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The only time i saw Alice was touring Dragontown in 2002. To be honest it wasn't as good as i'd hoped. It seemed too 'light' and in comparison to other bands not very dangerous. Thunder were supporting and absolutely killed it. We also got Quireboys but their sound was really poor so we went to the bar instead. |
It seems that the city of Detroit is going to re-name a street 'Alice Cooper Court' sometime in 2021 Radio station WCSX is holding a competition to choose the exact location of Alice Cooper Court https://wcsx.com/contests/enter-to-win-alice/ |
Alice related news Alice and Dennis Dunaway are featured in a new advert for RotoSound strings Meanwhile, Nita is the cover star of the January issue of f 'Recovery Today' magazine - a journal for 'Addiction, Recovery and Sobriety'! |
The Nightmare: When Vincent Price and Alice Cooper Threw the Greatest TV Party of 1975 / Lethal Amounts "In March of 1975, Australia's Labor and Immigration Minister Clyde Cameron categorized Cooper as a "degenerate." Cooper wasn't the only one so dubiously labeled by the Australian government and press. A year later, so was AC/DC, the country’s most valuable export, rock 'n' roll-wise. They had been classified as "obscene" causing so much trouble the band strongly considered leaving Down Under for good. Anyway, the story of Cooper's banned-in-Australia predicament made it all the way to TIME magazine's pages in the April 7th, 1975 issue. Here's what Minister Cameron had to say about Cooper's request to bring his Nightmare to Australia: "I am not going to allow a degenerate who could powerfully influence the young and weak-minded to enter this country and stage this sort of exhibition here." If he does make the application, he will not be allowed in this country." At the time Alice was already on tour and when responding to Cameron's comments, calling them "crazy," wondered aloud why people still thought he "killed chickens on stage." He also promised his Australian fans that he would see them in September. However, that never happened. The ban was lifted by Aussie Senator and Minister for the Media Doug McClelland before the summer of 1975. When Coop finally made his way to Australia in 1977 he was arrested in connection with an outstanding legal dispute with the original promoter associated with the failed 1975 tour. Yeesh. Through all of this (including countless television appearances, including the Grammy's and tour dates with Suzi Quatro), Cooper managed to film a $350,000 television special in Toronto - 'Alice Cooper: The Nightmare' - with veteran actor and horror icon, Vincent Price. Since splitting with his band, Cooper had started sleeping with a tape-recorder next to his bed so he could record details of the strange dreams he had been having. His dreams would serve as the basis for Welcome to My Nightmare, centering around a killer who hunts his victims while they are dreaming. Cooper's original plan was to incorporate his dreams into a screenplay, which sadly never got off the ground. And, just in case you were wondering, Cooper's unfulfilled screenplay has no connection to Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The story of what inspired Craven's original screenplay for ANOES is much more sinister than any of Cooper's nightmares, as it is based on the grim phenomenon of Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome (SUDS). Cooper’s dreams would be fully realized not only on Welcome to My Nightmare but also for Alice Cooper: The Nightmare, during which each song on the album became, for lack of a better way of describing it, individual video stories, or very early versions of the modern music video, presented by Cooper and Vincent Price. The special was groundbreaking as it was the first time an album had been marketed in such a way. 'Alice Cooper: The Nightmare' was more than just an innovative marketing scheme for Cooper. It also helped him avoid any legal or contractual issues with Warner Bros, his former label. Sneaky! This brings us to Cooper and his crew's arrival in Toronto to begin filming The Nightmare TV special. One of my favorite parts of this Alice escapade is something I recall from my high school days. I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where Montreal was a popular destination if you were underage and legally wanted to drink alcohol. During my first trip, we discovered what Alice Cooper discovered before he arrived in Toronto--there was no Budweiser. NONE. To remedy this, Cooper traveled across the Canadian border with forty cases of Bud to get him through filming. Price’s participation in The Nightmare came to be during a visit to the set of Price's 1975 film Journey into Fear by either Cooper or Bob Ezrin. It’s a bit murky. Vincent Price became the character "The Spirit of the Nightmare" in which Cooper was trapped. Either Cooper or Ezrin wound up meeting Price onset with David Mann to see if he would be interested in directing The Nightmare. Price would first agree to lend his distinctive voice as a narrator on Cooper's song "The Black Widow” on Welcome to My Nightmare. He would also sign on to join Cooper for The Nightmare TV special, and his appearance alongside Cooper in the 90-minute creepy/cheesy show would solidify Price’s goth icon status at the age of 64. In the very special, special, it's really all on Cooper and Price as they, with the exception of actor Linda Googh (as “Cold Ethyl”), and various female dancers, were the only cast members. Like Cooper's live shows, it relied heavily on costumes and theatrics. Like a life-sized merry-go-round, because why not? The screenplay for The Nightmare was adapted by Alan Rudolph and Tony Hudz. Interestingly, Rudolph would become involved with another visual project involving Cooper, the 1980 film Roadie, inspired by Cooper's jam "Road Rats'' from Cooper's third solo record, 1977's Lace and Whiskey. In Roadie, Alice plays himself and the object of desire of Lola Bouilliabase, who is determined to lose her virginity to Cooper (played beautifully by Porky's goddess, actor Kaki Hunter). If you still need another reason to see Roadie, I have several suggestions, as it also features appearances from Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Clem Burke, Roy Orbison, Cooper's wife Sheryl, Meat Loaf, and the King of Soul Train, the late Don Cornelius, among others. Still in need of more inspiration to see this sloppy gem? How about this: Debbie Harry performs a cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire'' in it. Yee-****ing-HAW! But again, I digress. As you might imagine, given Cooper's reputation for his stage shows, ABC had some stipulations for The Nightmare. First, no fake blood. BOO! Next, ABC censors took issue with the title and lyrics of "Only Women Bleed," requiring Cooper to change the lyric "Man got this woman to take his seed" to "Man got this woman to take his need." Apparently, the mere insinuation of semen was a network "no-no" back in 1975. The Nightmare would win an Emmy in 1976 for Outstanding Achievement in Videotape Editing for a Special--a process that was still in the early stages of development back in the mid-70s. The show, long legendary, was first released on VHS in 1983 and decades later in 2017, on DVD as a part of Cooper's 1976 concert film, Welcome to My Nightmare. A piece of physical media more than worthy of adding to your collection." |
New interview in The Independent Alice Cooper: ‘You could cut off your arm and eat it on stage now. The audience is shock proof’ It’s 50 years since ‘I’m Eighteen’ made a star of the rocker who prefigured the gender-fluid glam rock era. He talks to Jim Farber about his new album, what Bowie borrowed, and how, before Trump, no one thought there’d be a worse president than Nixon "Alice Cooper vividly remembers the moment when his band finally found the sound that would make them both rich and notorious. “We were playing these long, complicated songs, with jams that would go on and on,” he says. “Our song ‘I’m Eighteen’ was like that. But then our producer, Bob Ezrin, said to us, ‘dumb it down, dumb it down. This song doesn’t want to be complicated.’ Finally, when we got it dumbed down enough, it became a hit.” In fact, it became a big enough hit in the US to make Cooper – born Vincent Damon Furnier – a sensation, and his band one of the top acts of the 1970s. It didn’t hurt that their “dumbed down” sound – thrashing guitars mixed with a reptilian croak – slammed like a battering ram, or that it carried a teen angst theme witty and urgent enough to become a pan-generational anthem. Better, the band’s male lead singer had the headline-grabbing idea to take a woman’s name and mount the stage wearing bloodied panties over leather pants while playing around with snakes and guillotines. “We gave the audience everything their parents hated,” Cooper says with a laugh. “The way we saw it, if you’re driving by and you see Disneyland on the left side and a plane wreck on the right, you’re going to look at the plane wreck. We were that plane wreck.” Next month will mark 50 years since it crashed, ignited by the 1971 release of the classic rock’n’roll album Love It to Death. To coincide with its anniversary, Cooper will release a new album this month that returns him to the sound and the city that inspired his breakthrough. Every song and musician on Detroit Stories honours the type of barbed-wire rock’n’roll created in that gritty American city. The album features a variety of players from seminal Motor City bands like MC5, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and Grand