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Alice: Forget the ghoul, you're good

Author: Ian MacDougall

Alice Cooper doesn't have to horrify people to make them listen any more.

The music has reached the point where people will come for it rather than the sideshow, entertaining though it is.

And 24,000 young people came to Varsity Stadium Saturday night to hear the five-man rock band.

The music is hard, heavy, uncompromising rock — raunchy with a lot of crashing, looming guitar work that fits well with Cooper's you-know-where-you-can-go delivery.

The content of many of the songs, like I'm Eighteen, Under My Wheels and School's Out, has a blunt adolescent reality that comes across clearly through the smokescreen of Cooper's macabre tricks.

And since the band was last in Toronto, those antics have become more of a smokescreen, delivered with more sarcasm, serving as a vehicle to carry the music rather than as a gimmick to fill in weak spots.

A few years ago, Alice Cooper didn't have a best-selling album and a single atop North American record charts. The group played a lot of small concerts and built a following around Toronto, but their theatre-as-gimmick attitude was beginning to pall.

Perhaps the performers began to feel the same way — Saturday night that worn-out straight-jacket routine they used to do was gone, but although Cooper hanged himself as he has done here before, it was more a case of Alice Cooper parodying what everyone expected Alice Cooper to do.

It's good to feel 18 and free of responsibility when you hear Alice Cooper sing the words "school's out... completely."

The bizarre American rock singer, and the group named after him, did School's Out at the beginning and at the end of their concert, and while the group was on, it was as if school were indeed out forever, leaving no pressures, rules or responsibilities.

But everyone, including Alice Cooper, knows there are pressures, rules and responsibilities, and while the 24,000 people at the concert were pretending that they didn't exist, the incredible sarcasm of Cooper's performance was an ironic reminder that they do.

And by doing outrageous things, like singing love songs to his 11-foot boa constrictor or hanging himself on stage, Cooper is separating his listeners from those who would be outraged by his actions.

That's what happened Saturday night at Varsity stadium, when everyone had a feeling of kicking over the traces, in spite of the fact school starts for most of them tomorrow morning.

You don't have to be of high-school age to appreciate Alice Cooper, but it helps, and most of the people at the concert were in that age bracket.