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Rock Hall to Induct Mr. Nice Guy

Alice Cooper's back in studio and finally gets his props

Alice Cooper tried not to let a little thing like being overlooked for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame get to him.

After all, he had built his reputation with horror-show stage antics and dead-end-kid anthems like School's Out and No More Mr. Nice Guy. He had fashioned a persona of a pop-culture Professor Moriarty, a psychotic Captain Hook for rock 'n' roll's Peter Pan syndrome.

And who's going to grant a villain entrance into the hall of heroes?

"We were Susan Lucci for quite a long time — or Pete Rose, whichever way you look at it," says Cooper 63, sitting on a black couch in the studio where he's working on Welcome 2 My Nightmare, a sequel to his platinum-selling 1975 album Welcome to My Nightmare.

On Monday, Cooper (aka Vincent Furnier) and the original members of the band Alice Cooper — rhythm guitarist Micheal Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, drummer Neal Smith and late lead guitarist Glen Buxton — will finally be inducted into the Hall of Fame, along with Neil Diamond, Dr. John, Darlene Love and Tom Waits.

It took only 16 years — to even get on the ballot.

Alice Cooper was first eligible in 1994, 25 years after debut album Pretties For You. Despite nine gold and platinum albums and 11 top-40 hits, Cooper and the band didn't make the ballot until last year, at which point voters promptly picked them.

Cooper's producer, Bob Ezrin, believes the induction could signal the start of a revival for the rock's master of macabre.

"Alice is one of the rock artists from that time who has not had his second golden era yet," says Ezrin, who initially worked with Cooper on 1971's Love It to Death, the band's breakthrough album. Forty years later, Cooper and Ezrin have reunited to create the sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare.

The concept, Cooper says is simply: "If Alice had a nightmare in 1975, what would his nightmare be in 2011 ?"

Beyond the tour

Cooper comes into Ezrin's studio clad entirely in black — his hair, long-sleeved shirt, jeans, boots — with a sword pendant dangling from his neck. He and Ezrin are putting the finishing touches on the ambitious concept album, scheduled for release in the fall.

Cooper's time in Nashville (he lives in Phoenix) brings lots of visitors to the studio, from his former guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, who both now live in the town, to former Senate majority leader Bill Frist. After hours, Cooper becomes something of a regular presence at nearby restaurants and a local movie theater.

"I go to see everything," he says. "I don't care how bad it is."

The new album won't just play off the 1975 Nightmare, though haunting motifs from the original occasionally can be heard worming their way into the new one. It actually pulls together threads from various stages of Cooper's career.

Portions of the album reunite the surviving Alice Cooper members. Others were recorded with members of Cooper's touring band, as well as Hunter and Wagner.

The album features newer friends, as well. Cooper and Ezrin wrote songs with Buckcherry guitarist Keith Nelson. Guests making cameos range from Rob Zombie and former Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 to Vince Gill.

"Vince Gill shreds," says Cooper, who attended a Nashville Predators hockey game a few weeks ago and wound up singing School's Out and Chuck Berry's Nadine with Gill and the team's house band between periods. "My guitarists are going to hear it and go, 'Holy crap.'"

Ezrin hints at ambitions for Welcome 2 My Nightmare beyond the album and a subsequent tour. "We're thinking not just the big tour. This has the possibility of being almost like a musical."

Considering Cooper's history, that's not such a far-fetched idea. He has long approached his tours as though they were musical-theater productions, each with its own unique score and book.

"We have 400 songs to go to," Cooper says. "If you did come to see an Alice Cooper show, if you were really watching, it actually did make sense from beginning to end. This little psychodrama had sense to it. But it was still never giving up The Yardbirds, never giving up The Who, never giving up that energy. We were first and foremost a hard-rock band. With this as the icing on the cake."

Riding the riff

The original pairing of Cooper and Ezrin ended up launching both careers.

Ezrin, a native of Canada with an early background in classical and folk music, brought a much-needed sense of structure to five guys from Phoenix whose music blended the influences of British Invasion rock, roadway musicals like West Side Story and spy and crime-show themes.