Funk Railroad, as well as all the surviving members of the original Alice Cooper Band. Cooper considers his classic group a Detroit act despite the fact that they formed in their native Phoenix and first sought fame in LA. (The singer was actually born in Detroit, but his family moved to Arizona when he was a child). “No city other than Detroit connected with what we were doing at the start,” Cooper says. “LA didn’t want anything to do with us.” At the same time, LA’s contempt for the band helped them get their first recording contract. Frank Zappa, an Olympic-level contrarian, signed the group after watching an entire audience run for the exits minutes after they began to play. “Frank loved the freak appeal,” Cooper says. The two Alice Cooper albums Zappa released on his Bizarre label, Pretties for You and Easy Action, were all over the place and, predictably, bombed. “We had that experimental sound, and when you put the theatre on top of it, nobody got it at all,” he says. “I think we scared the LA audience. They were mostly on acid and Alice Cooper is not what you want to see when you’re on acid.” Searching for a new home base, their manager told them, “the first place that gives us a standing ovation, we’re going to move to”, Cooper recalls. He thinks that turned out to be Detroit because “it’s an industrial city where they make cars so they’re always around machines that make a lot of noise. And it’s not real sophisticated. That audience wants hard rock.” They first came to the city to play the local Saugatuck Pop Festival which also featured MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges. “I’d never heard of either of them,” Cooper says. “They were just local bands. But when I saw MC5 I thought, ‘wow.’” Then’ Iggy comes on and I went, ‘uh-oh, I got competition.’ I’d never seen anything like it. Then we did our show and it was loud and raucous and they loved it! When they found out I was born in Detroit, that was the clincher. I was the missing finger in the glove.” The band began to record the Love It to Death album in the city, working with the then 21-year-old Ezrin, who had been an assistant on hit records by The Guess Who. (He would go on to produce everyone from Pink Floyd to U2.) “Bob hadn’t even produced an album yet,” Cooper says. “He was kinda like us, another kid. But we soon saw that this guy knows what he’s doing, and he became our George Martin. We worked every day for seven, eight hours relearning how to be Alice Cooper. Bob used to tell us, ‘when you hear Jim Morrison and the Doors, how do you know it’s them? They have a signature. You guys don’t have a signature.’ So, we worked on the sound of every instrument. Then he said to me, ‘you have a lot of different voices? What is Alice going to sound like?’ When we finally got that sound, it was Alice Cooper.” The result highlighted how special the band were as musicians. “Mike Bruce was a great rhythm player who wrote simple songs. Dennis (Dunaway) was our surrealistic bass player. A lot of his bass lines were like a lead guitar. Neil (Smith) was like Keith Moon. He was all over those drums. And nobody played lead like Glen (Buxton). He added a lot of personality to the band.” Meanwhile, Cooper both wrote the band’s lyrics and incarnated a character that exuded as much humour as horror. “I always thought, if you’re going to be scary, also be funny,” he says. For extra zing, the Alice character, which he created back in 1969, presaged the gender fluidity of the entire glam rock movement. “David Bowie brought the Spiders from Mars to see our show in London,” Cooper says. “He told them, ‘that’s what we need to do.’” Bowie downplayed the influence in later years, but it’s not hard to hear echoes of Love It to Death on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, released more than a year later, especially in such Cooper songs as “Caught in a Dream” and “Long Way to Go”. Following the pattern of “I’m Eighteen”, the band subsequent singles also aimed to be anthems. Their biggest chart score, “School’s Out”, which went to number one in the UK, offered an anarchic rallying cry for kids of any era. “You play that song for a 12-year-old right now and they go ‘yeah!’” Cooper says. “It’s something every kid can agree on.” Another hit by the band, “Elected”, predicted the rise of a demagogue like Donald Trump. At that time, however – 1972 – it was written about Richard Nixon. “Nobody thought anybody would be worse than Nixon,” Cooper says with a laugh. As the group became increasingly popular, even Bob Dylan came to acknowledge their talent. In a Rolling Stone interview in the 1970s, he shoe-horned in a line that proclaimed Cooper “an underrated songwriter”. At the same time, the road and the mounting pressures of recording took a ruinous toll on the group. Buxton’s drinking got