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Groucho Marx

WHO: Alice Cooper, Groucho Marx
WHERE: Polo Lounge, Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles
WHEN: October 1976 [1974]

I BELIEVE this photo was taken at Groucho's birthday party at the Polo Lounge. I first met him at a charity event Frank Sinatra had organised and we sang Lydia The Tattooed Lady, which was an old Groucho song from [1939 Marx Brothers film] At The Circus. My manager, Shep Gordon, looked after him in the later stage of his life, and for a period of time we were pretty good friends — we were kinda inseparable.

He was always great company, hanging around with him was just like being in a Marx Brothers movie, like being in Duck Soup. You'd go to lunch with him and he'd open the menu, call the waiter over and say, as loudly as he could, 'What kind of drugs do you have?', or, 'Can I get some dope for my friend here?'

I'd say, 'Shhh, you can't say that, Groucho!' But of course you never told Groucho that he couldn't do something because that would just egg him on more. He enjoyed the sport of it all.

We'd be having lunch and he'd say, 'Excuse me, I gotta go torture the maitre d'', and two minutes later the maitre d' would be looking like he wanted to strangle him. There was never a dull moment.

He liked me because I could make him laugh: if you could make Groucho laugh that was something. He was a unique entertainer, in that he could do anything — he could sing, play guitar, dance, tell jokes — and he looked at me as that kind of entertainer too. There was a certain absurdity to both of us.

Groucho came to see one of our shows once, and said, 'Alice is the last hope for vaudeville.' He saw me in that same tradition he came from.

Groucho would host great dinner parties, but if you had dinner at his house you had to perform afterwards. Except not in your own chosen field: if you were a singer, you had to dance, if you were a dancer, you had to tell jokes. I'd have to sing a Bing Crosby song, not a rock song, Fred Astaire would have to play piano, Mickey Dolenz would have to dance. That made it funnier for everybody. Those were good evenings.

Even in his eighties he was as sharp as a tack. I'd come back home and he'd be chasing my 18-year-old wife around the living room wearing Mickey Mouse ears, or she'd be sitting in his lap. Sheryl would say, 'Alice, he's 86, what is he going to do?', and he'd look up with a smile and a raised eyebrow. He was one of a kind, and I'm proud to have known him as a friend. He was a true legend.

"Prowling ghouls. Punk anthems. Transgender tough guys. School's out again..."

Twenty-six studio albums into his career, the Coop still makes us laugh, think and cower in fear.

Alice Cooper
Paranormal
Ear Music
****

Phil Alexander

On an inclement Sunday night in February 1982, Alice Cooper's freak show rolled into London for the first of two shows at Hammersmith Odeon. On the first night, Cooper delivered an astonishing set where classic material (I'm Eighteen, Under My Wheels, Cold Ethyl, Only Women Bleed) sat alongside songs from his recently released Special Forces album (a noted cover of Love's lysergic punk classic, Seven And Seven Is, included).

To an impressionable teenage watching Alice for the first time from Row B, the show - with it's larger-than-life stage props,sword play and the odd snake - was spellbinding. The sight of Cooper himself however, was deeply disturbing. Like a cross between Widow Twanky and Joan Crawford circa '73, the singer looked utterly emaciated. A year later, the 34-year-old would be hospitalised suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. It would be four years until he returned to touring.

Thirty-five years on from that Hammersmith gig, Alice Cooper remains sober. The man born Vincent Furnier has never succumbed to his old habits, preferring to lose himself in music while enjoying the process of Zelig-like reinvention. The mid-'80s saw him enjoying a commercial rebirth via four radio-friendly, MTV-approved albums (1989's multi-platinum Trash among them.) Then came his neo-grunge period (1994's The Last Temptation) followed by his dalliance with unbridled heaviness on the aptly titled Brutal Planet in 2000.

MORE RECENTLY, though, Cooper has re-connected with his past, most notably with the sequel to his 1975 solo debut, Welcome To My Nightmare 2, issued in 2011. The album saw him team up with both producer Bob Ezrin and member of the original Alice Cooper band. He does the same here on Paranormal. Hence, surviving AC band member Michael Bruce (guitars), Dennis Dunaway (bass) and drummer Neal Smith re-join Ezrin and Alice on two new studio tunes: Genuine American Girl and You And All Your Friends, both included on the second disc of this 2-CD set. In addition to this, there's a six-song mini live set from Columbus, Ohio, where Alice's current band crank their way through classics that include No More Mr. Nice Guy, Under My Wheels and the evergreen School's Out.

While most artists of Alice's generation would shudder at the prospect of drawing comparisons between their past glories and their current work, Cooper displays a remarkable insouciance. In fact, on first spin, the ten new tracks that make up Paranormal suggest that rock's Grand Guignol is still in the hunt for the next hoot and, quite possibly, the next hit.

The title track itself kicks off the proceedings in grandiose style: a late-night tale of a ghoul stalking his girl, the song is underpinned by a cavalcade of chromed Euro-metal guitars and a guest appearance by Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover who co-wrote the tune. Glover is not the only guest on the album, U2's Larry Mullen Jr underpinned nine of the ten new tracks with his distinctive, lyrical drum patterns. Also present is ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, who pops up with a couple of greasy solos on the tongue-in-cheek romp Fallen In Love - "I've fallen in love and I can't get up!" croons the Coop, with a knowing chuckle.

Where Alice excels, however is when he allows his inner punk to come to surface. Consequently, Dead Flies and the overdriven Rats emerge as two of the album's finest cuts, powered as they are by spit, venom and snubbed-nosed riffs. Equally, Fireball is a radio-friendly piece of post-Beatles pop, flecked with muscular guitar work-outs. the same is true of current single Paranoiac Personality, built on the age-old appeal of the air-punching big hooks, a gang vocal chorus, and the odd menacing Psycho-styled instrumental stabs thrown in for good measure. Most startling is The Sound of A, whose brooding textures recall Ezrin's work on Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Flip on the second disc and you find the two aforementioned tracks featuring the rescapés from the original Alice band laying down a '70s-styled, three-chord rama-lama on Genuine American Girl - where Cooper paints a portrait of a "bona fide beauty in an ugly world", in this case a tough guy who happens to be transgender - and proudly so. In the current Trump-ian climate, the subject matter serves as a reminder that Cooper's role as one of rock's great libertarians. In contrast, You and All Your Friends is a good-time rallying cry that could have come from the era of School's Out.

These two tracks suggest that, musically speaking, Cooper has come full circle. In truth, he is merely giving his audience what they want - while still living mischievously in the present.

Best Tracks: Dead Flies, Rats, The Sound of A, Genuine American Girl