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The Nightmare Returns

The new Alice Cooper show has to be seen to be believed, Alice has successfully pulled off the come­back of the '80s. By sheer talent and creativity, Alice has managed to hold on to his oldest devotees and, with the release of the hard­rocking Constrictor LP, he's snatched up a new audience of bloodthirsty youngsters as well. The crowd at the new Alice Cooper show is ageless. In many cases it's a family outing — with parents and kids alike raising their fists in unison, paying homage to the king of splatter rock.

The photos that accompany this interview were taken at the San Diego Sports Arena. Alice skipped off to Oklahoma before I could get a chance to talk to him, but we finally managed to chat sometime later when we hooked up by phone. Alice was holed up in a hotel room somewhere in Canada watching Freddie Krueger mutilate people on the television while Kane Roberts (Coop's guitarist) mutilated his guitar in the next room. The conver­sation began with tales of woe from the photo pit as I had just managed to scrape the last remain­ing drops of Cooper blood from my camera lenses. Then, it was on to one of Alice's favorite subjects: splatter flicks.

CS: Okay, Alice, what's the scariest splatter flick of all?

ALICE: The best one? I'd say if you want to be totally frightened ... are you good at being frightened? Do you like to be frightened?

CS: Let me put it this way: the original Night of the Living Dead still gives me the willies.

ALICE: Okay, that's nothing. There's a movie called The Evil Dead that you should pick up. It's in every video store. You gotta watch that one, but don't watch it alone if you get too squeamish. It's the Grandaddy. It's great! Take it from Alice — The Evil Dead. It's the one that most people who are into splatter movies will say is at least in their top five.

CS: Describe a typical day on the road for Alice Cooper.

ALICE: Well, generally we travel in the morning, you know — if it's like three or four hundred miles away, the city that we're playing in. We either travel at night after the show, like 2:30 in the morning and we get there at seven or eight in the mor­ning, or we travel the day of the show. So that's about a six-hour drive. Sometimes if I don't feel like driving I just fly into the city. Then I go to the video store and rent two or three splatter videos and two martial arts videos — I love cheap martial arts movies too. I always watch a martial arts movie right before the show in my bus.

CS: Don't you use the dressing rooms?

ALICE: I don't use a dressing room; I use the bus, always. I don't like using the dressing room; I think once you get into the dressing room you kinda lose your energy. You get too distracted from all the people around, you know? But any­ways, I usually go to the video store, get my videos, and I come back to the hotel, do usually about two or three interviews, and then close my eyes for about 20 minutes at 5:00. I wake up just in time to watch Wheel of Fortune, or if I'm real­ly lucky, Divorce Court or People's Court — -those are the ones that get me up for the show. Then I get down to the bus and I have one candy bar — Hershey's dark choc­olate — and I watch my martial arts movie, put my makeup on, and then I'm ready... for about an hour I sit there and turn into Alice.

CS: So you put on your own makeup?

ALICE: Oh yeah, I do my own make­up. I get all my Alice drag on, and then nobody's allowed in for an hour before I go onstage. That's when I do my transformation into Alice. Nobody knows where he comes from, but he shows up every night in my dressing room.

CS: Well, he sure is great onstage.

ALICE: Thank you, I'll tell him.

CS: Wait a minute — who am I talk­ing to?

ALICE: Well, this is me of course, but at the same time, you know, Alice only lives onstage. The char­acter really only lives on the stage for an hour and 20 minutes every night.

CS: It must be great to have that kind of release.

ALICE: Well, it is. I mean, if every­body had that kind of alter-ego to depend on, you wouldn't have any psychiatrists, you know? It's very convenient to be somebody else when you want to be. Alice is total­ly opposite of me; Alice is aggres­sive, and he's egotistical and he's arrogant. But that's the way the people want him. I think that's the way he is, and the people wouldn't accept Alice if he were humble. On the other hand, I'm just the oppo­site; I really am not egotistical at all. Alice demands attention; he's like a real show-off.

