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Alice's 'Bad Boys' make room for daddy

Alice Cooper is living proof that you can't judge a kook by looking at its cover.

Who'd have been dumb enough 20 yers ago this summer to be that the booze-soaked Alice — then going to hell in a 24-hour handcart — would outlive Elvis "The King" Presley?

Well, the King is dead; long live the King of Shock Rock.

Cooper, who headlines Monday's five-band "Operation Rock 'n' Roll" metalfest at CNE Grandstand, is now 43 years old, one year older than Elvis was when he checked into the Heartbreak Hotel for the last time, 14 years ago today.

Back in 1971, at a time when Elvis was enjoying his second career and receiving laurels for being an anti-drug advocate (and what a joke that turned out to be), Cooper was partying with the Grim Reaper on a round-the-clock basis.

But today Cooper is a teetotaler and proper family man — with one wife, two kids — who sings about evils of drug abuse and teen suicide on his new Hey Stoopid album.

And he has become godfather to a generation of rockers he calls the "Bad Boys' Club" — everybody from the Sex Pistols to Guns N' Roses — in the same was Elvis inspired an earlier group of rebels.

"I've had a lot of guys from other bands — and I won't say who — come to me and say, 'Is it possible to do this without killing yourself?'"

"And I say, 'Look at me, I'm having my second career now with this. I'm bigger now than I was then, and I'm having more fun.

"I don't have to depend on ingesting two bottles of whisky a night. I haven't had a drink in nine years."

Cooper's status as the Don Corleone of the metal mafia comes as a welcome surprise to a man who freely admits that "we turned Alice into a real creature" in the early years.

Back then — with hs creepy voice propelling nasty-brat hits like "I'm Eighteen," followed by "School's Out," "Under My Wheels" and "No More Mr. Nice Guy" — he was building international notoriety as leader of what he proudly calls "the most hated band in the world."

Music fans have been raised on the straight, we're-naughty-but-nice approach of Presley and The Beatles were stunned to see the preacher man's son from Phoenix, Ariz., using a woman's name (he was born Vincent Furnier), applying black mascara with a paint trowel and consuming beer and whisky by the case and quart.

Then there was his stage show, which combined Broadway theatrics with scenes executions, snake fondling, necrophilia and a few things even the Marquis de Sade wouldn't have dreamed about. And Cooper did it while sporting black executioner's garb that would ???? become de rigueur for the punk scene.

There were frantic press reports — all false, Cooper says ??? — that his shows had gotten ?? out of control that he'd ripped live chickens apart at Toronto's Varsity Stadium and that he and freakmaker Frank Zappa had consumed human feces at one U.S. concert.

But there were enough true scenes of reckless living to fill two lifetimes, and Cooper's role model was none other than Jim "The Lizard King" Morrison. The late frontman for The Doors had been a pal of Cooper's when Alice was just getting his act together in Los Angeles, back in 1968.

Morrison, whose own well-chronicled excesses may even have topped Cooper's, had a fatal date with Mr. Bubble in a Paris hotel bathtub 20 years ago this summer. He never got a chance to talk to Cooper about the dangers of a rock lifestyle, but even if he had, Cooper would only have encouraged him to keep it up.

"At the time I was just following along," Cooper recalls. "I was just a kid. I was just fresh from Phoenix. I was being a big star and I watched what he was doing and said, 'Oh, maybe that's what I'm supposed to do...'

"The Doors were sort of big brothers to us. They were a real influence."

Cooper wasn't surprised to hear that Morrison's hard-living had finally killed him, but he was shocked a few years later to learn of the death of The Who's drummer, Keith Moon, who had ingested a lethal mix of drugs and alcohol.

"I knew Keith wasn't the least bit suicidal, and he wasn't an unhealthy person. It was one of those things; he was just so reckless, and he was using Antabuse (a drug to fight alcoholism) and Antabuse is a poison if you mix it was alcohol."

Cooper knows all about alcoholism. He finally came to grips with his own drinking problem in 1978, around the time of Moon's death, when he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital to dry out. The experience produced his 1979 album, From The Inside, but it took him until 1982 to get completely off the bottle.

The early 1980s were also a period in which Cooper's career all but dried up. His album sales plummeted, and he didn't get close to repeating the success of his top albums of the 1970s Mdash; Killer, School's Out, Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome To My Nightmare — until 1989, when he hooked up with songwriting drill sergeant Desmond Child to produce the multi-platinum Trash.

But a funny thing was happening while he was coping with his personal nightmares. All the kids who had gaped in wonder at Alice Cooper during his live performances around the world were now starting up their own bands, and Alice was their idea of the coolest dude to copy.

