Many music performers have alter egos they inhabit at various times on record or onstage. Eminem routinely slips into his Slim Shady persona to wreak havoc on celebrities and society in general, while Nicki Minaj pretends to be more than 40% human parts. But none of these alter egos are as mysterious as Alice Cooper's Steven. This article includes spoilers for the concept albums Welcome to my Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, DaDa, The Last Temptation, Along Came a Spider and Welcome 2 My Nightmare. It will also be a lengthy, unfunny dissertation on an obscure aspect of rock music history which I consider it my autistic duty to elucidate.
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| I wish I had this subtly creepy wallpaper. |
Welcome to my breakdown
Steven first appears in 1975's Welcome to my Nightmare. The nightmare is presented as being Steven's. We are introduced to Steven in the song "Years Ago", in which he sings "All my toys are broken/And so am I inside, mom". Many people take this as an indication that Steven is a young boy, but in the song he doesn't seem to be so sure. Different voices alternately sing "I'm a little boy/No, I'm a great big man/No, let's be a little boy, for a little while longer? Maybe an hour?"
At its end the song segues into "Steven" with the phrase "I think I hear my mom calling..." and "Steven" then kicks in, with the name being repeated in a refrain that becomes more insistent. Steven says "it's right outside my door". He seems to be very afraid of whoever - or whatever - is outside his door.
The next song is "The Awakening". In this song Alice sings of waking up and looking for his wife, only to find that he has stabbed her to death in his sleep. The final song on the album is "Escape", which features the lines "But where am I running to? There's no place left to go/Just put on my makeup/And get me to the show".
What does it all mean?
Welcome to my Nightmare is a concept album. I believe it tells one continuous story - the origin story of Alice Cooper himself. Steven is the fictionalised Vincent Furnier - Alice's birth name. Steven is a grown man who is married. He also drinks to excess, and it makes him violent, or at least he fears it will. The song "Only Women Bleed" reflects this fear. It is preceded on the album by "Some Folks", which goes "I'm just no good without it/I'm not a man at all". While it is not specified what this refers to, I think it's alcohol.
The nightmare starts off in general terms. "Devil's Food" and "The Black Widow" are about generic scary things, like giant spiders and being eaten. But gradually the songs shift to more specific fears. Jack Torrance in The Shining had similar demons - he drank, and he once hurt his son. Like Jack, Steven is haunted by these fears.
Why does Steven drink? He drinks because of something that happened in his past. As mentioned above, there is some confusion about whether he is a boy or a man, but he must be a grown man to be married. I believe that in his nightmare he regresses into a little boy as a way to try to hide from the horrific realities of his life. After pleading to be a little boy for a while longer, he is frightened by someone outside his room, which leads to his awakening - his efforts to avoid reality are in vain.
"I think I hear my mom calling" - but he doesn't hear his mom calling. The cries of "Steven" in the song of the same name are from a woman, but not his mother - his wife. She is crying out to him as he is stabbing her in his sleep.
When he wakes up, Steven realises that he has done what he feared the most - he has killed his wife. Now his only recourse is to do what he has tried to do in the dream - to escape into another persona. "Just put on my makeup and get me to the show". He escapes into madness; into the persona of Alice Cooper.
Alice Cooper Goes to Hell
Steven didn't appear by name on the next album, and it seemed to be about Alice, the entertainer, being sent to a comedy disco Hell for all the controversy that he caused with his antics during the early 70s. However, if you subscribe to the above interpretation of Nightmare, Alice and Steven are really the same person. This is, however, complicated by the inner sleeve of the LP, which featured this text:
Lay still, Steven, and I'll tell you a bedtime story. I'll tell you a bedtime story that's not for all children. It's a very special story, that only special children will understand. It's a half-awake story, and it will be better if you close your eyes. It's a story that takes place in a dream, like other nightmares you have known. It's a dream that Alice has dreamed. You can dream along with him. You can follow Alice down the staircase, deep, down the stairs to the pit where he doesn't want to go, but he has to.
If you go to sleep now, Steven, you can go down the long and endless staircase and sing sweet songs to Alice and free him. And if you can't get to sleep, Steven, and in the middle of the night you get out of bed, when everything is quiet and the trees are still and the birds are hiding from the dark, you can lay down on your bedroom floor and press your ear tightly to the boards. If you listen very carefully you can hear Alice searching for a way out, forever chasing rainbows.
Sleep tight, Steven. And have a good night.
You can read this in all sorts of ways. One way to look at it is that Steven really is a child, and Alice is a character in a story his mom or dad told him. Another is to think of this as a prequel to Nightmare - that Alice was a character in a story, and in "Escape" on Nightmare, Steven drew on this childhood memory to create a character to escape into.
