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Shock Rock Purist

Alice Cooper still indulges in aggressive sounds and horror theatrics, but his offstage antics lean toward the mundane.

There is a very good reason you will never see Alice Cooper brandish tattoos or incorporate a coffin into his theatrical performance.

They scare him.

"I have a couple of phobias," he admits. "I'm pretty claustrophobic and I hate needles. I am the biggest needle-phobe of all time. I won't get a blood test, and I would never get a tattoo."

Also on the list of things you might not know about the pioneer of shock rock is that he hasn't touched booze in 18 years, he's in peak physical condition, he's got a golf handicap of two, and he's finally reconciled his rock 'n' roll life style with his Christian belief.

At 51, the easy going and forthright Cooper is cleaner, but not softer. The only thing he's lost is a penchant for self-destruction. In a phone interview from Hollywood, Cooper says he's writing new songs for a new album that will be his hardest et.

"I'm getting tougher," he says.

Cooper celebrated his fifth decade with the release of The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, a four-disc compilation commemorating 34 years of lewd and deviant behaviour. The box set includes a minimum of one song from every Alice Cooper album, along with rare and previously unreleased cuts dating back to the Spiders and the Nazz (the early recordings reveal a surprising R&B-influence). Cooper is a dinosaur only in the sense that his breed of rock 'n' roller is an extinct species in the era of the ready-made rock star with a two-album career and a handful of singles. He has released more than 25 albums and cultivated a degree of loyalty among his fans unheard of today.

Unlike Marilyn Manson, who depends heavily on pricey props and lighting, Cooper is a purist who stick to old-fashioned psychological horror. He refuses to mention Manson or his imitators by name, but alludes to their cop-out gimmickry: "I go out of my way not to use a lot of high-tech props. I want the audience to see his organic thing out there. Always let the audience us their imagination. We're the Blair Witch Project, compared to The Haunting."

On the bloody heals of the box set, Cooper goes on the road for his usual three-month stint, including his show Saturday at the Orpheum. The city has special meaning for Cooper, since it was here, in the mid-70s, the he fell 12 feet off the Coliseum stage and broke several ribs and wound up with 25 stitches in his head.

"I was stage diving before anybody else," he laughs.

It wasn't the first time Cooper did some bodily damage on stage. Once he put a sword through his thigh, thinking that he'd aimed for the floor. Such is the life of a shock rocker. Cooper was chopping up baby doll parts, spewing fake blood and performing on-stage mock executions before Kiss even thought of the human blowtorch routine.

The Detroit-born son of a Baptist preacher who got his stage name from a Ouija board has been shock-rocking his fans since the early '70s. Before Vincent Furnier and his group were collectively known as Alice Cooper, they were '60s rockers who established a reputation as the worst bad on the L.A. bar circuit. With guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce, bass player Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith, the original Alice Cooper lineup laid a solid foundation with platinum hits School's Out, Eighteen, Elected, Hello Hooray, No More Mr. Nice Guy and Billion Dollar Babies.

Cooper, who is venerated among his peers and second-generation fans like Nikki Sixx and Slash, says most new artists today don't have the luxury of proving themselves over time. He cites R.E.M., Pearl Jam and now defunct Jane's Addiction as examples of worthy talent among the generations that followed him.

"It used to be that a record company wanted to build a career, not just a fast 10 minutes of fame - in our time, they wanted to make albums with you 10 years from now, and we did," he says, sounding like the elder statesman. "They let me be Alice because they realized that I made Alice commercial. It started out very uncommercial, but when you're selling platinum albums, all of a sudden you're commercial. So the record company left me alone."

By the time Vincent Furnier went solo and kept the Alice Cooper tag for himself, he'd fashioned himself a macabre image as menace to parents everywhere and a certified freak before freaks had any cred. He was always a raging alcoholic.

Today, Cooper is godfather to baby rock stars who've lost their way in a haze of drugs and booze and pitfalls of fame. "You wouldn't believe how many come to me, knowing I'm a recovering alcoholic," he says. "They say, 'Listen, I want to talk to you about what I'm doing, and I'll say, 'You know if you're an alcoholic or not, and I guarantee you, you might feel great the next fine years, but it will eventually get you. Because I was a very functional alcoholic. I could do a show, and never miss a word. You would never know that I drank a bottle of whiskey that day. But in the end, it wore me down."

It is well documented that in 1978 Cooper checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for treatment. However, he credits his own self-will for overcoming his addiction. And, he add with a laugh: "Maybe a lot of prayer."

