Alice (alongside Roger Daltrey) appears in a new music documentary entitled 'Rock Camp'

December 18, 1976 - Alice or Andy!

The many moods of Alice

The latest news and sightings

There's a new interview / feature with Alice at Arizona Central

"How Alice Cooper returned to his roots for the new album, 'Detroit Stories'

Alice Cooper spends his latest album, "Detroit Stories," paying tribute to a city that looms large in Cooper legend for obvious reasons.

First and foremost, he was born there.

And although he met the other founding members of the Alice Cooper group in Phoenix, where his family moved when he was 12, the Cortez High School track star and his bandmates were sharing a farmhouse on the outskirts of Detroit when they recorded "I'm Eighteen," their breakthrough single.

They'd moved to Detroit after several years in California, where they cut their first two albums for Frank Zappa's Straight Records.

As Cooper, who now lives in Paradise Valley with his wife, Sheryl Cooper, explains, they didn't feel as much like outcasts on the Detroit scene, surrounded by such kindred spirits as the Stooges and the MC5.

"Detroit, their sound was hard rock driven by guitars," he says. "And that's where we felt right at home."

'Let's make Detroit the thing'

On "Detroit Stories," an album due to be released on Feb. 26, he celebrates the legendary music city and its hard-rock heritage, a premise Cooper first suggested in a conversation with long-time producer Bob Ezrin.

"Bob and I, we never go into an album and say, 'Let's just write 12 good songs,'" he says. "Both of us come from a very theatrical background. So I said, 'Let's dedicate it to Detroit. Let's make Detroit the thing.' Because I'm from Detroit."

Once they'd decided on that "Detroit Stories" concept, there were certain ground rules.

"I said 'The most important thing is let's make sure that everybody on the album is from Detroit. Let's record it in Detroit. Let's not give up on that.'"

Guest appearances include such veterans of the Detroit scene as Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad and Johnny "Bee" Badanjek of Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels.

The only person on the album not associated with Detroit, Cooper says, is guitar hero Joe Bonamassa, who plays a cover of the Velvet Underground song "Rock 'n' Roll."

Although the Velvet Underground was based in New York City, not Detroit, the arrangement is on loan from Ryder's cover of the song, produced by Ezrin.

"Bob also produced 'Berlin' for Lou Reed," Cooper says. "And Lou was a buddy of mine. We used to live at the Chelsea Hotel back in the early '70s together."

Ezrin played their version of the song for Laurie Anderson, Reed's widow.

"And she said she loved it," Cooper says. "She said Lou would've loved our version. The Velvet Underground's version was very New York heroin chic. We took it and gave it the Detroit treatment."

How Bob Ezrin helped hone their sound

It was Ezrin who initially helped Cooper and his bandmates hone their sound into the airplay-friendly hard-rock anthems that became their stock in trade as "I'm Eighteen" gave way to "School's Out."

The young producer had been sent to see them play a gig at Max's Kansas City (a New York club) with strict orders from his boss, Jack Richardson, a producer enjoying a run of big hit singles for the Guess Who.

"It was the only time a producer ever came to a show," Cooper say, with a laugh. "And he came there to get rid of us. That's what Jack Richardson told him. 'Just get rid of them. Go see them and tell them we're not interested."

But Ezrin couldn't do it.

As Cooper recalls the gig that changed his life, where future members of the New York Dolls were pressed against the stage, "The audience went crazy. They loved it. And Bob went back to Jack Richardson and said, 'I know I'm fired. But I signed them.' Jack said, 'Then your punishment is you have to produce them.'"

The success of "I'm Eighteen" convinced the suits at Warner Bros. to take a chance on releasing a full-length Alice Cooper album, the 1971 classic "Love It To Death," produced by Ezrin.

"Well, 'Love it to Death' became a huge hit," Cooper says, with a laugh. "And nobody saw that one coming. But Bob was totally right. What he saw in us was the future. He said, 'I listened to them. I watched them. And I saw something I wasn't expecting. They're great players. But they could be a lot better.'"

'He was our George Martin'

It was Ezrin's job to make them better. And the weird thing is, they let him get away with it.

"It's funny," Cooper says. "We never listened to Zappa. Zappa gave us advice. A lot of guys gave us advice. And we never listened to it. We thought 'We know what we're doing.' For some reason, we listened to Bob Ezrin. He was a young, young guy with long hair."

Ezrin went on to produce their next three albums, "Killer," "School's Out" and perhaps their most iconic effort, "Billion Dollar Babies," and continued to work with the singer when Cooper went solo in 1975, resulting in another huge commercial triumph, "Welcome to My Nightmare."

"He was our George Martin," Cooper says, referring to the man who famously produced all but a tiny fraction of the Beatles catalog. "And still is. I would rather work with Bob than anybody."

"Detroit Stories" is the singer's third consecutive album with Ezrin producing, following the "Welcome to My Nightmare" sequel, "Welcome 2 My Nightmare," and 2017's "Paranormal."

