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Stoopid Coopid

Chicken heads are firmly in the past, gore fans. The reborn Alice Cooper is a more elegant kind of villain. Who no longer breakfasts on warm budweiser. Still, as Paul Elliott discovered, the man still enjoys the odd drug or two...

"I'm just on one of those antibiotic buzzes right now, where everything's just a little off, a little bit queasy..."

Vincent Furnier has a toothache. In 1973, his alter ego Alice Cooper had a tooth wrenched out, slowly and bloodily, on the nauseating 'Unfinished Sweet'. Furnier's old gag is back to haunt him.

Furnier nurses his bad tooth in the mixing room at A&M Studios in Hollywood; as he speaks, his new Alice Cooper LP Hey Stoopid is being fine tuned. Across the corridor, in Studio C, Jan Astbury is recording vocals for the new Cult album.

Hey Stoopid is the work of the thing Furnier calls "the new Alice". Furnier has sobered up of late; so too has his alter ego, and though Alice declared "I'm a dirt talkin; beer drinkin; woman chasin' minister's son" on 1967's 'Guilty', the anarchic, Bohemian Alice who cooed 'I Love The Dead' has kicked a few of his bad habits. He ain't Mister Nice Guy, but nor is he quite so sick and obscene.

Alice returned to the radio in 1989 with the sex-mad Trash album, co-produced with pop metal hack Desmond Child and featuring the hit single 'Poison', but his renaissance began with two corny heavy metal records — Constrictor and Raise Your Fist And Yell.

"They were calling cards saying: 'Alice is back, Alice has not gained 50 pounds and he's not coming back mellow.' I actually wanted to put a sticker on those albums saying 'Featuring No Ballads'... Hey Stoopid is a little rougher than Trash. Also, I went for people who'd colour the album differently — Slash and Axl, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue. In the early days, we wanted to keep Alice different from everybody else, but I think the early Alice period is over. I don't think you can shock the audience any longer.

"I titled the album Hey Stoopid because it's such a powerful thing to say. It's a summer album. All year, you gotta be so collected, you got to work, so in the summertime you should be as 'stoopid' as possible! The album cover is in fuchsia and green — summer colours — with skulls and razor blades sticking out. It's a real party album, even though the main subject of the title is teenage suicide.

"I got some odd mail from 14-year olds telling me they were gonna top themselves. I don't know whether those letters were just fantasy, but suicide is a big problem... When I was in high school, people messed about in the back seat, but nobody ever really did it. If someone went all the way, it was a real talking point. Everything had gotten so loose: when I was in high school, I didn't know anybody that did drugs, not even a joint. We just drank beer.

"If some kid told me they were gonna commit suicide, I'd say 'Hey, stoopid, what are you trying to do?' I wouldn't use the voice of authority, 'cos Alice is no authority. I want Alice to be one of the guys on the street. 'Hey, stoopid' is a little sarcastic, and you could only say that to a friend. It's like 'School's Out': it has a black sense of humour."

Isn't this all a little compassionate for the monster who, at the death of the '60s, vowed to "drive a stake through the heart of the Love Generation"?

"Well," (his leathery features creasing into a smile) "we did that already. I wouldn't mind driving a stake through the foot of the dance generation. Back in '69, we killed the Love Generation single-handedly, thank you. It was over anyway. We applied the final tap. We were pre-Clockwork Orange. Alice was doing choreographed violence because it was fake fun. He wasn't advocating it. When you see two guys fighting in a bar, it's heavy stuff. When you watch a James Bond movie, it's just a piece of ballet. The Terminator is so choreographed that it looks good, but when you see a real war film, it's not funny. There's a real art to Alice's violence."

Primarily, Alice's victims are women. Is this not so much art as misogyny?

"Y'know, I've never really picked victims for their sex. The bad guy against the hapless woman just works better; it's more of a classic storyline. But Alice always got punished in the end. Alice got executed and came back in a white tux and tails."

Allegations of sexism are answered by 'Only Women Bleed', a ballad hit from 1975 later covered by Etta James, Tina Turner and Julie Covington.

"A lotta people thought Alice was trying to get away with another menstruation song. Now, it's been a hit about six times around the world. In most cases, controversial songs are misunderstood. 'Dead Babies' (from Killer in 1972) was the first anti child abuse song. Ozzy Osbourne's 'Suicide Solution' spoke of alcohol as a killer. These witch-hunts for Ozzy and Judas Priest are real modern-day Salem stuff. It's such a cliché that it's almost embarrassing, but those people refuse to look into the home, where the problem is. On Hey Stoopid, I've got Rob Halford (Judas Priest's vocalist), too. I think that's ironic justification.

Alice's songs are still wickedly ironic.

"There's so much irony in sex, in relationships. One of the new songs, 'Burning Our Bed', is about the end of a relationship. The only way the guy could hurt this woman that hurt him is to burn the bed where everything happened; just torch it right in front of her. Sure it's bitter, but it's handled with a sense of humour, too. It's a very pretty song, bluesy even, which is a little odd for Alice."

