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School's In!

After years in the wilderness, ALICE COOPER learned to take the trash out and become a Billion Dollar Baby again. Anita Winslow spoke to him about returning to find a sea of imposters and imitators.

LAST YEAR SAW several cartoon characters come back into '80s consciousness. It wasn't just Batman and Dick Tracy.

Alice Cooper was another. He made great records in the early '70s that brought out the dark side of our characters — "Under My Wheels", a larger than life cartoon character, guillotine killings and fake blood onstage, writhing on full live pythons which he fed with live rats.

In 1989, after making some lackluster albums, Alice Cooper — and his creator Vince Furnier — caught the public ear with "Poison". There were some who said the record showed how Cooper had "mellowed" and "sold out", making a record that sounded like Bon Jovi's.

But in the interview below, Cooper argues that he changed the lyrics originally supplied to him by Desmond Child to make it authentically his.

Anyway, now that he's recaptured the public, Cooper has no intention of letting go. He's just shown on his recent American and European shows that in terms of menace and showmanship, he can give Guns 'N Roses a run for their money. He's surrounded himself with some young hungry dudes who've breathed into his stage act an energy and excitement lacking in it some years back.

Opening with "Trash", swinging a bullwhip over his head, Cooper has described his current stage show as "a lot less gore and a lot more whore". The music is hard rock with lots of catchy hooks, with a mean-sounding guitarist called Al Pitrelli, bounding between the old classics like "Billion Dollar Babies" and the newies from the Trash album.

It's noticeable that Cooper's audience these days is predominantly a young one, who've cottoned on to him via "Poison". They're noticeably quieter and barely tolerant through the early stuff, but go crazy for the Trash songs. So what do they make of "Ballad Of Dwight Fry" when the nightmares on­stage begin, when the guillotine is brought back for "I Love The Dead", with fake blood pouring all over and Cooper holding up a gore-spewing head in triumph.

The finale of the Cooper show is awesome: with thrusting renditions of "Poison" and "Bed Of Nails", Alice gets the crowd to sing along to "School's Out" and then an encore with a powerful "Under My Wheels". No doubt about it: like Batman, the cartoon character has been updated to '80s attitudes and given a new lease of life.

Cooper plans to tour Australia some time in the first half of 1990.

The current show is certainly less bloody orientated, more whore than gore, so to speak.

"I think that whole blood thing had gone as far as it could go, you know. It had always been done with taste and humour, but on the last tour we did, I just knew it'd gone as far as it could. If I'd repeated it, then I would have made the whole thing stale and redundant."

But the horror's still there in the show, though.

"Oh, of course, I don't think there'll ever be a time when you go to an Alice Cooper show and not find horror! But It's less subtle, not as pointed. On the album, I went more for a Future Sex Shock angle. It's not a sexist album in the sense it says 'I'm a man, you're a woman', it looks at the decadent things men and women do together with and to each other. If you listen carefully, 'Poison' is actually a song about S&M."

You've actually taken the Alice Cooper show back on the road a full year earlier than you planned.

"Oh sure, I meant to take a longer time off, but I just went crazy sitting around watching TV, instead of getting out there and being part of it all. I just went nuts! These days I don't drink, and I don't hang out in clubs. So for me, those hours onstage are really the ultimate for me."

Do you feel you're in competition with the young dudes?

"Yeah, I do. This business makes you like that. But I've always been that way, even in the 'School's Out' days, you check out what records everyone else is doing, what everyone's wearing."

Ha, you don't feel strange watching Guns N'Roses picking up on the snake 'n' top hats routine?

"It is strange, but it's a compliment."

YOU CLAIM are not that sexist, the yet feeling that the woman's always being blamed. In the videos women are seen as temptresses, monsters, demons...

"There is that element in Alice Cooper, as there is in any male, I think. Men can't understand the impulses in their bodies, so they always try to project it onto their females. Even in this day of AIDS and the New Celibacy, people feel trashy when they hit the streets, go out to nightclubs, trying to find cheap quick sex. They (men) know that they're feeling trashy, they can't abide that in them, so they project that onto women.

"Like all men, Alice Cooper has a love-hate relationship with women. He wants to hurt them, tell them 'if all else fails I'll hammer you on a bed of nails', smash a female doll on stage until her legs come off. But then he regrets it, and sings 'Only Women Bleed', because he knows that ultimately it's women who suffer from abuse.

"I don't think the moral climate changes the fact that through the ages, men have always had a love-hate relationship with women. I think the '90s will be a romantic age, very much like the '50s: people will date, fall in love, and have sex six months after. But that love-hate will always be there, and it'll show itself in various ways. Alice Cooper is a journalist, he reports it all, the good and the bad, the sadness and the humour."

So you're saying that Alice Cooper really isn't you?

"Oh no, he isn't, he's the Joker, Dracula, the Riddler, the ultimate villain. I mean, he almost tried to kill me once! Alice is everything I'm not, or maybe he's everything nasty in my personality that I wish I didn't have.

"In a lot of ways, he and I are fighting to take control over my body. I try and kill him by hanging him, or sending him to the electric chair, or to the guillotine. He has to be punished for doing horrible things to women and children. But then he tried to kill me too. He turned me into an alcoholic. Every time I had to go into that costume and paint my face and take him onto the stage, I had to have a drink."

It's interesting that Kiss' Gene Simmons is suing King Diamond for stealing his face makeup, when...

"You're right, when they both copied me! I gotta be honest, though, and say that I'm down on this Satanic thing. Death is something that comes to us all and we're scared of it, so one way to handle it is to laugh at it. But Satanism is something else altogether — King Diamond goes onstage and wants to conjure up demons as part of his act. Everybody knows that once you invite the vampire in, you can't get rid of him. So King Diamond's playing with fire, and it's obvious it's something he knows very little about."

