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The lighter side of Alice Cooper

By Dan Craft
dcraft@pantagraph.com

As students in town return to the classroom, along comes the guy who preached that, hey kids, actually "School's Out." Forever. Blown to pieces, in fact.| From the archive: Looking back with Alice Cooper

Many a high-schooler faced many a stern look from many an un-amused teacher when that anthem came sneering out of car radios and 8-track decks during its late-summer-of-'72 heyday.

Especially the part that went, "We got no class. We got no principles."

All puns intended.

Would those same educators be as un-amused today, 36 school terms later?

Especially when the man behind the anarchic anthem is now probably older than they were in the fall of '72?

Sixty-year-old Alice Cooper, who joined the ranks of the sexagenarians back in February, has never been left un-amused about anything he's sung or done on stage, tape, vinyl, video and beyond.

He's a past master at getting the last laugh, even while crying through his own miseries (a little late-'70s celebrity alcoholic rehab, anyone?).

When he takes to the stage of Bloomington's U.S. Cellular Coliseum August 21, smile if you call him humorless.

"I look at me as sort of the amusement ride at the fair," observes Cooper in his deceptively affable, conversational style.

"The scary one," he adds, with a chuckle.

We all know that laughter trumps screams under those circumstances, and Cooper, for all his shock-rock connotations, says that, in the end, it's the amusement part of his ride that counts.

Proving that even he can be made afraid, very afraid, Cooper sighs with relief when reminded that he was interviewed by GO! three years back prior to a Peoria Civic Center show.

So "we don't have to do the official 'career' story this time," he's told.

"Oh, thank God!," he rejoices. "I don't have to go back to 1968 again!". (For those interested in the story of AC's life, that 2005 Cooper interview can be accessed here.)

As a man who says he thrives only in the present, Cooper is currently stoked about three things:

• His successful, ongoing gig as a radio show jock -- the medium's first literal rock-shock-jock, in fact. "Nights with Alice Cooper," now three years old, is a five-hour, five-nights-a-week affair with Cooper pretty much allowed to indulge his every musical whim and fantasy (it airs locally on WDQZ-FM, 99.5 The Eagle).

"It's still absolutely fun for me," he testifies. "And I'm never going to run out of material."

• His current "Psycho-Drama" summer tour, the one stopping over here August 21, then wending its way through Canada and Europe by year's end.

• His new conceptual album, released three weeks ago, "Along Came a Spider," which already has turned into his biggest commercial success in more than 15 years.

Though the album will get its own tour next year, Cooper says we can expect a preview tonight, along with a generous overview of all the greatest hits one would anticipate from a man whose performance odometer has logged more than 40 years.

True to Cooper form, the new album outwardly seems to be courting controversy per its subject matter.

The 11 cuts (and we do mean "cuts") are jagged pieces of a conceptual narrative puzzle that tracks the life and times of a vicious serial killer named Spider, portrayed by, yes, Alice, who, lest we forget, is a character himself, portrayed by the son of a preacher man and named Vincent Furnier.

Spider's modus operandi befits his name: He cocoons his female victims in a silken shroud, then removes one of their legs in a bid to create his own eight-legged freak.

After assembling seven legs, he crosses paths with a potential victim who ends up pulling his leg, so to speak: He falls in love with her.

"This is about our love affair with serial killers," begins Cooper, a hardcore horror movie freak who was concocting gruesome scenarios when Rob Zombie was still in his swaddling clothes.

"Fictitious serial killers," he qualifies. "We can all get behind a Joker, or a Hannibal Lecter, or a Jason Voorhees. But we never seem to be able to get behind real serial killers, who are the most abhorrent people in the world, a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Charles Manson, people like that. You don't hear people going, 'yeah, I'm a John Wayne Gacy man myself.'"

But make one up, like Cooper has with Spider (and all his other past stage and album characters), and you're on safe ground.

"I thought, 'let's create one who's really a lot of fun, not just that he fashions himself after a spider, but that he's got a comic side, an intellectual side and a romantic side," he continues. "If I were a serial killer, this is the type I'd want to be -- someone who has the class to wrap his victims in silk that matches their eye color. Even though you know he's doing all these wrong things, you kinda like him."

As a born-again Christian (a conversion that occurred in the early '90s), Cooper sees no problem with his role-playing.

If you follow the album through to the grisly end, through tracks like "Wrapped in Silk," "Killed By Love" and "Wake the Dead," you'll realize that ambiguity gets the last laugh here.

"There are two conclusions you can draw," notes Cooper, including one that suggests the scenario has taken place in the mind of a man who fantasizes more than acts out.

Or, more disturbingly, that the murders did occur, but that another, unknown killer performed them.

His professed Christian ethics are sometimes called into question, even by his fellow Christians, Cooper notes.

"If they want to come down on me, OK, but let me give you a scenario: I'm a Christian guy and an actor, and I get cast to play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare. That's very classy: Macbeth. It's a good role, but Macbeth is also a murderer, and he's everything that's horrific to the Christian religion. But that's OK, because it's Shakespeare."