His most comic work is 'Alice Cooper Goes To Hell' (1976): "For criminal acts and violence on the stage/For being a brat/Refusing to act your age/For all the decent citizens you've entraged/You can go to hell."

"That was pure comedy," Furnier recalls with relish. "There was a movie called Hellzapoppin', which was just sight gags. It's probably my favourite movie, and that's where the idea for Goes To Hell came from. It's a comedy version of Dante's Inferno.

"Ninety-nine per cent of the horror movies I see are comedies. You get the initial rollercoaster shock, but then you think 'how perfectly absurd'. The only horror movie I saw which didn't have comedy was The Exorcist. That was really disturbing. Being a Christian seeing The Exorcist, you think 'Yeah, there could be that much evil in the world'. There was no redeeming part in that film. It's not like Godzilla, a big rubber thing, or Dracule, a prefabrication. When we talk theologically, we talk of the devil with horns." He laughs nervously. "It's a little too real."

The story goes that the name Alice Cooper was drawn from a Ouija Board.

"That was one of the ten stories we let out — that one of the guys' mothers was a medium and when she asked a Ouija board who Alice Cooper was, it said 'Vincent Furnier'. And she didn't know my name. I thought: 'Great press release!'

"The real story is that we sat around with this all-girl band called The Weeds Of Idleness, who fed us when we didn't have any money, and I said 'We gotta have a name that people listen to'. Alice Cooper was the first that popped into my head. We already had that really strange kinda Baby Jane thing: smeared make-up. Funny thing is, it got very mystical. We said Alice was a 13th Century witch. We had no-one to answer to and everybody believed everything."

Was Alice born the day you dreamt up the name?

"Alice developed," Furnier muses. "I was a little more Alice with each show. Pretty soon there was this character who was outstandingly inhuman, who stood for all the wrong things. He was crippled, a victim. Every parent hated him and every kid loved him. The re-born Alice is a much more clear-cut sadistic villain, more elegant. The new Alice is so much more fun to play."

Furnier reckons this dichotomy is not so freakish. He is different only because he has identified the killer inside.

"I don't have to be Alice until five minutes before I go on-stage. When I was drinking heavily at the end of the Nightmare tour it was terrifying. I hated it. Every time I saw the tights and the boots and make-up lying there, and it was an hour before I went on-stage, I'd get sick in my stomach. It was one of the biggest rock'n'roll tours of all time, and it was so sad I couldn't enjoy it. Every time I looked at the costume, I knew I had to drink half a quart of whisky."

Alcoholism is another part of the Cooper legend. Of rumours, Furnier smiles. "If they're about drinking, believe all of them. If I had to be on an airplane at nine, I'd get up at 5.30 so I could start drinking and throw up, because then you're okay. You get up and drink as much as you can to get rid of what you drank the night before. I started spitting blood, which'll scare you every time. You see blood in the toilet and you think 'Jeez, this'd be great on-stage, but I'm here alone in a Holiday Inn and I've got 56 more dates to do'.

"In the beginning I'd drink warm Budweiser to cause a good vomit in the morning. It got to the point where I'd never touch alcohol until ten o'clock at night. It was a running joke with Keith Moon... there was a drinking gang called The Hollywood Vampires which included Harry Nillson and John Lennon.

"It was all negatives feeding each other. When I got off the Nightmare tour, if I never saw another stage I woulda been real happy. Now, I love it. I work on my own fear. I've finally got Alice the villain back and the last thing I wanna do is dilute him. We won't do People magazine. We got a little showbizzy there in the late '70s when dance music came out, and we went to Hollywood. I think it hurt us. It made Alice untrustworthy with the kids, and I understand that."

Alice mellowed? Sold out?

"Yeah," he sighs with regret.

You got your golf handicap down, though.

"Yeah," Furnier laughs. "I got really good. My handicap was six. I did lots of prime-time TV things, too. I thought it was brilliant but it back-fired, and the kids hated it. But you were allowed to do The Muppet Show."

Alice did, beautifully.

"We played 'Welcome To My Nightmare', 'You And Me' with Miss Piggy, and 'School's Out'. I was trying to get Kermit to sell his soul to become a rock star; it was the whole Fuastian thing. Still, Hollywood Squares was the worst of all. I don't even remember doing it, I was so drunk."

Were you drunk while you were playing golf with Gerald Ford?

"I never did play with Ford, but I did hang out with Groucho Marx. He took to me 'cos he thought it was his kinda show — such a sacrilege to regular showbiz. I wasn't hanging out with the Rod Stewarts, I was with Groucho and Salvador Dali — the real surrealists!

"I never understood a word Dali said, but he was my hero when I was an art student. He was the Elvis of art.

"Like Elvis, Alice is a true reflection of the insanity of America. Alice was never a dove, but a hawk, which is much more American. A shiny red Cadillac with a blonde, a beer and a switchblade — the Alice ideal."