CS: Don't you ever feel like picking up the microphone and saying, "Hey, how are you guys doing out there?"

ALICE: No, Alice likes to look out there and see those staring up and going "Wow," to him, that's more im­portant than him communicating a "Hi, how are ya," type of thing. Alice wants to go out there, and in­stead of going up there with the at­titude of "Gee, I hope you like us tonight," he goes out there with the attitude of grabbing them by the throat and shaking them for an hour and 20 minutes. If you look at it, a lot of people have a love affair with their audience. Alice likes to rape them and I think the audience likes being raped. They like the idea of taking the female part, ya know, sort of taking a female roll in this thing, and they like the idea that Alice assaults them. He assaults them with theatrics, he assaults them with the music, and he as­saults them with that sort of over­bearing personality of his, and I think that's what the audience comes to see. They wouldn't ac­cept Alice if after every song he said, "Thank you, oh, thank you so much. And this next song is about. .. " That just wouldn't be Alice. It does create a lot of ten­sion, but I found out that most of the time the audience more or less looks at Alice as a catharsis kind of thing, where we more or less do everything for them. There's usual­ly very little violence at our con­certs because they're too busy watching the show and they don't have time to react — to go do any­thing at the show. I've been to other metal concerts where the band gets up there and after their fourth song, the people are going, "Okay, come on, let's do something." Because there's just nothing going on up there onstage. So, our idea is to exhaust the audience. We want them to walk out of the place go­ing, "Geez, I feel like I just worked for an hour and a half." So we do have a lot less violence at our con­certs than most other bands.

CS: That leads to a question that I wanted to ask you: Do you think there's an intelligent solution to the fan violence?

ALICE: I don't think there's any so­lution to the fact that rock & roll, just in itself, is an aggressive kind of music. It's written for young kids, and when I talk about young kids, I mean up to 30 years old. Most people that grew up on rock & roll are still kids. But, the 15-year-­olds, up to that age... there's a 15-year spread there where rock & roll really affects them heavily. I think that if you go to see an Alice Cooper show, you're gonna get a high from it. We attack everybody's senses. We just keep hitting them, and hitting them, and hitting them with more spectacular stuff, and it's like a free high without taking anything. But I don't think that, even if a band like Journey, or a band like Genesis... I don't care who it is; if they do a great concert, you've got 16,000 kids there and there's.gonna be a certain amount of violence. I just don't see any way around it. I would say most viol­ence is caused by alcohol. I think the biggest cause of aggravated violence is alcohol. So where do you put the blame? Do you blame it on the rock & roll or do you blame it on alcohol? I don't think anybody goes to a rock concert to sit there — unless you're going to see John Denver, or somebody to walk out going, "Gee, that was an edifying evening of pure entertainment and loveliness." People go to see Alice Cooper to go, "Yeah! More Blood!"

CS: On the new album there's a song called "The World Needs Guts." What else do you think the world needs?

ALICE: The reason that was written actually, was because it was kind of a criticism. I am not very political at all. I try not to be political even though I am politically aware of what's going on. I don't think rock & roll should be a political kind of thing. We write about death, sex and money; I think that includes horror and that includes sensation­alism, and absurdity. But when it comes to politics, I think we wrote that song just when we were about to bomb Libya and the French wouldn't let us fly over France. They were our allies. I was going ­"Hey, come on. It's time to kick the bully's ass, and you guys are wim­ping out." I mean, they made us fly all the way around two countries to get there. It kinda pissed me off. Why are they being such wimps about it? So, I just said, "The World Needs Guts." Then after a while I thought about it and I thought, well, it also means you can't let the bul­ly down the street push you around either. You can't walk around the extra block because you have to pass the bully on the street. Some­times you gotta stand up and kick his ass.

CS: Okay, Alice, let's talk about the show. How long did it take to plan?

