed. The next morning when we got up, Glen started screaming, “Where’s my guitar? Where’s my fuckin’ guitar?” His beloved white semi-hollow-body Gretsch with gold pickups was missing.
Nothing else was touched. In a mad thrashing panic, we turned everything inside out and upside down. The door and windows were locked. The fire escape was pulled up. How could this have happened?
We charged down to the front desk and yelled, “We’re checking out of here, your security is beyond lax,” and then went across the street to the Howard Johnson’s to make new plans and get a bite to eat, leaving our stuff with the concierge. Or did we pace in the lobby angrily, wondering what to do? Or did we stand, fretting, on the sidewalk with our luggage, waiting for a cab? Again, memories vary.
We were tired, hungover, disoriented, and afraid. But whatever we did or didn’t do, next thing we knew, Glen’s suitcase was gone. And a week later, after we’d moved hotels, his pink Les Paul too. Welcome to New York.
Glen was devastated. We felt so bad for him, but what could we do? Shep and Joey bought him another guitar. I tried to cheer him up, saying, “Look on the bright side. Somewhere in Manhattan there’s a wino with green velvet pants and a pink Les Paul.” And if looks could kill…
Michael [Bruce, guitar] says that Glen was never quite the same afterward, that the brand-new Rickenbacker he selected never gave him the feedback or sustain he wanted. To him, his Gretsch wasn’t just a guitar; he’d modified it according to his own specifications – reengineered it with his own patented “giggy” bits – and there was no replacing it.
But worse, some kind of pilot light inside of him was snuffed out. He’d already been drinking harder than the rest of us every day – a bottle of whiskey a day, plus the weed and uppers and downers and everything – but Michael maintains it was after the theft of everything he owned – his guitars, his clothes, his identity – that he really started overindulging.
We left the city feeling beat up, spat out by the Big Apple like a mouthful of seeds
We were virtually unknown in New York, but because what we wore on the street was exactly the same as on the stage, drag queens and ladyboys flocked to us like moths to a flame, following us around like we’d walked into a scene from Last Exit to Brooklyn. I thought they had a sad edge to them, but also a defiance that you had to admire. They weren’t just dressing up, they had to dress up – to become the people they wished they were. They knew they’d always be social outcasts, they knew they’d be beaten up and spat on, but they had no choice.
Still, I never felt too comfortable with them. I get that the outrageous glamour, the too-fabulous RuPaul thing, can be an art form, yet here’s these guys that want to be not just female but an exaggerated, garish version with scarlet lipstick and huge hair. I’ve never understood why more women don’t think it’s making fun of them or insulting them at some level.
Anyway, there was this one Puerto Rican guy with curly hair who was really getting on our nerves. He knocked on the door of our hotel room with a couple of his friends, all made up and mincing about, wired on bennies, and after a couple of hours Glen gets up, says to the guy, “Here, follow me,” and goes to the bathroom. “Get in the bathtub,” he says.
So the guy does, real excited like something sexual was going to happen. Then Glen turns on the cold water from the showerhead and drenches the poor guy, and Michael says he’ll never forget him wailing, “Glen, you’re the devil!” like it was the end of the world.
Anyway, one good thing: As I recall, Glen got one of his guitars back from a pawn shop after one of those very same drag queens gave us a tipoff. But, honestly, we left the city feeling beat up, spat out by the Big Apple like a mouthful of seeds.
- Excerpted from Devil on My Shoulder: A Memoir by Alice Cooper, published on October 6, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by Nightmare, Inc. Used by arrangement with Da Capo Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
