alice cooper tour manager

On Tour With Alice Cooper – Manager Reveals Insider Stories

David Libert (born January 20, 1943) is an American music executive, musician and author. He was one of the founding members of the musical group,  The Happenings . Hailing from  Paterson, New Jersey , United States, The Happenings had several hit records including “ See You in September ” and a cover of “ I Got Rhythm ” that was on the  Billboard   Hot 100 Singles  charts for 14 weeks in 1967, and peaked at number 3. [1]

David Libert shares the unvarnished, absolutely true tales from the inner circle of the music industry from Alice Cooper to Prince; on the road, backstage, on private jets and inside the notorious after-parties with music legends in the era of free-spirit, hard- driving rock ’n’ roll and R&B. It’s life on the road in technicolor. A rollercoaster ride like none other. You’re in the trenches as “Dyno Dave” engages with his hilarious, edgy, and sarcastic wit. As Tour Manager for Alice Cooper, running the first large-scale, theatrical, international rock tour to Manager of Parliament-Funkadelic Libert leads the charges with wisdom, ingenuity, dexterity, psychology, and arm-twisting. As much as it is the story of rock superstars, it is a tale of David’s journey from being the singer in the hit ‘60s pop group the Happenings (See You In September) through his days as a drug dealer on Sunset Strip.  

Check out the full interview with David about and be sure to purchase his incredible book, Rock And Roll Warrior Here

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On the rock ‘n’ roll road: tour managers of rolling stones, foo fighters, alice cooper share war stories.

Stranded groupies, collapsing stages, a shark in a hotel bathtub and $200,000 in a carry-on bag -- legendary road managers trade outrageous tales of their biggest headliners.

By Michael Walker

Michael Walker

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Going through customs with Keith Richards , losing Barbra Streisand 's flowers, watching Alice Cooper kill a shark in his bathtub: Legendary tour managers Patrick Stansfield , David Libert , Marty Hom , Gus Brandt and Stuart Ross swap war stories about ego soothing, corralling groupies and how exactly $100,000 in cash gets delivered.

STORY: On the Rock 'n' Roll Road: Tour Managers of Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Alice Cooper Share War Stories

Behind every music tour — from Beyonce ‘s Vegas-styled extravaganzas to Phish’s weed-and-‘shroom-fueled odysseys — is an unsung individual who’s equal parts field marshal, political fixer, armchair psychoanalyst and bag man. The tour manager on a major artist’s outing is often responsible for shepherding more than 100 musicians, gaffers, carpenters, lighting technicians and accountants on voyages that span the globe and entire seasons. At the same time, they have to anticipate hundreds of demands from not-always-appreciative employers while keeping the entourage happy, safe and out of trouble.

PHOTOS: Meet the Legendary Tour Managers of Rolling Stones , Fleetwood Mac, Alice Cooper and More

Going through customs with Keith Richards , losing Barbra Streisand ‘s flowers, watching Alice Cooper kill a shark in his bathtub: Legendary tour managers Patrick Stansfield , David Libert , Marty Hom , Gus Brandt and Stuart Ross swap war stories about ego soothing, corralling groupies and how exactly $100,000 in cash gets delivered.

Stuart Ross Ross has tour-managed Tom Waits for more than 20 years and was part of the team that launched Lollapalooza. He’s also headed Goldenvoice/AEG’s festival division and worked with acts like Metallica, George Michael and Weezer. He currently oversees touring and festivals at Red Light Management and heads his own Music Tour Consulting agency.

Patrick Stansfield Stansfield broke into the music industry as a stage manager for Bill Graham ‘s FM Productions, where he helped the famed concert promoter launch and popularize the first rock arena tours. Before retiring in 2002, Stansfield tour-managed The Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond .

David Libert After starting out with ’60s pop group The Happenings, which had four top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, Libert became a booker at the Willard Alexander Agency. He served as Alice Cooper’s tour manager during the rocker’s ’70s breakthrough, and later founded Available Entertainment.

