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Welcome to His Nightmare...

For more than 30 years, Alice Cooper has been hitting the road, treating fans to his own unique type of rock and roll horror show.

The man who's famous for stage props ranging from boa constrictors to straight jackets, and who has made getting beheaded a focal point of his shows for years, could easily find himself feeling pressured to top himself each time he creates a new road show.

Cooper, though, said he has always resisted that temptation.

"I don't really think about topping myself. I think about 'what haven't I done now that would really work?'" Cooper said. "I know the audience wants to see the guillotine. How do we make that guillotine look even more dangerous? How can we make this section of this show even more believable? How can we make them believe we're going to do this and actually do something else?"

This fall, Cooper takes his act back on the road, reprising a fall 2001 tour that was designed to support his studio CD Dragontown. To coincide with the new tour, Cooper is releasing a special two-CD edition of Dragontown that features two unreleased tracks ("Can't Sleep" and "Clowns'll Eat Me"), live material, video footage and remixes.

The original Dragontown single CD and tour, Cooper said, got overshadowed in the aftermath of last September's terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

"I think it came out in a time when it kind of got... a lot of albums got buried during 9-11, which, of course, that was one of the most important things that ever happened and I can understand that," Cooper said. "I just thought it was time to give it another life. We have an entire show that is based around this album. We are going to tour. We're going to tour for three months, and I wanted the audience to be a little bit more aware of the new material, the quality."

Dragontown is actually the second in a three-CD trilogy that finds the Alice Cooper character taking on a topical slant and in his own unique way, examining a host of ills and atrocities that afflict a world of the future.

The trilogy began with the 2000's, Brutal Planet, which was accompanied by its own world tour. The stage show placed the Alice character in a nuked-out city of the future where civilization is failing on all fronts from technology, to family life, and to morality. The Dragontown CD and tour takes the Alice Cooper character to the next logical extreme.

"What we're doing is we're saying now that you've been in Brutal Planet, let's take you to the capital of Brutal Planet," Cooper said. "Let's take you to where they put the worst of the worst — and that's Dragontown. That's sort of like the headquarters. So who would be in Dragontown? And I invented this new character now that is sort of — he's half Hell's Angel, he's half ninja, probably a cannibal. He's certainly some sort of really bad survivor, or he wouldn't be there if he didn't eat rats. And the first half of the show now is this guy."

Cooper is quick to assert that the vision of the future he is presenting in his current trilogy of CDs reflects the outlook of his Alice Cooper character, not the man who's real name is Vincent Furnier, and who displays a far more personable and down-to-earth manner off stage.

"I am the eternal optimist," he said. "Anybody who knows me knows it's very hard to get me to say something negative about anything. I always tend to see the positive in everything. Alice on the other hand, sees everything as totally negative. He sees everything as cynical. The world is going absolutely to hell.

"So then how do we not go to hell or how do we get out of hell? His theory is you don't. Once you're there, you're there," Cooper said. "And like any other good movie, or like any good novel you go, 'yeah, but there is a secret way out.' Alice keeps going, 'No. There's not.' I think people keep expecting me to say, 'OK, now in the third part, here's the way.' I haven't decided if I'm going to tell them."

Cooper said he thinks the Brutal Planet and Dragontown CDs compare favorably to most any of the records he has recorded in a career that began with the 1969 album Pretties For You and includes a string of critically acclaimed early 1970s releases — Love It To Death (1971), Killer (1971), School's Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973).

But like many veteran artists, Cooper is usually categorized as a classic artist and finds it difficult to get radio to play his current material.

"I'd be shocked if I heard my new record on the radio, even though I listen to it and I know this blows away the stuff that's getting played on the radio right now," Cooper said. "And it's not classic rock. I mean, if you listen to what's going on on Brutal Planet and Dragontown, it's very Rob Zombie. It's very Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails). It may have more melody and it may be more singable — but you listen to what's going on, and it's got all the guts that those other records have. And I like Rob Zombie albums and I like Trent Reznor albums. I'm just saying, 'Why can't Alice get played?' That's frustrating."

But even if Cooper struggles to gain attention for his newest music, his place in rock and roll history is assured. His music, rooted in the bluesy power rock of fellow Detroit acts such as the MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges, has slowly gained respect among critics for its blend of crunch and melody. And of course, his theatrical stage show served as a model for a host of shock­rocking groups, ranging from Kiss to Marilyn Manson to Zombie to Slipknot.

Fans still turn out to see each new chapter in the Alice Cooper stage show saga, and Cooper himself has his theories on why his alter ego has endured so well for so long.

"I think by now, the Alice character is a piece of Americana," he said. "And if you come and see Alice right now, the first part of the show, you're going sit there and go, 'Who is this guy?' — because this guy is still untamable. You see the Alice character up there, it's still going to put a chill in you. You're still going to say, 'What rock did this guy crawl under?' At the end of the show, I let Alice become a lot more personable. But the dark Alice is really pretty much, not uncontrollable, but hard to categorize.

"I mean, Alice is as much a character as Batman is, or Zorro," Cooper said. "He's an American character — he's an American villain, and he's lasted all these years because there's something really valid about him. He's rock's villain. He's rock's Captain Hook. He's rock's Jack the Ripper, and I just really kind of like being able to hone the character in and make him very believable. When Alice does "Eighteen," Alice thinks he's eighteen. I mean, absolutely, he's got a crutch in his hand and he's staring at the audience and he only weighs 150 pounds, in black leather, and he's got this makeup that's dripping down and he's looking at the audience. He's going 'I'm eighteen and I like it.' And the audience goes, 'OK I'm not going to argue with him.' Are you?"

Don't miss Alice Cooper at the State Theatre in Kalamazoo at 406 Burdick Street on Tuesday, October 8 @ 8:00pm. Seating is reserved. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 day of the show.