A strict interpretation of the singer's album credits would suggest that "Welcome 2 Nightmare," released in 2011, was the first they'd worked together since the criminally underrated "DaDa" hit the streets (but not the U.S. album charts) in 1983.

But Cooper says it's not that simple.

'If anybody knows Alice Cooper better than me, it's Bob Ezrin'

"Bob has always been my go-to guy," he says.

"If I was doing an album with David Foster or all those different producers, I would always run the songs by Bob and say, 'What do you hear here?' And he'd send it back and go, 'Well, I'm doing this other band right now, but this chorus could be better' or 'Cut that section in half' Or 'Alice would never say that.'"

There's a trust they've built up through the years that goes beyond familiarity or even friendship.

"If anybody knows Alice Cooper better than me, or at least as much as me, it's Bob Ezrin, because we created that character together, voice-wise," Cooper says.

"So we know what he would sing and what he wouldn't sing, if this song is an Alice song or if we're forcing it on Alice. Sometimes it's a great song and you go, 'Yeah, but it's just not an Alice song.' And you put it away."

'We always felt like social debris'

The other three surviving members of the original Cooper group – guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith — appear on two tracks of "Detroit Stories", "Social Debris" and "I Hate You."

Cooper wrote "Social Debris" with Smith and Ezrin.

"We just always felt like social debris," he says. "We didn't feel like we ever fit in. So that song came out pretty easily. It sounds like it should have been on 'Love it to Death' or 'Killer.' So it worked."

"I Hate You" was written by Cooper, Dunaway and Ezrin, and features the former bandmates trading insults.

The band loved Glen Buxton

"Most bands when they break up hate each other," Cooper says.

"We never did that. We didn't really break up with bad blood. So we wrote a song where each guy has a verse about the other guy. The funny thing is, everybody that thinks the Alice Cooper band hates each other, we said, 'OK, yeah, we hate each other. Here's the song.'"

The song ends with a tribute to the late Glen Buxton, who died in 1997.

"But most of all we're filled with rage," they sing. "At the empty space you left on stage."

As Cooper says, "We all loved Glen."

Alice Cooper doesn't live in the past

It's tempting to think that the timing of Cooper's tribute to Detroit is based at least in part on the 50th anniversary of "Love It to Death," a breakthrough album recorded while sharing a farmhouse with his bandmates on the outskirts of Detroit.

"Detroit Stories" hits the streets on Feb. 26.

"Love it to Death" turns 50 on March 9.

"People always surprise me when they say 'It's the 40th anniversary of this' or 'the 50th anniversary of that,'" Cooper says, with a laugh.

"I never think about. I guess because I don't really live in the past that much. But the fans do. It's very important to them. I didn't even know it was the 50th anniversary until you mentioned it.""

Alice features in the March issue of 'Uncut' magazine...

"ALICE COOPER: When Cooper and his band found themselves in Detroit in 1969, they found their natural home. As he prepares to revisit those roots on a new album, Uncut winds the clock back to look afresh at the Motor City’s heyday and Cooper’s “improv, guerrilla theatre”."

...and is featured on the cover of the French language 'Rock And Folk' magazine

New article in Rolling Stone magazine

Strippers, Drag Queens and Dancing Dogs: The Insane 1971 Party That Launched Alice Cooper

There were record companies, and then there was Warner Brothers. During the halcyon, Wild West days of the music business in the Sixties and Seventies, Warner Brothers — along with its associated labels like Reprise and Sire — earned a reputation for signing some of pop’s most idiosyncratic or unconventional artists. But even better, the label — and executives like Mo Ostin, Joe Smith and Lenny Warner — allowed those musicians the freedom to roam and grow in the studio with few artistic constraints. Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, the Grateful Dead, and Randy Newman were among the label’s first wave of talent, followed in later years by Prince, Madonna, Van Halen, Devo and the post-indie Replacements.

The result wasn’t just a mind-boggling string of classic and often groundbreaking music but also plenty of profit to go around — and plenty of ways to spend it and revel in the excesses of the times. In this excerpt from Peter Ames Carlin’s Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince, the label — especially head publicist Bob Regehr working with band manager Shep Gordon — decides to go all out to launch a new band called Alice Cooper in 1971. The gorilla suits alone make us nostalgic for a long-gone aspect of the business.

"Alice Cooper, a five-piece hard rock band known for its cross-dressing, horror movie villain–style front man (who later took the band’s name as his own), had been a tough sell for its first couple of years in the Warner/ Reprise family. Signed by Frank Zappa for his Warner-distributed Bizarre/ Straight label, the band’s first two albums bombed, due in part to Zappa’s disinterest in them. The band didn’t help itself the night Gordon corralled a group of Warner/Reprise executives to their show at the Whisky a Go Go and, amid the band’s lackluster set, the drummer managed to fall off the stage. A terrible show.