"We didn't know anything about recording, we didn't know anything about songwriting," Cooper says. "We knew that we wrote great parts, but we didn't know how to arrange."

Ezrin helped transform Alice Cooper into one of the '70s' great riff-based rock bands. "The melody of the riff had to be memorable," he says. "It had to be something people could sing." Those early Alice Cooper records are more complex than they initially appear, with counter-melodies under Cooper's vocals, and secondary melodies that usually come in the form of guitar solos. "Underneath it was a foundation of rhythm that never changed," Ezrin says.

A long time coming

As a result, Love It to Death sold 1 million copies and got Alice Cooper on the radio with I'm Eighteen. Ezrin produced the band's biggest albums — Killer, School's Out, Billion Dollar Babies, Muscle of Love — and Cooper's early solo work, like Welcome to My Nightmare and Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. He went on to produce key albums for Kiss (Destroyer), Lou Reed (Berlin) and Pink Floyd (The Wall).

"Alice Cooper was the first thing that got me excited about music," says Zombie, who'll induct the band into the hall. "He invented everything that is now a staple in rock music. People you wouldn't even think of owe him. People thought it was so neat when Michael Jackson used Vincent Price on Thriller. But it was even cooler when Alice Cooper did it nine years before" on Nightmare.

Some of the acts that Cooper influenced preceded him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"OK, David Bowie is in in 1996," Cooper says. "Alice was before David Bowie and influenced David Bowie. Well, I never begrudged him that. I went, 'Great, David Bowie belongs in there.' Elton John? 'Wait a minute, Elton John got all his theatrics from watching Alice at the Hollywood Bowl.'"

Eventually, Cooper decided that he got more attention for not getting into the Hall of Fame. "I went, 'That's kind of cool. Every year, it's this new outrage.' I was sitting there, going, 'Calm down. Don't worry. Our time will come.'"

But as five years passed without even getting nominated, then 10, then 15, "it got harder every year for me to keep calming people down."

Of course, the very notion of Cooper — whose concerts have featured multiple hangings, decapitations, mutilated mannequins and other mock atrocities — wanting to calm anybody down might seem surprising. In its early years, Alice Cooper thrived on controversy and outrage.

"We realized that the more out-there, the more lunatic fringe we were, the more the parents hated, the more the kids liked us," Cooper says.

As years passed, the Alice persona became less of a threat and more of a burlesque. With the band's induction into the Rock Hall, the perception changes once more, recognizing the impact his music and his showmanship has had on acts ranging from Kiss to Lady Gaga.

Cooper has also changed the way he sees himself. For years, he says, "there was a gray area where I didn't really know where I started and Alice ended." That area was blurred by alcohol, what Cooper describes as one drink that lasted 18 years.

In the mid-'80s, "when I got sober, I finally realized that I like to go to the movies, I like to go play golf, I like to go shopping," Cooper says. "I want a wife (he'll celebrate his 35th anniversary with wife Sheryl on March 20) and kids (they have three) and a family, my spiritual life, my Christian life. This Alice character didn't want any part of my life.

"I separated the two, and I found that Alice became more defined as Alice, and I had my own life."

Lovable Character

Now, where Alice is the villainous maniac who owns the stage, Cooper is outgoing and accessible, a four-handicap golfer and a substitute teacher for a regular Wednesday morning Bible study.

"He's always the first to speak and the first to reach out — he's that kind of friendly," says Christian singer Amy Grant, who met Cooper through a VHl celebrity golf tournament in the mid-1990s (where they were put together as part of a "Heaven & Hell" foursome). "That's really disarming in somebody that's had such a monstrous career."

When approached in public, Cooper happily poses for pictures and signs autographs. And he says most fans have learned not to expect Alice when they run into Cooper at the mall.

"I think, by now, they get it," Cooper says. "I've become incredibly lovable. The character has become Vincent Price. Which is OK, because when Vincent Price wanted to be scary, he could still be scary.

"The Alice villain is still in me. If I really want to slit somebody's throat onstage, I will. And I'll say, 'Let's be sure it squirts into the audience.'"