Is it true you get a lot of your fashion sense by continually watching horror movies?

"Listen, the stars of a horror movie are not the actors, or even the directors. It's the special effects people. They've got the best imaginations!"

That's why you've always shrugged off any negative effects the Alice Cooper character will have on your audience, because horror movies are seen as fun more than anything else.

"Last Halloween I took my kids out, to a high school fair. I had on a Michael Myers mask — Myers is great in those Halloween movies, because he just refuses to die! — and all the kids there thought the mask was great — ooh look, Michael Myers, what fun! It's all showbiz, they know it's harmless."

We were talking before about Guns N'Roses nicking your ideas, and you said it was a compliment. Surely you get annoyed sometimes, though.

"I only get pissed off when I read stuff that Kiss were the first in rock music to get into makeup, or that Bowie introduced rock theater. That's bullshit, man, because Alice Cooper did all that stuff first. It's not Kiss and Bowie who go around claiming these things, it's just ignorant people who don't know any better who're saying 'em. I mean, I haven't got a copyright on all this, but at least give Alice Cooper proper credit for what he's done."

You probably get a lot of bands coming up and telling you how you were such an influence on them.

"Yeah, it gets embarrassing when they say they'd never have picked up a guitar if it wasn't for me! Of course, I'm more flattered if the band who says I inspired them turns out to be a good band! I mean, a band which doesn't copy licks, but takes all the old riffs and turns them into something fresh and new. That's why I love Guns N'Roses so much — they take all that Alice Cooper and Aerosmith stuff from the '70s and make something new out of it."

Do you think that your over-the-top antics stopped you from getting some radio airplay?

"Somewhere in this world, there's someone wanting to save kids from Alice Cooper! So, yeah, I probably lost some airplay. I'm in the Top 40 business, I gotta get airplay. This album's probably a whole lot more melodic than the last two albums. I'd just kicked alcohol then, I was pretty pissed off with myself and pissed off with the world, and those two albums that came right after that period were very angry records. Too angry for radio airplay, that's for sure."

I understand you first got to hear Desmond Child's work by listening to the radio.

"I listen to the radio when I'm driving around. Usually the radio's kept at a low hum, then when something that knocks me out comes on, then it's turned right up. Consequently, I very seldom turn my radio up!

"Anyway, I was in the Corvette, and Aerosmith's 'Dude (Looks Like A Lady)' comes on, and I turn it right up. I'm thinking to myself 'shit, this is the best thing I've heard for f*** ages!' The song that comes on after that is Bon Jovi's 'Livin' On A Prayer', and I'm thinking to myself 'this is great stuff too'.

"Radio's radio, right, and the dj plays some more stuff, and it's wimpy and bland, so I turn the radio down again. Three songs later, I'm turning it up because Kiss' 'Heaven's On Fire' is on. It's the sound I like, so I get Brian (his assistant, and president of the Alice Cooper fan club Nightmare Inc) to chase up who these three dudes were who wrote those songs.

"He looks at me and says 'that wasn't three guys, that was ONE guy, and his name is Desmond Child', and I almost fell over. I wanted to work with him right then and there, because he was making music I wanted to hear. Plus I could take those songs (by Aerosmith, Bon Jovi and Kiss) and see my vocal style really cooking on them. I knew Desmond could help me make the kind of Alice Cooper In The '90s-type LP which I was dying to make."

A lot of old Alice Cooper fans thought you'd wimped out working with Desmond, you know...

"Naaah, they're talking shit. 'Poison' is not a NICE song, it's not the sort of song that Bon Jovi could do. I took Desmond's mainstream thing, and distorted it to make it a bit nastier. Put an Alice edge to it. I changed the lyrics to make them a bit darker, and once you put that Alice Cooper vocals to it, ain't no-one in their right minds who could say it's like a Bon Jovi track!"

Is it true that once you and Steve Tyler of Aerosmith went driving in your Rolls Royce, and you were both so screwed up that the next morning you looked at each other and one of you was holding a gun and the other a bottle of whiskey, and neither of you could remember how they'd come to be in your hands!

"Hahahaha, that's a true story. We still to this day can't remember what we did. We talked a lot about it when he came into the studio to sing on 'Only My Heart' and he was saying 'well, gee, I just hope we didn't end up robbing a liquor shop or sumpth'n!"

The new album musically sounds like 'Love It To Death', did Desmond tell you it was a favourite album of his?

"It seems to be a lot of peoples' favourites. People always request the song, and when we were writing songs for Trash, we were listening continuously to 'Love It To Death' off the Greatest Hits album, because that's the vibe I was after for the new album."

Why, don't you listen a lot to your earlier albums?

"No, because I prefer to listen to whatever is new, ya know. I'm not knocking any of that early stuff, I love 'em to death. Every time I hear any of that old stuff, some wonderful memories flood back. When I cut those records, I believed in everything I did on them, I believed in them absolutely. The only album I'm a bit embarrassed about is the live one in Las Vegas, I was fried then... we'd been continuously on the road for five years, I was really into the booze, I guess I was so bored and f***-up I didn't even care what sort of shit went out under my name."

Whose idea was it for you to go around to radio stations in America in a trash can and personally deliver the LP to djs?

"It was fun to do, I suppose, but I don't think that's my image any more. I've gone a bit classier."

Do you find people sneer at you because you don't touch alcohol?

"People who sneer at others because they won't indulge in something have a problem of their own. In my case, if anyone is stupid to say that, I can look at them straight in the eye and say 'look, asshole, read the newspaper articles on me in the last ten years, I've had more to drink then than you ever will in your whole life!' Because I came close to death, I really did. I was so bad that before I could dry out, they had to put me in hospital for two weeks first! Now that's being in a bad shape."