The incident that made Alice Cooper a household name was captured on film by D. A. Pennebaker, the director of Don’t Look Back and Monterey Pop. It doesn’t appear in Sweet Toronto, Pennebaker’s documentary about the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see why it ended up on the cutting room floor. Let’s say it’s not long on “good-time rock and roll” vibes.
Like me, you’ve probably seen the split-second clip of Alice throwing the chicken into the Toronto festival audience dozens of times, but it’s a different story in the context of the actual feedback-soaked bacchanal. The climax of the set Pennebaker captures on these thirteen minutes of film is so violent, so unsettling and so totally deranged in 1969 terms that you can forgive witnesses for thinking the bird was ritually sacrificed, or deliberately shredded by the band as a Dadaist outrage.
Getting Alice Cooper on the bill at this festival was a coup for manager Shep Gordon, whose unlikely career in showbiz is the subject of the entertaining documentary Supermensch (now streaming on Netflix). As Alice and Shep tell the story, the manager turned down an offer for 30 percent of the festival’s profits, instead opting to book Alice for a nominal fee of $1. In exchange, Shep’s clients got the slot in between the festival’s two headliners: John Lennon, in his first performance without the Beatles, and the Doors. From Supermensch:
Alice Cooper: Sixty thousand people. We go on, and it’s great. We’re tearing the place up, and the feathers are going, and I look down and there’s a chicken onstage. The only person that could’ve bought the chicken was Shep, because nobody in the audience would bring a chicken to that concert. Nobody would say, “OK, I got my keys, I got my tickets, I got my chicken.”
Shep Gordon: I thought, “Let’s have a live chicken, it would be fantastic.” I threw it out at him.
AC: I took the chicken and tossed it, thinking it had feathers, it should fly. Well, it didn’t fly as much as it plummeted.
SG: Everybody went wild.
AC: The audience tore it to pieces.
SG: They threw it back at him. They threw back wings, and legs, and heads came flying back up on the stage. And then I saw blood, so I turned my head ‘cause I faint when I see blood.
AC: Next day in the paper, “ALICE COOPER RIPS HEAD OFF CHICKEN AND DRINKS THE BLOOD.” What should have been incredibly horrible press for anybody became the thing that put us on the map. Now we could do anything we wanna do!
Alice throws the bird at 11:38, but you’ll miss nearly all of the actual mayhem if you fast forward. The song they’re playing at the beginning, often called “Freak Out Song,” is a version of “Don’t Blow Your Mind” by proto-AC band the Spiders. It’s nice to learn that Alice was a fan of The Prisoner.