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Magic Alice On The Road

While Billion Dollar Babies (Warner Bros.) was racing up the charts, New York's Alice Cooper office was in a flurry of active preparations for his newest venture, a three month extended tour of the U.S. The Amazing Randi stood colorfully garbed in one corner of the Greenwich Village townhouse, playfully sending supersonic jet flashes from his fingertips streaming across the room. "I'm teaching Alice some magic tricks," he revealed, while his rainbow-featured cockatoo looked on silently from Randi's sarong-covered shoulder. With a flick of the magician's wrist, magic wands appear to change instantly into delectable floral bouquets, and red handkerchiefs turned green. What was Alice doing cavorting with the Amazing Randi, star of late-night TV variety shows? Preparing for his three-ring circus, a new act richly laden with Houdini-like disappearing tricks, beheadings, and quick-change disguises.

And from the moment Alice slinks onto the runway singing his hit single, "Hello, Hurray," to the fiesta-like grand finale, complete with onstage dancing and drinking, the show is a Cooper thriller in the best bloodiest tradition. Magic dominates the evening. A guillotine chops off Alice's head with a thud, and as the singer's body is temporarily hidden from view, the four remaining band members emerge from the shadows with four plaster masks of his face held aloft. The Amazing Randi himself, always in the background supervising, appears onstage to saw Alice's slender body in half. The resurrected Alice releases glowing flashes from his fingertips, and simultaneously, thirty feet above his head, duplicate flashes stream across the stage, igniting the darkness with their eerie glow. Bloody heads, levitating bodies, magic wands - how does Alice feel about his new role as rockdom's new Houdini? As he hisses in "Hello, Hurray," "Loving every second, every moment, every scream."