Gus Brandt Brandt began as a punk-rock promoter in his native Pensacola, Fla., before breaking into road managing with Down by Law and Pennywise. He began working with Foo Fighters in 1996, and has tour-managed them ever since. Along the way, he’s worked with Eminem , Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails and many others, and booked Pensacola’s DeLuna Fest.

Marty Hom A 40-year industry veteran, Hom is the longtime tour manager of Barbra Streisand and Fleetwood Mac, and also has worked with Shakira , Bette Midler , Lionel Richie , The Eagles, Alicia Keys , Shania Twain and Janet Jackson . Hom was deposed by AEG as an expert witness in the Michael Jackson wrongful death lawsuit.

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Everyone has a preconceived notion of what a tour manager does. How would you describe your role?

Gus Brandt: What we do is such a rarefied, weird, not noble thing. Just having that sixth sense of knowing when Barbra [Streisand] is going to go off on you or when [Foo Fighters’] Dave [ Grohl ] is going to be upset about the way the cheese smells — not that he ever has, but just as an example.

Marty Hom: It’s about budgeting. It’s about hiring and cutting the deals. It’s about logistics.

David Libert : We know how to get things done …You’re really not allowed to make mistakes because everybody depends on you. It’s like when [Alice Cooper manager] Shep Gordon [looked] me in the eye and said, “Is everything covered?” That’s like asking a thousand questions, and if I said “yes,” that represented a thousand answers.

Several of you started out in the late ’60s and early ’70s. How have things changed?

Stuart Ross: In the ’60s, bands would have one or two people working for them, doing everything. I worked for The Doors doing equipment when I was 16 and they had one person on the road with them, Vince Treaner , and he picked up people regionally and we worked for free. He did sound, lights, checked the band into the hotel, picked up the check from the promoter. Libert: And there were no cellphones. And no email. ( Laughter .) Ross: I don’t remember how we sent the rooming list to the hotels. Libert: You had to convince that hotel that if they didn’t have envelopes with keys and a room list, there would be mayhem and chaos in that lobby when those 50 people walked in … Patrick Stansfield: At 2:15 a.m. Libert: Somehow, 99 times out of a hundred, we were able to convince these hotels.

How did you handle the logistics, without email or cellphones?

Libert: Every road manager had that enormous book that could tell you the mileage from any city to any city in the entire country. Stansfield: A Rand McNally Gazetteer. Ross: If you were going from Anchorage [Alaska] to Xenia, Ohio, you looked up Anchorage and then you went down all of the names until you got to Xenia and it would give you the mileage. And that’s how we routed tours. We had no other way to do it. Stansfield: Remember that in this equation, the band’s management had a somewhat different agenda in terms of routing. … Management wants you to play where they’ve decided you’re going to play. If you were to say, “I can’t guarantee you we can make that gig,” [promoter-turned-movie producer] Jerry Weintraub would say, “Pat, I’m a rich man. I pay guys like you to figure this out.” Tap, tap, tap on the cigar. “Don’t tell me nothing except ‘yes.’ Now, get the f— out of my face.”

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How do you cope when that happens?

Stansfield: You go out, throw the dice and make sure it happens. Libert: One thing a road manager could do to influence the routing of a tour is, if there were two days off, you would try and figure out where the hottest girls were. That was where we wanted to have those two or three days off. Because to be in a town for one night was one thing, to be there for two or three days was completely different. … So I would convince Shep Gordon why it was good business, why we should stay there: It was cheaper, the trucks needed whatever. But it was about the chicks.

The “sweet, sweet Connie,” from Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band,” right?