so bad, he barely played on the band’s final album, Muscle of Love, in 1973. So, three years after they broke through, the group imploded. “We had run our race,” Cooper said. “There was nothing else we could do as that band.” Cooper himself went straight into a successful solo career with his 1975 album, Welcome to my Nightmare. And while the rest of the group formed their own band – named Billion Dollar Babies after the hit Alice Cooper album – it tanked. During the 1990s, Cooper enjoyed a second strong run in the UK when three of his solo albums cracked the Top 10. Over the last decade, he has reunited several times with his surviving band mates. (Buxton died of viral pneumonia in 1989, after years of alcoholism.) The new album features a track, “I Hate You”, in which each of the band members sings a verse pretending to put the other guys down. (In reality, Alice said there was never bad blood between them.) The song ends with all the guys yelling the line, “the thing we hate most is the space you left on stage,” which refers to Buxton. “Glen was our Keith Richards,” Cooper says. “He was the heart and soul of the band.” Cooper believes the “shock rock” that launched his band could never be replicated today. “You could cut off your arm and eat it on stage and it wouldn’t matter,” he says. “The audience is shock proof.” Yet, his snake and the music live on. At the age of 73, Cooper plans to return to the road as soon as touring becomes possible again, at which point he’ll happily belt out “I’m Eighteen” for the zillionth time. “When you sing that song in front of an audience, you are 18,” he says. “The way I look at it, Alice is like Batman or Spiderman. Those characters never age.”" |
There's a feature on Alice in the latest edition of 'Metal Hammer' magazine https://www.loudersound.com/news/ali...ZVuEviE_Oa-u0E "Alice Cooper hoped to terrify parents with a band who made the Rolling Stones ‘look like choirboys’ Alice Cooper reveals his early shock rock masterplan in new issue of Metal Hammer Alice Cooper had a fiendishly simple game plan for stealing the souls of a generation of American youth: he wanted to create a rock ’n’ roll band who would make The Rolling Stones look like choirboys. Looking back over his storied career in the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine, Cooper reveals that seeing his parents’ horrified reaction to the Rolling Stones helped inspire him on his journey shock rock superstardom. Asked, ‘Do you remember the first time an artist shocked you, and did it have any impact on the route you took?’ Cooper recalls seeing Elvis, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones on TV, and realising that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had the power and presence to make parents recoil in horror...and blow teenage minds. “I was seven when I first saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show and we were so used to doo-wop music when I was a kid, all of a sudden we didn’t know if Elvis was the hero or the villain, but I knew my parents liked him,” Cooper recalls. “The second time was when we saw the Beatles – we all went, ‘Wow look at that hair, look at the boots, look at the suits! These songs are the best songs I’ve ever heard!’ Then the Rolling Stones came and I got the reaction from my parents that these guys were scruffy, they could be drug addicts – that appealed to me. “I looked at them and thought, ‘If I ever get a band together, I’m gonna make these guys look like choirboys!’” The new issue of Metal Hammer is an emotional salute to late Children Of Bodom legend Alexi Laiho, who passed away at the age of 41 in December, with tributes paid by Kerry King, Nightwish, Mastodon, Zakk Wylde, Dimmu Borgir and many, many more. From his early life to his rise as a modern day guitar god to his legendary hellraising, it’s the ultimate look at the life of a true one-off. Also in the new issue, we take you inside the year that Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax changed metal forever, get Sam Carter to reveal all about the bold new Architects album, find out how Epica came back from the brink to make their most fascinating album yet and meet the excellent Divide And Dissolve – the drone duo dismantling white supremacy." |
Alice interviewed on Australian television, February 17th, 2021 |
