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Hail to the Coop!

Alice Cooper — 20 albums and countless nightmares late, the quintessential King of Shock-Rock, is alive, well, happy and sober. Née Vincent Damon Furnier, the man terminally in black leather and blacker eye makeup has carved out a niche for his horror-schlock-hard-rock with guillotines, axes and classics like "Eighteen" or "School's Out." Having sat out the disco era, his chronic battle with the bottle beaten, it's not surprise how fiercely he came back in the mid-80's with albums of unabashed heavy metal like Raise Your Fist and Yell — No more Mr. Nice Guy, indeed! With 89's Trash, he mustered a chilling rock 'n' roll vision that, while joining forces with Bon Jovi songwriter Desmond Child, was distinctly Alice. The album was a hit. Cooper was back in spades. Now, with this year's Hey Stoopid, he's laid off the sugary-sweet harmonies, stopped behaving like Bon Jovi's wicked Uncle Vinnie and given us a rollicking Mike Tyson-punch rock 'n' roll album. Joined by the likes of Slash, Nikki Sixx and Joe Satriani, it's a perfect balance of crunching, shotgun-blast anthems and sheer menace. It's 12 tracks of pure, unadulterated Alice. Y'wanna argue with that?

Compared to your last album, Trash, Hey Stoopid! has so much more bite. It's everything...

That you wanted Trash to be? Yeah. I think in working with Desmond [Child] on the last one, we gave up a certain percentage of Alice and injected that percentage of Desmond. I think on this album there's a lot more Alice and everybody's attitude is more Alice. At the same time, I realized something about the last album: you spend most of your time writing, not just recording. This time we wrote 40 songs and narrowed it down to 12 but they're the 12 cream-of-the-crop songs. Before, it used to be that we'd write in the studio, and write songs which were little more than a series of riffs to fit with this certain guitar solo. These are real songs.

Do you think Trash fulfilled a function?

Absolutely. A lot of people forget that in the early days, we were on the radio, we were always on the radio. We were in competition with people like Paul Simon. That was a common place for us to be. When we more or less went underground during disco then all of a sudden it seemed natural for people to consider us more FM — they forgot about the 10 or 15 hits we had. Now I think we've gotten Alice back on the radio, which has gotten a lot more rock 'n' roll oriented anyway. Definitely, part of the function of the Trash album and having someone like Desmond Child write with me on it, was to get Alice back on the radio on the same level as Aerosmith or Bon Jovi. The album did 3,000,000 copies, it was a mega-album for us. I think what it really was, was that we gave them a package that everyone liked. An Alice that everybody could listen to. It made it OOK to be an Alice fan again.

Trash was Alice talking about sex. Does Hey Stoopid! have any central, unifying theme?

No. We didn't really go for a theme on this. It's a fun summer rock 'n' roll album. It's a bit like Billion Dollar Babies in that respect, but it's still Alice all the way. The title track is probably the closest we've ever come to social consciousness, though. I was getting a lot of fan mail letters that really disturbed me. Stuff like, "I'm 15 years old, my dad's an alcoholic and raped me and my mother's a crack salesman, blah, blah, blah. All I'm trying to decide on now is how to kill myself." At 15, all that kid's thinking about is how to kill [herself] out of sheer depression. Then, I'd read a couple more letters and come across something like "I can't wait to die." What is going on here? There's a real sickness out there. Teenage suicide was once unheard of and now there's so many kids, all of whom are at the point where rock 'n' roll should be everything, who just want to die. Out of that, the song, "Hey Stoopid" came along. It's probably the first thing I would say to a friend of mine who told me they were about to kill themself. "Hey stooopid!" I don't want Alice to be a parent, a teacher or a preacher. I just want to be one of the guys.

Sounds like Alice is... (gulp!) growing up!

I hope Alice never grows up. I check on vince every once in a while to see how he's doing — he's probably grown up too much. Luckily, I have Alice to fall back on and everytime Alice does "Eighteen" onstage he believes it with a vengeance. It's not like him trying to hold on to being eighteen, but every time that song comes up so does all the angst and anger he had at that age. The nice thing about Alice is that Alice is ageless. He's 120 or he's 15. He's just as old as he has to be. He's Superman and Dracula, y'know? Myself, I appreciate rock 'n' roll more than I ever did before. I got a second chance. I wasn't one of those legends that died. Y'know, I'm pissed off that guys like Jim Morrison, Janis Jplin, Jimi Hendrix are gone. There was no reason for it. I knew them. I drank with them. They taught me how to drink. I was the kid and they were my teachers. Now, all these people I grew up with are dead. My rebellion is not to end up like them. To be a legend that doesn't die. I'm going for perfection. I want Alice to be a punch in the mouth, not a drug and alcohol casualty.

This time, you had guys like Ozzy, Nikki Sixx, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Mick Mars and Slash come in and jam. Was it more of a fun, creative and friendly project than the usual Alice album?

Oh, sure. It was great to work with those guys. On the last album I had guys from Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Kip Winger. They seemed to fit that album. This album seems to be a little more outlaw so I went with more of the back-street guys and they fit in more. Believe me, I didn't have to tell Slash what to play on "Hey Stoopid." He just came in and "Slash-ed" right through it. Same with Satriana and Vai.

Then a permanent band isn't really important at this stage in the game?

It's a different concept for me now. I'm at a point now where I think that the guys in the touring band should be different. The guys I've got in the studio just wouldn't be right for the stage. They haven't got the fire, they haven't got the look. Then again, the guys onstage may not be as precise as the guys in the studio. So what's wrong with giving an audience two bands? That's just the way it works for me.

You describe this record as a "fun" Alice Cooper record. What does fun mean for you?

My idea of fun's a little different than everybody else's. There's a lot of black humor in there, to put it mildly. Just look at the titles alone: "Burning Our Bed," "Hurricane Years," "Feed My Frankenstein" — which I wrote with Zodiac Mindwarp. It's about a guy's libido.

How's the acting career going?

I did Nightmare On Elm Street VI: Freddy's Dead and I play Freddy's stepfather who is just a very bad guy. The sort of guy with a beer in one hand and a belt with a very big, very painful belt-buckle, in the other. I do a good job as a father trying to teach him the meaning of pain. Suffice to say, I don't get out of the film alive. Acting's great. It's like a hobby for me these days and unfortunately, because of Alice commitments, I have to turn a lot of scripts down.

What would be a dream role?

I would have loved to play Hannibal the Cannibal. Who knows, hopefully one day someone's going to give me something I can really get my teeth into!