But Gordon, all of twenty-two, was convinced his group was bound for stardom, so when they were offered an opening spot on a national package tour in the summer of 1970 only to be denied the tour support money they would need by Zappa’s partners at Bizarre/Straight, the manager decided to take his case to the central office on Warner Blvd. Gordon gathered the group, bought a few sacks of tacos on the way to Burbank, waited until Joe Smith had gone out to lunch, then rallied his troops to invade the label president’s office, where, with their large and odoriferous lunch in hand, they stretched out on his chairs and sofas to wait. When the executive got back, Gordon greeted him at his door and introduced himself. He and his entire group were staying put, he promised, until Smith came through with the cash they needed to go on their summer tour. Or else, Gordon continued, Smith could always call the police and have them thrown out. But then the matter would be in the public record, and did Smith really want to read news stories about how he’d had one of his own bands tossed out of the building? Smith gave this some thought and then nodded. “You’ve got balls,” he told Gordon, with new respect in his voice. “Come with me.” Smith led the manager down to the finance office and told them to cut the check.

The tour went well, and given the dough to produce a new single, the band came up with the rocking but tuneful “I’m Eighteen,” a tale of adolescent frustration that scraped against the Top 20 on Billboard’s singles chart. Reassigned from Bizarre/Straight to Warner/Reprise, the group saw their third album, Love It to Death, climb to No. 35 in March 1971. In it, the band traded its psychedelic influences for a crunchy hard rock sound that, along with its comic book horror, satire, and some distinctive sexual transgression, put them at the fore of the blossoming glam rock genre.

It was a potent combination, but how could Warner/Reprise distill its essence into a promotional campaign that would grab the media by the ear? This was a problem Bob Regehr was uniquely equipped to tackle. Hunkered together in his office, Regehr and Gordon fell into a brainstorming session that began with the idea of throwing a debutante ball for the Alice Cooper character at the elegant Ambassador Hotel, where all the best Los Angeles families celebrated the launch of their daughters’ social lives. The Ambassador’s managers would never allow it if they knew what the event was actually about, so Regehr asked his assistant, Shelley Cooper, who had the most proper voice and attitude in the building, to deal directly with the hotel.

No one was to give any hint that the debutante in question was actually one of the freakiest rock & roll bands currently in existence. To make certain that Mo Ostin and Joe Smith attended, Regehr scheduled the affair for the evening of July 14, so it could double as a fete for Evelyn Ostin’s birthday. Did they know July 14 was also Bastille Day in France? They didn’t, but they tossed that in, too, because why not? Then, with all that figured out, they got to work on the details. And this was where things got interesting, and expensive. After the bills topped seven grand, a massive amount for a single event in 1971, a very concerned Smith came to ask what the hell they were up to. Regehr gave him some kind of reasonable explanation, then told Shelley Cooper to stop sending the invoices to the finance office until after the party was over. “If it’s a success, they won’t care,” he explained to her. “If it’s not, then we’ll all be fired anyway.”

They hired a traditional dance band to play standards, procured an oversize wedding cake designed to have someone pop out of it, rented a pair of gorilla suits, and hired, among other entertainers, a dog trained to do things dogs don’t do, a three-hundred-pound singer/stripper named TV Mama, and an entire troupe of dancing drag performers from San Francisco known as the Cockettes. They then sent engraved invitations to hundreds of industry and media figures, asking that they dress formally, or “appropriately,” which could, and did, mean many things to the many people in the Warner/Reprise sphere.

Regehr had specified that their debutante, young Miss Cooper, would prefer a room bedecked with chandeliers, so the Ambassador’s managers put the affair into the regal Venetian Room. When the evening arrived, some guests arrived clad in tuxedos and gowns, others in suits or cocktail dresses, and still others in worn denim cutoffs and midriff-baring halters. The actor Richard Chamberlain was there, along with the pop poet and Warner Bros. recording artist Rod McKuen, Randy Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, Steppenwolf ’s John Kay, Donovan, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and a handful of the company’s other acts, along with dozens of writers, reporters, critics, and industry figures.

The gorilla suits were assigned to two waiters, greeting the guests with silver trays of hors d’oeuvres, which some nibbled as they found their way to one of the many open bars scattered around the room. The Edward Gould Orchestra played sprightly versions of “Moonglow,” “Somewhere My Love,” and other dance favorites as couples gamboled before them. When the appointed time arrived, the entire crowd gathered in the main lobby, much to the astonishment of the chiffon-clad society dames and tuxedoed gentlemen bound for other affairs. Gould’s band struck up “Pomp and Circumstance” to kick off the procession.

First came the Cockettes, a dozen heavily made-up men in spangled dresses and plus-size high heels. One was dressed as a nightclub cigarette girl with a shoulder-strapped tray bearing cigars, cigarettes, and tubes of Vaseline. Next came the dog walking on its hind legs and pushing a baby stroller with its front feet. He might have been wearing a party hat; memories differ. TV Mama, the three-hundred-pound singer/stripper, came next, in a silky, white fur–lined black gown cut to feature her prodigious assets. Finally came Alice Cooper, the five band members clad in tuxedoes, one set off by his caked-on mascara, streaks of rouge, and heavily powdered cheeks, grasping one of the long-stemmed roses being scattered in front of and over him.

