Looking back with Alice Cooper

From the Pantagraph archives: October 6, 2005

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 4:25 PM CDT

Alice Cooper: Welcome to his ... well, you can't really call it a nightmare anymore.

When you're a living-breathing rock survivor at 57, and you've got your own golf tournament, and you're happily married, and you became a born-again Christian around a dozen years ago ... where's the bad dream?

Cooper isn't arguing that fact as he and his "Dirty Diamonds" tourmates wend their way across America for a rendezvous with the Peoria Civic Center (7:30 p.m. Tuesday, tickets still available).

The "Welcome to My Nightmare" years of the '70s have been history for three decades now.

In rock culture terms, that's the history of the universe. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the architect of the entire shock-rock tradition is into a pleasant-dream mode these days.

Speaking from his home in Phoenix, Cooper is happy to divorce himself from the notion that he's a native Arizonan - even if he's called the desert state his home for most of his life.

Crucial above all, he insists, were the first 10 years of his existence growing up in Detroit as one Vincent Furnier.

"I think that's really where my roots are," he says. "Yeah, now I live in a great big house in Phoenix overlooking everything, and it's wonderful - but I grew up in a tiny little wooden house on a block of tiny little wooden houses on the east side of Detroit."

The inner-city ethnic weave of Poles, Italians, Irish and African-Americans was good for little Vincent as he soaked up the rich cultural atmosphere and its assorted musical influences, which, per Cooper, was 100 percent Chuck Berry, "never anything flowery or groovy - it was always hard, cold rock 'n' roll."

Also helping instill the Midwestern ethos: the fact that "I came from as lower middle class as you can get," he recalls. "And my dad was the most honest used-car salesman in Detroit - so honest, he ended up becoming a pastor."

So the old adage about preachers' kids being natural-born hellions rings true once again?

Well, what else was Rev. Furnier supposed to think about his boy Vincent a few years later - when Vincent was calling himself Alice, painting himself with mascara, wearing fishnet stockings, blowing up schools in his songs, wrapping his records in pink women's lingerie and performing acts of horror movie carnage on stage?

Surely he wasn't getting up in the pulpit every Sunday and greeting his congregation with, "That's my boy!"

"Dad was always straight up and said what he felt," says his son 35 years after the fact. "So, in the beginning, when I got my first band together in high school, he was supportive. He knew who played for The Animals ... he loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones."

By this time, the Furnier clan had, in fact, moved to Phoenix. And 16-year-old Vincent's rock interests had resulted in a garage band called the Earwigs.

"What dad didn't get was the lives rock musicians lived," Cooper recalls. "He told me, 'I love the music, I'll always love the music. And you guys are a great band. What I can't support is the lifestyle - the drugs and the chicks every night.'"

By the time the Earwigs had mutated through several larval stages and emerged as Alice Cooper, some of Rev. Furnier's worst fears of the rock lifestyle were about to come true.

Even so, Rev. Furnier understood the theatricality of the show.

"He would say, 'I'm a pastor, you know, and I can sit around saying that's right and that morally isn't, but I know you're not satanic just because you've created this character who is definitely what I would call an arch-villain.'"

In fact, Rev. Furnier was so into the stagecraft of his son's macabre alter-ego that he helped build some of the props the band used on stage - "he built a whole back end of the stage with spider webs."

But when stardom hit with the band's pivotal 1971 album, "Love It to Death," which spawned Alice Cooper's signature anthem, "I'm Eighteen," the distinctions separating stage and reality began to blur.

With "School's Out" (1972) and "Billion Dollar Babies" (1973), the Alice Cooper band established shock-rock as mainstream entertainment. And Vincent Furnier had long since legally changed his name to Cooper.

By the time Cooper and the band parted ways, sending Alice on his solo way with 1975's "Welcome to My Nightmare," the bad habits were leading Rev. Furnier's boy into full-blown alcoholism.

"He stood behind me always, and he even sat me down to talk and said, 'You're becoming an alcoholic, and I still love you, but I think you're really blowing it.' And I was totally messed up."

By 1978, he was in rehab and writing about the experience for a forgotten album called "From the Inside."