Stansfield: There was this body of knowledge, mano a mano, from your lips to my ears: “Man, that Connie in Little Rock … f—ed me silly. Swear to God. At the end, she brightly says, ‘Thank you,’ and was off. I found out she went to the other bus and f—ed the entourage until the sun came up.” (To Hom:) You ever meet Connie? Hom: Theoretically. Stansfield: If you played Little Rock [Ark.], you couldn’t help but meet Connie. She was a schoolteacher. Third grade. Libert: She had her own room set up at the arena. There used to be a line.

Was that on a Stones tour?

Stansfield: That was Neil Diamond.

Those buccaneering days, why did they have to end?

Hom: There was so much money at stake. It had to end. You couldn’t run wild anymore. In the mid-’80s into the ’90s, it started becoming a legitimate, huge business for people to make a living — not just artists but also those that worked for the talent. You could actually support a family, buy a house, put your kids through school. I think it took a turn around that time. People got very serious about what they do. It was still a lot of fun, we still love it, but it’s a business. Ross: Once we started carrying sound and lights and all of a sudden, it’s not just two to six people, you’re at 25 to 100. The dynamics shifted when carrying big production became feasible and our jobs went from making sure people stay out of jail to essentially being the CEO of a small corporation that shuts down after six months or a year.

Speaking of staging, there have been several collapses in recent years. Ultimately, it’s your decision where to call off a show.

Brandt: Which is a tough call. Hom: We were doing a sold-out stadium with Shakira in Spain. And during load-in, a corner of the stage buckled. I called the promoters and the guys who built the stage into the tour production office. They said, “Oh, it’s safe.” I looked at them and said, “OK, you’re going to stand with me, your kids and your family underneath that stage when we play tonight. Because what you’re asking me to do is put my family underneath that stage.” They didn’t say a word. It was dead silence. And I said, “Here’s my answer.” We canceled.

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So your show is done for the night. How is the money handled?

Ross: Until about 10 years ago, maybe less, tours were all cash. There were a lot of dollars going across the desk every night. So tour managers or tour accountants had to call the promoter in advance and say, “I need $50,000.” And it was not unusual for any of us to pick up that amount or $100,000 and distribute it.

How is $100,000 in cash delivered to you?

Ross: Somebody comes in with a big briefcase or a gym bag and lays down a stack of $100 bills and we count them. Libert: You didn’t let the band go on until you had the money — period. And if you didn’t have the money, you’d hold up the f—ing show. Ross: I went to see Al Green at the House of Blues and noticed after his last song, he walked over to the drum riser, picked up a thin, fashionable, alligator briefcase and walked offstage. ( Laughter .) And I knew that he had gotten paid in cash prior to the show. Putting his pay on the drum riser: safest place. Stansfield: I walked through U.S. customs with Keith Richards , coming back in from Australia into Honolulu. And I had my own briefcase and an extra suitcase that was filled with, I don’t know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. Ross: I remember when they started put­ting on the customs forms: “Are you carrying more than $10,000 dollars in cash?” And it’s like, I’m going to have to divide this up between a bunch of people on the plane. Brandt: Exactly. Do the envelopes before take off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “Hold this for me, please.” Ross: The last South American tour I did, I weighed the ticket drop. … I would put a person at each ticket entry location and put the tickets in bags, and they’d bring the bags backstage. And I have a scale that turns weight into a count. And we would count all the tickets. Hom: That’s awesome.

Tour managers are famous for solving crises. Tell us about some.

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Ross: When you knock on the hotel door and wake up the singer at 1 p.m., then you get the call saying, “I can’t believe you woke me up! Now I can’t sleep! I’ve been up all night writing songs. I’m not playing the show!” Libert : 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. Brandt: When I was working for the group Il Divo, we were flying from Mexico City to Monterrey and back in the same night. And it was down to the choice of planes: a turbo prop, a small jet, a bigger jet. So these guys chose the turbo prop. Ross: Nothing wrong with turbo props. Brandt: But Mexico … Ross: Yeah. Brandt: So we go up, no problem. Coming back, there’s rain and I’m trying to ask the pilot, “Hey, are we going to be OK?” He shows me the radar and it’s just red. But the band wanted to go, so we took off right into these thunderstorms. One of the guys filled four bags of vomit. People were crying, screaming. The plane got zapped by lightning and the pilot was like, “I have to pull us down.” So we landed in the middle of what we found out was a drug cartel war zone, this abandoned airport that was surrounded by guards. The promoter wouldn’t send the cars to come get us. We sat there until dawn guarded by these 16-year-old kids with mustaches and AK-47s. And then drove three hours back to Mexico City and played a show.