He pauses for punctuation, then continues: "So why would it be OK for me to play Macbeth and my show wouldn't be OK? My show isn't as bloody as Macbeth. And mine's funnier.

He adds, "When I became a Christian, I didn't get a list of rules. I got a Bible, and it's been a one-on-one relationship between me and Christ, not the church."

So if, say, Jesus turned up at tonight's Alice Cooper concert at the Coliseum, would he be comfortable in his ringside seat in the VIP area as Alice belts out, "School's out for summer, school's out forever, school's been blown to pieces"?

"I have to ask myself that all the time," confesses the man who has been welcoming us to his nightmares for four decades. "I really do wonder ..."

Four decades of Alice Cooper

By Dan Craft | dcraft@pantagraph.com

"Along Came a Spider" is being ceremoniously billed as the 25th studio album of 60-year-old Alice Cooper's four-decade recording career.

Following is a countdown of those albums in the order of their success with the record-buying public.

It should be noted that the "studio album" tag means that AC's four live albums -- 1977's "The Alice Cooper Show," 1997's "A Fistful of Alice," 2003's "Brutally Live" and 2006's "Live at Montreux" -- are not included in the tally.

The tag also omits compilation albums, including 1974's "Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits," the only one of the dozen-odd titles to qualify as a chart hit, reaching No. 8.

The number in parentheses represents the album's highest-ranking on Billboard's Top 200 album chart.

1. Billion Dollar Babies (1973; No. 1) -- AC's first and last No. 1 album.

2. School's Out (1972; No. 2) -- The first pressing of the album came wrapped in a pair of flammable pink women's panties, forcing a recall of the LP and a quick redressing with fire-retardant replacements.

3. Welcome to My Nightmare (1975; No. 5) -- AC's first solo project after ditching his band; produced AC's first hit ballad, "Only Women Bleed."

4. Muscle of Love (1973; No. 10) -- Considered a commercial disappointment, leading to AC's split with his band.

5. Trash (1989; No. 20) -- AC's official "comeback" album, producing his first Top 20 single in 12 years, "Poison."

6. Killer (1971; No. 21) -- "The greatest rock album of all time," quoth Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

7. Alice Cooper Goes to Hell (1976; No. 27) -- First AC album to address his drinking problem via the ballad "I Never Cry."

8. Love It to Death (1971; No. 35) -- Birthing place of the first AC Top 40 hit single, "I'm Eighteen."

9. Flush the Fashion (1980; No. 40) -- AC goes New Wave, epitomized by the Devo/Gary Numan-esque single, "Clones (We're All)."

10. Lace and Whiskey (1977; No. 42) -- Birthing place of the only AC "easy listening" song, "You and Me" -- so easy it was covered by a crooner named Sinatra.

11. Hey Stoopid (1991; No. 47) -- AC's first "all-star" LP, featuring guest appearances by Ozzy Osbourne, Slash, Joe Satriani, Vinnie Moore, Nikki Sixx, Steve Vai and Mick Mars.

12. Along Came a Spider (2008; No. 53) -- AC's biggest commercial success in 17 years, and his first recording as a sexagenarian.

13. Constrictor (1986; No. 59) -- A comeback album after three years of "retirement"; provided the sixth "Friday the 13th" film ("Jason Lives") with its theme song, "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)."

14. From the Inside (1978; No. 60) -- AC's album-long chronicle of his experiences as an alcoholic in rehab.

15. The Last Temptation (1994; No. 68) -- The return of AC's favorite running character, strange boy Steven, the protagonist of "Welcome to My Nightmare" 20 years earlier and a player in "Along Came a Spider" 14 years later.

16. Raise Your Fist and Yell (1987; No. 73) -- Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) meets AC on the track "Lock Me Up."

17. Special Forces (1981; No. 125) -- The first AC album that failed to crack the Top 100 ranks.

18. Dirty Diamonds (2005; No. 169) -- AC's first encounter with a rap singer -- Xzibit on "Stand."

19. The Eyes of Alice Cooper (2003; No. 184) -- "The Detroit schlock artist proves he can still rock hard ... but the songs don't hold up, and the whole package sounds muddy and a bit directionless." -- Rolling Stone.

20. Pretties For You (1969; No. 193) -- AC's first studio album ever.

21. Brutal Planet (2000; No. 193) -- AC's first flirtation with an industrial metal sound.

22. Dragontown (2001; No. 197) -- A quick sequel to the above album, christened after Brutal Planet's "worst town."

23. Easy Action (1970), 24. Zipper Catches Skin (1982), 25. DaDa (1983) -- The only three of AC's 25 studio albums that failed to crack the Billboard album chart at all.

At a glance

Alice Cooper in concert

When: 8 o'clock August 21, 2008

Where: U.S. Cellular Coliseum, 101 S. Madison St., Bloomington

Tickets: $29.50 to $59.50

Box office number: (866) 891-9992

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