As of October 2005, "I haven't had a drink for 23 years. I've never smoked. I'm 57 years old. And I'm probably in better shape now than I was in 1969 or 1970. I know guys like Ozzy (Osbourne) and Iggy (Pop), if they do two shows a week, that's too much. I do five shows a week, and each one is two hours of all-out Alice Cooper rock, with four costume changes and no rest periods. It's an all-out assault."

Though Cooper is a self-professed born-again Christian as of 13 years ago - a couple of years after his father died - his garish stage persona is not exactly the stuff of Sunday School lessons.

"Today, you can only shock an audience if you do something so drastic - if Marilyn Manson actually cuts his forearm off with a meat cleaver, or if Alice actually bleeds or actually kills his snake on stage."

The reaction: "OK, I'm shocked. Wonderful."

So, technically speaking, Alice Cooper no longer is able to shock.

The man in mascara is there to simply put on a show.

"I go up to entertain the audience, bigger than life. Even I'm impressed with Alice. I love him. He's timeless. That's why I can sing 'Eighteen' at 57. When I'm me, I'm 57; when I'm Alice, I'm this character who's suspended in time, and when Alice does 'Eighteen,' the audience believes I'm 18."

Cooper says he loves the charade.

"Alice is the Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees of rock - no matter what happens to him, he'll just ... keep ... coming ... back."

Welcome to his nightmare

Some gory highlights from the career of Alice Cooper, past to present:

What his parents called him: Vincent Damon Furnier

First time his parents called him that: Feb. 4, 1948

Where the nightmare began: Detroit, until age 10; then Phoenix, until now

Before there was Alice there was: The Earwigs (early '60s), which begat The Spiders (1965), which begat Nazz (1966), which begat the band Alice Cooper (1968), which begat the man, the myth, the legend, Alice Cooper.

Why Alice Cooper and not, oh, say, Betty Boop?: The name belongs to an alleged 17th-century witch whose moniker allegedly turned up in a ouija board allegedly being navigated by Furnier.

Quick, name the eccentric rock legend who signed Alice Cooper to his own label: Frank Zappa, whose Straight Records released AC's first album, "Pretties for You" (1969), and a flop follow-up, which ended the Cooper-Zappa association.

Origins of the Cooper legend: 1971, via the third AC album, "Love It to Death," which spawned the classic acne anthem "I'm Eighteen" (even though it never rose higher than the drinking/voting age of 21 on the Top 40 charts).

Ground zero for the Cooper legend: 1972-3, via the fifth AC album, "School's Out," which hit No. 2 and produced AC's first Top 10 single with the title song; and the sixth AC album, "Billion Dollar Babies," which climbed to the very top and produced still another hit, "No More Mr. Nice Guy."

Quick, name the article of clothing included in every copy of "School's Out": The first pressing of the album came wrapped in a pair of pink women's panties - flammable pink panties, as it turned out, which forced a recall of the album and a quick redressing with fire-retardant replacements.

Ch-ch-ch-changes: Following the relative disappointment of album seven, "Muscle of Love" (1973), AC split with the band and went solo via 1975's "Welcome to My Nightmare," which produced AC's first hit ballad, "Only Women Bleed." Solo album No. 2, 1976's "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell," followed on its high heels.

The mascara starts to run: Alcoholism reared its ugly head within a couple years as the Cooper legend started to recede in the face of punk and New Wave's rise. Result: AC became one of the earliest celebrities to check himself into rehab, chronicling that experience via 1978's bounce-back LP, "From the Inside."

From drinks to links: As part of his drying-out process, AC traded in his barstool for a golf cart and became one of rock's first and most avid fairway freaks, eventually earning his own tournament, the Alice Cooper Celebrity AM Golf Tournament, which debuted in 1997.

The mascara reapplied: A 1989 comeback album, "Trash," emptied out AC's first Top 20 single in 12 years, "Poison." He continued to plug away through the '90s ("Hey Stoopid," "The Last Temptation") and on into the 21st century. His current 2005 release, "Dirty Diamonds," returns AC to his stripped-down garage-band roots.

Welcome to his salvation: Around 1992, AC - the son of a Baptist preacher - became a born-again Christian, though he didn't, and never will, forsake his macabre alter-ego.

AC/DJ: Earlier this year, Cooper began haunting the airwaves via his first-ever nightly radio show, the nationally syndicated "Nights with Alice Cooper."