ALICE: This show was about two and a half to three months of re­hearsals and getting together a lot of the special effects. We had music rehearsals going on at one side of town, and rehearsals for the lighting and staging and for the people that were gonna be the ac­tors on the other. They had to get down what was gonna happen with them. We were having the props built so there were three different things going on at once. I had to have another head made for the guillotine scene so I had to do a plastic cast to the head and that was irritating as hell. That's one of the worst things you could ever do is get your head cast. They have to put that stuff all over your eyes and the only sense you really have is smell because that's the only thing left open to breathe with. It's very claustrophobic, but it's the only way to get a perfect head for the guillotine thing.

CS: How much does it cost to put on the show?

ALICE: I know the whole show to­gether was about $400,000 to put together. I'd say per week it must cost $100,000. It's the kind of thing where everybody's a specialist in the show so everybody gets paid according to their specialty. It real­ly works out well that way: Every­body makes money and everybody has a good time. The most impor­tant thing is that everybody has so much fun with the show. Nobody dreads doing the show. After about a 100 shows you start going, oh no, not another show! But with this troupe of people, if there's a day off, everybody gets restless. You see, normally we run around and everybody does what they have to do and then at night everybody gets together and does the show. It's a relief. It's sort of like an or­gasm to get up onstage for an hour and 20 minutes and do the show. Everybody gets off on it. When we have a day off, we sit around going, oh brother — what are we gonna do now?

CS: Do you ever get stage fright?

ALICE: Yes, in fact, the first two dates — Santa Barbara and San Ber­nardino [California]. I didn't get stage fright but for the first time in a long time I felt nervous. It was because I hadn't performed in three and a half years — the new show and everything like that. The moment I got onstage it was great, everything just popped right into place. In fact, I've found that the stage has be­come a real cure-all of everything. The other night my stomach was killing me — I never get sick, but I realized that as soon as I got through the first four songs, as soon as I blasted onstage and got the energy and the adrenalin, that everything was going to be okay, and it was true: Every single time you get sick, you get onstage and let the adrenalin cure you.

CS: I'll bet it was tough to choose the songs.

ALICE: It was kind of hard because we had so many things to do. I more or less had to figure out which songs worked for the stage show. A lot of people wanted us to do "Black Widow" and "Devil's Food" and lots of people wanted us to do "From the Inside," things like that. But when you've only got so long to do it.... We're doing 18 songs in the show as it is. We thought that "Man Behind the Mask," "Thrill My Gorilla," and "Life and Death of the Party" were going to work, but they didn't. So the ones that worked are the ones that we could really do onstage. I don't know, there's a chemistry be­hind a song that works onstage and one that works on record. I never thought that "Be My Lover" or "Dwight Frye" were ever going to work onstage and "Dwight Frye" is probably our best stage song.

CS: Tell me, if you can, the funniest thing that ever happened to you onstage.

ALICE: We were in Flint, Michigan, and we had a twelve-foot-long can­non that was supposed to shoot me across the stage. And it's a great, big, gigantic cannon, and I would get in the cannon and there would be a trap door on the side. The audience would see me load­ed into the cannon and I would get out through the trap door. There would be a dummy of me in the canon and it was supposed to shoot Alice all the way across the stage and then I would appear, of course, from the other side. They lit the cannon and the music's going and then bang! It's the loudest bang you've ever heard, and the dummy comes out about four feet and lands onstage like a wet mop. It just laid there, and I had to come out and sort of, like [laughs], pick up the dummy and take him off. We had to play it off as comedy you know, 'cause everybody was really embarrassed. The audience loved it because they knew we were trying something new and it totally failed. It was just one of those things where the spring didn't work and it didn't shoot the guy across the stage; it just looked really stupid.

CS: What you wouldn't have given for a video of that one!

ALICE: Yeah [laughs]. It would have been perfect.

CS: Anything else like that happen?

ALICE: Well, I had a couple of dan­gerous things happen. The guillo­tine blade only misses me by eight inches and it doesn't have a safety catch on it. We took the safety catch off because I wanted the au­dience to know that; it's sorta like when you go to the circus and you see the guy on the highwire or the trapeze and then suddenly they take the net away... you realize if this guy slips, it's all over. It's the same thing with the guillotine now, it's a 40-pound blade and it's all based on timing. If I don't release myself at the right time, the blade will hit me.

