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Horror films inspire Arizona's bizarre star

PARADISE VALLEY — Vincent Damon Furnier, better known to the rock-music world as Alice Cooper, says he's a television junkie and that many of his bizarre concepts for albums come from watching "as many bad horror movies as I can — just about anything that's stupid."

Cooper, 35, grew up in Phoenix and has a home in Paradise Valley, a fashionable suburb north of Phoenix. His home, complete with werewolf pictures and macabre memorabilia of Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., Jack the Ripper and Bela Lugosi, is very close to Barry Goldwater's mansion.

"I like the idea of black humor. A lot of it had to do with studying Salvador Dali. There was always a sort of funny horror about him," Cooper says of the surrealistic painter. "I think that most things that shouldn't be laughed at are funnier.

"I've always touched on death in all my albums, because I think there's something funny about it. Nobody knows anything about it, so why shouldn't we have a little fun with it?"

Cooper also says he gets a kick out of the "townspeople thing," when people shudder and avoid him in the street.

"That's always fun. I like being popular on that level," he says. "It's not that I'm not a nice guy. I'm a wonderful guy. It's just that I like that (dark) side. I just seem to fit there."

The persona of Alice Cooper came after Furnier and his band, the Spiders, became tired of playing in Phoenix and Tucson, and moved to Los Angeles after his graduation from Phoenix's Cortez High School in 1966.

"I think people want me to be Alice. I get to be that dissident voice. I do speak for a certain amount of lunatic fringe, I think," Cooper says. "I still am in kind of like an adolescence, a mental adolescence. I'm really not any more than 17 years old, mentally."

In his new album, "Dada," there's a song, entitled "I Love America," which encompases the patroitic half of Cooper's split personality.

"I've always been totally pro-American. I'm such a hawk. I like the idea of 'Don't Tread on Me.' It's the kind of thing where I don't like the Russians at all," he says. "The Alice thing has always been an all-American thing, as much as apple pie. Alice Cooper is a nice American name."

However, Cooper cringes when parents and other people accuse him of corrupting the nation's youth with his million-selling anthems of "School's Out," "Killer," "Billion Dollar Babies," and "Welcome to My Nightmare."

"They just don't understand me," he says. "No matter how you look at it, you're going to be manipulated in this country. So why not have fun with it?"

In her syndicated column, Ann Landers once complained about an Alice Cooper song dealing with necrophilia, so Cooper says he "wrote her back and said I will take responsibility for this song if there's a gigantic ruch of necrophilia. I figured it was sort of something to snicker about.

"Let's face it. What would you rather pick up if you're going to pick up a newspaper? Would you rather pick up a headline reading 'Today Reagan Travels to Asia' or 'Man Born with Dog's Head'?

"It really explains why people come to my concerts," he says. "More people would rather go to an airplane wreck than a circus. You give them what they want. I know what they want. But the bottom line is you've got to be a great band to pull off stunts. People are saying, 'This is not supposed to happen, but it's an extra.'"