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Alice, with Malice

Hacking way up comeback trail

Freddy Kreuger, the raisin face from Nightmare on Elm Street, has just released his first album, Freddy's Greatest Hits, but, hah, he's a pussy cat compared to that old shocktrooper, Alice Cooper.

Alice (rhymes with malice) has been hacking his way up the comeback trail with a machete for a few years now. Ever since he stopped drinking, got into shape, realized that nobody really wanted to hear him trying to compete with synthesizer geeks and decided to get back to baseness, the erstwhile Vincent Furnier (rhymes with nothing) had returned from the dead.

"Alice Cooper '87 is stronger than ever," declares the besnaked one. "The show is a real power house."

What he means is that Alice Cooper has seen red, and so will you if you go to his show, tomorrow, at the Coliseum.

From his sober vantage point in hometown Phoenix, Arizona, Alice realized that there were legions of heavy metal bands who were making successful careers out of doing what he used to before he symbolically fell off the Coliseum stage in 1975 in the middle of his Welcome To My Nightmare tour.

"If you're in the first 20 rows you should wear something that goes well with red," warns Alice (rhymes with callous).

In the old days, when Alice used his guillotine, all that used to happen was that his head would fall into a basket. Monday, Alice goes for the jugular.

"People said to me, 'Well, Alice, it's 1987; you're never going to shock these audiences; they've seen everything.'

"I said, 'Oh yeah!' Now most of the reviews say, 'Alice Cooper goes one step too far.'"

Alice-on-the-rebound has nostalgic old fans and an entire rock generation of new ones who missed him the first time around but have heard their older siblings' Killer and School's Out albums.

Alice-cashing-in has recorded two heavy metal albums in a row — Constrictor and Raise Your Fist And Yell. The new Alice has musclebound Kane Roberts playing pump-iron guitar, stuntmen and actors who've worked in films such as Aliens and The Fly and songs descriptively titled Chop Chop Chop.

"It's important to stress that it's rock doing theatre not theatre doing rock," Alice points out.

"I think there are certain things that are stable and don't ever change. Horror and comedy are both stable. I could have written Chop Chop Chop in 1972 or Dwight Fry in 1987.

"That one section (a trilogy featuring Chop Chop Chop) of the show leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth because it really is too splatter-oriented," says the man who watches two mad slasher movies a night. "It's a little too graphic ad that's been one of the criticisms of the show.

"But if it didn't have a redeeming black humor then I wouldn't do it," he reasons cheerily. "If you don't like it, that's because you're not supposed to like it."

Opening for Alice Cooper is L.A.'s Faster Pussycat. Motorhead, which was also to be on the bill won't be at Vancouver or Victoria shows because the band didn't get it's work-permit paperwork done in time.

(Originally published in the Sunday Living supplement of The Provience, December 27th, 1987)