Talk about rock ‘n’ roll hotels. You’ve all stayed in the same ones.

Stansfield: The Riot House in L.A. Libert: Which was Gene Autry ‘s Conti­nental before that. Ross: Swingos in Cleveland. Stansfield: The Holiday Inn, on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Where [ This Is ] Spinal Tap was made with the famous line, “And this twisted old fruit … I am, sir, as God made me.” Libert: 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 …

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Another shark story from the Edgewater? I though Led Zeppelin owned that particular urban legend.

Libert:  … 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.”

Did the shark die?

Libert: 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.

I can’t picture that happening today.

Hom: Now on bigger tours they have hotel advance people who actually fly ahead of the artist and prep the hotels and make sure they’re ready for the artist’s arrival. Libert: And on really big tours, the artists want their suites with their own personal stuff in them. Ross: I know somebody whose job it was to drive Bono ‘s bed from hotel to hotel on the last tour. Bono wanted to sleep in his own bed every night. So instead of being able to fly him, I assume, back to Dublin, there was a bed that was in a Ryder truck and they loaded it into the hotel.

Sounds like a long way from the Riot House.

Ross: We went from having to deal with guys who would wreck hotel rooms to dealing with people who won’t accept a hotel until they see the 24-hour room service menu in advance. So the expectations we’re managing are a lot different. It’s like, “What do you mean I can’t get into the Ritz-Carlton? What do you mean they’re sold out? Where am I going to stay?”

The concert business used to be populated with promoters who were fairly outrageous. Tell us about your experiences with them.

Hom: That’s the thing I miss — back when I first started, the personal relationships with all these guys, the Jack Boyle s and the Larry Magid s. The business was so vibrant and they were such an essential part of it. Stansfield : We walked with giants. Brandt: A lot of the big personalities aren’t participating anymore. Ross: [New York promoter] Ron Delsener is still participating, thank God.

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The Weinstein brothers, who founded Miramax, were originally rock promoters in Buffalo.

Libert: Harvey and Corky. Stansfield: Harvey was a SUNY student and chairman of the concert committee.

You all speak with such reverence about these guys, like they were the lineup of a great baseball team, even though they were trying, as you put it, to screw you.

Hom: But they were smiling, and they were your friends. Libert: Promoters traditionally feel like they’re getting screwed by the artist, so they have a hundred different ways to make money that you don’t know about. It was like a game. Ross: Even after the show was over and we battled it out, you would always look forward to seeing Ron Delsener or Jules Belkin or Rick Franks . These were the guys we looked forward to working with. Brandt: Characters. Ross: They threw good parties, they were big personalities, they were colorful.

Some of you have toured with the same bands for more than a decade. Describe the bonds that form between you and them.

Hom: I’ve been with Fleetwood Mac for 17 years, Barbra for 13 years. If you’ve toured with somebody long enough, they are your family. And you’re kind of like the dad who takes care of them, and they depend on you. The younger artists are a little different in that they surround themselves with entourages now. They have assistants, they have managers who go on the road, publicists, they have people. The relationships are still good but they’re not as personal because there are layers of people you have to go through.

Sounds like it can get pretty intimate.