Then the real revelries began, fueled by the sloshing open bars and whatever was causing all that snorfling and snuffling in the bathrooms. Mo and Evelyn Ostin arrived along with Joe and Donnie Smith, Ahmet Ertegun, and whomever he was dating in Los Angeles at the moment. Evelyn’s arrival triggered a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” led by TV Mama, who pressed in to sing, shake, and shimmy her assets as close to the birthday girl’s personal space as possible.

When that ordeal was over, Evelyn grabbed Joe Smith’s shoulder and shouted in his ear, “Are we supposed to be here!?”

Smith shouted back, “Where else in the world would you rather be!?” Whatever Evelyn said in response was lost when the oversize birthday cake at center stage blew its top. Miss Mercy, the GTO band member they’d installed in the cake’s inner compartment, had gotten sick of waiting for her cue and came exploding upward wondering, at the top of her lungs, what the **** she was doing in there. Then she started scooping up handfuls of frosting and hurling it at the guests, many of whom hurled it right back at her. Alice Cooper played a short set, and as the clock spun to midnight and beyond, a laughing mayhem prevailed. The poet McKuen, a tumble of silver hair, aquiline nose, and bespoke tuxedo, climbed onto a table and started dismantling one of the chandeliers piece by crystalline piece, while the Cockette cigarette girls returned with trays overflowing with multicolor dildos, many of which were carted away by frisky couples eager to take a test drive. And somewhere out of sight, a Cockette had traded her gown for one of the gorilla suits, in which she scampered out of the hotel’s main entrance and was last seen on the Sunset Strip galloping into the dawn.

When Regehr got back to the office late the next morning, his desk fluttered with angry messages from the manager of the Ambassador Hotel (You broke our chandelier!), from the costume rental company (You stole our gorilla suit!), from the hotel manager’s boss (You shattered our dignity!), and a few others. But these were overwhelmed by messages about the avalanche of Alice Cooper coverage the party was spurring. The Los Angeles Times planned an A-1 feature for the next Sunday. The wire services spread the story into newspapers all across the country, while industry magazines cranked out their own party tales, all celebrating how Warner/Reprise had launched another hit act.

The tsunami of publicity swept the three-month-old Love It to Death album back up the charts, where it remained for the rest of the year on its way to selling 1.2 million copies. Killer, released around Thanksgiving, climbed to No. 21 on the album charts. The group’s next single, “School’s Out,” jumped into the Top 10 in May, tugging its album, also named School’s Out, released a month later, to No. 2 on the album charts and more than a million copies sold. As Regehr predicted, no one ever asked how much the party cost."

Excerpted from SONIC BOOM: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince, by Peter Ames Carlin. Published by Henry Holt and Company, January 19th, 2021. Copyright © 2021 by Peter Ames Carlin. All rights reserved.

New interview at Entertainment Weekly

"'We were not against a little violence onstage': Alice Cooper on life in Detroit

There are few things Alice Cooper loves more than telling a good story, especially one with vibrant characters, tons of action, and horrific scares that unfold one killer verse at a time. But for Detroit Stories, his 27th studio album, the shock rocker, 73, turned to his hometown for inspiration — and found a fresh appreciation for the Motor City music scene.

"Welcome to My Nightmare, Brutal Planet, School's Out, Paranormal: I like writing to a theme," he says, listing off a number of his prior records that each revolved around a concept. "This one, I said, 'I want to do a real rock & roll album; real AC/DC-type, pure rock & roll.' That takes me immediately to Detroit, because it's the home of hard rock. Los Angeles had the Doors; San Francisco had the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead; New York had the Rascals; and then Detroit, what were they known for? Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5 — and Alice Cooper."

Cooper (born Vincent Furnier) grew up in Detroit, but his family moved to Arizona when he was 10 years old. He cut his teeth with his first band in Phoenix before heading to Los Angeles at the end of the '60s, where he scored his first deal, on Frank Zappa's Straight Records. But Cooper's career didn't really take off until he left L.A., in part because the city didn't feel like home. He puts it succinctly: "We just didn't fit in anywhere we went." Though his hard-partying days at notorious West Hollywood hangout the Rainbow inspired the formation of the Hollywood Vampires, his star-studded supergroup with Joe Perry, Duff McKagan, and other veteran rockers, Detroit had always been Cooper's lodestar. He considers it to be the "proving ground" of hard rock, which goes back to his first game-changing gig in his home state, at the 1969 Saugatuck Rock Festival.

