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Alice Cooper: Healthy, Wealthy and Dry

Alice Cooper can't figure out why his pals Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and Jon Bon Jovi - all of whom worked on the shock rocker's forthcoming album Trash - continue to live in the chilly Northeast. "I kept saying, 'Guys, you don't understand,' " says Cooper. " ' When you make a lot of money, you go to someplace warm.' "

Cooper has lived in Arizona on and off since his family moved their in the Fifties. In fact, hot afternoons at Phoenix's Cortez High inspired his hit anthem of rebellion "School's Out." After leaving to pursue his rock & roll career in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, Cooper returned to Phoenix for good in 1984. "It was kind of a dramatic move back," he says, "because I had just finished my thirteen-year alcoholic career in Los Angeles. To me the Hollywood social scene was nothing but drinking and partying every night."

Cooper runs two miles a night near his home in Paradise Valley and during the day tools around Phoenix in his late-model red Corvette, looking for gory videos. "I'm on my third viewing of most of the worst movies you've ever seen," he says. "Like Shriek of the Mutilated."

He still gets back to L.A. twice a week - "for interviews or photo sessions or for recording," he says. "It's fun to plug into L.A. now rather than being there. Everybody says, 'Oh, you look really healthy.' That's not necessarily a compliment when you're trying to be Alice Cooper all the time."