Living and Touring with Alice Cooper and Other Stories

It's the era of Peace and Love. The mid-sixties. Mike, a typical college freshman attended classes and hung out in the Student Union with musicians Glen, Vince, and Dennis. He had the one thing they lacked in their quest for fame: a vehicle to haul them and their equipment. They made him an offer to be their first roadie.

This is the story of Alice Cooper, the group that nearly never was, and Mike's adventures with them as they overcame all odds and grew from a cover band to a super group. Mike Allen, nicknamed Amp Boy by Vince, and the group lived and travelled together on the exhilarating, sometimes punishing road to the top. Their shared experiences molded them into a family.

Some of the adventures inside:

-A catastrophic accident nearly ended it all. There was a band meeting: "What do we do now?" was the question. Alice said, "We don't know how to do anything else!" They had to find a solution.

-On a warm spring night in the Arizona desert, Neal Smith suffered a gunshot to his foot. He confessed to the police that he shot himself. But is that the way it happened?

-At their Topanga Canyon home, the band experimented with the occult holding a séance that made an everlasting impression on everyone who witnessed it - especially Jim Morrison of The Doors.

-Because of a chicken and a flare gun, the group achieved notorious worldwide attention at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival by putting on the most extreme visual show in the rock and roll world. Did Alice bite the head off the chicken and drink its blood? Was the chicken torn apart by the crowd and the remains thrown on stage? Was the stadium set afire by a flare gun?

-Cindy, sister of Neal Smith their drummer, became their costume designer and house mother, tagging along for the adventure as her love story with Dennis begins, and Mike clumsily pursued the girl of his dreams.

Together they had wild and fun experiences, and hung out with Jim Morrison, David Crosby, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and other famous and soon to be famous rock stars. They found love, had all too-frequent police encounters, and discovered theatrical talents that would define them and shock the world.

These are stories of friendship and family, hardship and near disaster, failure and success, laughter and pain, the mundane to the ridiculous-- living the rock and roll life.

Included are close to 100 photographs, nearly 70 unpublished, from the early years of the group as they evolved from The Earwigs, The Spiders, The Nazz and finally to Alice Cooper.