"Shep [Gordon], my manager, said, 'The first place that gives us a standing ovation, we're going to move there,'" he recalls of that first show, which also featured the Stooges and the MC5. "We watched the bands going on before us, and every band was a killer rock band. We got onstage, and they loved us, the theatrics, the attitude. They could see that we were not against a little violence onstage. They took us right under their wing. When they realized I was born in Detroit, I became a favorite son. We fit right in with all those bands. It was exactly where we should've been." Cooper adds that in Detroit, "if you didn't come onstage with an attitude, and with artillery, that audience is not going to respect you."

Fast forward to 2018, when the seed for Detroit Stories was planted. While touring behind 2017's Paranormal drew to a close, Cooper spoke with his longtime producer Bob Ezrin. Intrigued at the prospect of pulling from the world Cooper knew for his next album instead of building a new one, the two began working on songs that would eventually make up 2019's Breadcrumbs, Cooper's first EP to date — and one that serves as the "movie trailer" for Detroit Stories. They eventually returned to Detroit and assembled a wrecking crew for the project, with the Detroit Wheels' Johnny "Bee" Badanjek on drums, renowned jazz bassist Paul Randolph, and notorious MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer.

"'I immediately said, 'Is Wayne still working?'" he recalls. "He's a better guitar player now than he was then! I thought, 'Okay, I'm connected now to pure Detroit.' This guy was a White Panther, this guy was in jail, he always kept a sense of humor, and always kept his true sense of rock & roll. I love his playing. It's got this real street Detroit feel to it, and it's not glamorous at all."

Kramer's blistering solos stand out on Cooper's cover of "Sister Anne," one of his favorite Detroit Stories tracks; other notable covers include his pummeling take on Bob Seger's "East Side Story" and the Velvet Underground's "Rock & Roll" (which was penned in Detroit). Detroit Stories offers plenty of new material, too, which touches on multiple facets of the city's musical history and indefatigable spirit. "Don't Give Up" is a moving encouragement anthem that Cooper released at the bleak height of the coronavirus pandemic. (Cooper was diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, as was his wife, but both made a full recovery: "We had it at the same time, which was great, because we could commiserate.") The R&B groove Randolph brought to the table for "$1000 High Heel Shoes" invokes the influence of Motown, which Cooper considers to be a crucial helix in the "DNA of Detroit." And while the adrenaline and heavy guitars that roar throughout the record throw to the scene of his youth, the lyrics are just as surly and street-savvy — and occasionally inspired by the Detroiters Cooper counts as kin.

"When I started writing the songs, I thought, what references can I make to when I was a kid?" he says. "I made a reference to St. Clair Shores; my mom was a waitress there. I tried to put something about Detroit that tasted like Detroit in every lyric… it's not written about elegant characters, but blue-collar characters. The three bums that are sitting and singing 'Hail Mary,' they sit there drinking all day in the alley, and this one secretary walks by every day, Mary, and she's the high point of their life: 'Hail Mary! Full of grace, what are you doing in this place?!' In other words, we belong here, you don't belong here. My uncles were all those guys. I had an Uncle Jocko, an Uncle Lefty, and an Uncle Ratsy, and they were at the track every day, that's all they did. That influenced me."

But Detroit Stories is, if anything, a prompt for further listening: it's a love letter from Cooper to his city, and one that encourages a deep dive into his own back catalog and that of his peers. He even namechecks his essential Detroit artists — Mitch Rider, Suzi Quatro, the Stooges, MC5, the Motown roster — on the updated version of his 2003 single "Detroit City," which he includes on the track list. One thing's for certain: you can take the rock star out of Detroit, but you can't take the rock & roll out of Cooper — and you definitely can't take it out of Detroit, either.

"I'm proud of being from Detroit, I really am," he says. "I always found that Detroit was a tough city, and rock & roll belonged to Detroit — they deserved the title of hard rock capital of the world.""

I'm hearing rumours that both Alice and Sheryl contracted Covid either late in 2020 or early in 2021

1st February, 1973 - 48 years ago today, the Alice Cooper Group release an edited version of 'Hello Hooray' from the 'Billion Dollar Babies' LP as a single


The single is backed with 'Generation Landslide', also from the 'Billion Dollar Babies' LP


The single spends 12 weeks on the chart, and peaks at #6 on March 17th. Above it on the chart that week were:

1: CUM ON FEEL THE NOIZE - SLADE
2: THE TWELFTH OF NEVER - DONNY OSMOND
3: 20TH CENTURY BOY - T. REX
4: FEEL THE NEED IN ME - The DETROIT EMERALDS
5: CINDY INCIDENTALLY - THE FACES

New single - 'Social Debris'

February 4th, 1948

There's a three page interview with Alice in the latest Metal Hammer.

The album gets 7/10

Roppongi Rocks - The Tokyo Rock magazine

Album review: Alice Cooper “Detroit Stories”


"On the new album “Detroit Stories”, shock rocker Alice Cooper pays tribute to the city where he got his proper start as an artist in the early 1970s.

