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Cooper 'trashes' Canada

Snake-rocker Alice figures his musical traditions will survive into the next century

Shock rocker Alice Cooper will present the first concert of the '90s at Halifax Metro Centre.

Twenty years down the road from his debut, Cooper has seen more imitators than you can shake a snake at. Funny as it seems, his 17-daye Canadian tour is celebrating his first Top-20 album since 1975, and Cooper sees himself and his flatterers set to end the century.

"We came along at a time when we defined what the street look was. That definition was so on the money that people still love that look. They love the big hair and a little make up, and ripped-up Levi's with leather boots. Since we did it first. I do get a lot of credit for designing that look.

"But I think a lot of bands have copied more Alice attitude, in the sense that it's rock and roll and it should be fun and should have a certain rebellion to it," Cooper said in a telephone interview from a tour stop in Ottawa.

The tour, dubbed Alice Cooper Trashes Canada after the singer's latest album Trash, stops in Halifax on Jan. 8 at 7:30 p.m. and at Sydney's Centre 200 on Jan 10.

Trash marks the softening of Cooper's sound. He worked on the album with songwriter and producer Desmond Child, who has worked with the bands Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, among others. While market expansion was an obvious goal, Cooper said he didn't want to dilute his image.

"I said to him that I didn't want to change Alice Cooper, I just wanted him to bring out the best parts of the songs. That's really what he does well. It's something like my 20th album and I don't know how many songs he's written but we would know very quickly whether something was working or not.

"I think you can't stop a great song. If a song is a hit, you cannot stop it. Poison was one of those songs. It's been out there for four months and it's still being played. Hopefully, House of Fire will do that, and I'd like Only My Heart Talking to do that."

Trash brings to a close Cooper's flirtation with campy horror movie violence, except for renditions of oldies, and instead has a loose theme showing the world awash in deceit and disease. Cooper said that now ever sex is life-threatening.

"The whole sexual thing is a great subject for Alice. It's a much more common denominator kind of subject than blood and guts and I think there's a lot of room there for irony, romance, drama and black humour. If I ever lose that, it won't be fun anymore. I've always felt that Alice could inject that kind of black humour into any subject.

"I made a lot of albums in the mid-eighties but I think they were more underground Alice Cooper albums — more for the connoisseur of Alice Cooper. But we really tapped into what the audience wanted on this one. I think it all comes down to going back to the original Alice sound. The Trash album reminds me of the Billion Dollar Babies or School's Out kind of sound.

"Raise Your Fist and Yell and Constrictor tours were very heavy metal. They were also very bloody. The theatrics were almost an ode to splatter movies. I thought that was fun to do and it was a calling card. People certainly knew Alice was back and had not mellowed. This show is 20 or 30 minutes longer than the last show, we do about 80 per cent of the new album, the classic stuff, a lot of stuff we've never done on stage, and a half-hour of theatrics in the middle of the show."

Cooper makes no secret of the fact that he had to battle alcoholism while at the top of his career. He said that the shows in the mid-seventies were performed in a fog and he has much more energy now. Still, Cooper doesn't want to set himself up as a reformed roll model.

"In some ways I look at that as puffery and in other ways I look at it as being nothing heroic. It was either stop or die. It's good that there's an example made — 'OK, Alice was at the peak and let himself become an alcoholic and now he's back and he's doing better than ever without the alcohol.' That's a great story. But there's nothing heroic about it. If I hadn't stopped, I'd be dead. I always make all my mistakes in public, but I do it first."

Born Vincent Furnier in Detroit in 1945, the younger singer formed a band with friends, adopted the ambiguous Alice Cooper moniker and moved the group to Los Angeles in1968. Cooper signed to musical satirist Frank Zappa's Straight Record label and their first album, Pretties For You, was released in 1969.

In 1970 Alice-mania hit when the teen-angst anthem I'm Eighteen got massive airplay. Combined with a live show that featured a huge snake and mock hangings and electrocutions, Cooper rode a huge wave of popularity. He even "Went Hollywood" for a time and guested on Hollywood Squares anf golfed with Bob Hope.

The persona has served him well and Cooper said it's because he is so malleable.

"When I do Eighteen onstage, the character I play — Alice — is eighteen. he definitely believes everything he's saying up there. If there was a song that required him to be 105, he'd be 105. If he has to be three or five years old, like in the song Steven, then he becomes that. I've always looked at him as a character."