Alice Cooper still has the goods to make your sleep uneasy
by John Sewell
It's rather amusing to see how the cruel progress of time tends to make creative movements once perceived as shocking seem quaint and even downright cuddly in retrospect. Now that rock 'n' roll has been a pivotal force in American pop culture for almost 50 years, it's no surprise to see middle aged rockers still cranking out the same old anthems of teenage rebellion that earned them infamy in the '60s and '70s. Heck, even the alternative generation has its share of classic rockers grinding it out on an endless treadmill of shows that might even be thought of as a neo-oldies circuit.
When Alice Cooper first came to national, mainstream attention in the early '70s, it was as if the devil himself had charted a top 40 hit. Cooper was perceived as the very embodiment of evil: picketed by church groups, lambasted by politicians and loved by millions of teenage rockers. Alice's onstage antics were the stuff of legend, providing the grist for evangelists and right-thinking moralists everywhere to decry his band as harbingers of the imminent decline of America's moral fabric. And Cooper used the ensuing public outrage to his every advantage, creating the shock rock genre in the process. He was every bit as shocking as, oh, Marilyn Manson.
Thirty years down the road this seems like a lot of bluster over what was essentially a P.T. Barnum approach to rock 'n' roll. Now in his 50s, Cooper is a household name, an avid golfer, runs a theme restaurant in Arizona, and tours incessantly. There's no business like show business.
"I think that short of killing somebody on stage, it would be pretty hard to shock anybody these days," says Cooper. "With the media and with TV the way it is and the special effects on all the new movies, it's really hard to get anybody's attention.
"I don't think you can really shock anyone anymore, but you can push buttons. I think Marilyn Manson pushed some buttons with his anti-Christian thing and with his Satanic thing. I don't know how much of that's real—I think he just wanted to press some buttons and get people pissed off. But really, I'm not in the business of shocking people anymore. I haven't been for years. My attitude is that I'm just trying to entertain."
What goes around, comes around. And these days, a new crop of rock 'n' roll ghouls has rehashed Cooper's formula and reaped big bucks in the process. Rockers like Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, GWAR and Cradle of Filth have all acknowledged Cooper's influence as an antecedent to their modernized shock 'n' schlock. And today, Cooper freely admits to taking a few cues from his imitators by copping some of their licks on his new album, Brutal Planet.
"I don't mind learning from other people at all," says Cooper "I wrote the book on what these new guys are doing, but I'm not gonna sit back and just keep doing '70s- and '80s-sounding albums. I mean, if they have a new way to make and record sounds, I'm gonna use it too. I love the idea of a digital guitar sound. I love the idea of the drums being bigger. My new album is a current sound and I'm not done competing with these guys.
"I've had people ask me to make my next album sound just like Love It To Death, but I've already made that one. Why would I want to make it again? I want to make something that can compete with Rob Zombie—who, by the way, is one of my best friends.
"I want the audience to walk away from my show going 'What a great party that was!' Sure, I give them all the theatrics and a heavy dose of Brutal Planet, and some of the stuff is very nasty. But you've got to talk about that heavy stuff."
Heavy indeed. The new album is arguably Cooper's bleakest offering, chock full of a life-sucks-and-then-you-die sentiment that incredulously examines current atrocities like the Columbine massacre. For once, it seems that Cooper is shocked at the current state of the world rather than the world being shocked by him.
"Some of the songs are pretty heavy, but I feel like I really have to talk about that stuff," says Cooper. "You can't let Columbine just be another bad day in America. I think it's up to me to document that and say look, let's not let that ever happen again. You can't just let that go 'cause too many people died.
"The funny thing is, the four darkest songs on the album—and they're pretty dark—they're written from what I saw on CNN. They're written from total reality. They're not about fiction."
With time, Cooper has mellowed somewhat from the hard living hellion he was in the '70s. But even though he's reached middle age in good health and achieved an odd maturity, this doesn't mean that being Alice Cooper is by any means an average kind of life.
Asked if he remembers any of his legendary Knoxville appearances in the '70s, Alice relates an episode where one of the boa constrictors used in his show got loose in his hotel room. Perhaps the story stretches the credibility factor just a bit. Nonetheless, it's a funny one.
"The snake got lost in the hotel," says Cooper, laughing. "It [The Hyatt Regency] was a brand new hotel, and they got us in there before it was even finished. So we hadn't even realized that the toilet seats hadn't been put on yet. After we got into our rooms, we just couldn't find the snake anywhere. We realized that the snake went down the toilet and into the plumbing. And the snake didn't come up until two weeks later—into the toilet of a room that Charlie Pride was using.
"So can you imagine Charlie Pride sitting on the toilet and all of a sudden there's a 14-foot boa constrictor coming up through the toilet? I was very proud of that moment. As a matter of fact, every time I've seen Charlie Pride since then, he chases me with an ax."
October 5, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 40
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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