Alice Cooper returns with a new album that is far removed from his polished 1980s hair metal days of “Poison” and “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”. “Detroit Stories” is a trip back to 1970 and the early days of the original Alice Cooper band. Here, some five decades later, shock rocker Alice Cooper has reunited with producer Bob Ezrin as well as the surviving original band members who all put in an appearance on the album. There’s also other guests such as MC5’s Wayne Kramer. The music styles on the album, which contains a mix of covers and new material, are varied. The album is a laidback, good-fun tribute to the Detroit rock scene of the early 1970s. Here we get blues, soul, pop, garage rock, hard rock and much more. There will of course be fans who won’t like it because it is very different from what they are used to get from Alice. This is a version of Alice Cooper that doesn’t care about expectations. He wants to pay respect to his musical roots and he does it well, very well. He seems happy. There are some real gems on the album, such as the excellent pop song “Our Love Will Change The World”, the punky “I Hate You”, the rocky “Social Debris” and the bluesy “Drunk And In Love”. There is also a decent cover of Velvet Underground song “Rock & Roll”.

Alice Cooper’s new album “Detroit Stories” will be released on 26th February in Japan via Ward Records and internationally via earMUSIC."

New interview at Spin

"Feed My Frankenstein: Alice Cooper Isn’t Slowing Down

50 years into his career, Cooper still wants more

The big story on Alice Cooper, aside from the music (check the start to finish classic LP Love it to Death and the hit-heavy Best Of for starters) has always been theatrics. From his garage band days in the Spiders to his heyday in the ’70s and early ’80s, Alice Cooper was a bridge between rock ‘n’ roll and theater, and the band helped inspire and create heavy metal, punk and new wave. The idea of spectacle on stage isn’t a new one (Aristotle noted its importance in Poetics more than two millennia ago), but Alice always adds his trademark touch of shock and awe to immersive and fantastical effect.

Though his touring schedule is already booked through the next decade, like the rest of us he’s sitting out the pandemic and waiting for the giant pause button on the world to be lifted. Alice fills his days at home in Paradise Valley (an exclusive enclave that’s part of the sprawling Phoenix megalopolis) playing golf, taking early morning jogs, creating new music, buying vintage cars, happily ensconced in family life, and helping teens with his philanthropic charity Solid Rock. Never judge a book by its cover, nor a rock star by his stage performance. Behind the makeup and the spectacle, Alice is a Renaissance kind of dude with a heart of gold.

Where does the inspiration from your songs come from? Do you prefer to write songs by yourself or with other musicians?
I almost always write the title first, and then I let the title write the song for me. I guess that means I work backward, I go with the punchline first. In the old days, we would write music to shock people. These days you can’t shock anyone anymore, you turn on the news and nothing we could ever write would top that. So I look around at what is going on for inspiration a lot of the time. I’ve been working with Bob Ezrin since the beginning and we usually bring in other writers. We also write a lot with the original guys. Any time we are writing a new album I’ll call up Dennis and Neal and Mike and ask them what they’ve got kicking around.

From the start, you’ve created some amazingly artistic and theatrical stage performances. Can you say something about how it all started?
I always believed that lyrics should be the script for the show. So in other words you don’t just say “Welcome To My Nightmare,” you have to give the audience the nightmare. When we were starting out Dennis and I were both art majors. We were both really into surrealist work. We started our band in the early days in response to the Beatles. We would do Beatles’ covers. But even in those early days, we were bringing props on stage. We had a giant spider web and there was a guillotine at our first gig believe it or not. I think it was just important to us to put on a show, to add visuals to the music. That really made sense to us.”

Where do you buy jewelry? And do you have a favorite clothing designer for daily wear and your performances?
I buy jewelry all over the place, but I buy a lot from Metal Urgency and Nightrider. But I pick up stuff all over the place. Clothing wise we usually start a new tour by with designs by Hazmat Design. Carin spends a few weeks drawing up concepts based on what I’m looking for and we end up with a baseline of wardrobe from there. Those are the big looks, and things like pants or shirts get interchanged. I work in stuff from John Varvatos and Diesel pretty often. I’ve had some pieces made by Lord SM in Paris. But I think fans would be surprised where a lot of my wardrobe comes from.”

How do you stay fit and maintain the stamina it takes to perform?
I play golf which is a very physical thing, that’s a big part of it. When we are on tour it’s really easy to stay in shape because we are never standing still. We play golf in the morning, we are walking around every city we’re in, going shopping or grabbing dinner. When we are home it can be a bit more challenging, but during this pandemic, I’ve really made it my goal to stay in shape for the road because we really don’t know when things will get back to normal and I want to be ready. I don’t necessarily have a strict workout routine, but basically, I start with golf, we do our usual day to day activities and in the evenings when it cools down here in Phoenix I go for a jog. I usually try to run two miles a day. Sometimes Sheryl and I will go for a walk instead. Speaking of Sheryl, she and I and really the whole family have been taking tap dancing lessons, believe it or not. That’s been really fun.”

