When the album "Killer" was released, Warner Bros. built a gallows for the band Alice Cooper where the singer was executed during each concert. During the show at Varsity Stadium in Toronto on September 2, 1972, the excited guitarist Glen Buxton, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 49, made the devil horns long before it became fashionable.
ALICE COOPER: I was keen that the hanging scene didn't look cheap. It had to look real, like the executions you see in the movies. We had this gallows built and the well-known magician Amazing Randi showed me how to make the hanging look believable. When the floor disappeared from under my feet, I was completely helpless. My hands were tied behind my back and if anything had gone wrong, I wouldn't have had a chance of surviving. It reminded me of when I was a kid and went to the circus. I remember seeing a man locked in a cage with four lions and a tiger. All he had to defend himself with was a stool and a whip. Those cats could kill him in a second. I was sitting in the audience and I felt, “Oh my God, today something might go wrong and the tiger might kill him.” I wanted to incorporate that feeling into our show. The risk was only one in a million, but I wanted the audience to feel that on this particular night something that shouldn’t happen might happen. That added an extra layer of drama. When Alice came back for the encore, it got a huge reaction.
There were many executioners in the show, but Glen Buxton was the first. He was constantly in a state of rebellion. He was the thug in the band and never went anywhere without a weapon. He always carried a stiletto and a couple of pills that he shouldn’t have. With a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he was really who you thought he was. Glen was the nicest person in the world but at the same time he had a bit of a gangster in him, you could tell he was from Akron, Ohio. That's why he enjoyed being the one to execute me on stage. Glen was my drinking buddy and we drank all day. During the concerts it was perfect that he put down the guitar and executed his own singer. Eventually the executioner became a woman, a kind of creature and both.
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