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Alice Cooper: Your Travel Agent to a Brutal Planet

Alice Cooper, the Detroit-born son of a minister, is without a doubt one of the most all encompassing and important figures ever in the annals of rock 'n' roll.

Rank him right alongside the likes of Elvis and Dylan in my book for the tremendous impact and influence he has had on the shape of modern music.

While others before him, like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Screamin' Lord Such and Arthur Brown (of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown) may have fooled around with theatrics in the rock music arena, it took Alice Cooper to make it an epic art form.

Alice beat out everyone — including David Bowie and the New York Dolls — in wearing dresses and cavorting on stage in drag. He beat KISS wearing make-up and glittering costumes on stage.

In fact, legend has it that when KISS first came together, it was as an Alice Cooper tribute band. They did a few shows as such, until Shep Gordon (Coop's manager) hit them with a cease and desist order. So, in a sense, Cooper forced Gene and Paul to create their own identity and thus become the world's second greatest rock 'n' roll show band. Yes ... second!

Heck. When you think about it, Coop's accidental "chicken episode" even beat ol' Ozzy's bat-biting schtick by over a decade.

Is it any wonder why Cooper, who rarely talks to the press these days, is on our cover? The man has just released for your "unworthy" consumption, what is easily his best album in years, Brutal Planet.

What follows are Coop's own words on the making and playing of the new music of Brutal Planet, an album not created by pulling things from the dark corners of the Shock Rock king's macabre mind, as were Welcome To My Nightmare,Goes To Hell, From The Inside and The Last Temptation.

"For the first time in my career, my fantasy could not conceive of anything so horrible and frightening as what I have seen lately on the nightly news," said Cooper. "'Brutal Planet' was inspired by real things, real atrocities that are happening in our world today. Now that's really scary!"

As Alice drove around St. Louis on his way to that evening's show, he buzzed me on his cell phone. After talking about his early Dex Card-promoted shows here at the Scherwood Club in Northwest Indiana in 1970 and chatting about the current White Sox winning streak, we settled in to talk about darker and more disturbing topics.

Without any further delay, here are the highlights of my chat with hard-hearted Alice ....

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BEAT: What's the current show like?

ALICE: We've gone back to a bigger theatrical production because the music just calls for it, I mean when you write something called 'Brutal Planet' you better give the audience a 'Brutal Planet.'

Of course, we get all the hits into the set, but we also give them 5 or 6 of the new songs because I'm really proud of this album, really proud.

It's a very updated, high energy show (pausing) ... actually, it is probably the most high energy show I've done in a long time. It's an hour and 45 minutes of just all out Alice Cooper theatrics and rock. A little touch of insanity, if you will...

BEAT: When you mention the older songs and the updates are you talking about how you did an updated version of "Generation Landslide" years ago? Are you changing the old songs in any way?

ALICE: No. Actually, we’re doing the old stuff exactly like people expect it. What I'm saying is we're not backing off of doing the old stuff to squeeze in a lot of new songs. A lot of times a performer will say, 'Well, I want to go out, but I don't want to do my hits.'

I love my new songs, but my thought is, 'How can you not want to do your hits? What are you crazy?' I know Bowie did that one time. Bowie went out and did nothing but new songs and the audience looked around and went, 'Come on dude ... do 'Suffragette City.'

BEAT: Elvis hated doing "Hound Dog" in his later years. Are there any of your past hits where you say, "God, I wish I didn't have to do that one again!"

ALICE: Well, there's always that point where you say, 'Jeez, 'School's Out' again?' But once the song starts on stage, are you kidding, that audience goes crazy. How could I not want to do that song?

We've got weather balloons out there with confetti in them, because it's party time when that song starts. You know it's the finale of the show, but that's really one of the most fun moments of the show too. I've made 'School's Out' the huge end anthem. I've made it the moment that everybody's building up to — the band, me and the audience.

BEAT: You play Hawthorn Racetrack here. Are all the tour dates outdoor this time?

ALICE: No, no, no. We're only doing a few outdoor shows. We're doing many more theaters, which I think this show fits into a lot better.

I like the idea of taking this production and putting it inside a theater. Even though we've done it outdoors in front of 15-20 thousand people, the same show, inside a theater with only 3-4 thousand people and it could get a bit claustrophobic. It's intense and I want the audience to not be seeing 'Brutal Planet' but to basically be in 'Brutal Planet.' There's a part of the show, where we kind of encompass the audience and make them a part of 'Brutal Planet.'

Even the very beginning of the show is pretty frightening. The stage looks Iike a nuked out city and what you see coming up out of the floor and through all this garbage is what's left of humanity and the Earth. It's just the sad, horrible remains. I play sort of this insane Samurai. A character that's kind of a demented Bladerunner. But that's really a great Alice character.

