Musician still has faith in rock’n’roll
Aged 69, and after four decades on the road, Alice Cooper still hasn’t let up on his touring schedule.
In 1977, Alice Cooper toured Australia and New Zealand for the first time. His 11-date Welcome to My Nightmare Tour was the fastestselling tour of that time – quite the dazzling feat for pre-internet days.
He’d had nine studio albums by that stage, with monster hits such as School’s Out, and came with a scandalous reputation for shockrock theatrics in his live show.
But despite the thirst to see this rock curiosity, there were other competing musical forces on Aussie touring turf when he arrived in March that year.
Scandinavian camp-fest Abba was also making its first venture Down Under.
‘‘I’ll tell you the funniest story about that,’’ says Cooper, on the phone from the US.
‘‘The very first show was in Perth and I was just recovering from all that flying. And I walked on my balcony at the hotel, about 12 storeys up, and there’s thousands of kids down there. And they’re all going [makes a muffled chanting noise] ‘ah-ah, ah-ah, ahah, ah-ah’ and I thought they were saying ‘Al-ice’, and then I looked up and two storeys above me was Abba. They were all going, ‘Abba, Abba, Abba’.
‘‘Oh, I thought for sure they were all down there for me, you know like ‘Alice, Alice, Alice’. I was laughing so hard because I thought for a few seconds there I was incredibly enormous in the city.’’
To be fair, Cooper’s tour was enormous at the time. And 40 years on and at age 69, his touring schedule hasn’t let up yet. This year he’s been taking a lengthy circuit of the US, South America and Europe, and hit Australia and New Zealand this month.
He says he spends at least six months on the road each year, alongside his wife Sheryl, a dancer, who has been performing with him since the 1970s.
‘‘There’s never really a time where I back up and say ‘OK, no touring this year’. If I take six months off, I start getting edgy. I want to get back on the road,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s not really the adoration, it’s the actual performance. I feel more comfortable on stage than just about anywhere else.’’
Cooper’s shows are much lauded for their circus factor, with Cooper as the ringmaster of a horror pantomime with props and hammy scenes featuring guillotines, electric chairs, buckets of fake blood and boa constrictors.
Perhaps the most infamous event in Cooper folklore is the chicken incident in Toronto in 1969. As legend would have it, a live chicken came a cropper after joining Copper on stage, outraging just about everybody at the time. So what actually happened?
‘‘The audience wanted it to be real so much that they made it part of rock history,’’ he says. ‘‘So the idea that somebody threw a chicken on stage and I threw it back in the audience ended up that I somehow brought this chicken on stage and bit the head off and had blood all over me. But that’s [the story] the audience wanted. They wanted this Alice Cooper character to be that. So the trick was, just don’t deny it.’’
Decades later, acts have pushed the boundaries far, but real-life terror and the proliferation of news mean there’s instant horror at the touch of a button, he says.
‘‘In 1976, it was really easy to p... off your parents and p... off the establishment and to really make everybody angry, the older generation, which made the younger generation love you. Marilyn Manson was probably the last really outrageous character and even he and I talk about this now. We just both totally understand that we are not as shocking as CNN. I will turn on CNN and there’s a guy getting his head cut off for real and I’m going ‘how is what I do on stage, doing the guillotine, shocking any more when that’s the real deal’.’’
Social media and the internet have also taken away some of the magic, buzz and folklore that used to surround bands.
‘‘I think that we’ve lost the romance,’’ he says. ‘‘We’ve lost the personality, and it’s because everybody has to know what’s going on at all times. Here’s the worst thing about it – now we have settled for average rock. In other words, we’ve settled for fast food, rather than gourmet food.
‘‘I think the last great rock band was probably Guns N’ Roses, who were really a great rock’n’roll band. After that there was so much of a glut of music that now we care more about what’s next, rather than what’s good.’’
Cooper’s own remarkable personal journey since visiting Australasia in 1977 took him into a severe alcohol addiction in the 1980s, from which he emerged as a born-again Christian.
‘‘Everybody has a different path that they’re on through their whole life,’’ he says. ‘‘I was the prodigal son. I grew up in the church. My dad was a pastor, my grandfather was an evangelist. I grew up in the church and went as far away as I could, almost died with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and those guys, came very close to joining them and then came back to the church – and the only thing that it’s done with my career is made it stronger.
‘‘It’s made everything in my life stronger because I have a faith now that I believe in, and that faith does not say I cannot be Alice Cooper. It says ‘yeah, go ahead be Alice Cooper but be the best one you can be’.’’
The greatest thing about being Alice Cooper, he says, is simple.
‘‘I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. The idea of having your ducks in a row and having your prerogatives in order. I love being Alice Cooper and I love creating and it’s so amazing that my career has gone 55 years and it’s still working.’’ – Sydney Morning Herald ❚ Alice Cooper will perform at Wellington’s TSB Arena on Saturday, October 28. Tickets available via Ticketek.