September 29, 2024

Skylight Webzine

Online since 2000

Former tour manager of Alice Cooper,David Libert, talks about the wild stories from the road


“I guess my favorite story is the Edgewater Inn in Seattle. You have to get the artist the rooms that overlook Puget Sound so they can fish off of the balcony. It really was a shitty hotel but you could do that. Everybody wanted to stay there. So Alice, just before we were about to go to a show, catches a shark . . . And he doesn’t want to throw the shark back because he wants to get a taxidermist to stuff it, right? Well, what are we going to do with the shark in the meantime? He says, “Fill the bathtub up with water. We’ll pour a bunch of salt in it.” Of course it died. But as we were standing there with Alice, we’re looking at the shark, and this shark in the bathtub, he’s actually looking at us. I don’t know what he’s thinking but he’s looking at me and Alice. That was a really bizarre moment.

 

Alice [Cooper] was doing a show in Vancouver and he slipped on one of the props and flipped off the stage like a tiddlywink and ended up in the pit. He cracked his skull open. This was after a couple of numbers. We take him backstage and I know he’s in bad shape. And it came down to this: “We’ll put a bandage around your head. You go back out there and do two or three songs. Otherwise, we’ll have to postpone the show, we won’t get paid, and you’ll have to come back.” So that was the motivating factor. “Go out there and do a couple of songs because as bad as you feel right now, it will feel a lot worse tomorrow.” So we put a bandage around his head with a little red ink on it, he did three more songs, pretended to collapse and we took him offstage. And he got paid.”

 

Source: Billboard