BEAT: I hear your guillotine is back in the show.

ALICE: The guillotine fits into the show like a piece of the puzzle. I wasn't going to do it, I was going to do something new, in fact I invented something new called The Crusher and it worked great, but the audience wants the guillotine. I'm of the old Barnam & Bailey adage — 'Give the people what they want!' But it really does fit perfectly into the show, so I'm glad it's back.

BEAT: Are you using the new "Crusher" as well?

ALICE: 'The Crusher' is going to be in 'Brutal Planet Part Two,' which is going to start out on the road next summer.

BEAT: How long is this tour out? All U.S. dates?

ALICE: Well, we just finished Europe, had 40 shows in Europe. We've done about 20 shows in the States and we've got about 20 more to go. Then, we'll probably go to Australia, South America, and Japan. Then I'll be in the studio writing and recording 'Brutal Planet Two' and then we'll start that tour next summer.

BEAT: Brutal Planet is very dark and nihilistic. You wrote the songs with your guitarist, Bob Marlett. What was the mindset when you sat down to do this project?

ALICE: I said to Bob - 'If were going to say, 'Brutal Planet,' then let's be relentless. Let's take them to a place that's a utopia in the future that's gone totally wrong. Let's give them a little glimpse of the world in general, a godless world, a place where morality has failed, church has failed, technology has failed, everything has failed except just the fact that we're just humans at our worst and that's all that is left.'

Then it got grisly. I asked - 'Who are the others? Who are the survivors? Cannibals! Yes, they are whatever they have to be to survive.'

And yeah, I try to throw a good scare into people with this album, but not by using fiction though. For the first time, to me facts were scarier than fiction, because I found while making 'Brutal Planet', that most of it is already here.

There's 65 wars going on right now on our planet. Major wars. Thousands of African warriors get macheted to death in one day in a (tribal) war. Life is really cheap when you leave the United States. We flinch here when 3 people get shot at a McDonald's, but let thousands die in one day and we just flinch and say, 'Well that's Africa.' We Americans are a very sheltered society that had better wake up to the brutality that exists day to day on our planet.

BEAT: On "Wicked Young Man" you address the issue of the violence in the arts causing world decline...

ALICE: I defend it and at the same time in all reality, I do hold lyric writers and artists responsible for what they say.

I mean, if you say, 'Go kill a cop!', to a bunch of black kids, well they might just go do it. So as an artist, you don't really want to say it. It's not a good message to send, I don't think. If you say, 'Go slaughter a farm animal and worship Satan!,' that's not a very good message to send either. I think those are very bad messages and an artist should be responsible for that.

But when they say the Columbine tragedy happened because of a movie like 'The Matrix' and because of a video game like 'Tomb Raiders' and because of albums by Rammstein and Marilyn Manson, well, I don't buy it! Because, 99.999999999 percent of the population have seen all those things, done all those things, played all those games, watched all those movies, and they didn't go out and kill people.

I think what it comes down to is those two guys were psychopathic killers. I think they were purely evil. I think they were wicked young men. That's what the song addresses.

What heavy metal band was Hitler listening to when he slaughtered millions of people? I mean there's a million arguments there, but at the same time it's a very weak argument saying that those two guys killed because of the music they listened to. How could a father not know that his kid's got 50 bombs in the garage? I know if my son has a fire­cracker. How disconnected can you be? One of the fathers was actually teaching his son how to make a pipe bomb, I mean come on, where does this responsibility lie, it's gotta be Marilyn Manson, right?

BEAT: You had not done a concept album for many years until your last album, The Last Temptation. Brutal Planet is Likewise conceptual as well. Why the return to concepts?

ALICE: Because I know that's what I'm good at and I know that people expect me to tell them a story with my music. I kind of look at myself as a Stephen King type of character when it comes to writing stories. I love to give the audience a story. I think I'm one of the only people that does that anymore. I love the idea that I've developed characters for them that run through different albums.

At the same time, there's an extremely huge glut of music out there. I don't want to put out 12 innocuous songs, because that's pointless. There's so many bands doing that and the reviewers sit there and say, 'Oh geez, another CD.'

Whereas, if an Alice Cooper album comes out and it's 'Brutal Planet' and it's a big production and it's a story, then they have to go — 'Wow, what's this about? At least we know Alice writes good stories and usually writes pretty good records.' I like to give myself the advantage of making my records semi-events. People 1ook at it and go, 'Well, it's another Alice story,' but hey there's a lot of people looking forward to those stories.

