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Shock Rock 'n' Awe

Releasing a new album in the form of 'Paranormal' and reuniting the original band, ALICE COOPER talks to James Sharples about Hollywood Vampires, switchblades, the split personality of Alice and how punk is in his DNA.

How are you doing Alice?

"I'm great! I'm in St Louis tonight with Deep Purple and the Edgar Winter Band. It's show day today, then we're in Cleveland tomorrow and then Cincinnati the day after and then we get to go home for a week and then we're off down to South America..."

You're definitely keeping busy. Speaking of which, a lot has been said about this being your first album in quite a few years but that's not, strictly speaking, true, is it?

"Well, you know, the funny thing was that everyone's been saying that it's been six years since I made a record but I did the Hollywood Vampires album (the supergroup of Cooper, actor Johnny Depp and Aerosmith's Joe Perry who, along with former Guns N' Roses members Matt Sorum and Duff McKagan and many others, created the tribute album of the same name in 2015. Featuring guest spots from Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl, it was a tribute to the celebrity drinking club that Cooper was a member of) in the middle of those six years. That was a full year of recording and touring with those guys. So it was like doing an Alice album but with another band and it was still the same workload as far as doing the vocals and arranging it and picking the songs. The great thing about it was that it was really a sort of fun project because it was a bunch of guys I really liked honouring a bunch of guys that I really liked and doing songs that we all really liked. Doing songs for all our dead, drunk friends. And then it was really fun going out on the road, not with my band, but with Joe Perry, Johnny Depp and Duff McKagen and all that. It was really a lot of fun."

It must have been quite refreshing to take that break though? Does that kind of project help in making what you do less of a 'job'?

"It used to be a job. I think that when you first start, you tour because you have to, you make records — well, of course you want to make the records — but you get to the point where you have a couple of hit records where now you have to make the records and you have to tour. I'm at a point now where, for the last twenty years, I record and I tour because I actually want to. There's a big difference between having to and wanting to. The pressure is off and you're kind of calling your own time, you're working with the people that you want to work with, you work as many shows as you want to... It just so happens that I feel that if you're going to go out, you should go out for a hundred shows. If you're going to put a show together and it's going to be a big production — do a hundred shows! That's old school thinking but that's the way I always thought about it."

Has the way you work in the studio changed over the years? Or do you have a set pattern of working?

"A lot of how I work in the studio had to do with the producer. I sit down and write with anyone who I feel is in the same world as I am. Although sometimes I like working with someone who isn't, like I worked with Henry Mancini one time and I worked with Carole Bayer Sager, people who are totally out of my world, but it was kind of neat to see how they would approach a song compared to how I would approach a song. But normally I'm working with guitar players or I'm working with piano players or producers, guys like Bob Ezrin, Roy Thomas Baker, guys that really have the same reference points as I do. When I was working with Johnny Depp, I could look at Johnny and say 'John, you know that song 'Evil Hearted You' by the Yardbirds? Well, the guitar should be something like that' and he'd know exactly what I was talking about, he knew exactly what that reference was. Or I might say to one of the guys I'm working with onstage now, 'Go to West Side Story, listen to West Side Story, 'The Jets Song 'and that feel' and once you get those references down, then you're talking the same language. I write the title and the chorus first and then I work backwards because I think that's the way Chuck Berry worked.

'Paranormal' is a very streamlined album — do you have to be ruthless when it comes to editing the end result?

"I don't have to — Bob Ezrin does that (laughs). Bob's definitely ruthless when it comes to being in the studio. He's the greatest guy in the world and he's so creative. But some of your best producers are guys that beat it out of you, where you say, 'Okay, I've got that vocal' and he looks at you and he goes 'Oh no, you can do better than that'. And you're going 'No, no I nailed that!' and he goes 'No. Come on...'. Everyone that's worked with Ezrin, they complain that they work too hard with him and at the end they listen back and they go, 'Wow, I never knew that I could do that'. He pulls things out of you that you don't think you have."

How do you know when a song or an album is finished?

