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Alice Cooper: Colonel Sanders' Revenge

His blood cells got him before the giant chicken did

"Oh yeah, I'm getting restless. I want to play again." Alice Cooper, enhancing his already deep tan with the early-June afternoon sunrays slanting into the patio of his rented Hollywood Hills abode (where he waits for them to finish rebuilding the one that recently burned down), appeared to be a perfectly healthy California specimen, save for a little drainage problem caused by a deviated septum, which he's resolved to have corrected.

Since the Welcome to My Nightmare tour ended with the Lake Tahoe engagement late last year, Alice had been lifting weights, golfing avidly, playing baseball with his beloved, league-leading Hollywood Vampires, writing, recording and raising a little hell with cronies like Nilsson, Ringo and Bernie Taupin ("Hollywood's getting to be fun now," he declared: "A lot of really crazy people are going out and getting drunk again, like it used to be.") Alice was looking good and sounding eager to hit the stage for his summer tour of America, set to begin July 4 in Detroit. Little did he know that his haywire blood cells would get him before the giant chicken could.

Two weeks prior to the start of rehearsals, Alice described the forth-coming show with unabated enthusiasm: "It's gonna be a 'Best of Alice Cooper' type of thing. I might look back and say, 'OK, let's do "Under My Wheels"... What do you want to hear?' It's not gonna be a heavily produced show. It's gonna be a rock 'n' roll show this time... Yeah, I tell you, I've been wanting to do that for a long time."

As fate would have it, Alice will have to wait a little longer still. When he arrived for the first rehearsal he looked, according to an aide, as if he'd just come off the Billion Dollar Babies tour, an acknowledged landmark in rock 'n' roll torture tests. Diagnosis: acute anemia, manifested by extreme lethargy and to be remedied by four to six weeks in bed, a strict diet and a cutback on the Budweiser intake. Its effect on the tour: havoc. The plan now is to fit in as many major dates in late summer as time will allow, but it all rests on Alice's rate of recovery.

The Alice Goes to Hell show, based on the current album and tentatively set for early '77 remains operative. That's where the vengeful overgrown pullet comes in. "I have a giant man-eating chicken," said Alice. Oblivious to the corpuscles facing off for battle in his veins, he achieved a high state of self-amusement over this bit of inspiration. "I had to do it. It was too much of an in-joke to do, but I had to do it. I figured that would be the only way to get back at the press for all the 'Alice Cooper Kills Chickens' things, to have this enormous chicken come out. This chicken is so big that it actually scares the Cyclops."

Also featured in this Nightmare sequel will be a Runyonesque Devil in the mold of Guys & Dolls' natty Nathan Detroit, an intrepid Alice who tangles with him to determine precisely who is the coolest of them all, a Hades that turns out to be a disco ("I figured, what a funny idea for Hell-a disco. It would almost be comparable to They Shoot Horses, Don't They."), and' some music—the Alice Sound with a disco bottom—that he calls "the best material we [Cooper. Hunter and Ezrin] ever wrote."

The Hell show looks to be a continuation of Alice's drift away from the shock-rock tactics of old. For one thing, the production concept would allow Alice to catch the bubonic plague without messing up the itinerary. "The Hell tour might go to Broadway," he explained, "It might go to theatres, I don't know. I want to have it where an actual company can do it, without me even being there. Somebody will play Alice. You would have a real production, like A Chorus Line. You go into a city and audition a cast for it."

Alice delivered his familiar "Alice always was vaudeville and burlesque" line, but he acknowledged that in terms of sheer impact, things have changed: "The Dwight Frye thing was the most frightening thing I've ever done. 'Cause it was depicting somebody that had no control of himself. That person was in a straightjacket, and you could see it in his face, that he was a total maniac. That is more frightening than the 9-foot Cyclops up there. I wanted the Cyclops, instead of looking that threatening, to be a little more Walt Disney-ish. I didn't want it to be threatening. I love the idea of doing a Walt Disney mock-horror thing."

Having gone from shock to mock, having long since proved his point, with Alice the image and Alice the person now happily reconciled, Alice has assumed the aspect of a father-figure to the outrage-rock scene, leaving the toil and the hard-core destruction of sensibilities to youngsters like Kiss. He agreed without hesitation that the Gotham goblins do indeed reflect the Alice Cooper influence, but, with a flash of lingering rock 'n' roll pride and a trace of smugness, he dismissed the idea that they've usurped his throne.

"I don't feel threatened by anybody in this business," he said. "I know if I went to a city, like Chicago, and they were here and I was here, I know I would sell more tickets than they would. They're good. I respect them. It's great that somebody finally caught on that theatrics onstage works. Shit, we were the first ones that did it. Now I look back and go, 'Told you so' to all the people that said, 'Get these guys off the stage, who are these guys?' I just sit back and laugh to myself... But I sure do respect a lot of the bands. I know, exactly what it takes to put that makeup on every night."

With the recent relaxation of his rigorous pace (he's now almost an album ahead of himself), Alice has had time to become a budding art collector, a newlywed, a thoughtful human being ("I've finally discovered a truth in life-friends are important"), a prospective actor (as Bunny Hoover in Robert Altman's film Breakfast of Champions), co-author of his autobiography, Me, Alice, and—who knows?

"I don't want anyone to typecast me, to say that's the only thing he can do. I like the idea of not only being Alice Cooper the rock star—I've already done that and I'm still gonna do that—but I'd like to be known as Alice Cooper the playwright. Musically? I want to prove myself more as a writer than a singer. I'm not that great of a singer. That's not my forte at all. But I know that I can write. I could write a song for Glen Campbell if I wanted to. Or I could write a song that would fit the Fifth Dimension... There's a point where you can't just keep doing the same thing or you get stale, and then you're no fun to yourself; you're no fun to anybody."

As the sun started to dive toward the low-lying L.A. haze, Alice moved in-doors and began to devour a pizza in front of the television, where Adam-12's policemen did their stuff behind a spider-web crack in the set's glass. Alice finished his beer, then raided the kitchen for a can of Coca-Cola and a bottle of Seagram's Seven. He mixed his drink, a living contradiction to his claim in Me, Alice that he was. through with the hard stuff.

"Well," he said a little sheepishly, "It's after six, and anyway this is an occasion—I'm here. Really, don't ever believe anything I say. I'm the biggest liar in the world. I don't believe a damn thing I say. Ali works that way. He'll say, 'Wepner the Bleeder, huh? I'm not gonna hit that turkey in the head.' He came out there the first five rounds; the only place he hit him was the head." Alice chomped into a slice of pizza. Poor diet will prove to be the chief cause of the anemia attack.

Among his newly acquired artworks is a gift from his manager, Shep Gordon: Guy Peellaert's original Alice Cooper painting from Rock Dreams, which hangs on the white wall above the white sofa (which sits on a white shag rug) "It doesn't seem like me," he observed, glancing up at the vision of Alice as a Barnum-like entrepeneur, cigar in hand and feet resting on the desk in a seedy office. "It's a funny idea, but I'm no businessman. Shep should be sitting there."

Dominating the left side of the portrait is a poster showing a top-hatted, mascara-yed Alice about to sink his teeth into the slimy, freshly-skinned (except for the cute furry little feet) carcass of a rabbit. Would, one wondered, Alice Cooper ever leave the Disney props behind and do something repulsive and disgusting on stage again? Alice replied instantly.

"Yeah, I think so," he said, attacking another wedge of the pizza, which suddenly looked disturbingly unappetizing. There seemed to be a glint of Dwight Frye mischief in his eye as he dropped another glob of sinus phlegm into the wastebasket by his side. "Oh, I'm not beyond that at all."