Hom: Let me tell you how intimate. I had to tell Ian Astbury from The Cult that his father had passed away. They were onstage at the old Omni in Atlanta, and the manager called me. It was one of the hardest things I had to do. I was just in Europe with Fleetwood Mac and [bassist] John McVie wasn’t feeling well. So we got him to a doctor in Berlin. And he called me afterward and says, “Marty, can you come over to my hotel and talk to me?” I know that’s not good, so I jump in a cab and go over to his hotel. We sit down and he says, “I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer.” And John’s sitting here and then Mick [ Fleetwood ] comes over, and we have a discussion of what we’re going to do next. We ended up canceling Australia and New Zealand — 15 sold-out shows. The band thought about moving on without a bass player but … you can’t get onstage without John McVie.

Some of you have been at this for more than 40 years. What keeps you coming back?

Ross: We’re in a bubble. Nobody new comes in, nobody leaves. And we all support each other. Hom: You know what I think it is? I think we do it not only because we love it and we’re passionate about it but I think there is a sense of camaraderie. It’s like when you all go on the road together and you have this great team of people and you pull off a show and you kind of look at each other because everybody on that tour played a small part in accomplishing that show. Ross: It’s all about 8 o’clock.

A version of this story first appeared in the March 1 issue of Billboard magazine.

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DAVID LIBERT, Former ALICE COOPER Tour Manager And SHEP GORDON Protégé, Dead At 81

March 7, 2024, 3 months ago

news hard rock david libert alice cooper shep gordon

Deadline is reporting that David Libert, a founding member of the ’60s pop group The Happenings as well a tour manager for Alice Cooper and Prince, manager for George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, the Runaways, Living Colour and many more, died February 20, according to a post on his official Instagram page. He was 81.

The title of Libert’s 2022 memoir is Rock and Roll Warrior, and it’s an apt one. Over the course of his decades in the music business, the Paterson, NJ-raised Libert found success as a musician, songwriter, road manager, concert promoter, author and (briefly) drug dealer, for which he spent about a year in prison.

Just out of the Air Force in 1961, Libert started The Happenings with four other kids from Paterson. The group’s major hits were “See You In September” in 1966 and a cover version of George & Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” the following year, both of which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Two other singles, covers of “Go Away Little Girl” and “My Mammy,” hit to Top 15.

Despite that success, Libert decided to leave the group in 1970 to pursue other interests that had roots in his unique role with The Happenings.

“I was also the manager of the band. I liked it because I was dealing with record companies and booking agencies, promoters and publicity firms,” said Libert in a recent interview.

His big break came when he connected with supermensch and ubermanager Shep Gordon. Gordon managed Alice Cooper — among many other acts — but, according to Libert, “didn’t want to have to be on the road” because he had so many other responsibilities than just being on tour.

“I owe Shep almost everything that I learned about the business, no doubts,” Libert once said. “Not just tour managing, which I did not know really much about it, before meeting him but a lot more too. Working with Alice was really a tremendous job, travelling the world, hanging out with Alice and the band. It was just one big happy family, back then. I learned from Shep also how to handle complex situations and what it takes the whole touring machine going day in, day out. Shep wasn’t only a business administrator, really, he was part of the creative force of it all,

Libert became the Alice Cooper Band’s road manager in 1971 and lasted in that grinding gig until 1975. It was the peak of the group’s commercial success, when it racked up five consecutive Top 10 albums including the chart-topping Billion Dollar Babies. He also contributed backing vocals on that smash 1973 LP.

In Rock And Roll Warrior, he wrote of the tour manager gig: “There was no job manual, no job description, and no one telling me what my job was. My initial perception was a collection of about thirty or so crazy-looking people, completely unsupervised and crawling all over everything like giant insects. Oh God, what have I gotten myself into? I just quit my nice, convenient, cushy job road managing Rare Earth for this insanity? I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life.”

What he discovered, however, was that Cooper and his crew were pros.

“All the people that worked for Alice were professionals. They really knew what they were doing,” he said. “There was a lot of equipment and props. Before anyone else, we carried our own lighting systems and sound systems and staging. It was my responsibility to make it run like a well oiled machine. It taught me responsibility, discipline and how to work with other people.”

