Psycho Drama
Published Thursday October 16th, 2008
Alice Cooper brings his old tricks to New Brunswick.
Alice Cooper - family entertainment?
Well, yes and no. When the 60-year-old shock rock pioneer comes to New Brunswick as part of his Psycho Drama tour "" including stops at Harbour Station October 18 and the Moncton Coliseum October 19 "" the audience makeup will range several generations. Grandmothers who watched Cooper in his '70s heyday will sit beside 35 year olds that loved his 1989 comeback album Trash. And let's not forget the healthy dose of teenagers who discovered Cooper's music through their parents. You'll be hard pressed to find an audience as demographically diverse as the one you will find at an Alice Cooper concert.
That being said, don't expect a remake of the Lion King when Cooper hits the stage. Straightjackets, nooses, and dead babies are all part of the elaborate show, which leans heavily on the singer's early musical catalogue.
"What we are is just pure entertainment," says Cooper during a Vancouver tour stop. "We take the audience on a trip for an hour and 45 minutes. The show is more intense now than the stuff we did in the '70s, when every single organization wanted us banned, but now people look at the show and say there's nothing about it that's bannable."
What a difference 40 years makes. When Cooper first burst onto the scene in the late '60s, the band (Cooper would later go solo, taking the band name with him) was one of the only rock acts to mix actual theatrics and pop sensibilities.
"All of the guys in the original band were either art majors or journalism majors," says Cooper. "We had a talent for the visual of it, and the talent for telling the story."
Cooper's macabre imagery and bizarre stage presence became a hit on the club circuit, and caught the eye of Frank Zappa, who released the band's first two albums (Pretties For You and Easy Action) on the Straight record label.
"Frank Zappa liked us because he didn't get it," laughs Cooper. "He thought it was so weird. We were from Phoenix, we played these weird little songs, and we looked like we were out of Clockwork Orange. That's why he signed us."
While the albums failed commercially, Cooper's stage show became the talk of North America. An incident with a chicken at a Toronto show in 1969 "" reports ranged from Cooper throwing the bird into the audience to Cooper killing it and drinking its blood "" made the national press, who demonized the band and its unusual antics. Cooper did nothing to dull down the controversy.
"I never saw a specific rock and roll villain," says Cooper. "I went, 'I'll fill that void. I'll be the king vampire, and when I walk in the room things will get quiet and people will take a step backwards.' I like the idea that Alice had that effect."
However, it wasn't until the band paired up with Canadian producer Bob Ezrin that Cooper became a true superstar. Erzin streamlined the group's sound, turning tracks like "I'm Eighteen" and "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" into Alice Cooper classics.
"We were a band who had a bunch of good songs, but we didn't have a guy like a George Martin who could take those songs and put them into a form that could be played on the radio," says Cooper. "When Bob came along, he said 'You have 80 great pieces of songs, but no real songs. Let me come in and arrange it and produce it.' For some reason we trusted him."
Ezrin worked with the band off and on for twelve years, through career highs (the 1973 release Billion Dollar Babies, Cooper's only number one album) and lows (the uncharted and unperformed Dada, Cooper's last disc before entering rehab in 1983). Cooper credits Erzin for helping shape the band's signature sound.
Cooper's bad guy image spilled into real life, with several church groups and parental associations attempting to ban Cooper concerts in their region. Rising popularity did little to clean up his image, and the rocker would be on conservative hit lists for nearly two decades.
"We had all this smeared makeup on, half our clothes were women's clothes, I had a snake around my neck, and we had a guillotine," he says. "You put all that together and it didn't add up at all, but it was terrifying, and if you give that same band a hit record, now you're really opening the floodgates."
"We never did anything Satanic, or anything anti religious," he adds. "We didn't even use bad language on stage, no nudity or anything like that, yet we were considered the scariest band in the world."
Cooper isn't considered as scary these days. Several artists have pushed the boundaries of good taste since Cooper's commercial peak (including copycat artist Marilyn Manson), making his antics seem tame by comparison.
No longer a bad guy, Cooper's now a spokesperson, showing up in commercials, appearing in celebrity golf tournaments, and hosting his own radio show, Nights with Alice Cooper.
"Our show is darker is scarier and more hysterical than it was then, yet people bring their kids and walk out going, 'That was the best show I ever seen,'" says Cooper.
Either way, when Cooper hits stage, all bets are off.
For one hour and 45 minutes, Cooper is the most dangerous man in the world, and generations of fans will love every minute of it.
And so will Alice.
"I like to think I am the Bela Lugosi or the Vincent Price of the rock and roll world," he says. "To me, that's really good."
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