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Yes, Alice Cooper Is a boy

FOR IT'S FINALE the rock group called Alice Cooper plays "Don't Blow Your Mind Like You Did Last Summer" and blows a cloud of chicken features over the audience.

The feathers are followed by the chickens, like and squawking. Then Alice himself — yes, Alice is a boy who wears eye makeup and a silver-sequined dress over dirty yellow trousers — gets into a fist-fight with his drummer who wears white long hair and generally performs in a sparkling gold undershirt and gold-lenses pilot's goggles.

If things to well, the audience is in an uproar. And if things go really well, the group gets attacked.

"A motorcycle gang rushed the stage in Michigan and tried to kill us," Alice recalls pleasurable. "It was great, but we felt we had to get out of there."

ALICE COOPER is one of the new — and newly wealthy — groups on the pop music scene. What they perform is called "dada rock," and it takes its name from a certain resemblance to a long outmoded kind of painting in which the artist uses and sometimes distorts unexpected objects for symbolic purpose and for shock value.

DADA ROCK takes pride in the unexpected. If an audience shows real signs of understanding, the groups begin to worry. Indeed, some of them are so far out, they make the Beatles look like so many little old men.

Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, for instance. A California bou, he used to roam the streets singing his songs about love and motherhood and murder to strangers for a dime. His behavior was so weird that he was thrown out of high school and he was twice committed to mental institutions by his mother. But his new album, "An Evening With Wild Man Fischer," is now climbing the charts and he's considered one of dada rock's brightest comers.

NEW as it is, dada rock has an Establishment Figure. This is Frank Zappa, 29, founder and leader of the legendary Mothers of Invention. For five years, the Mothers rocked the rock scene with brilliant, far-out music, vicious satire and outrageous behavior.

Now the Mothers are gone, but Zappa carries on with a rock empire of his own known simply as Bizarre. It was he who discovered Alice Cooper and promoted the group's first bigtime appearance at Bill Graham's Fillmore West last fall.

Part of the dada world is contempt for society, and this usually includes the eager audiences for dada rock.

"I don't think the typical rock fan is smart enough to know he's being taken," says Zappa. "These kids wouldn't know music if it came up and bit 'em."

ZAPPA is also responsible for the recent meteoric rise of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. The captain is an affable, hairy man of 28 who kicked around for years trying to play "other people's music." HIs latest album, "Trout Mask Replica," is the first thing he's done that he's really proud of.

"None of us in the band can either read or write music and I like it that way," declares Beefheart. His band consists of his cousin, the Mascara Snake, on bass clarinet, Zoot Horn Rollo on glass finger guitar and flute, Antennae Jimmy Semens on steel appendage guitar, Rockette Morton on bass and Drumbo on drums.

Beefheart is so far out (from most of the rock scene) that he is patriotic. "I don't think this government should be completely torn down," he says "I do think the U.S. Constitution is a beautiful document and I wish everybody would live by it. If that's being patriotic, I'm patriotic."

BUT like everybody else in pop music, he takes a dim view of contemporary civilization. His song "Wild Life" says it most clearly:

"Wild life along with my wife,
I'm goin' up on the mountain fo' the rest uh m'life,
'Fore they take m'life, m'wild life, m'wife...
Find me a cave an' talk to bears,
I'm takin' me in.
Wild life is a man's best friend..."

There seems to be a limit, though, to how much of the calculated chaos of dada rock even the groups themselves can take. One of the zaniest of the new genre, The Bonzo Dog Band, recently split up. They did it, singer and chief clown Vivian Stanshall explained, to prevent "boring audiences and ourselves."