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Living Next Door To Alice

Author: Chris Rodda

Alice Cooper is dead. For those who came in late, the old story ran that she was a witch burned at the stake back in the middle ages and reincarnated forty-nine years ago as Vincent Furnier, son of a Detroit preacher.

Forming in Arizona in 1967, Vincent's band adopted the witch's name which came to be associated exclusively with the man himself. Their stylised sex and murder stage show impacted in the early days of shock rock performances from the likes of the Plasmatics, the Tubes, Iron Maiden and lately White Zombie and Marilyn Manson.

Alice's career has been dogged by rumours of en­mities with other rock and roll personalities but he will hear nothing of such scan­dalous allegations nor com­ment on anybody ripping off his Grand Guignol trademark.

"Everybody always wanted there to be a feud between myself and Iggy or a feud between myself and David Bowie or myself and Kiss. Now they're trying to cre­ate one I think between me and Marilyn Manson about who's the creepiest or who's this or who's that. I keep saying everybody that they're talking about does totally different things."

"I think Iggy is the best punk band of all time. No doubt about it. Nobody'll ever come close. Not even the Sex Pistols were as good as Iggy and the Stooges... Kiss became like four comic book characters and a lot of explo­sions... but again, nothing like what Alice did."

While he respects the other artists' work, Alice admit a competitive streak constantly drives him towards one-upmanship.

"I'll look at everybody's show and I'll say 'That's great... let's be better than that. I haven't seen Marilyn Manson's show but I guarantee you if we ever played with them on the same show, you'd remember our show."

Alice turns fifty next year but shows no signs of slowing down, currently touring the world yet again with his theatrical rock and roll production.

"It'll be the Alice Cooper Rock and Roll Carnival '97 and it'll be very kind of carny," he says of the show. "Kind of creepshow-ish but with Alice's greatest hits."

"There's this kind of thing where people go Alice's been doing this for thirty years so he's probably really slowed down a lot. I don't think so! I'm in better shape than I was twenty years ago so they better get used to me. I'm still gonna be around for a long time."

"I still fit in my pants from twenty years ago. I still have all my hair and more energy than I've ever had so I'm ready to go."

With twenty albums to his credit, Alice is celebrat­ing his thirtieth year in the business and over that time, he has maintained his inimitable style while consistently keeping abreast of musical changes.

"I think that you have to be able to be a bit of a chameleon as long as you don't fall away from what you're good at. To me, we've always been a good hard rock band. I look around and see what bands have got the longevity in the business; it's always the hard rock bands. Look at the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Alice, Kiss. We're bands that have survived thirty years because I think we do a great show and we write good songs and the energy behind it is right there."

"I'm a real big fan of songwriting. I'm not much on high-tech sound as much as I am on how good is the song? Basically, can you sit down on a piano or a guitar and play this and sing it and is it a great song?"

The current Australian tour comes on the heels of a new live album, A Fistful Of Alice, recorded at Sammy Hagar's Caba Wabo Cantina in Caba San Lucas, Mexico.

"I've always found that live albums in big halls sound awful," Alice says. "They sound big and fat and mushy whereas I wanted an album that was going to be really tough and lean. Something that was really in your face."

"I said: 'I wanna be able to hear the strings hitting the picks.' That kind of thing where it's really right in your face and I think that's what we got on this album was a real tough sounding album."

Sammy plays lead guitar to the classic School's Out while Slash plays on three songs and Rob Zombie guest growls on Feed My Frankenstein and Elected.

"We made it very casually. I called up some friends and said 'Look, I'm doing a live album down here'. I asked Slash 'Do you wanna come down and play on a song?' He said 'No. I'll play on four songs but I don't wanna play on a song'. Slash is one of those guys that he's like a real great rock and roll guitarist. He's like Keith Richards. He's like Joe Perry. He's not a high tech rock and roll guitarist. He's a real gutsy player and so he really fits in with what I do."

A Fistful Of Alice also sports a new studio track, Is Anyone Home, which he describes as a teaser for his next album. While it hasn't taken shape yet, Alice alludes to a short story which he wrote and is in the process of adapting into a concept album. While he is enthusiastic about the project, tenta­tively titled, Spirits Rebellious, he says it might take second priority given the number of songs he has ready to record.

"The nice thing is there's a glut of material that I've written over the past three or four years so we have lots of stuff to choose from but I think it'd be a high concept album."

The album might well see a return of Steven, Cooper's everykid who has remained ageless for the last twenty years, continually anchoring Cooper's songs in common ground with the audiences' most basic shared experiences.

"He's the one that's being tempted. He's the one that can't wake up out of the nightmare. He's the one that's in the mental institution. He's the one that's gotta cope with everything."

"I like the idea of more characters in Rock and Roll," Alice says. "Out of all the different kinds of music. Rock and Roll needs to create the characters."

Living by that belief, young Mister Furnier created Alice Cooper and spawned a leviathan which lumbers on today with whiplash eyeliner focused on a surre­al horizon of his own devising.

Alice Cooper plays at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Wednesday, September 10.

(Originally published in Issue #300 of Australia's Rave Magazine, August 27 - September 2, 1997)