Yes, the man who's made a career out of playing the musical equivalent of a droog out for a bit of the old ultraviolence now prays. And therein lies the conflict for a lot of fans, that rock 'n' roll's most ambitious harbinger of mock evil has the capacity to embrace not only a boa constrictor but a Bible. In the introduction of Cooper's 1976 autobiography Me, Alice, Ether Moroni Furnier wrote: "Am I dreaming or suffering from wishful thinking, that after all this decadence there will emerge from this dynamic personality a servant of God...?"

"I'm not up onstage preaching," Cooper told the Detroit Free Press two years ago. "I don't see why a Christian can't be a rock 'n' roller. I don't think I'm doing anything offensive to the Christians. I don't find anything offensive about these songs."

Fair enough. After all, Cooper never said he really was evil.

His concerts never contained actual references to the occult or promoted cultish behaviour, but seemed more absurdist morality plays that always ended with the protagonist's self-imposed execution. Cooper has always been more drama queen than prince of darkness, and besides, he continues to demonstrate an unsaintly hunger for controversy. Two years ago, he contributed to the Detroit rap group Insane Clown Posse's profanity-heavy album The Great Milenko, which proved so offensive that it was pulled from stores. On the other hand, Cooper is resolute about running a family restaurant, bereft of smut. Back home in Phoenix, Arizona, he runs Alice Cooper's Town restaurant with mates like Megadeth's Dave Mustaine. It shows off memorabilia like a teddy bear gift from Ted Nugent and lists Welcome to My Nightmare Chili on the menu.

"If there's ever a wet t-shirt contest, I'm out," he says, firmly. "It's a family restaurant. I want people to bring their kids there."

Cooper has always spoken of himself in third person. The persona he has created allows Cooper to walk the divide between reality and fiction, and through the device, he very cleverly escapes responsibility for his contradictions. Take, for example, that Cooper is 51 and still singing his major hit, Eighteen.

"I think it's ridiculous, but Alice doesn't have an age," he says. "When I play Alice, I go, 'How old is Alice? Well, he's 18 now. Next songs he's 103. He doesn't have an age. Alice feels totally comfortable singing Eighteen.

"I am probably the most successful schizo of all time," he adds. "I've learned to manage it.

"We treat Alice the way we would treat the Joker, or any fictional character. I've always thought that Kiss were more comic book and Alice was more Phantom of the Opera. I put it in simple terms at the beginning, and some people didn't like it, but I always said there were lots of Peter Pans in rock 'n' roll out there, and we needed a Captain Hook."

If Cooper is to be criticized for his seemingly contradictory ways, it wouldn't be the first time. When he appeared several times on game show Hollywood Squares, he was lambasted by some fans for wading too far out in the mainstream. But it wasn't as if he was vying with Paul Lynde for the centre square gig. "I wanted to do that to make fun of the fact that Alice Cooper was an American icon. Alice made a huge crossover from underground freak to international celebrity because we did things like that. But we never did back off from our music or out stage shows."

Then there's the not so little matter of golf. Cooper playing golf before it became fashionable for rock stars to do such country club-ish things. "I always tell [people] I'm just trying to make the game more violent," he says, with a laugh. "Everybody wants my job. I play golf in the morning, and I play rock 'n' roll at night. What a great life.

"It's something that I've kept separated," he says of his two passions. "At the very beginning I couldn't every say 'I play golf.' It was such a bad image thing. No, Lou Reed plays golf. Iggy Pop plays golf. You know what I mean? It's not an old-man Republican game. It's guys going out there and hitting the ball. It just so happens that I'm a two handicap, so I play really well. Two's really good. It's tournament golf."

At this point, Coper goes all the way, admitting he's harboured fantasies of playing professionally. "Of course, I'm lying in bed at night, and I'm going, 'How great to have a No. 1 record and win a golf tournament.' That would just blow everybody's mind, because people pigeon hole you. But I can do a lot of other things really well. I want to write movies, I want to act, and I want to do a lot of different things."

As to whether Cooper will ever retire the pancake makeup, he admits that the pull of fame makes it a difficult decision. "There is a very unnatural thing about being a star, where you go anywhere and they recognize you. It's very hard to give that up. There is a point where you have to let it go, though. If I ever get in front of an audience, and I cannot make them stand for the whole show and scream for more at the end, that's when I'll get off stage.

"Also, if I gain 60 pounds and lose my hair I'll quit. Luckily that hasn't happened."

(Originally published in the Vancouver Sun supplement, Queue, September 9-16, 1999)