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Never Can Say Goodbye

Rock star Cooper, who started out in Murder City, releases 21st album

In 1970, 22-year-old Alice Cooper decided to leave Los Angeles. Frustrated with his band's lack of success after two years of gigging, the theatrical rocker had to admit he had caught the ear of almost no one. (Frank Zappa was an idiosyncratic exception, telling Cooper: "I don't get what you're doing... and I think that's great.")

So, with "20,000 groups from around the world heading to (L.A.)," the singer relocated to Detroit. In the Motor City, he found his crowd.

"The people in Detroit wanted their bands to sound like machinery that they were working with in the Ford factories, or at Chrysler," Cooper says. "It was a very masculine kind of society. It was tough. If you were in a band you also had to know how to fight. Nobody ever went out alone."

These days are recalled on Detroit Stories, the singer's 21st album. Produced by longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin and co-written by Wayne Kramer, the guitarist in Detroit punk-rock band MC5, the 15-song collection is both a love letter to the city in which Alice Cooper (real name, Vincent Furnier) was born, and in which he lived until he was 10, and his best record this century.

California could keep its dreamin' because here Cooper and his band were in the thick of a meatier musical epicenter. It was quite the time to be alive.

Detroit Stories describes a city in which people were "trying to burn the place down." The riots of 1967 between mainly Black residents and the police left 43 people dead and 2,000 buildings in ruins. Pock-marked and freezing, the Motor City which took the new nickname "Murder City," laboured under a racial divide that permeated all areas of life save for one.

"If you were a musician who had long hair, during a riot you could into any Black bar and you were not the enemy," Cooper says. "You were a musician, so you were a brother. Other times we'd be on stage and I'd look down into this audience of black leather jackets and long hair and I'd see Smokey Robinson, and there'd be two of The Supremes, or there'd be one of the guys from The Temptations. There was no colour barrier in Detroit in music."

Returning to a music scene in Los Angeles that was whiter than the cast of The Waltons, the singer forged a shock-rock reputation and a loyal fan base that endures to this day.

"In Beverly Hills, if you were a rock star you could do anything you wanted," the singer says. "Unlike Detroit, L.A. was all about the glitz and the glamour. Up in the Hollywood Hills there were probably 500 parties a night. It was a whole different scene."

Unusually for the 1970s, Cooper claims to have eschewed illegal substances. Turning his attention to bending the elbow instead, he gamely attempted to drink himself to death. Alcohol was "safe," he reasoned, while pills and powders were "dangerous."

Running riot in a rampantly licentious Los Angeles, the singer says that "if anyone was doing drugs, I certainly didn't know about it." It's a dubious claim. Thinking aloud, I wonder if this determination to draw a line between drink and drugs indicates a mindset that is rather old-fashioned.

"I think you're right," he says. "But you have to remember that I had a career to protect. I worked really hard to get to that point. I had big records out and I was selling out all these big venues. At that point you definitely have something to protect. I was very aware of that, so I stayed very clean to anything like (drugs)."

Instead he spent his time at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, on the Sunset Strip, becoming a key member of the legendary Hollywood Vampires drinking club. On any given night, "A car would pull up and John Lennon would get out with Harry Nilsson. Along with myself, the club's mainstays were Keith Moon, Bernie Taupin and Micky Dolenz.

None of them ever saw daylight, hence the name. "At that point, nobody thought about getting past 30," the singer says. "It was the party that never ended."

Until it did. Following the release of a slew of albums that he can't actually remember recording. Cooper gave up drinking in 1983. Thirty-two years later the Hollywood Vampires were repurposed as the name of the supergroup in which the singer appears alongside guitarists Joe Perry, from Aerosmith, and longtime fan Johnny Depp.

What did Cooper make of Depp's libel trial last year, in which a judge concluded that Depp was, "on the balance of probabilities," guilty of a string of assaults against his ex-wife Amber Heard?

"I know Johnny well enough to know that he's one of the gentlest, most harmless people I've ever met in my life," he says. "I only know him from being in the band, but I've been to his house, I record there, and I've never met anybody as nice as Johnny when it comes to people. Johnny is one of the classiest guys I've ever met."

As our time together draws to a close, I ask the 73-year-old singer to nominate the words he'd like to see engraved on his headstone. He gives his answer without hesitation: "Here lies Alice, since from when he was teething, never stopped rocking 'til he stopped breathing.'