Read more at Deadline , and watch David Libert tell insider tour stories in the video below from Produce Like A Pro:

        View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by David Libert (@dlibert2)

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David Libert Dies: Alice Cooper's Ex-Tour Manager, Shep Gordon Protégé & The Happenings Co-Founder Was 81

David Libert, a founding member of the '60s pop group The Happenings as well a tour manager for Alice Cooper and Prince, manager for George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, the Runaways, Living Colour and many more, died February 20, according to a post on his official Instagram page. He was 81.

The title of Libert's 2022 memoir is Rock and Roll Warrior , and it's an apt one. Over the course of his decades in the music business, the Patterson, NJ-raised Libert found success as a musician, songwriter, road manager, concert promoter, author and (briefly) drug dealer, for which he spent about a year in prison.

Just out of the Air Force in 1961, Libert started The Happenings with four other kids from Patterson. The group's major hits were "See You in September" in 1966 and a cover version of George & Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" the following year, both of which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Two other singles, covers of "Go Away Little Girl" and "My Mammy," hit to Top 15.

Despite that success, Libert decided to leave the group in 1970 to pursue other interests that had roots in his unique role with The Happenings.

"I was also the manager of the band. I liked it because I was dealing with record companies and booking agencies, promoters and publicity firms," said Libert in a recent interview .

His big break came when he connected with supermensch and ubermanager Shep Gordon. Gordon managed Alice Cooper - among many other acts - but, according to Libert, "didn't want to have to be on the road" because he had so many other responsibilities than just being on tour.

"I owe Shep almost everything that I learned about the business, no doubts," Libert once said . "Not just tour managing, which I did not know really much about it, before meeting him but a lot more too. Working with Alice was really a tremendous job, travelling the world, hanging out with Alice and the band. It was just one big happy family, back then. I learned from Shep also how to handle complex situations and what it takes the whole touring machine going day in, day out. Shep wasn't only a business administrator, really, he was part of the creative force of it all,

Libert became the Alice Cooper Band's road manager in 1971 and lasted in that grinding gig until 1975. It was the peak of the group's commercial success, when it racked up five consecutive Top 10 albums including the chart-topping Billion Dollar Babies. He also contributed backing vocals on that smash 1973 LP.

In  Rock and Roll Warrior , he wrote of the tour manager gig: "There was no job manual, no job description, and no one telling me what my job was. My initial perception was a collection of about thirty or so crazy-looking people, completely unsupervised and crawling all over everything like giant insects. Oh God, what have I gotten myself into? I just quit my nice, convenient, cushy job road managing Rare Earth for this insanity? I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life."

What he discovered, however, was that Cooper and his crew were pros.

"All the people that worked for Alice were professionals. They really knew what they were doing," he said . "There was a lot of equipment and props. Before anyone else, we carried our own lighting systems and sound systems and staging. It was my responsibility to make it run like a well oiled machine. It taught me responsibility, discipline and how to work with other people."

Somehow, Libert said, he thrived in that environment.

He later started his own firm, the David Libert Agency, which caused a decades-long split with Gordon which, according to Libert, was healed after he published his memoir and the two reconnected.

The David Libert Agency represented a diverse lineup that included legends such as George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, spinoff Bootsy's Rubber Band and up-and-comers like The Runaways.

Libert's relationship with Clinton was key in his smooth interactions with Prince - who, according to others, could be difficult.

"When Prince was playing in Detroit for like, seven days in a row, it was during Thanksgiving that we all went up to George's farm in Michigan for Thanksgiving and this was a huge deal, for Prince," Libert recalled. "I don't think I had ever seen him acting like he did, like a fan with his biggest idol. I guess that my association with Clinton was a key factor, in my working relationship with him, because he never came off like a jerk to me. To me, it was amazing that Prince would even care about what I thought about him, but likely, he did and it was nice."