CS: So you could actually get kill­ed with that?

ALICE: Absolutely. It's a real guillo­tine. The only trick part of it now depends on when I release myself.

CS: Alice, that's crazy!

ALICE: But it gives the audience more of a thrill when they know that it actually could happen. I'm not gonna let it hit me! Now, back when I was drinking, I would never have tried that. But it's the same principle about a guy jumping over twelve buses on a motorcycle. You gotta trust that you know what you're doing.

CS: So now you have Mistress II with you, how's she working out?

ALICE: Well, boas are really pretty easy to work with. Onstage, the big­ger they get, the more they seem to react; they like the warmth of the lights up there and they don't mind the people at all 'cause they're deaf.

CS: I noticed she likes to crawl in­to your microphone pocket a lot.

ALICE: Yeah, they like to get in any place where they make it difficult for you. This one's very good. Sometimes you get a snake that's just really boring. You get 'em up there and he just lays there. Some­times you get one that's really ac­tive. This one happens to be very active, which is great.

CS: Here's kind of a sticky one: The first thing I noticed about Constric­tor was that the lyrics were printed on the back of the album. Did you do that intentionally to comply with the PMRC?

ALICE: I always do that. I can't think of one album that I've done where I didn't print the lyrics anywhere. The PMRC did come to us and they did say, "We demand that you write these lyrics on the back," and I said "I insist on it. I have nothing to hide." We're on the top of their hit list anyway. They just released an article in New York saying we were definitely rated X. I said, "So, now are we allowed to come to your homes and rate the books that you read? Can we rate the novels that you read, because I'm sure we'll find some Jackie Collins novel [laughs]. We'll compare lyrics and see who's reading what!" The kids are a lot smarter than the parents give them credit for. So, the PMRC doesn't bother me at all. I think the great thing about the PMRC is that they do have a right to be. You know, this is America; they have a right to do anything they want to do. But I think when they get to the point of telling you that you're so stupid that you can't judge what to look at, or what to listen to, that sounds to me like a 1984 Big Broth­er. I don't like the idea of that. I think it's pretty insulting to the American public to have a senator's wife tell them what to listen to.

CS: Alice, what's the strangest thing you've ever received from a fan?

ALICE: I got a will to somebody's house. This guy and this girl got married and they made out a will in case anything ever happened to them and they willed me their house.

CS: Have they died yet?

ALICE: I hope not! I said, "Why don't you give this to somebody that needs it? I don't need this." And they said, "No, we want you to have this house because when we die we're gonna be ghosts and we're gonna live there and we want you to own the house that we're ghosts at." So I said okay. I can totally understand that. So, if these people ever die, I own their house and it'll be haunted so you can come over if you want to.

CS: I've got one last one for you: What scares Alice Cooper?

ALICE: What scares me? I'd say the interior decorators for most of the hotels we've been staying at. Who­ever that person is should be def­initely committed. Whoever would put turquoise drapes with orange carpeting is really scary. [Laughs.] Things that scare me are the things in the news. Reality scares me. Fantasy doesn't scare me. Things that I do don't scare me. Things that I read don't scare me. But the reali­ty in things scares me, when I hear there were 55 people killed by a bomb in Beirut. I mean, that's real. That's 55 human beings that died because of some jerk. That's fright­ening, I think. I think the reality of life scares me so that I spend more time in fantasy than in reality.

CS: In closing, is there anything you'd like to say?

ALICE: You can mention that Alice Cooper is pure 1987 rock mayhem and it has nothing to do with Satan­ism. That's something we have to live through every city we go to ­even though we don't care. I mean, I think it's great we have 500 peo­ple picketing outside. You know, fundamentalists and things like that. It's people who don't know what they're talking about. It's fine with me. I think it's great!