BEAT: Bob Marlett was your producer and Bob Ezrin was on board as executive producer. How'd things work.

ALICE: Bob Marlett and I wrote everything. And we had a sonic theory about this album. We certainly didn't want to do a classic '70s album, we didn't want to rewrite 'Welcome To My Nightmare.' What we wanted to do, was to take the best parts out of what made those old albums of mine great, which meant a story where every song was connected to the others, but where they still could stand on their own as a great song.

We also wanted to plug into a digital sound, nothing on the album is synthetic, all the guitars are real guitars, all the drums are real drums, all the bass ... everything! So I wasn't going to write a synthetic album a la Trent Reznor.

This was definitely going to be a rock 'n' roll album, but plugged into a digital sound, so if that you strip away the production, it's pure garage rock. If you look around at the bands that are still around from the '70's it's those bands — Aerosmith, Ozzy, Alice, AC/DC — and what do they all have in common? They are all basically garage bands. The Rolling Stones are the best garage band of all time.

BEAT: How much input did Bob Ezrin have on this album?

ALICE: We brought Bob in to be the overseer, because when you're a musician and a lyricist, I'm going to drift. I'll be writing in a song and all of the sudden find these beautiful cords that drift off into this or that. Bob will listen to it and go, 'Hey, that can't happen on 'Brutal Planet!' Then I will ask, 'Why?' and he will say, 'Listen to it, that kind of nicety would never happen on the kind of planet you've created.'

Ezrin is the one that keeps us within the lines as we color the story. He would say — 'Guys, what are you thinking? In the song, 'Take It Like a Woman,' she can't live! She has to die, because nothing innocent and loving survives on 'Brutal Planet.' He'd look at me and say, Alice, this isn't 'Only Woman Bleed,' this is a song from 'Brutal Planet.'

So, because of Bob Ezrin, in 'Take It Like A Woman' the character died. She didn't get away from the abusive husband quick enough and she died. It's a very pretty song, but I mean still it's tragic. In the end, Bob was absolutely right.

BEAT: Is the same band on Brutal Planet touring with you?

ALICE: Yeah, all the guys. 'They're awesome players. They're gunslingers, you know? They can play, 'Eighteen' and 'School's Out' and 'Billion Dollar Babies' just like the records. Then they get a hold of 'Brutal Planet' songs and just eat that stuff up. You get Eric Singer who played drums on the album playing it live and I mean he just drives it home. It's a very 'big' sounding stage show. It's right there with anybody, I would put this band up against anybody out there.

BEAT: What are you releasing as singles off of this album?

ALICE: The next single is going to be the 'It's The Little Things' and then I think the one after that is going to be 'Take It Like A Woman.'

BEAT: I was listening to "Little Things" while driving and got a bad case of road rage at some guy on his cell phone.

ALICE: But isn't it true? It's always the 'little things' that get to us. I needed a little bit of sardonic humor on this album, humor that kept with the theme of destruction and this song just lent itself perfectly.

Why is it always that the guy who goes postal and kills 15 people, never kills anybody because somebody went and shot his family or anything drastic like that? Instead, those kind of guys kill people because somebody ate half of his egg salad sandwich or somebody parked in his parking space. It's that one crazy little thing that always sends you over the edge and turns you into a total monster.

Just like you said, you can deal with your wife and you having a fight, or your kid running away, or your running over the dog, or your stock market crashing ... but if one guy cuts you off in traffic, you're ready to go buy a sub-machine gun and blow him away. Why is that? To me, that's humorous. I think there's something funny about that, because I know it's human nature. That song is all about those little things that set us off. It was needed on the album and you know, on stage it has been getting one of the best reactions. People can relate to it.

BEAT: How involved are you in designing the theme and ef fects of your stage shows?

ALICE: Everything you see on my stage is based on my ideas. I come up with an idea and say, 'I want this stage to look like Cleveland nuked out, only I want it to look like it's been sitting there for 5 years after it's been nuked out. I want it to smell like that, I want it to look like that, I want it to feel like that.

Then, when I know exactly what I want, I go to a place called Distortions who build it all so it can travel. I tell them 'l want a taxi cab turned over on its side in front of the keyboards, so it looks like it's flipped over and wrecked.' Then they build that for me. It's all got to be mobile so I can move it around, from St. Louis to Louisville in one night. So it's a bit of an engineering feat. I must say, those guys are the best. They make our stage and me look good.

BEAT: Any last thoughts or comments?

ALICE: Yes. I want everyone to come to the Hawthorn show, because it's going to be fun... lots of fun. We had a great time there last year.

Oh yeah, one more thing — Go White Sox!