New feature at Kerrang "“I will never, ever outgrow rock’n’roll. And I will never, ever tell my band to turn the volume down” Alice Cooper has lived the rock’n’roll life harder and longer than most. Here he reflects on those shocking early days, hanging out with Jim Morrison and why golf is his new addiction… During his first flush of success in the ‘70s, Alice Cooper was so famous that he appeared as a guest on The Muppet Show. At the time a weekly half-hour broadcast, each episode would feature one human guest, the star quality of whom was usually astonishing. Performers and actors such as Elton John, Mark Hamill, Roger Moore, Diana Ross, Dudley Moore and Steve Martin were just some of the names that deigned to stand in the presence of the iconic creations from Jim Henson’s workshop. On the week of Alice Cooper’s appearance, the show begins with the guest being told by the character Scooter that he has 15 seconds until the curtain rises. The singer is surrounded by deformed and ghoulish puppets. “Those monsters aren’t ours,” Scooter tells him, to which he receives the reply, “I know, they’re mine.” The subtext was clear: Alice Cooper is America’s bogeyman. Alice is the creation and the alter-ego of Vincent Damon Furnier, a name today used by no-one. During a golden period of albums released in the ‘70s – records such as School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies – the character’s constant rebelliousness and, in a live setting, macabre theatrics would prove influential across a wide musical spectrum. There is a credible case to be made that his act drew up the blueprints for punk in a way that was just as profound as those designed by his friend Iggy Pop. For years a dedicated drunk, in 1989 a now sober Alice re-emerged with the ubiquitous smash hit single Poison. This not at all subtle take on the subject of AIDS once again secured its singer prime real estate in rock’s mainstream. From here, the stroll to the status of a legend has been short. Today the 73-year-old is a member of Hollywood Vampires, the good-natured supergroup that also features Joe Perry from Aerosmith and Johnny Depp, and is gearing up to release his 21st album Detroit Stories on February 26. But as he enters his eighth decade in rock’n’roll, it would surely be unwise to present Alice Cooper with a pair of slippers as a Christmas gift anytime soon. What was the power that rock’n’roll held over you as a young man? “I’ve listened to music, especially rock’n’roll, since I was eight years old. First off it was Elvis [Presley] on The Ed Sullivan Show. My uncle also bought me a Chuck Berry record, and that changed everything. I was also the perfect age when The Beatles came out. I was 15. Before that I was listening to chart music. I was listening to The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons and Motown, everything that was on Top 40 radio. Then all of a sudden I heard this thing that I’d never heard before; [The Beatles’] She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, and then I heard Please Please Me. I heard, like, five Beatles songs in one day, and I just went, ‘What is this?!’ Not even knowing what they looked like or who they were. I knew that sound was really different and really cool. And when I saw them and saw what kind of a reaction everybody’s parents had to them, I immediately became a Beatles fan.” There are certain performers – Lemmy would be one, Slash another – for whom the sense of wonder of rock’n’roll has never dimmed. You seem to fall neatly into this category. “Absolutely. You will never wash away the sound of a Pete Townshend power chord. To me that’s the most important sound in the world. Or a Jeff Beck solo. Or a Keith Moon drum solo. Or a Beatles harmony. But you can take it all the way back to Chuck Berry – nobody was a better lyricist than Chuck. He could tell you a story in three minutes, and it would be this ridiculously funny thing. I will never, ever outgrow rock’n’roll, and I will never, ever tell my band to turn the volume down.” Are you aware that John Lydon – otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols – once said that his entire career stemmed from him standing in front of a mirror miming along to your song I’m Eighteen? “I heard that, and I heard that he and [Sex Pistols bassist] Sid Vicious would busk in the subway playing songs such as I Love The Dead and all these other dark Alice Cooper songs. I thought that was a funny scene when I pictured it in my head. But I know Johnny well and I can understand that. At that point I probably represented the most rebellious band that he’d ever seen. I mean, they tried to ban us in England.” What was England like in the days when you first came over here? “For us to go to England was like going to a holy land. To us, it was the land of The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds and The Who – the best bands in the world. We would not be anything without having listened to them and learning how to play. So going there was so exotic to us. And we’d go to Kensington Market, which was the coolest place in the world, because you could get platform boots there. And we’d go to the Hard Rock or Tramp’s [club], which were also the greatest places. We stayed at Blakes Hotel, which was the rock’n’roll hotel at the time. And