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Alice Cooper Interview

At 73 years old, you would think the lure of the Arizona sunshine and the opportunity to spend more time on the golf course would be the biggest draw in Alice Cooper's life. Yet the man who over the last five decades had brought us a plethora of hit singles and classic albums, and has been the inspiration for multiple artists dipping their toes into the shock horror pool before finding their own path, continues to release music and tour. Without Alice, we probably wouldn't have the likes of Rob Zombie, W.A.S.P., King Diamond and many more artists who have delivered some of the best in rock and metal over the years.

If musicians find inspiration in Alice, then where does the man, born Vincent Damon Furnier, on 4 February 1948, find his own muse? The answer it would appear is the place he was born and spent the first ten years of his life, Detroit.

'Detroit Stories', Alice's 28th studio album, takes all of the things that have made Detroit great over the years and delivers a series of stories about the motor city that spawned the likes of the MC5 and Iggy And The Stooges. Loosely conceptual, it feels like a show that could be heard off-Broadway, with enough characters, musical styles and themes to suit audiences of all ages. Ever pragmatic, Alice explains just how an album about a city he left behind more than sixty years ago came to be.

"Most of the concepts that we did were not intentional; they started out being one thing and when you start writing the lyrics, all of a sudden you fall into a theme. 'Nightmare' was, of course, intentional and 'Brutal Planet' as well but let us take 'Paranormal' — 'Paranormal', the last album, is just a series of stories, and it ended up that every character involved was paranormal, every character was interesting. I started pushing it ['Detroit Stories'] that way, and once it started going in that direction it kind of occurred to me that the home of hard rock is Detroit. Not only was I born there but whereas San Francisco had The Grateful Dead and a couple of different kinds of music and New York had Young Rascals, Detroit had Iggy And The Stooges, the MC5, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Suzi Quatro; you know, all these band that came out of Detroit were hard rock bands. So I said, 'well, let's not just do a hard rock album, let's go to Detroit. We should write the album in Detroit, record it there, and use all Detroit players.' Now it became a theme, then it became a concept, then because I am from there, I know guys that would make great characters, and then it suddenly became a thing, a dramatic kind of thing."

Detroit has of course been known as the motor city for many years thanks to the fact that the big three, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantic North America (Chrysler) are all headquartered there. It's a real blue-collar place and not surprisingly Detroit grew its hard rock scene because of the number of working guys that needed that type of music.

"Detroit is not a sophisticated place," offers Alice by way of explanation. "Or at least it wasn't when I was a kid. Motown was there, and I think most of the people at the time worked in factories, they had lots of machines and they picked up on that, deciding that their music should reflect that, too. As you can imagine, soft rock did not work. People when they went to the concerts, they wanted to hear a band that was not only loud and in their face but a band with attitude and mixed with a little anger as well."

Pausing to consider for a moment, Alice then continues, "It definitely was a blue-collar thing but very social as well. There was the Motown scene and the rock scene, and they were in bed together. I mean, we would be playing the Eastown Theatre or the Grande Theatre with the Stooges or MC5 and we'd be looking out over a really mixed audience of some fifteen hundred people."

It wasn't uncommon in those early days that the musicians on stage could look down into the audience and there would be Smokey Robinson and there would be one of the Supremes and two of The Temptations shoulder to shoulder with the guys that had just come off shift out of the automobile factories.

“They loved coming to the hard rock shows, you know?" says Alice. "It was a sweaty, really high-energy place, and we would reciprocate and also go to see them. We would go down the Roostertail [which opened in 1958 and is still going strong in Detroit today] and places like that where these R&B bands were playing, and there was no colour involved — it was just music and if you were a musician you were a brother."

Detroit does of course have its darker side. For all of the times where race could be forgotten and venues could host a gig with little or no trouble at all, the city, as industrial as it was at the time, became known not only as the murder capital of America but also the drug capital. Reminiscing about the times he played there in the 80s, Alice also recollects a story which allegedly saw the city mayor at the time re-elected having only recently been caught smoking crack. Only in America, I guess!

"Only in Detroit, to be honest with you," says Alice with a laugh. "But I think it came down to this, the logic there was, 'well, at least he is honest'."

A quick slice of research shows that this type of activity with US mayors wasn't restricted to the slightly more free-thinking era of the 1970s and 1980s. As recently as the turn of the 21st Century, Kwame Kilpatrick was elected mayor at the age of 31 and seen as a rising political figure. In 2002 Kilpatrick reportedly held a sumptuous party at the Detroit mayor's mansion during which his wife Carlita Kilpatrick physically assaulted a 27-year-old stripper named "Strawberry". Soon after the event, the woman was mysteriously found dead in what remains an unsolved homicide. By 2008 Kilpatrick was out of office and serving 28 years in prison after being found guilty of two dozen crimes, including racketeering, extortion, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Only in Detroit indeed!

