Go ask Alice
The shock treatment can't be done
By M. Scot Skinner
skinner@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.04.2008
"You can't shock an audience anymore," says Alice Cooper, the man in macabre makeup who originated shock rock more than 30 years ago.
"It can't be done," he said during a phone interview last week. "Marilyn Manson and I don't agree on much, but we agree on that.
"It was easy to shock people in the '70s, because you didn't have all this immediate information," Cooper continued. "I can go onstage and get my head cut off and it looks great and everybody is going, 'Wow — that's cool.'
"Then they go home and go to their computer, where they can see a terrorist cutting somebody's head off for real. Reality definitely has become more shocking than anything we could do."
Cooper, an Arizona resident for the last 50 years, is content to be called a showman these days.
"I'll give audiences a few shock moments and they pretend to be shocked, but it's really pure entertainment," he says.
Cooper was still known as Vincent Furnier when he first started entertaining audiences in Tucson.
"We played the VIP Club in Tucson all the time when we were the Spiders. It was a great rock 'n' roll club on Speedway. It was a free-for-all in those days. You had the greasers, the Mexican kids, the cowboys and the long-hairs.
"We were the only ones with long hair, so we had to battle our way out. At the end of our shows, we had to grab bar stools and fight our way out to our cars."
Cooper promises fans the "full-on Alice experience" Tuesday night at Casino del Sol's AVA.
"If you're in the first five rows, don't wear your best clothes, because our show has a tendency to, shall we say, spill into the audience."
The concert, part of Cooper's 100-city "Psycho-Drama" tour, will be almost like a "best of Alice" show, he says.
"The first hour is classic Alice: 'Eighteen,' 'Under My Wheels,' 'No More Mr. Nice Guy' — all of those hits. It's like a shotgun blast. We don't even give the audience a chance to react. It's just boom, boom, boom, with Alice rocking all the way."
Then, all of a sudden, the page turns and it's time for "Welcome to My Nightmare," "Steven," "Dead Babies" and all of the "really dark stuff," as he puts it.
"At the end, they hang Alice in a straitjacket. There's a story line that you're following and it's weird — a demented sort of vaudeville cabaret."
Alice comes back in white tie and tails for "School's Out," "Billion Dollar Babies," "Poison" and, this being an election year, "Elected."
Says Cooper: "I'm very bipartisan. Nobody gets away without being made fun of. Obama's on stage, McCain, Bush. At the end, it's like 'I'm really your only choice.' "
The Alice Cooper character seems harmless now, almost cuddly, but there was a time when people were genuinely disturbed by this guy.
"Maybe it's the same thing with Vincent Price or Boris Karloff. At the time when they were at their most effective, they were so different from everybody else," Cooper says.
"When Alice first came out, the music was all peace and love, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the world is a wonderful place with flowers and all that, and Alice Cooper was like, 'Really?' "
Alice, of course, did not do peace and love.
"There was no Internet, there was no CNN, and Alice was this creature," he remembers. "Every parent was terrified that their son was going to end up like Alice Cooper. And, of course, as long as the kids loved you and the parents hated you, you were going to be a hit."
And although he turned 60 in February, Cooper still can get on stage and scream "I'm eighteen" with utter conviction.
"I don't know how old Alice is," he says. "When he's doing 'Eighteen,' he's 18, as full of angst as he ever was. Alice is ageless. How old is Batman? How old is the Joker?"
Cooper, a Detroit native who moved to the Phoenix area with his family when he was 10 years old, is a solid citizen by any measure. He hosts charity golf tournaments, keeps an eye on his Downtown Phoenix eatery, Alice Cooperstown Sports Bar & Grill, and raises money for his Solid Rock Foundation, a Christian nonprofit group that aims to keep kids on the straight and narrow.
Somehow, Cooper also finds time to host a radio show called "Nights With Alice Cooper." It's syndicated five nights a week on rock stations across the nation, including Tucson's KLPX (96.1-FM).
Cooper's new concept album, "Along Came a Spider," is his 18th solo album and his 25th overall. It's full of creepy, hook-heavy rave-ups and bombastic arena anthems, with a few impressive ballads along the way.
The album, easily Cooper's best in recent years, tells the story of a serial killer named Spider.
"For some reason, I started thinking about this one night," he said. "We have no love affair with real serial killers. We abhor the Charles Mansons and the Ted Bundys, and when we think about what they did, we're glad that they are in jail or dead. But then we love our fictitious serial killers. We love the Joker; we love Hannibal Lecter; we love Darth Vader and Jason."
And Alice Cooper thinks he knows why: "It's because they've got a lot of style."
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