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Alice Cooper still rockin' at 48

Mom, Dad, three kids and Grandma pack into a van and head for Tucson.

Dad looks a bit road-weary when he pulls up to the hotel at midafternoon on Tuesday.

He registers in the lobby, and the rest of the clan slowly gather their belongings and meander out of the van.

"I just drove down from Phoenix," Alice Cooper says after getting his family settled into the hotel. He turns from the seventh-floor window where he's been keeping a watchful eye as his kids play in the pool.

"I've played nine holes this morning. Then I said, 'I got a job. I've got to go to Tucson.'"

At 48, four years after his last tour, the Paradise Valley resident is back on the road, leaving hearth and home because he was asked by Germany's hard-rocking Scorpions to co-headline a U.S. tour.

The Tucson date at the Convention Center Arena is the 10th of the tour, the final tuneup before two major shows at the Universal Amphitheater on Wednesday and Friday in Los Angeles and Cooper's homecoming show today at Compton Terrace. They'll have played 47 dates by the time the tours wraps up Aug. 13 in Atlanta.

Besides the tour, Cooper has a live album recorded at Sammy Hagar's club in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, due in September. It features guests such as Hagar, White Zombie's Rob Zombie, and Guns 'N Roses guitarist Slash working on Cooper standbys. He plans a new studio album after that.

"It's almost like if you're a baseball player, you've got to play baseball," Cooper says. "After a while, you sit at home and say, 'I've got to get out and do something.' Even if it's doing your hits."

At show time, Cooper becomes a cartoon character, a maestro of mayhem presiding over a rock show of hits and a series of tableaus based on his songs. He's a strait-jacketed victim in Ballad of Dwight Fry, a lone hero fending off a band of street thugs in Gutter Cats vs. the Jets, and a sword-wielding cynic spearing a wad of money and shaking bills out over a hungry crowd during Billion Dollar Babies.

At home, he's a suburban dad with maybe just a little more time on his hands than typical. He plays golf daily, and "Alice sightings" are as common at classical concerts and small eateries as they are at the Valley's rock clubs.

"I know who I am on both levels," Cooper says. "I know who I am at home in my daily life and I know who I am on stage. I mean, if people don't know that Alice is a character by now, that I play both him..."

His words trail off in consternation.

"They can't still be thinking that I'm running around at Chris-Town with makeup on and a snake," he says. "I made that so plain. The two things are so separate, and it's been that way for so long."

He thinks about audience expectations and then says, "I can't watch William Shatner in anything except Star Trek, because he's Captain Kirk, you know? When he plays something else, I go, 'I don't want to see that,' because he's Captain Kirk. I want him to be Captain Kirk...

"When a guy plays a role really well, you really don't like to see him in other roles."

It's the same for his audience, he reasons.

"I think it's kind of funny because in my reality, I'm straighter than straight, and I think that's what makes Alice even more intense, because he's a fantasy character for me. He's certainly nothing like me."

In the beginning

There was a time when Cooper didn't seem capable of separating the two roles. His offstage became as fantastic and strange as that on stage.

Cooper was born Vincent Furnier on Feb 4, 1948 in Detroit. His parents moved their family to Phoenix in the early '60s, where Cooper eventually went to Cortez High School.

In 1964 he formed his first band the Earwigs, with buddies Glen Buxton and Dennis Dunaway and two others who eventually left. By 1965, they were the Spiders and had added Michael Bruce. In 1966, the band changed the name to the Nazz and added Neal Smith. They played dates around Arizona.

In 1967, the band found out the name the Nazz was taken by a Philadelphia group led by Todd Rundgren. The story goes that Furnier took the name Alice Cooper after a hypnotherapist told him that men and women contain elements of both genders.

It became the band name as well.

The concept of a man with a woman's name leading a rock band seemed completely subversive. Their costuming completed the illusion of rocking transvestites years before David Bowie's gender-bending 1970 tour.

"It must have been a little frightening," Cooper said. The costumes they wore for their 1969 debut Pretties for You, came from an ice show that was going out of business in Michigan. The band, impoverished at the time, jumped at the offer of cheap costumes.

"We went in and bought everything that we could buy for $10," he said. "The cheerleader thing? I just ripped it open and wore it like a vest, and suddenly it was I was wearing a dress."

The album deal came about in 1968 when the band closed a memorial birthday party for the late Lenny Bruce at the Cheetah in Los Angeles. After four songs, the band had chased off most of the 8,000 people who'd been watching such groups as Electric flag and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Frank Zappa, in the front row, liked and signed the Alice Cooper band to his label.

"It was so much of an innocent time," Cooper says now. "It was so easy to shock an audience because they didn't have anything to compare it to. We really weren't that shocking.

"You take what we did then that was considered really shocking and do it now, and we're family entertainment.

"I tell people, 'I do not mind being relegated to the Haunted House at Disneyland.' I don't mind being the Haunted House of Disneyland of rock and roll. That's what I do. I'm really good at it, you know?...

