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Iggy and Alice — the Outer Fringes

Author: Lynn Van Matre

HALLOWEEN came early to the Opera House this year. Iggy Stooge [or Pop, as he's calling himself this year] flounced onstage in a weird winter wonderland flash, his face, torso and chest covered with specked of icicle glitter, his hair thickly dusted with silver.

A male in spite of his name, Alice Cooper, in garish eye makeup and beauty spot, was costumed in silver lame stretch suit with attached hood, peaked with attached hood, peaked Ku Klux Klan style. Later he would strip to a black stretch leotard, slit below the navel, giving him the appearance of a demented witch. Later on, a straightjacket would figure in his wardrobe.

With all the talk about rock going soft, marching toward reality to the strains of the James Taylors, it's easy to overlook its outer fringes, its kinky spectacles. Two of the hardest-to-ignore exponents of those twilight zones performed Saturday night in the Opera House to receptions which indicated there's a still a big market for it.

Iggy's gross antics are "reality" of another sort. To the guitars and drums of the other three Stooges, the rhythms running strong and insistent and full of crude energy, Iggy does his things. He sings, but that is incidental to his repeated jumps into the audience, his blatantly suggestive movements, stamping and flouncing, his petulant glowering and gaping, looking at the audience from popping glazed eyes. He crouches on all fours like a feral child and behaves like one — crudely, with no emotional restraint, relating on the basest level, expressing, perhaps, what his audiences have buried beneath the layers of civilized society.

He's insane. Or so it would seem, so he wants it to seem. But while fascinating in a diseased sort of way for a while, Iggy soon gets horribly boring. His basic antics seem never to vary, and after a while of self-indulgence, no matter how weird, begins to pall.

The five-man Alice Cooper group, on the other hand, is predictable only in its unpredictability. A "child of the media," vocalist Alice feels the world is based on sex and violence and seeks to reflect this in performance which is as much a visual assault as a musical one. Unlike Iggy and the Stooges, Alice Cooper's music can stand alone. It is hard and pulsating, rough and chaotic, all drums and guitars except for an occasional churning weird organ and Alice's harmonica. It writhes with turmoil and uncertainty, with aberrations; it speaks of insanity and its setting it literally or figuratively the mental institution.

Coupled with the entertaining outrages of Alice himself, the effects are cubed. Smiling coyly like a transvestite Tiny Tim gone berserk, Alice opens the set singing one of the songs from their "Love It to Death" album — beating the floor with a silver hammer which earlier hung bizarrely from it's own stand.

A shrouded object pushed onstage proves to be a Frankenstein's monster chair, with weird lights and tubes. A black-garbed dummy sits grotesquely in it. Soon it lies on the floor, stabbed by witch doctor Alice, while Alice sits in the chair with a big funnel on his head intoning "Bodies... need... rest." The finale, involving a ripped-open pillow, clouds of vapor and a blower fan, left everyone gasping — especially if you were near the stage — and choked on the monsoon of feathers. It was different.

The prelude to all this was Jam Band, featuring Michael Quatro on a specially made spinet-shaped electric piano with the inner workings laid bare. From it he coaxed a variety of sounds from a variety of selections from Rachmaninoff to rock with equal assurance. If any group can bridge the gap between classical and rock, Jam Band can, with Quatro's piano and a rocking drummer and bassist.