But there's another possible meaning that fits into what we learn on the next Steven album, 1991's Hey Stoopid. That maybe this is something a doctor is telling the now institutionalised Steven. In this analogy, the doctor is trying to get Steven to give up his Alice persona. The pit where Alice doesn't want to go, but has to, isn't really Hell, it's the unconscious mind. The doctor may be trying to get Steven to get rid of Alice, to lock him away under the floorboards of his own psyche. He is treating Steven as a child because Steven has now fully regressed into one.
A Wind Up Toy
Hey Stoopid only mentions Steven at the very end, on track "Wind Up Toy". The song implies its subject is in a mental institution, with doctors who run tests but can't determine what is wrong with him. The song also mentions his parents: "Daddy won't discuss me/What a state I must be/Mommy couldn't stand/Having such a wound-up boy".
This could mean that his parents are alive, and have given up hope for his recovery. However, it could also mean he has regressed to his child-state and only imagines that they are around. This seems likely if we take into account the information that we later learn from "Hell Comes Home".
The Last Temptation
Steven appears again as the protagonist in The Last Temptation, Alice Cooper's 1994 album. This time he seems to be free. In the tie-in comic he's depicted as a young boy. This could mean it is a prequel or that Steven is imagining himself in a free world. I do not believe this is a prequel to Nightmare and all the other albums. For a start, it's called The Last Temptation. It could hardly come before Nightmare, in which Steven has succumbed to the temptations of alcohol. Moreover, Steven is shown to have sexual desires for the character Mercy, which means he must be of a mature age in reality.
So in The Last Temptation, Steven goes (in his mind) to the sideshow, where he meets the Showman (depicted as Alice in the comic), who offers him things. The Showman shows him how his life could be boring or miserable, and offers him a way out. In crisis, Steven prays for salvation, and ultimately confronts the Showman and rejects him. The Showman is strongly implied to be the Devil, which is basically confirmed on the next album, Brutal Planet, as the Devil on that album shares his catchphrase, "nothing's free".
The Last Temptation is a morality play, and Steven's rejection of the Devil seems to clear the way for his redemption: "I'm Heaven bound/Go back to where you belong". Thematically, it also represents a rejection of the sideshow, the "Escape" from reality Steven has relied on for so long. By overcoming his demons both literal and figurative, he may now be able to rejoin the world.
Along Came a Spider
The name Steven reoccurred on 2009's Along Came a Spider. This album revolves around a serial killer named Spider who's collecting legs from eight victims to create his own giant spider, like a cross between Dahmer's zombies and The Human Centipede. At the end of the record he reveals to Steven that he's been in this cell for 25 years, so couldn't possibly have committed the recent murders.
From the wording it could be interpreted that Steven shares the cell with him, or that he has some sort of multiple personality disorder, because he uses the word "we". I don't think it's common practice for the criminally insane to bunk up together, but if Steven isn't in the cell with him, why is he there? Well Steven on The Last Temptation and Spider both kind of find Jesus in their respective storylines, so maybe Steven is a priest now and he's visiting Spider in prison. I don't know if that was the idea though. It could not be. Another possibility is that Steven is another personality of Spider.
DaDa theory
Alice Cooper's best album is also one of his less widely known. 1982's DaDa told the story of Sonny, who may also have multiple personalities. Some fans believe that Sonny is also Steven. Potentially, Alice, Steven, Sonny and Spider could all be the same person (of course, they are IRL). I don't believe that Sonny was meant to be Steven, as there are no overt continuity references on DaDa, and Sonny commits suicide at the end of the album. However, Sonny and Steven both seem to share something in common in their backstories: an abusive father.
The Nightmare returns
Steven is mentioned one more time to date in the AC discography: in track "When Hell Comes Home" from Welcome 2 My Nightmare, the 2011 sequel to the original. The song describes a scenario in which a young boy shoots his alcoholic father who has returned home in a menacing rage. This boy appears to be Steven, which, in keeping with our conception of Steven as a grown man in Nightmare 1, makes this a prequel within a sequel, like the Vito scenes in Godfather 2. Killing his abusive father may be the traumatic event that caused Steven to lose his childhood, which he would spend his adult life trying to get back.
As Steven is only mentioned on the one track, it seems likely that the protagonist for the rest of the album is Alice himself, as on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Except, as we know, Alice is likely the creation of Steven. The album ends with his surprise death, which would seem to put an end to the character once known as Steven. Except, as we know, Alice Cooper is the grand villain of rock and roll, and like all good villains, he can never truly die.
Do YEW have an autismal theory about a series of albums going back to 1975??? Poast!