Your new album is called Detroit Stories and you’ve said in an interview that Detroit was “the epicenter” for angry hard rock. As a successful artist and philanthropist, how do you sustain the “angry” part as a performer — or do you?
I think that rock ‘n’ roll is inherently angry, and if you want to see the true version of that you watch Pete Townsend. Pete is 75 years old and his knuckles are still bleeding when he hits his guitar and he’s still angry up there. Personally, I’m not really angry about anything but when I hear the music it brings that up. I created this character to really embody all of these negative things — the anger I guess — but that wasn’t really ever who I was myself. It was a character. Ever since I got sober, I make sure I leave Alice on stage. He doesn’t exist anywhere else, and I put all of my negative energy into him. So really it is easy to be a philanthropist and care about Solid Rock, our charity here in Phoenix. On the flip side, because Alice is a character, he has parameters, so to speak. Bob Ezrin is really the only other person who knows who Alice is. He knows what Alice would and wouldn’t say. When we’re writing lyrics for Alice one of us will say a line and the other will say, “No, no, Alice would never say that.” It’s like writing a script for Freddy Krueger — Alice is predictable and the anger he has is his own, so I don’t have to have that myself. I do think that anger has a lot to do with rock ‘n’ roll though. It needs to be angry. If you lose that you’ve watered it down.”

If you didn’t live in Phoenix where would you live?
I could probably find myself living in Maui. I have had a home in Phoenix pretty much my whole life so I never think of leaving, but if I HAD to leave I think it would be there. Though I’m not sure you’d be able to get me to leave Phoenix given the number of golf courses we have here.”

What’s your favorite golf course?
My favorite golf course to play is probably Makena in Maui.

Do you have a vintage car guru and what’s the next vintage car you’d like to buy? What else do you collect besides cars?
Coye Pointer is my car guy here in Phoenix. He has all of the connections when we are working on a restoration or when I’m looking for a particular car. I have a ’68 Bullet Mustang that’s essentially an old Mustang set on top of a new Mustang so it’s all brand new on the inside. I have a ’63 Studebaker Avanti, and I’ve had several of these over the years. I have an Alfa Romeo Spider. We also have a Dodge Hellcat. But I am always buying and selling cars so my garage is always evolving — in fact, right now I’m looking at a 1933 Ford Hot Rod. I’m also always looking for a 63 split-window Stingray. I am not sentimental about music memorabilia, but I do collect watches, mostly vintage Rolex bubble backs.

Do you write love songs for Sheryl?
All four major ballad hits that we had were written about Sheryl. She really is the love of my life.

When you’re touring, what’s your favorite city?
We love London. London is always our target audience, and it’s one of those city’s where we have spent a lot of time over the years and because of that it’s become very familiar. We have our favorite spots, you know? We stay in a lot of hotels, sometimes three in a single day depending on how we are traveling. I just stayed at the Shinola Hotel in Detroit. It is an incredible hotel. We love to stay at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles as well.

What do you do in Phoenix during the summer when the temperature is the hottest in the country?
We are almost always on tour in the summer so I’m rarely home, though this year we were due to the pandemic. In the summer everyone just adjusts to the heat. If you want to jog, you do it at night or before the sun comes up.

The Hollywood Vampires honors your “dead drunk friends” as you’ve put it, by covering some of their songs. Will you be adding songs by other musicians who have passed away?
Well, it depends on who it is who’s passing away. Originally, we wanted to tribute only those who were part of that particular group — guys who were in the room. But then we sort of expanded a little and we tip our hats to those who WOULD have been Vampires had they been around. In other words, I couldn’t see Tom Petty as a Hollywood Vampire. He wasn’t really in our crowd, whereas I could see Eddie Van Halen as one even though we never crossed paths because I was sober by the time they came around. But the Vampires have sort of moved past the tribute thing a bit and now we’re focusing more on creating our own music.

What is one thing you can tell us that we might not know about you?
Sheryl is not the shopper in our family, I am. I am addicted to shopping.

Outside of rock and roll, do you have any interest in other genres?
I like all kinds of music really. I listen to Antonio Carlos Jobim. I listen to a lot of Broadway which might be hard to believe. I almost always have my radio set to XM’s Beatles station, the Beach Boys or Sinatra"

Just preordered the cd/dvd version of Detroit Stories.

Looking forward to it.

So have I - Amazon £15:99

Do you have any other Alice live DVD's, or will this be your first one?

What tour is the Live In Paris concert from? Was it the last one, or the one before (when he had the 'original band' as special guests)?

I just wish it was getting a stand-alone release. I don't like it when it's just a bonus to an album.

I could have just looked at the tracklist, I've figured it out :lol:

It was recorded at the Paris Olympia on December 7th, 2017 as part of the 'Spend The Night With Alice Cooper' tour. It was the same tour when the UK dates (November 8 - November 16) featured a mini-set with the surviving members of the original Alice Cooper Band

Personally, I'm disappointed it wasn't the Wembley date (with the original band, that I know was recorded) wasn't released instead

I wonder if it was always planned to release the 'Paranormal Evening At The Olympia Paris' DVD / Blu-Ray with the 'next release', or whether the Covid pandemic has forced someones hand and, with so many shows being cancelled, the decision was made to release it as a 'special thank you' to fans

It doesn't make sense that the CD album of the concert which came out 2 years ago didn't have the concert DVD packaged with it.

