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The Chicago Opera House, a vaulted baroque cavern with ornate gilded balconies reaching up like cyclopean steps, is not the likeliest place to hear rock 'n' roll. But a concert featuring The Stooges and Alice Cooper was scheduled there recently, so we went — partly to hear their music, partly to see if they lived up (or down) to their images. The Stooges, we had read, were lead by Iggy Stooge, a singer with a habit of wearing black leather and lacerating his flesh while performing. Alice Cooper, on the other hand, we knew to be a ladylike group of guys whom even Frank Zappa once called "very strange" and who are currently mincing towards rock's Queen of the Hop Award. Together we though, they should make for an unforgettable evening of pervo-rock.

While we sat among the several thousand long-haired faithful — an engagingly motley assortment — waiting for the presumably depraved appearance of Iggy, someone in the balcony stuck up a spirited kazoo chorus of Battle Hymn of the Republic; it turned out to be the best music of the evening. While the sweet smell of nearby pot teased our noses, from down in front came "Gimmee an I, Gimmee a G. . . . Whaddyagot? Iggy!" And in a few minutes we got him along with the four other Stooges. The group is not misnamed. Iggy marched out on stage wearing no leather, only washed-out Levis, with silver black ornamenting his bare chest like psychedelic war paint.

After giving his crotch a couple of test shakes to make sure it was in proper working order, he launched the group into 50 minutes of the most earnestly awful Rolling Stones imitation we have ever heard. By the third number, we noticed that the pot smokers near us were toking down a little desperately, apparently in the vain hope of improving what they were hearing. The band, which knows at least three chords, was careful to use no more than two in any given song — and Iggy cooked along in the same spirit, rolling on stage, crawling down into the audience, flapping his legs and arms like a duck possessed. We were happy to see that his work permitted him to get so much exercise, but as the lady who was with us put it, "He's just like Mick Jagger — except he doesn't have any moves and he can't sing." We had to agree — and to be grateful that the audience didn't cheer hard enough to encourage an encore.

Intermission lasted 40 minutes, and then Alice Cooper — announced as "the most glamorous group in the world" — finally came out. The group — three guitarists, a drummer and Alice — wore gleaming silver-lame jump suits and looked rather like 42nd Street rough trade in Vogue-model drag. As they worked through most of the cuts on their Love It To Death album — including I'm Eighteen, their solid hi single — it surprised us to notice that even in person their music lacks the slightest hint of mint. It's perfectly competent — if not always memorable — hard rock, and we could hear in it traces of the old Animals, the Doors and, at their best, the Stones.

But Alice knew that the real point of the evening was bizarre spectacle, not music, the he worked hard not to disappoint anyone. Donning a tall K. K. K./magician/dunce cap for Hallowed By My Name, he shed his jump suit (revealing black leotards with a V-neck that plunged below his navel) to begin Is It My Body and finished the song with a little help from a live snake, which coiled around his neck. The next bit ended with a genuine-looking nurse in starch white leading him off the stage. Alice returned seconds later sporting a strait jacket, which he wore to sing the Ballad of Dwight Fry, a psychotic little ditty about a mental institution.

Then came the big finale, a sort of voodoo production number called Black Juju. Someone wheeled in a large lump covered with a white sheet — which Alice quickly whipped off to reveal a dummy seated on a throne festooned with lights. While singing, Alice dethroned the dummy, stabbing it with a spear, and then took its seat. Lights flashing around his head as the drummer went into a ticktock beat and Alice produced a large watch — with which he tried to hypnotize the audience by swinging it back and forth in the glare of a baby spot. We almost fell asleep with boredom, but that's as close to a trance as we got. Alice finally broke the spell by turning a bright spotlight on the audience; and then, building toward a big finish, the band and the stage exploded — the band with music, the stage with colored smoke, huge clouds of feathers and mounds of fire-extinguisher foam — while Alice dismembered the dummy, tossing its parts in all directions.

There was an encore, but we knew it would anticlimactic, so we ducked out before the crowd, wondering what this all meant, if anything. It was tempting to ponder ominously on the jaded sensibilities of kids in a culture glutted with kinky violence and sexuality. But as we walked for a taxi, it struck us how tame it all was. Country-fair side shows have been serving up far weirder fare to far straighter audiences for 100 years, and Alice Cooper isn't much more than a sanitized medicine show in drag. The Stooges aren't even that. Ultimately, their cheap theatrics and second- to fifth-rate talent make them not harbingers of cultural or even musical doom but headliners for some Ed Sullivan show of the long-hair generation.