Whilst the LA scene was too trippy for Alice in the late 60s, and early 70s, with everybody on LSD, which meant that the Alice Cooper Band were a little too frightening for them, back home in Detroit everyone absolutely loved them. According to Alice, Detroit really took to the theatrics; they loved the attitude, the in their face rock and roll.

"We were the missing finger in the glove and then when they found out I was from Detroit, well, then I was like a long-lost son."

To have left Detroit so early in life, yet still feel at one with the city, Alice had to have experienced some fairly seismic events in the first ten years before he moved to Arizona, the sort of things that would leave an everlasting impression.

"I can honestly pinpoint it. It is one of those things in your life, you wonder if I go in this direction or why did I go in that direction, and that was when I was seven years old and I saw Elvis Presley on 'The Ed Sullivan Show'. Imagine at the time, if you can: my father and my uncles, they were all like characters out of 'Guys And Dolls'. These guys spent the time at the track, they drank beer, they smoked cigarettes, followed boxing, the whole thing. They introduced me not only to Elvis Presley, but they followed it up with 'if you like Elvis, you are going to love this' and I heard Chuck Berry for the first time. This was really the first time I had ever heard a song that was guitar driven. It was Chuck Berry's guitar that started the whole thing and drove right through the song. Chuck Berry was perhaps the greatest lyricist of all time. He could tell a story in three minutes with a punchline and he did it consistently to the point where even to this day, I still say he's the best."

The feel of 'Detroit Stories' also has to make the listener believe the music was born out of the city; no easy feat but one that Alice and producer Bob Ezrin decided early on had to work.

Alice has surrounded himself with great guitar players, great drummers, and what you get is a flavour of Detroit. Johnny "Bee" Badanjek of Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels on drums is, according to Alice, the premier drummer there. He's also got Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner, organist James Shelton and The Motor City Horns who helped the album pull in a little of the R&B DNA.

"I would normally say, 'oh, no, we've got to get rid of that, make that more rock'," says Alice. "on this album, I went 'no, no, keep it in'. Bob Ezrin and I both sat there and thought, that is a little funky, is it not? and I said, 'yeah, but that is Detroit' and so we kept all the stuff in that gave it that flavour. I probably won't do that on the next album, but on this album it worked. Like Ozzy and Steven Tyler, we all know who the players are. We all kind of have our own that we will call on. Then with Bob Ezrin, he has always been my George Martin. He has always been the guy that takes everything and puts it all in the right place on the record."

Several of the tracks on the album are covers; some originated from Detroit bands. The opening track, 'Rock 'n' Roll', suits the album perfectly but originated in New York and came from The Velvet Underground. A slight change in lyric to reference Detroit station instead of New York station in the opening verse and we have the perfect fit.

"The Velvet Underground vibe, which was sort of New York heroin chic, wouldn't fit what we tried in Detroit. That New York sound was a little drone, monotone, throw away. It was cool. That was what Velvet Underground was great at. But if you took that same song, took it to Detroit, and put a V8 engine in and upped the horsepower with whoever you are going to play with, then all of a sudden you have this monster rock song."

Those monster rock songs, carrying the Detroit dirt, energy and atmosphere through their veins, are supported in addition to those noted above by other artists like Joe Bonamassa, jazz bassist Paul Randolph and of course the MC5's Wayne Kramer: fifteen tracks of music in a style that fans of the early Alice Cooper Band material would lap up.

One song that has evolved though is 'Don't Give Up'. Released last year with a video featuring clips from some 20,000 fans, the song focused on the hard times everyone was facing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Alice and his wife Sherly both tested positive for the disease last year and whilst not hospitalised, the virus forced them to take a time-out, take stock and just recover. Recognising that life had stalled, Alice took a song intended for this album, reworked it as a message of support to people who were experiencing the same issues and the song now finds its way back on to the album, as it was originally intended, as 'Hanging By A Thread'.

"I wrote this song about suicide and at the end, we give the suicide hotline number, but when Covid-19 came along Bob and I talked together; I said if we change the second verse, we can turn this into a song about the pandemic but with the attitude of let us not be victims anymore, let's tell Covid-19 that we are not going away, it is going away. It [CV-19] only has a certain lifespan but we are the human race and we will keep going, and I wanted to give the audience a different view of it, not as victims, but being the aggressor. Let's punch the bully on the nose, and that is really all that we did".

Having now been vaccinated, presumably with a V-8 boosted Detroit version of the vaccine whilst a tour in support of the new album isn't immediately forthcoming, he will go out with Hollywood Vampires later this year. During the month of August, after (hopefully) life returns a little to normal and restrictions are lifted, the band will be playing the UK and mainland Europe. 'Detroit Stories' is out now on EarMusic and was reviewed in issue 238.