If they were thinking it would be a nice thank you to the fans who haven't been able to see an Alice concert in the last 12 months, then surely it would have been a nicer gesture to use the UK dates like you say, with the mini-set. Perhaps there are rights/licensing issues though?

I've also got Trashes the World and Theater of Death.

I keep meaning to pick up the Brutal Planet tour dvd but not got round to it.


Are there any must haves, Susan?

Trashes... is fantastic, his band on that tour was great.

Personal fav is The Nightmare Returns from '86. Brutally Live is a good one though.

I had The Nightmare Returns on vhs. Is it out on disc?

It is yes, it has a crappy cover though. I had the VHS as well, it was an 18 cert, I had to get my mum to buy t for me :lol:

I recall when i got it that He's Back wasn't part of the show. Thought that was extremely disappointing. I loved the green cover though.

I was actually at that concert, it was FAR too quiet a gig. Not sure what they were thinking? I also recall not being very surprised at the crowd heckling the drummer after his rather boring, never ending drum solo. I think originally it was supposed to be called 'Live From the Brutal Planet.' Changing the title to 'Brutally Live' was an inspired move (considering that the drummer was told to feck off).

This used to be my favourite t-shirt. A girlfriend who went to see the Raise Your Fist and Yell tour brought it back for me.

I wore it down the pub and for loads of gigs. Being white the material wasn't as durable as the black ones (not sure why) and it only lasted a few years before it began to get holes in around the neck. Probably through folks grabbing hold of you during Skid Row shows. :lol:

I wonder if it was quiet due to the recording equipment? Although I'm sure they don't turn it down for other concert films... weird!

Last 2 times I saw Alice it wasn't particularly loud but I wouldn't say it was too quiet either. As for drum solos, I'm rarely impressed, I guess they're designed to give the singer a break during a longer set.

The odd thing is that a friend went to another Brutal Planet show and apparently it was very loud. It is weird.

OFFICIAL live releases are:

• Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper - The Alice Cooper Group on the 'Billion Dollar Babies' tour in 1973. Recommended if you want to see that band when they were 'the most dangerous act in the world'
• Welcome To My Nightmare - There are two versions of this. The original release features the full 1975 concert, while the re-issue version has an edited concert, but includes the television special 'The Nightmare'. As a completest, I have both version, but I don't know which one to recommend to someone who had neither!
• The Strange Case Of Alice Cooper is from the 1979 'Madhouse Rocks' tour, promoting the 'From The Inside' LP. Recommended, and highly theatrical, but it features a very ill looking Alice (this was just before he went into rehab for his drinking) and is only available as a region 1 release
• The Nightmare Returns - One of the best and highly recommended. It's genuinely the only music DVD which has resulted in me having a nightmare after watching it! [It was the 'Teenage Frankenstein' for anyone who is wondering]
• Trashes The World - To be honest, I wasn't overly impressed with this one. A great band and a fun song selection, but (for me) there was *something* missing
• Brutally Live - Recommended. One of the best
• Live At Montreaux 2005 - A fun show, but the show is more than half way through before the theatrics happen
• Theatre Of Death - The one show I would recommend to anyone. If my house was on fire, this is the DVD I would save
• Raise The Dead: Wacken 2014 - Entertaining, but nothing really special

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."

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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!

• Alice Cooper - Lead Vocals, Backing Vocals
• Tommy Henriksen - Guitar, Percussion, Backing Vocals
• Joe Bonamassa - Guitar (on 'Rock'n'Roll')
• Johnny “Bee” Badanjek - Drums
• Mark Farmer (Grand Funk Railroad) - Guitars, Backing Vocals
• Wayne Kramer (MC5) - Guitars, Backing Vocals
• Garrett Bielaniec - Guitars
• Paul Randolph - Bass, Backing Vocals
• Dennis Dunaway - Bass (on 'Social Debris' and 'I Hate You')
• Neal Smith - Drums (on 'Social Debris' and 'I Hate You')
• Michael Bruce - Guitars (on 'Social Debris' and 'I Hate You')
• Steven Crayn - Lead Guitar (on 'Social Debris')
• Rick Tedesco - Guitar (on 'Social Debris')
• Bobby Emmett - Keyboards
• Bob Ezrin - Keyboards, Percussion, Backing Vocals
• Nolan Young - Saxophone
• Allen Dennard - Trumpet
• Long Shorty - Backing Vocals
• Mick Collins - Backing Vocals
• Sheryl Cooper - Backing Vocals
• Calico Cooper - Backing Vocals

February 19th, 1987 - 34 years ago today, the nightmare returned to the Providence Civic Centre, with support from Megadeth