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Alice Cooper back with nightmarish Paris Hilton salvo
SHOCK ROCK Granddaddy of the genre remains enamoured of the job and pleased with himself for creating one of rock's most beloved caricatures
There are, generally, two types of show biz folk. There are the rock stars who take their craft terribly seriously and disdain the mundane parts, such as answering the same interview questions over and over again.
And then there are the rock stars who are simply grateful to be a rock star, and are too gracious to outwardly tire of the duties, no matter how tiresome.
Alice Cooper is in the latter group, and if you didn't know, or wanted to hear it again, he'd tell you all over again why it is that he's forever confused with Ozzy Osbourne when it comes to biting the heads off birds. Or how yes, he can be a rock star and a hardcore golfer at the same time.
Cooper plays next Wednesday at the Orpheum, and it isn't just a routine runÂthrough of old hits like I'm Eighteen, School's Out and No More Mr. Nice Guy. After a couple of less-than-scintillating releases, Cooper is back in fine form with Dirty Diamonds, a throwback that contains strutty glam rock out Sunset Babies (All Got Rabies) and the tamer Perfect, on which he sounds like John Lennon.
The well balanced Cooper fest has fans rejoicing and making the declaration, "Alice is back."
"Yeah, I hear that, too," he says. "I never went away. Maybe this album is more relatable.
"And also I kind of put everything back in the stage show. For awhile there I was fearing that maybe I was repeating myself too much. But I realize that that's really what they want.
"If you are in show business, you give an audience what they want. And they want the guillotine, they want the snake. They want the straight jacket. They want all of the bits that make them comfortable with Alice. Every once in awhile, I throw them something that makes them uncomfortable," he adds, laughing wickedly.
This time out, the uncomfortable thing would be Cooper's actress daughter portraying Paris Hilton, who gets her throat ripped out by her dog. Cooper laughs.
"I just figured, 'Is anybody else tired of this chihuahua?'" he says. "And I thought, well, Paris will come out and do her little number, and she'll start talking to her little dog and the dog will go for the jugular vein. It's so funny. It's one of the funniest bits ever. And the blood is squirting all over the audience. And she's beating this dog and the dog is biting her back, and... " He stops to laugh.
"I think there's always a certain amount of Monty Python sense of humour that I have," he adds. "It's a very dark sense of humour."
At 57, Cooper remains enamored of the job, and unabashedly pleased with himself for creating one of rock 'n' roll's most beloved and outrageous caricatures, a cartoon villain with a campy, Halloween sense of the macabre. Cooper always likes to say he's the Capt. Hook to Peter Pan, and that Alice Cooper is a character he plays, like a theatrical performance.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
The name: Legend has it that Vincent Furnier named his band Alice Cooper after his mother decided to consult a Ouija board and the letter indicator spelled out the name A-L-I-C-E C-O-O-P-E-R. Originally, it was the name for the band, but Furnier eventually adopted it as his own.
The chicken incident: In 1969, the media erroneously reported that Cooper bit the head off a chicken and drank its blood. It never happened. At a concert in Toronto, a fan tossed a live chicken on the stage, and Cooper, thinking it could fly, scooped it up and arced it into the air. The bird dropped into the frenzied crowd and was killed. But the rumours persisted, and Cooper's reputation as the king of shock rock was cemented.
Vietnam? Columbine? Blame Alice Cooper
His merger of rock 'n' roll with theatre, as well as his send-up of rock 'n' roll as every conservative parent's worst nightmare, laid the foundation for Marilyn Manson — who also took a girl name and went a step further by transforming himself into a genderless, insect-like mutation. Both Cooper and Manson have, in their respective hey days, been blamed for everything from the Vietnam war to the Columbine high school massacre — successfully upsetting the moral majority and providing a convenient scapegoat in difficult times. It was Manson who shone a light on the hypocrisy of blaming a rock 'n' roll star for driving people to violence. For Cooper's part, he was only trying to have fun.
"Oh my God, I was the anti-Christ," he says. "I probably got banned in England, I got banned everywhere. I think that at the time I scared just about every organization in the world. I think it was because they were looking at the future of rock 'n' roll and I was making fun of it.
"They were saying, 'I want to see something that I can relate to, and I was giving them surrealism, you know," he says, laughing.
Loud, too. Unlike the 1960s folk fans, Cooper celebrated when Bob Dylan went famously electric.
"We learned from The Who and The Yardbirds, there is nothing worse than wimpy rock."
Legendary 1970s rock critic Lester Bangs once said of Cooper that he embodied the spirit of punk rock because the shock rocker could take a pie in the face. Cooper happily accepts the role of punk godfather.
"If you look at anything the Sex Pistols did, the Sex Pistols looked at us as being their fathers. To this day, I am the only act that Johnny Lydon [Johnny Rotten] ever liked.
"And after our first album came out, Lester reviewed it as "a tragic waste of plastic." I said, Wow. That's pretty harsh. That's great that he would say that.' Frank Zappa produced our first album and Lester didn't get that album. Lester picked up on us after we had a bunch of hit records. In fact, we went out of our way to be more obnoxious when we got hits. I think that's what he liked."
That, and the fact that Cooper has always been more about trash and flash than pomp and circumstance.
"I forget sometimes I'm Alice Cooper. I'll be at home and people will come up to me in a grocery store and say, 'I'd like your autograph,' and I go, 'Oh yeah yeah, I'm Alice Cooper.' I never have ever made it the most important thing in my life."
But he is proud, too, of the influence he's had on popular culture, of his standing as a household name that will forever fall into the out-in-left-field category.
"I think Alice has sort of been woven into Americana now, whereas before, I was on the outskirts, I was sort of the uncle that nobody talked about. Now I think when you say 'Alice Cooper' you're almost saying 'Vincent Price.' And I like that."
As for his experience with Canadiana, it hasn't all been rosy.
"I have a little history there, I fell off the stage there and broke all my ribs. That was back in the Welcome to My Nightmare days. But Vancouver doesn't scare me," he adds, laughing.
(Originally published in the Vancouver Sun, October 13-19, 2005)
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