Album Guide

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Alice Cooper. The stage shows. The classic rock anthems. The name itself. There's never been anyone quite like Alice Cooper — not even close. Alice says "everybody was into peace and love. We were in to fun, sex, death and money. I was trying to do anythign and everything to upset the applecart. Our attitude was Clockwork Orange instead of buckskin and granola. We wanted to see what was next. It turned out we were next, and we drove a stake through the heart of the love generation."

An now, in 1986, Alice Cooper returns to the rock wars with a vengeance, rocking harder than ever before with the new album, Constrictor. "This album's for the hardcord," he says, "no ballads." Produced by Beau Hill (Ratt's producer) and mixed by Michael Wagener (Dokken's producer), Constrictor revels in the same sly wit ability to turn teenage angst into anthem with the ease of a boa's slither that has always been an Alice Cooper trademark.

As for the name itself, Alice discloses, "I always envision an innocent, sweet-looking girl named Alice Cooper slyly hiding an axe behind her back, ready to do some serious damage. Alice Cooper can never be trusted." And why the emphasis on being so different, so shocking? "Remember how the Beatles were acceptable to your parents, but the Rolling Stones were considered too shocking? Well, we wanted to shock the Stones!"

Debuting in 1970, Alice Cooper soon turned the music world upside down, wearing outrageous clothing and even more outrageous make-up, performing music powered by crunching loud guitars framing lyrics that seemed to connect directly to the disaffected teenage psyche. Many artists have made similar attempts, but none have been able to equal the double-edged panache and knowing humor of Alice Cooper.

It became a series of triumph after triumph, as Alice recollects. "We were the first to use make-up and wild clothing onstage, and the first to use unusual sets and stage props in our show. At first everything was low budget, but then, when 'Eighteen' became such a big hit, suddenly we could afford to really do the things we wanted to do. We had the money to do it right. It was like a license to thrill."

Colossal concert tours followed, each one more elaborate than the next. Utilizing, for the first time in rock history, multi-level stage sets and elaborate scenery, special effects, props and illusions, plus revolutionary lighting concerts that have since become common, Alice Cooper concerts have always been the standard to which other rock tours must be compared. The use of the "magazine screen," where the visual image virtually bursts from the screen, has now become commonplace. Not so commonplace, of course, are some of the theatrical performances from the Alice Cooper stage shows, including the use of such terrifying props as the guillotine, the electric chair, and the gallows, with Alice invariably the victim. The Killer tour, then the School's Out tour, and then the highest grossing and most monumental undertaking in rock and roll concert tour history at the time, the Billion Dollar Babies tour. This was a landmark tour, a tour that set a precedent for all the tours that have followed, including by Alice himself, who was forced to rise to the occasion in order to try and top himself. He did so handily with the Welcome To My Nightmare tour.

Along with the historic concert tours came eight consecutive gold and platinum albums, featuring classic rock anthems of rebellion like "Eighteen," "School's Out," and "No More Mr. Nice Guy," among others. Innovations were not only the province of the tours — as proven by the creative packing of such albums as School's Out (the jacket unfolded into a school desk, and the record came wrapped in a pair of panties), Killer (detachable calendar depicting Alice being hung), Billion Dollar Babies (snakeskin walled unfolding with an oversized billion dollar bill inside), and Muscle of Love (in a grease-stained cardboard box).

In addition to influencing the very fundamentals of concert touring and record packaging, one look at punk fashions and heavy metal fashions of the '80s, and the Alice Cooper influence is overwhelmingly obvious, as it is in the music and attitude of so many punk/new wave groups and metal/hard rock groups. The trend-setting effects of Alice Cooper are everywhere, literally.

Even in video. Years before MTV was even a bleak in someone's eye, it was Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare that was perhaps the first long-form rock video — an album of the same name, linked sequentially. Nightmare was also one of the first commercially available home video rock tapes. And it was Alice Cooper's promo video for "Elected" (in 1972) that was probably the first rock video utilizing the performer in a conceptual video with an actual story line, as opposed to lip-synching the song or in some kind of amorphous fantasy sequence.

In fact, in so many ways, Alice Cooper brought show business and rock and roll together in a way never seen before (and rarely seen since). Alice Cooper is a pioneer of considerable foresight, a fact often overshadowed by the shock waves cause by his image, and quite possibly one of the greatest media creations of the modern day — so utterly self-invented and self-aware that the hype itself became a plaything and a foil.

After literally defining and spearheading rock and roll in the '70s, the effects of all that success and the rock and roll lifestyle combined with the musical stagnation of the disco era allowed Alice a chance to take some well-deserved (and much-needed) time off in order to lay the groundwork for his next adventure.

His plans really swung into high gear when he met guitarist Kane Roberts, from upstate New York. "We started writing together immediately," says Alice of the collaboration that has resulted in the new album Constrictor. "We share a taste for loud rock and roll and splatter movies, and we have the same sense of humor."

Once the songs came together, producer Beau Hill was selected to produce because, as Alice said, "we like the way he got Ratt's sound on tape," and Mix-Master Michael Wagener was brought in to complete the album. During the mixdown stage, Alice and the movie "Friday the 13th, Part 6 — Jason Lives" were put together in a marriage made in hell, when Alice was asked to write a theme song for the film — the first time this highly successful series of films had ever used a rock score. This linkup resulted in two additional firsts — the first rock video, "He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)," to be produced for a "Friday" flick, and the first appearance by Jason in any other medium, as Jason appeared in the video footage with Alice. Wagener produced and mixed "He's Back" in its entirety.

The result of the team effort is musical mayhem at a most exalted level, an aural apocalypse shot through and through with the screaming guitar of Kane Roberts over a bone-crunching rhythm section. And through it all, Alice's aplomb never falters. Alice Cooper is a truly timeless character: the creepy kind of guy you never felt comfortable around, half-grown up and gold weird, like the "Teenage Frankenstein" of the album's first song. The subject matter ranges far and wide through Constrictor, but Alice's calculated outrages walks a fine line. "Thrill My Gorilla" offers gonad-level primate parody of all the cliches of phallic exhortation as Alice sings "Where were you when the monkey hit the fan?" "Give It Up" is a tractional Cooperesque rocker, while "Simple Disobedience" recommends exactly that for its own sake. Alice speaks out about the global situation with "The World Needs Guts," about which Alice says, "I'm no dove. The last thing anybody should want to do is push America around. THis is a heavy metal country, and I'm proud of it."

And, if there were any doubt that Alice Cooper is back on the track, just ask him about the upcoming concert tour. "We've got the best production team in the world for this stuff, and, if anything, after a couple of years off I've gotten even more diabolical! We may even have to pass out blood bibs to the front row seats on this tour!"

Accept no substitute — the original and still the champion — Alice Cooper.