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Alice doesn't do that anymore

ALICE COOPER. YOU remember him from the '70s. Mr. Nice Guy. Dark black makeup. Snake around his shoulders. Used to show up on stage with a guillotine.

Well, take Vincent Furnier's word for it. That Alice Cooper was soft. And Furnier should know, because he created Alice Cooper — the man who was to rock 'n' roll on-stage theater what Phil Spector was to in-studio production: He took everything that came before and cranked the volume up to full. He made excess into art.

And that was even before Alice, who plays the Ritz next Monday, put it all together. "The late '70s were an alcoholic binge," says Furnier. "On the stage then, Alice was kind of boozy and sloppy. Now he's much more sadistic and vicious. He's not the kind of guy anymore that will hunker over and say, 'Oh, gee, I hope you like us.' Now he grabs 'em by the throat. He's so into it that when he leaves the stage I don't even hang out with him."

At a time when dozens of '60s and '70s stars have discovered they can make fairly easy bucks by reprising their old tunes, it would be easy to write Alice Cooper off as one more package: "The Billion Dollar Babies Return!"

But that isn't it. He's got a new album, "Trash," which has become his biggest seller ever; kids in the audience think "Trash" is his first record. A few years ago, he was doing two or three news songs per show. In this one he does eight tracks from "Trash" alone.

"I hate nostalgia," he says. "I never want to do one of those Doobie Brothers things where you just play the same chords over again."

What he'd rather do is remind people that in addition to the snake and the theatrics, Alice Cooper was once a first-class band. Not in the late '70s and early '80s, when the alcohol had kicked in and disco had booted rock off the radio. Alice got a little loose around the seams then; he was spotted doing things like "Hollywood Squares."

But before that he was a real band and he says that's what he's come back to — starting with "Trash," on which he worked with producer Desmond Child. "He did the melody lines, I did the lyrics and the attitude. It worked out perfectly. I wanted to get away from writing words to go with guitar riffs and get back to songs."

The album, obviously, clicked. Then he found a road band that could play it. "I auditioned 400 guys and found five that are perfect," he says. "They can play the old stuff and the new stuff. They all weigh 110 pounds, have hair to their waists and are covered with tattoos."

Alice himself, now almost eight years removed from his last drink, is in better shape than ever. "I do an hour and 45 minutes and it's like nothing," he says. He also acknowledges, however, that with all the theatricality in rock today, he has to work hard not to look as if he's parodying himself — or parodying someone else, who in turn was copying him.

"Yeah, I look around and see a lot of my children," he says, with some satisfaction. "And I think, 'Hmmm, I don't remember having him.' But what I have to do is treat my own material seriously. I have to sing the songs with the same anger I had when I wrote them, which I can do. 'Eighteen' feels like I wrote it yesterday."

The one exception, he says, is he now does "School's Out" with "a little more humor. It's the last song, and it's like a release for the audience. It's been so intense up to then, this sends them out with a party attitude."

AND IT SENDS ALICE out with a powerful hunger. "One of the most important changes in life on the road now is that the hotels are better. They have 24-hour room service with real menus. I only weigh 136 to begin with and I lose about three pounds a show, so when I get back to my room I'm famished. In the old days, all you could find was a pizza or a cheeseburger, if you were lucky.

"I get back and I think, 'I'm real happy this is a Four Seasons hotel.'"