"In the early days we didn't know when an album was finished. We only knew that it sounded good to us. Now, you get to the point where you finish the song and if you and your producer and your guitar players and your drummer look at each other and just kind of smile, you know it's done. You know you've nailed it. Or you've nailed it to the point where that's what you want out of it. It might not be what anybody else would want but you've got what you wanted out of that song and that happened on every single song on this album. Working with Bob for ten albums, he's like the other half of Alice Cooper when it comes to knowing what Alice is about. In other words, I'll write a lyric and he'll look at it and say 'This is really good, but Alice would never say this' and I'll look back and say 'Yeah, you're right, Alice wouldn't say it that way'. We can talk about Alice in the third person. It's an interesting way of looking at it (laughs). We all understand that I'm playing the character Alice so when I write a song I don't write from my point of view, I write from Alice's point of view. In fact, there are some things that Alice has said on records that I don't agree with! But people aren't buying my opinions, they're buying Alice's opinions."

Surely that must be a bit schizophrenic?

"Oh no, it's waaaaaay schizophrenic! But at the same time I get it. When I put the makeup on and get up onstage, Alice has a different view of the world than I do. He's more cynical, more satirical, he can be very cutting and at the same time he can be very clever. Sometimes I listen to it and I actually start laughing, like 'Oh, that's a great line'. There's a line in the song 'Genuine American Girl' where, in the '70s with the original band, this song was written as "I want to find a genuine American girl'. And then I thought, 'Well Alice would never say that. Alice would say 'I want to be a genuine American girl', so let's start with that'. And there's one line on there where he says "I'm only thirty out of fifty shades of grey" which makes me laugh out loud."

What was that feeling like, getting back in the studio with the guys from the original Alice Cooper band?

"It was so easy because the original band never broke up with any bad blood. We broke up but we were still friends and wished each other well. I had Dennis (Dunaway, bass) play on things, I had Neal (Smith, drums) play on things... It wasn't so much a divorce as it was a separation. It wasn't awkward being in the studio with these guys and just saying 'Okay, let's just play this the way that we would have played this in 1974'. Also I didn't want to overdub anything, I wanted to do it all live. And man, you're talking about three of the really great rock musicians right there, Neal and Keith Moon used to play together all the time and Dennis is one of the most copied bass players around and Mike Bruce (guitar) is one of those great hook players so they just did what they did normally. I just sang with it and it sounded like Alice Cooper, you know?"

What's your most vivid memory from the 1970s with the band?

"I think the most overriding thing was that every time we did something that was misconstrued or blown out of proportion it just made us bigger. The whole thing with one of your MPs and Mary Whitehouse where they tried to ban us just over the rumour of what Alice was, having never seen us, that couldn't have worked in our favour better than it did. The British public was kind of like 'How dare you tell us what we can see and what we can't see'. The record went right to number one and we sold out Wembley in two days and that was just because of the controversy of Alice Cooper. We were sitting there laughing, like 'Jeez, every time there's a horrible story about us we do better!'. I think the Sex Pistols took a chapter out of that."

Did you feel an affinity with punk?

"Before us the Doors were probably the most dangerous band and when Alice Cooper came along we were not just glam, we were also Clockwork Orange and we were punk. I'm from Detroit so there was punk right there in my DNA. And we did not mind a little violence onstage. Everybody else was peace and love and we used real switchblades. I got cut many times on stage. It was part of the theatrics. Nobody knew how to take Alice Cooper because it was a dangerous band but they couldn't help liking us because it was dangerous."

What do you think the young Alice Cooper would make of Alice Cooper in 2017, still up there on stage and doing it to this day?

"You know, the young Alice Cooper was fun, but this Alice Cooper is a lot better than that one when it comes to really just knowing what to do up there. The original Alice, there was something really guerilla theatre about it that I really appreciate but the music was not nearly... It was more punk, it was more raw but I don't think it was as listenable as what's going on now. I still do songs from that era but I surround myself with the best players. I've got three gunslinger guitar players. I've got the best drummer in rock 'n' roll. I've got a bass player who kills it every night. My wife plays three characters in the show and when you see the show you walk away just going 'Wow! What was that?!'. It's a full on strange, vaudeville hard rock sideshow and that's what I always wanted it to be. But we'll see you in November. We're bringing the original band with us as well so it's going to be like two bands onstage. It'll be great."

'Paranormal' is out now on earMUSIC. Alice Cooper tours the UK in November.

(Originally published in Vive Le Rock issue #48; 2017)