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The Ghoul Next Door

'Lovable' Alice Cooper delivers good scares and good laughs

One guy who can always find work around Halloween is Alice Cooper.

"October is always like that," rock's top ghoul says from Mount Pleasant, Mich., on the last week of a tour that brings him to Hard Rock Live on Wednesday, just a week after the holiday. "I've kind of become the Vincent Price of rock 'n' roll."

After decades of doing his rock, "I think Alice has become almost lovable. Which is weird. Because I still do a very, very hard, very edgy show," he says. "We're still doing guillotine — all the stuff. But people are seeing it differently. They're seeing it as legendary."

More than just doing the '70s hits, though, he's performing from a new album as well.

The new release is Dragontown, which fol­lows last year's Brutal Planet in delving into a vi­sion of hell that has some eerie moments in light of recent world events, and closes with a song in which the protagonist holds a bomb and warns: "I want the world to know I'm sending all the infi­dels to hell."

"When we wrote this a year and a half ago, we were pointing right to what's happened," Cooper says. "We just didn't expect it to happen for another 25-30 years."

Cooper says he hasn't changed his show as a result of Sept. 11.

"There was nothing in our show to really change," he says. "Although I wish there would have been something anti-Taliban in there."

Besides, it already had patriotism in it.

"We do 'God Bless America' in the show right after 'Elected,'" Cooper says. "And we cover 'Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire,' and what could be more American than that?"

"We're very pro-America," he says. "But we still do the beheadings. People realize there's a little Edgar Allan Poe in what we do."

One of those getting the guillotine treatment this year is pop queen Britney Spears.

"We give a whole new meaning to Britney being topless," Cooper cracks.

"Oh, that's really nice!" Spears said from Orlando on Halloween when told of the staging in a teleconference. "But, seriously, stuff like that, I don't take myself that seriously; I have to laugh it off when stuff like that comes up. I find it interesting when they find me that interesting."

Cooper tries to keep up with his pop lampooning. When he played the Mohegan Sun casino in 1998, in the era of Spice Girls, he revealed a T­shirt proclaiming him "Alice Spice."

Playing casinos is a natural progression for Cooper's theatrical shows.

"I always went, 'I don't want to play casinos.' But once I saw how it worked in there, it was perfect."

"Billion Dollar Babies" especially resonated in the land of slot machines.

The classic No. 1 album of the same name, which was reissued in a lavish package last year, was written by Cooper and his band in Connecticut, at a huge Greenwich mansion.

"It was, like, 30 rooms and had its own big gates. It looked just gothic enough for us to go 'Great!'" Cooper says. "We rehearsed there and nobody knew it, because it was 10 acres, a real estate. Bette Davis lived next door and she raised more hell than we did."

Yet there was something about the place that even spooked rock's biggest spook.

"Even big boys like us, you didn't want to be there alone at night," Cooper says. "I remember I had the flu one New Year's Eve, and I was there all alone and was creeped out. The house was creaking; there was a bell tower and a cathedral; there were secret passages in the walls all around the house. It was creep city."

Cooper's own creepy act has lasted long enough to be imitated by loads of other rockers, including Kiss and Marilyn Manson.

"But you've got to give them a laugh along with it," he says. "I think some of these bands forget to do that. And I think they become funny accidentally when they take themselves so seriously and want people to think they're so evil.

"With Alice, I'll give you a good scare, but at the end you'll walk out wearing confetti and maybe a little blood on you, and you'll say that's the best party you've ever been to."

The scariest thing about his current tour, though, is when he faced so many Yankees fans in the midst of the World Series. He played New York on Halloween.

"I live in Phoenix, and all my buddies are Diamondbacks. I was actually part-owner of the team for a while. So I'm very much a Diamondback fan," he said before the Arizona Diamondbacks clinched the championship Sunday.

"I'm glad it ended up Yankees and D-backs in the series," he continued. "But I'm not going to bring it up in my shows. I know when I'm outnumbered."