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World of Alice Cooper gets stranger every day

Author: Jim Knippenberg

It looks like there is going to be no stopping Alice Cooper. Ever since "Eighteen," Alice and the boys have been one of rock's biggest drawing cards. Getting bigger all the time.

We'd like to think it's the music that everyone is going in for, but that would be folly. Alice Cooper music, clean, crisp, pretty hard rock and roll, is only a secondary feature of the strange world of Alice Cooper. It is the stage show in which Cooper excels.

The group's records sell but they have achieved none of the success of the live Cooper show.

That's probably because the Cooper show is such a bizarre experience — growing more bizarre by the moment.

Some people might call it mixed media. A more accurate description would be confused, shook-up, jumbled and destroyed media. Alice Cooper is into that strange brand of theatrical rock that involves everything one can lay one's hands on.

Like the props for a Cooper show includes such items as a boa constrictor, a bubble machine — just like Larry Welk — a smoke machine, a gallows, an electric chair, a straitjacket, semi-formal attire, a baby doll and a hatchet. There are other charming toys in the act also, but none of them spring to mind at the moment.

It's hard to say what Mr. Cooper does with all these devices. It is more or less something one must see for oneself. Perhaps one should even see it twice.

It's sort of a mortality play or a skit that Cooper gang does — loose plot line, semi-related images, beginning, middle and end — though each is absurd. It's not easy to follow, and it is not necessary to even try.

All one need do to get the full effect is to drink in the frenzy and absurdity of it all. Both exist in gigantic measure. Which is not to say it is all good, just very frenzied and very absurd.

In between the antics, Cooper and his friends do their rock and roll thing. Over the years the group has matured greatly, all the while getting better at the music they play. Which is a hopeful sign.

An even more hopeful sign, is that perhaps all this theatrical rock and roll which has been going on so long but with so little to recommend it, is finally going to amount to something. It is apparently here to stay.

Perhaps Cooper, even if he isn't always tasteful and wonderful to watch, can give rock and roll theatrics a much needed boost.