at Kensington Market you’d run into T. Rex and people like that. England was the only place that really understood what we were doing. It was the only place that accepted us not just for the music, but also for the theatrics. So many people thought that Alice Cooper was from England. They certainly didn’t think I was from Arizona.” Why do you think so many people were so shocked by the theatricality of your act? “I think the DNA of England is very polite. America is a little bit more revolutionary. Us coming over to England and chopping up baby dolls, and the blood and the snakes, was extremely exotic to the public. And the fact, then, that MPs tried to ban us made us even more exotic. We were like the villains of rock’n’roll and everyone wanted to come and see why. They loved the songs, but on top of that you had this show unlike any other. It was the outlaw in Alice Cooper that made everyone want to come out.” Alice Cooper in the ‘70s seemed to have above-the-title billing in a golden musical age. How close to reality is that image? “It was an era when record companies, the music business and the public wanted rock stars to be individuals. They didn’t want another David Bowie or T. Rex; there was only one Bowie and one T. Rex. Now it seems that as soon as there’s a Bon Jovi, there’s 35 Bon Jovis. As soon as there’s a Bruce Springsteen, there’s 40 Bruce Springsteens. But in that era, the whole idea was to be the best band you could possibly be live. All of us learned swagger from [Mick] Jagger – the king rooster up there – onstage. Everybody looked at him and thought, ‘Well, I want to do that, but I want to do it the way that I do it.’ Rock stars are supposed to be sexy and glamorous. That’s when rock stars were rock stars. Now I think that rock stars are much too introverted.” You certainly weren’t introverted. Bob Dylan once said that he thought your talents as a writer were underappreciated. What did you make of that? “I was very appreciative of it. I didn’t even know that he knew that I was alive. I had never met Bob Dylan, but he was certainly the poet laureate of America. That was a huge compliment for me. And John Lennon’s favourite song was Elected, which he used to talk about, and that gave us some credibility. I do think that the music was overshadowed by the theatrics, but that didn’t keep us from trying to write great songs. To this day, if you don’t think that your next album is going to be your best album, or if you think that you’ve already written your best song, you should probably quit.” Is it true that there are a whole tranche of albums that you made in the ‘80s that you can’t remember recording because you were too pissed? “Yeah, there was a period where we wrote, recorded and toured albums that I don’t really remember. It’s so funny that those are the fans’ favourite albums. I always think, ‘Wow, I’ve got to go back and listen to them, because I don’t remember any of those songs!’” Presumably your lifestyle during this period led you close to death. What did you learn from these times? “Well, I had to get sober in order to suss it out. When I first came up, my elder siblings were [Doors singer] Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Keith Moon, and all of these people. I was sitting there trying to drink with them. And some of these people died when they were 27. I think that I realised then that Jim and Jimi and those guys were trying to live their image. Jim had a great image onstage. He was like a statue of [Michelangelo’s] David up there. He was always high and boozy and sexy and all the girls went crazy over him. I said, ‘I wonder if he ever puts that character away and just lives a normal life?’ Well, I used to know him and I know that he didn’t. He was always that character. And I think that part of that is what killed him. I looked at that and thought, ‘The Alice Cooper character is 10 times as extreme as me.’ I had to find a way to co-exist with him. Now I live a normal life – or as close to normal as you can be being in rock for this long – and I look forward to putting the make-up and the stage costume on. I can’t wait to get up there and become Alice Cooper. But there was a time when I thought I had to be Alice all the time. And it would have killed me if I kept going like that. It definitely would have killed me.” When you talk about the likes of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix being your elder siblings, this is in the sense that you actually knew them as people, right? “Oh yeah. I used to drink with Jim Morrison all the time. Jimi Hendrix passed me my first joint when I was 18 years old. Joplin and I used to drink Southern Comfort together, and she could drink anyone under the table.” And these days you play golf… “It’s the funniest thing. I quit drinking, so I had to find an addiction