In the '90s, he worked with "Cult of Personality" group Living Colour, which he called "one of the very best live bands that ever existed," but broke up at the peak of their popularity.

"They were an amazing band," Libert said. "I genuinely love those guys, they are very intelligent, disciplined, politically astute. It was a pleasure hanging out with those guys. I think that their downtime period, prior to breaking up the band, in the end it really hurt them. Who may predict what they would have become, if they stayed together? I am confident that they could have become as popular as bands like U2, Bon Jovi…"

Also in the category of "ones that got away" was Guns N' Roses, whom Libert recalled being introduced to in about 1985 when they were living in a storage locker without a bathroom or running water.

"I went over there to check them out and was immediately impressed. Their songs were special and they were extremely disciplined when it came to the music. They practiced several hours a day, their songs were terrific, and their musicianship was high quality. I liked everything about them. They were the real deal. They were never not Guns N' Roses. They were always Guns N' Roses if they were together or hanging out individually. You knew that there was no way in hell they were not going to make it. I wanted to manage them."

The issue with landing Guns N' Roses was having the money to get them off the ground.

"I went looking for money and I failed in that pursuit," he admitted. "So I had to walk away because I couldn't have been a benefit to them."

Here is the post on Libert's Instagram page announcing his passing:

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David Libert Chronicles Crazy Career in ‘Rock and Roll Warrior’

When it comes to having juicy material for a book about a life in music, David Libert may be second to none.

The New Jersey native started as a performer, having hits with the Happenings ("See You in September," "I Got Rhythm") during the mid-'60s before switching to the business side of the industry. He became famous, or at least notorious, as Alice Cooper 's high-flying tour manager between 1971-75, then moved on to work as a manager and booking agent, with clients that included George Clinton and Parliament - Funkadelic , Bootsy's Rubber Band, the Runaways , Brian Auger, Sheila E., Living Colour , Cactus and many more. These days he's mostly retired and spends time as an animal-rights activist living in California's Yucca Valley.

Libert's new memoir, Rock and Roll Warrior: My Misadventures With Alice Cooper, Prince, George Clinton, Living Colour, the Runaways and More ...  is indeed a juicy 273 pages, he strived to keep it free of cheap shots and gratuitously tawdry details.

"When I started to write it I decided I didn't want it to be a tell-all, salacious kind of book," Libert, 79, tells UCR. That said, he is the guy who kept the "ball scores" on the Cooper tours, dividing the entourage into "teams" that scored points based on who indulged in specific extracurricular activities.

"There’s a little bit of that in there - it's rock 'n' roll, you can't help it," concedes Libert, who also spent time in jail for dealing cocaine. "But I didn't want it to be that kind of book. I wanted it to be more of the adventure I went through. In the end, I had to decide if there was some stuff I didn't want to put in the book. I didn't want to throw anybody under the bus. I was just hoping it would be a good read for somebody who just wanted to see what it was like to be on the inside of all this stuff, what it felt like to be there. That was my goal."

Watch Alice Cooper Perform 'Billion Dollar Babies'

Libert's glimpses are nevertheless detailed and, for the most part, unapologetic. "There's no question that I did have a good time, and there's nothing wrong with that," he says. Rock and Roll Warrior is filled with great and occasionally historic characters, from his Happenings bandmates and early record executives to Libert's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame employers. He particularly credits Cooper's manager Shep Gordon for schooling him on the many nuances of building and maintaining a global superstar act.

"Shep Gordon was a real ballbuster and just fascinating to deal with because he was so creative in terms of marketing Alice Cooper," Libert says. "So I learned an awful lot there, and I learned a lot about the infrastructure itself - how the whole booking process worked, how the money was broken down. You can't buy that kind of knowledge. You can’t read it in a book, and you can't really go to college for it. It's mostly on-the-job stuff.

"So I consider myself fortunate in that I was sort of like a sponge, soaking up everything that I could possibly learn. And I had some great teachers."

