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Tending Sick Alice On Tour

Phony Patriotism In Philly

Author: Al Rudis

PHILADELPHIA — It's the City of Brotherly Love and the birthplace of Liberty. So why did Alice Cooper choose Philadelphia to launch his latest outrage? Well, the Liberty Bell is cracked.

A few miles from Independence Hall, in a huge arena called the Spectrum, the group Alice Cooper, led by singer Alice Cooper, played host to 18,000 fans, plus writers flown in from all over the country.

It was a road show that will hit at least 56 American cities and gross $4.5 million, and despite the turn for kinky theatricality in pop music, it maintains Alice's reputation for putting on the most professional and most disgusting concerts of them all.

THE PRODUCTION is based on the group's new album, "Billion Dollar Babies," and most of the songs therein are dramatized to their illogical extreme. A guillotine has replaced the gallows on which Alice used to be hanged, but even though the safety catch on the 40-pound blade is temperamental and the audience may someday see a genuine decapitation, the scariest thing in the show is not the execution but the extraction.

For a sequence based on the song "Unfinished Sweet," Alice is attacked by a huge dental drill while the loudspeakers play a tape actually recorded at Alice's last visit to the dentist. After the drilling, Alice battles with a giant, decayed, dancing tooth, finally vanquishing it with the aid of a huge toothbrush. But even this comic relief doesn't drive away the drilling sounds, amplified hundreds of times.

THIS NUMBER, as much as anything, is the key to Alice Cooper. At a press conference the morning after the show, Alice explained how he came to do it: "I think it's just the fact that everybody's scared to death of dentists. And that seemed like the perfect thing to use for frightening people."

It's wrong to conclude that Alice has got every 12-to-15-year-old in the country in his hip pocket (as some have claimed). There are many teenagers who enjoy school, who have a warm relationship with their parents, who prefer folk music or light pop to raunchy rock and roll, and who don't think a trip to the dentist is a fate worse than death.

Some of these teenagers, and even some older folks, still like Alice Cooper, but they aren't his constituency. They aren't the ones for whom he wrote his anthems about blowing up school or being obsessed by doubts. Although Alice is in his 20s, he is tuned in to this segment of American teendom and they are the ones buying him his shopping centers and apartment complexes.

AFTER Alice has played with his snake, speared a doll, rolled around with pieces of mannequins for a number called "I Love the Dead," been guillotined and comes out for the inevitable encore where he tosses out posters and turns the audience into a raging mob, he closes the evening with a bizarre curtain call. As Kate Smith's recording of "God Bless America" booms out over the loudspeakers, Alice unfurls a huge flag, hangs it on a post, then tosses out little flags to the audience, as the cast marches by holding sparklers and saluting.

What Alice may be saying with his patriotic ending is truly as all-American as his name, that he has attempted to capture the modern spirit of this country. Or as he put it when someone asked him if he thought he could still top himself: "Sure. People just keep getting sicker so, so do we. The sicker you kids all get out there, the sicker we'll get."