"We never killed anything on stage. There was never any nudity on stage. There was never swearing. I didn't allow swearing on stage. So there was really nothing, but it was just the idea of Alice that shocked people.

"It was the idea that there was this guy named Alice Cooper with hair down to here, that their kids were buying his records."

Finding an audience

The first two albums did not do well, and the band moved from Los Angeles to Detroit, where things went much better.

"Detroit understood us, totally," Cooper says. "The first gig we played was with The Stooges, MC5, and we fit like the missing piece of the puzzle. It was 'Click,' and everybody says, 'Oh yeah!' And he's from Detroit on top of it!' It's my hometown."

In Detroit, they came under the tutelage of producer Bob Ezrin and produced their 1971 breakthrough album, Love It to Death.

After listening to the first two albums, Ezrin told them, "People want to like you. They really do want to like you, but there's no handle. There's absolutely nothing to hold on to, except your image, the fact that you guys are really out there and you're one of the bands people love to hate.

"If you listen to a Doors album, when you hear Jim Morrison or the keyboards or the guitar, you know immediately it's the Doors. You have to do that with Alice Cooper."

They took the advice and devised a mix of songs that was equal parts cathartic rock-and-roll release (I'm Eighteen, Under My Wheels) and songs about the macabre (Ballad of Dwight Fry, Dead Babies). Suddenly, the band was a hit.

Parents may have been shocked, but kids flocked to the shows in droves.

The group's increasingly big budget gothic horror fantasies, with beheadings, hangings and electrocutions started the '70s trend of huge rock-and-roll productions. Would Kiss and Bowie have made the impact they made if Cooper hadn't led the way?

All of this seems to be mighty dark stuff for the son of a preacher, but Cooper doesn't think so.

"Alice Cooper's always been a morality play," he says. "Alice does something bad. They catch him. They punish him. They cut his head off or they do something to punish him, and then he comes back and he's forgiven."

Cooper's most recent album, 1994's The Last Temptation, emphasized this moralistic theme. The Cooper character offers a kid anything he wants, if he'll just join his circus, and the kid refuses — a parallel with Jesus refusing Satan in the desert.

"I have no problems with promoting morality because I think if there's anything this country really needs right now, it's a good shot of morality," he says. "I think that we're collapsing from within… We abuse freedom more than anything."

Decade of debauchery

He speaks from experience. The success of such albums as School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies and the tours that followed fueled a decade of drinking and debauchery. The band flew on a private jet where booze and pliant women were plentiful.

The more successful he became, the more Cooper talked about visualizing sexual fantasies on stage and the link between violence and those fantasies.

In those days, he sounded like the embodiment of all that was evil and reptilian. Yet rock critics such as the late Lester Bangs recognised early that what Cooper offered was a cartoon of violence and sex.

Bangs declared in 1972 that "we all grew up on two things: rock and roll and TV."

"Alice Cooper was the first rock group to recognize that fact and fuse the two influences in a big way." Bangs said.

Cooper disbanded the group in 1974, and Cooper leaned a bit more towards television than rock. His Welcome to My Nightmare became a TV special. Did he really have his own square on the Hollywood Squares? He appeared to be running in the same show-biz circles as George Burns and Jack Benny.

His last big hit of the '70s were ballads such as Only Women Bleed and You and Me, which came out in 1977, the year after he married his wife Sheryl.

Back in the Valley

In 1979, he was treated for alcoholism. In the early '80s, he was bounced from his longtime label and hit bottom in his personal life as Sheryl filed for divorce (they later reconciled) and he was treated for alcoholism again.

He also moved back to the Valley from Beverly Hills.

"When I had my daughter, I said I would not bring her up there, so we moved back here," he once said. Daughter Calico is now 15.

In 1986, Cooper returned to recording with what he calls his "splatter movie" album, Constrictor. New technology allowed him to go all out on the stage gore. The beheadings looked more real than ever as the severed head's features writhed.

Many new bands have taken "shock rock" down road Cooper never traveled, making sex, drugs and rock and roll seem relatively tame.

"My three targets of social ridicule or sensationalism were always sex, death and money," he says. For the most part, he avoided politics and religion.

"Politics to me was absolutely the most boring subject in the world, and religion was much too personal. I grew up in a Christian household.

"To me, I mean, I would never, ever do anything anti-religious because I'd be afraid of getting hit by lightning. I mean, my dad was a pastor. My grandfather was a pastor. I was the original prodigal son. To me, religion was something I never messed with at all. I had too much respect for it.

He won't do such sexy songs as Bed of Nails in his show now, because "they might be misinterpreted."

"I can't get up there and just sing a bunch of stuff that I just don't believe in anymore," he says. "People take sex way too casually."

Maybe that's the father in him talking. Besides his daughter, there's his 10-year-old son, Dash, and three-year-old daughter, Sonora.

Dash will be riding in the tour bus with his dad for a week, sleeping in bunks decked out with TVs, naturally.