Libert maintains a friendship with the Cooper camp, and he considers the artist "a really cool guy who never really took himself very seriously. He never wanted to be perceived as a prima donna by his friends and other tour members. We were just having fun. Everybody wanted to have a good time, and I made sure, at least from my position, to make sure that it was smooth and fun, like a big party.

"It was pretty crazy when you look back on it, but it really functioned pretty well. And that was my job."

There were bumps in the road, of course. Libert had a front-row seat to the dissolution of the original Alice Cooper band and watched the situation deteriorate as Alice Cooper, the man, became the star of the show, much to the chagrin of his bandmates.

"When I first got the job it seemed like everybody was on equal footing," Libert recalls, noting that the downward spiral began when Gordon decided that Cooper should conduct the pre-tour press conferences solo because he didn't feel the others were as comfortable in the situation.

"That's when I started to realize there was sort of a wedge growing in between Alice and the rest of the band. I used to tell them, 'Look, let Alice be the star. It's good for business. You're all making great money.' But they had a tough time dealing with it, and they started to resent all the gimmicks and props onstage, which is the reason people came to the Alice Cooper show. The rest of the band felt that sort of took away from the music. It was an untenable situation. Oddly enough, they're all friendly today. So it wasn't irreparable, and it's a good thing because I like those guys. When the band broke up it sort of saddened me, but I'm happy to see them doing things together again."

Watch Parliament-Funkadelic Perform 'Give Up the Funk'

Rock and Roll Warrior portrays Libert's time with Clinton as the most arduous of his career, juggling a circus of shifting desires and inspirations as well as myriad personnel and hangers-on - including drug dealers to whom Clinton was indebted - that were part of the Parliament-Funkadelic universe. "If I threw anybody under the bus in this book ... I suppose it would be George, as much as I praise him about a lot of things," Libert explains. "Let me put it to you this way: When I worked with Alice Cooper I had a lot of bushy hair. I'm completely bald today, and I blame George."

Libert's relationship with Prince , meanwhile, seems almost random. Libert, who was involved in managing Sheila E. during the early '80s, first met Prince at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by Clinton on his farm near Detroit. When Sheila E. was on the road as an opening act during the Purple Rain tour, Libert was often invited to hang out in Prince's hotel suites and help critique the concerts.

"I liked Prince," Libert says now. "He was a tough guy to deal with, but not for me. He was very nice to me. Prince was very antisocial; he felt awkward in social situations. He didn't really know how to deal with people on a certain level, so he just pretended he was angry all the time. But he was nice to me because, I guess, he didn't want to look stupid in front of me, which is amazing that Prince would even care what I thought about him. But I was older than anybody else in his inner circle, and because I worked with George Clinton, that got me some respect. But I’m guessing on all of this."

Watch Prince's 'Purple Rain' Video

Humorously, Libert writes about how he eventually tried to find ways to avoid or escape from Prince's company. "I liked him, but I didn't want to be obligated to have to go to his room every night with the select group of people he invited," Libert explains. "Prince was not fun to hang out with, that's for damn sure. But, yeah, it was an interesting experience. I seemed to go there every once in awhile and it seemed like he was happy to see me whenever I did, so that was nice."

Libert acknowledges that "they're talking about a movie" based on the book, while he's staying involved with the marketing and promotion aspects of the project. "This book is one of the high points of my life, probably the last high point, so I want it to do as well as it can, and we'll see what happens," he says. But Libert won't rule out doing a little more Rock and Roll Warrior -ing at some point in the future.

"I get calls all the time from people who want me to produce something or manage them," he says. "I turn almost everything down because unless it sounds really interesting or I can make a quick buck or they want to hire me as a consultant, I’m not really interested in doing that much anymore. I'm sort of enjoying my life of leisure, hanging out with my girlfriend and my dogs. It would take a lot to take me away from that."

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