One of them was Johnny Rotten (a/k/a John Lydon), the leader of the Sex Pistols, the now-defunct British punk band. Lydon got his job singing with the band after manager Malcolm McLaren told him to audition by singing along with Cooper's record, "I'm Eighteen."

The bands KISS, Motley Crue and Poison also copied Cooper's shock-rock mantle.

But a more recent and noteworthy example of Coopermania is Guns N' Roses, a band that used to open Alice Cooper shows and has since gone on to become the world's most popular hard rock act.

Lead singer W. Axl Rose loves Cooper so much that he's been singing Alice's Only Women Bleed during the Gunners' current tour. And Rose invited Cooper to sing with him on a song called "The Garden," an extended piece that is to be included in GNR's multi-disc album, Use Your Illusion, which may or not be released this year.

"It was great," Cooper recalls of the recording session for Use Your Illusion, which is already gaining notoriety as one of the most difficult albums ever recorded.

"I'm one of those people who really believes in the fraternity of rock 'n' roll. And when you live in LA, you meet all these guys.

"I don't have a problem with anybody in rock 'n' roll. I don't have feuds going with Ozzy, or any feuds going with Motley Crue, or anybody.

"People want to think, 'Well, these guys really ripped you off.' And I say, 'I don't think so.' I'm glad they saw what I did and liked it and picked up on it.

"People always wanted me to hate KISS, and I don't hate KISS. Everybody knows who did it first, and I don't have a problem with that."

Besides, being a member of the Bad Boys' Club means you can always call up your pals to help you out with a new album, as Cooper did for his latest Hey Stoopid.

The celebrity sessionmen on the album includes GNR lead guitarist Slash, Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars of Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne and guitar gods Steve Vai and Joe Satriana (who appear together on record for the first time, backing Cooper on "Feed My Frankenstein").

The other star appearance on Hey Stoopid is by a posse of real rattlesnakes, which Cooper used to add authenticity to the tune "Snakebite."

"Everybody working with us on the album wanted to use electronic sounds," he recalls. "And I said, 'No, no, no, no, we use real rattlesnakes on this album!'

"And everybody was stepping on chairs, because we had to let them go."

This is turning out to be the year for Cooper. Besides his new album — his best, he says since Billion Dollar Babies, his celebrity gig with Gun N' Roses, he'll soon be appearing in the eighth and — they promise — final chapter in the horror movie series Nightmare On Elm Street.

Cooper plays the stepfather of razor fingered Freddy Krueger in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, due out Sept. 13th.

"They put me in really old makeup and made me look like the 50s and that kind of thing.... I've got a baseball hat on and a big leather belt I'm going to beat (Freddy) with.

"The whole thing is, it's a lesson in pain. I'm trying to show him a lesson in pain, and he ends up showing me a lesson."

Getting sliced-and-diced by Freddy was a laugh, Cooper says, and so is everything else these days.

He can't understand why some of his fellow rock stars manage to work themselves into a rage over some of the nutty things that happen on the road.

"It's funny, I think that in a lot of cases people take themselves way too seriously.

"You know, I think you get to the point where you just have to have fun with it... I always had a sense of humor behind it."

This is advice that Axl Rose might profit from, although godfather Cooper treads lightly in commenting on the latest antics of his most notorious protege.

Rose has been working overtime at making a bad name for himself this summer. He has arrived late for shows, threatened to cancel one altogether when police gave his limo driver a traffic ticket, touched off a riot in St. Louis after jumping off the stage to confront a fan he saw taking pictures.

"That's his style," Cooper says. "I can see Guns N' Roses now and I can totally understand what they're doing. They're rewriting the rules.

"When we did Billion Dollar Babies and School's Out and Nightmare we totally rewrote the rules. I said, 'Hey, we don't have to apply to everybody else's rules, we'll just rewrite them.' And I think it's kind of funny to see what (Guns N' Roses) are doing."

Cooper enjoys giving live performances now much more than when he was drinking ("I used to dread getting on stage") and he's especially looking forward to returning to Toronto for the Operation Rock 'n' Roll show with Judas Priest, Motorhead, Metal Church and Dangerous Toys.

Ya see, ol' Alice got his first big break in Hogtown — playing the legendary 1969 Rock 'n' Roll Revival Show alongside The Doors and a post-Beatle John Lennon at Varsity Stadium — and he says he genuinely loves the city.

That's why he and the latest version of his backing band chose Toronto for a rooftop concert earlier this summer. Cooper stopped traffic on Yonge St. as he showcased tunes from Hey Stoopid and tossed $2 bills to fans on the street below.

"We brought a different attitude to rock 'n' roll, an attitude of just get up and rock and have fun with it," Cooper says of a career that now approaches the quarter-century mark.

"I think too many bands are there going, 'Gee, I hope you like us tonight, you know, it would be great.' We've always just gone — 'Let's go!'"