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Alice Cooper Has Changed His Tune But Not His Music

There was a strange buzzing on the line when Alice Cooper called, so he said he would call back. On the second try, the line was clear.

With mock regret, Cooper cracked: "It's the only buzz I get anymore."

Not strictly true, of course. The 42-year-old heavy-metal veteran is conspicuously clean and sober these days, but his career has bounced back to a new high.

In the late '80s, Cooper seemed to have fallen into the shadow of his heirs, bands such as Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. Cooper was all over television as a "personality," but it had been a while since he had a hit such as "Only Women Bleed," "Eighteen" or "School's Out." His last two albums, on MCA, hadn't done particularly well.

Cooper switched to Epic and his new album, Trash, has been a success, selling like mad in every country he visited on his recent tour of Canada and Europe. Cooper, who will perform in Kissimmee Saturday, said Trash has sold about 1.4 million copies abroad and 2.5 million in the United States.

The single "Poison" made it into Billboard's Top 10, and you can hardly switch on your MTV without catching the video for "House of Fire."

"The two albums on MCA were both pretty much metal albums. Their intention was to bring Alice back," said Cooper, who talks 1.4 miles a minute and is as affable as his onstage persona is scary.

"Since he'd been off for four or five years, I wanted to let people know Alice wasn't bald, fat and stupid, let them know Alice was more visible than ever, at 134 pounds, and I wanted them to know Alice had not mellowed out," Cooper explained. "I didn't really expect mega commercial hits. They were pretty much calling cards."

After 1987's Raise Your Fist and Yell, Cooper mounted one of his most theatrical tours in years, titled "The Nightmare Returns."

"I think a lot of people thought, 'Well, Alice is retired and living in his mansion in Arizona, counting his money, watching MTV and laughing,'" Cooper said. "I'd watch MTV, I was semi retired, and everyone was doing my show. I said, 'Why am I sitting here. After I stopped drinking, I was in such good shape. Physically I'm in better shape than when I was on the road at 20 or 25. So I said, 'Well, jeez, I'm going back out there.' I missed it, to be honest with you."

When it came time to record Trash, Cooper was after more than the core audience of metal lovers. Pop-metal was on a resurgence, and Cooper wanted to be right at the top of the wave again.

"If Aerosmith and Bon Jovi and people like Motley Crue were on the radio, there was no reason why Alice Cooper was not on radio — Top 10," Cooper said. "I wasn't just talking about Top 10 AOR [album-oriented rock]. Most of my hits were commercial hits. 'Commercial' is not a bad word. It means, really, 'radio-able.' "

To get that radio-able sound, Cooper turned to producer/songwriter Desmond Child, who had helped make hits for Aerosmith, Joan Jett and Bon Jovi. (Members of Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and a few other heavy metal bands make guest appearances on Trash.)

"I wanted to do an album sort of like School's Out or Billion Dollar Babies with 1990s production," Cooper said. "I really like Desmond's stuff. He goes ahead and works with people, lots of different people... He doesn't try to change them, and he didn't try to change me. He said 'Let's take the best of Alice.'"

Child didn't want to just come up with riffs and leave Cooper to write the lyrics. Instead, they formed a team and spent months in a hotel room with a keyboard and a pad of paper. Cooper said he wrote 80 percent of the lyrics and Child wrote 80 percent of the music.

"His big-chorus thing, that's really his style," Cooper said. "People say, 'That's a Bon Jovi line. That's an Aerosmith line. 'That's an Alice Cooper line.' It's not; it's a Desmond Child line. He certainly does have one style. I don't mind plugging into that. He really does have a way of getting things on radio, and I really needed to be on radio.

"It's just part of the whole puzzle. You get on MTV, do your shows and everything, and I did that for years. But one element we were missing was radio viability. This album really had it — without changing the Alice sound. I listened to a lot of stuff for this album, and I didn't really have to surgically do anything to it to make it Alice Cooper."

Although some artists turn to new subjects as they get older, Cooper doesn't have any trouble writing teen-lust songs such as "Bed of Nails" or "House of Fire."

"I still have a lot of teenage lust in me, luckily," he said, laughing. "When I write songs, I really don't have an age at all; I really don't think about how old I am. I just turned 42, but look at Jagger, and [Aerosmith's] Steve Tyler I think is the same age as I am and Ozzy [Osbourne].

"I don't really think like a grown-up. There really is such a thing as a Peter Pan syndrome, and a lot of us rock 'n' rollers suffer from it."

Cooper paused and said, "I think probably I suffer from a Captain Hook syndrome. I don't want to grow up, and I want to be the villain."

Of course, it's getting a bit harder to play the villain these days even though, due to popular demand, Cooper still uses a guillotine in his shows, and because of his own propensities, there's still plenty of fake blood.

"I've always said it's hard to shock an audience anymore," Cooper said philosophically. "The audience has pretty much seen everything. When I was very shocking, it was when there was no Freddy Krueger around, no Jason — only Alice to scare them."

One compensation is that, for the first time, Cooper is starting to draw a sizable female audience, thanks to MTV exposure and songs such as "Only My Heart Talking," a power ballad with Steven Tyler. But Cooper worries that his theatrics might seem dull or that he's repeating himself or that he won't be able to keep oldies such as "School's Out" fresh.

"Then I remember the 15-year-olds in the audience out there, and they've heard these songs on the radio, but they've never seen me play them," Cooper said. "And it's amazing to go out and do songs off Trash, and the whole audience knows more off Trash than they do off the classics. I find that great.

"I don't count Alice Cooper as a nostalgia kind of thing. I hate nostalgia. I like the old songs, but I certainly don't live for what I did in '72. I'm more interested in my next album."

(Originally published in Calendar, a supplment of the Orlando Sentinel - March 2-8, 1990)