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Alice Cooper: Weird May Not Be Beautiful But It Sure Is Strange

I was there before it all began to happen big for the ACs, as I like to call them. Sometime before the Love It to Death album was released and before "Eighteen" became a teenage — what would you expect with a title like that — smash I saw Alice and the lads at Max's Kansas City. Some friends from France were visiting and I was reviewing for a well known trade magazine so I brought them along. When Alice came out made up to be killed and started smashing his mike stand with a hammer singing "Sun Arise" (the old Rolf Harris Down-under hit), I thought they'd die but, to my surprise, they dug it completely. My French friends were, as it turned out, theater freaks rather than your run of the mill rock and roll buffs (they've all since graduated from pharmacy school).

Can You Top This?

Having seen the Stooges the week before, I had gone into Max's feeling it would take something really powerful to actually impress me. After all hadn't Iggy actually puked while performing at Ungano's (this is not to say that others hadn't vomited in that hallowed rock dungeon but I'm sure nobody had thought to do it on stage until Iggy broke the ice)? How could this upstart top, Iggy's regurgitation routine for sheer theatrical excitement? Easily, I soon found out. When Alice started dancing around wearing a giant carton on his head and torso (similar in effect to the Old Gold dancing cigarette packs on TV in the 50s) I knew that I had found the ultimate in far out, yet nifty, theatrical rock and roll. His "Nobody Likes Me" schtick sung through Dutch doors was the clincher and I was an Alice Cooper fan for life. It seemed to me that anybody can look good in a daring decollete but Alice wasn't just another pretty body — this guy was real art!

Beer-Drinking Man

Later I actually met Alice when his manager brought him to the trade magazine for an interview and some hype on his single. I must say that I was more than favorably impressed by the personable Mr. Cooper, who artfully used his can of Budweiser as a prop through the course of the interview. He told me that television was the biggest influence on his career and I immediately knew that I had found a true soul brother (or sister, in this case).

Eventually Alice Cooper became a household word in several hundred thousand households as a result of the success of "Eighteen" and the group was booked to play Town Hall. I was eager with anticipation days before the gig. "Will success spoil Alice Cooper?" I wondered to myself. The day finally came and the act they put on was nothing short of masterful with fantastic props: an electric chair, boa constrictor, straight jacket and nurse dressed in white, and great music. Rock and roll, hard and fast, pure and simple — the kind you'd be almost willing to pay to hear on your AM car radio if you could.

Props a-Plenty

More recently the Academy of Music was the setting for another milestone in Alice Cooper's collective career. It was time for Alice to debut a new act, dubbed Killer, the same as the new album. As ever, props played an important role in the concert and the collection this time was mind-blowing. An incomplete list follows: bubble machine, smoke machine, hatchet, top hat, bowler (donated by an enthusiastic member of the audience), torn leotards, a white cutaway (tails), cute little doll (for the bizarro "Dead Babies" sequence), the boa (who looked well-fed as ever), whip, a great number of Killer calendars (courtesy of Warner Bros. , no doubt) which were donated to the throbbing masses and, the piece de resistance: a true-to-life-and-­death gallows.

As Alice mounted the gallows the smoke machine went crazy. The trap opened and Alice really looked as if he'd just gotten his just deserts as he twirled at the end of the rope. Blinding lightning flashes and deafening thunder (someone called it the condensed soundtrack album of World War II, starring the original cast) kept the media mixed &mdah; or all shook up.

But what's this? As the smoke clears, Alice is back sporting a white topper and tails to match and the band rocks out again. The anti­Christ is resurrected and we boogie again. More calendars are thrown into the audience and pandemonium breaks out. Curtain.

BUT IT'S STILL NOT OVER!

A far out rock and roll show, an execution, a resurrection: ALL THIS AND AN ENCORE, TOO!? Yup, he came back to sing "Under My Wheels," the new single, one more time. Alice is, as they say in the biz, a great example of "promotion in motion."

We love you, Alice. Keep on keepin' on. We'll be glad to watch you die anytime.