Rock fans have long known the basics of Alice Cooper‘s survival story with substance abuse. A new memoir fills in the chapter that came closest to ending that story much earlier. And and it starts with one sentence from someone who turned out to be wrong.
Alice Cooper, 78, is promoting his autobiography, Devil on My Shoulder, and in an interview with The Telegraph he described how his drug use started after he had already been treated for alcohol. The advice he was given about cocaine was simple. “If you smoke it, it’s not addictive,” he recalled being told.
“This was at the very beginning of crack, and crack is the most addictive drug there is, by far,” Cooper said. “That was really the thing that almost killed me.”
The book is just as blunt. “It’s only the most addictive thing on the planet,” he writes. “I’d never smoked cigarettes, hardly ever smoked marijuana, but I went all in.”
Related: Alice Cooper Reveals the “Scary” Reason He Has No Tattoos
The drinking came first. Cooper did not start until he was 20, and for years he believed he had it managed. “I was sort of the Dean Martin of rock and roll,” he said. “I was never drunk. I was always on this golden buzz, and I knew how to keep that buzz going.” That changed when his body gave out. “I just started throwing up blood, and that’s when you know that you’re not in control.”
He entered rehab for the first time in 1977, where a psychiatrist asked how much he drank onstage. The answer led to a verdict Cooper still repeats: “So Alice isn’t the problem. You are.” He stayed sober for two years before relapsing, and the crack use followed in the early 1980s.
It nearly ended his marriage to Sheryl Goddard. “We were almost in court, and I said, ‘This is wrong,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, I know,'” he said. Sheryl gave him a choice: get clean and return to the Christian faith they shared, or leave.
“So I did,” Cooper said. “And that put us back together, you know. And it was almost a relief to get back to church.”
He has been clean since 1983, and the couple renewed their wedding vows on their 50th anniversary earlier this year.
Cooper also told the paper that life on the road has changed. “If you’re in a touring band, nobody gets high, nobody ever drinks, because now it’s a big business and you can’t afford to have a guy that’s doing that,” he said.
Devil on My Shoulder arrives Oct. 6 in the United States from Hachette Book Group and Oct. 8 in the United Kingdom. Cooper has said he wrote it “to track Alice’s ‘evilution,’ and how I’ve tamed him at last.”
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