that wasn’t going to kill me. The addictions that I already had were killing me. I used to be a really good baseball player, and I thought that if I could hit a ball that was coming towards me at 80 miles an hour, I should be able to hit a ball that was sitting on a tee. I realised that when I was on tour I was sitting all day in a hotel room and that doing that would be nothing but temptation for me. So I searched for something to do in the day. I went to a golf course and the pro there put a ball down and I hit it right down the middle. Effortlessly. And he told me that I was a natural. So I traded alcohol and drugs and everything else for this new addiction. And now I play six days a week. But at first I had to be a closet golfer because my fans would have hated it. Their dads played golf. So I had to sneak out and play.” You’ve made music constantly throughout your career. Have you ever entertained any doubts that this was your calling? “Well, here’s the thing: rock’n’roll goes in a lot of directions in the period between 1965 and the present day. If you look at it, it went to punk, it went to glam, it went to grunge, it went to disco, it went to this and that. The only kind of music that stayed its course and did not change was hard rock. That’s the one music that never went away. So for me, I never get tired of that kind of music. Even when I’m rehearsing with the [Hollywood] Vampires, we pay tribute to our dead friends. So we do a John Lennon song, and we do a T. Rex song. It is so much fun being the world’s most expensive bar band.” Hollywood Vampires features you, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry. Who’s the coolest cat in the band? “Joe is one of those guys who is in his own world. Most lead guitar players that I know are in their own worlds. Johnny Depp was a guitar player long before he was an actor, so I can yell out [The Rolling Stones’] Brown Sugar, and he knows it and plays it dead on. He is a very well-rounded guitar player. He can play lead right up there with Joe Perry. People think he’s only there to be eye candy for the girls, but Johnny is as good a guitar player as anyone I’ve ever had in my bands. The Vampires is an awfully good band.” Supergroups often implode in a plume of acrimony because its members egos are too big. How will the Hollywood Vampires avoid this fate? “Despite this being a band of alpha males who are used to calling the shots, from the first rehearsal to this point there has never been one single argument. No-one has butted heads on anything. We try things and all of us instinctively know whether or not it works… Nobody ever pulls a hissy fit to get their own way. Johnny and Joe share leads and nobody ever argues.” You’re playing songs by great artists that have died. When Alice Cooper passes over, who would you like to play your music? “The Foo Fighters play my songs really well already. They know every song. I could go up there with them – I did this at Milton Keynes [in 2011] – and do Under My Wheels and I’m Eighteen and School’s Out, and they played my songs as good as my band do. So the Foo Fighters would be a good choice.” Alice Cooper has had a profound influence on musical culture. Is it pleasing to realise that? “That can go two ways. It can either make you egotistical, or it can make you very humble. I remember when I’m Eighteen came out. I think it got to number two on the charts and I looked at the bands that were under us and I was so embarrassed. Led Zeppelin were at number seven, The Rolling Stones were at number 10. I almost wanted to call them up and say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Because they were my teachers. You almost sit there and go, ‘I’m not in their league.’ Now I don’t look at it as competition. Back then, you did two albums a year. You didn’t have time to be egotistical about it.” If Alice Cooper was starting out now, how would he be different? “I would not change anything about Alice Cooper. I even think about the alcoholism and how that shaped Alice Cooper. I’ve thought about whether I’d change that, and I realise that I wouldn’t because I learned so much about myself from it – the same with the drug use. I realise how unbelievably out of control I was, yet I lived through it. In some ways it actually gave me a lot more confidence, and I would not have changed that.” What would you like to have inscribed on your headstone? “‘Here lies Alice, since from when he was teething, never stopped rocking ‘til he stopped breathing.’”" |
A preview of every single song on the new album The guilty parties!
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1 Attachment(s) February 19th, 1987 - 34 years ago today, the nightmare returned to the Providence Civic Centre, with support from Megadeth |
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