SHOCK ROCKER
Alice Cooper, coming to Mohegan Sun Wilkes-Barre, talks about new album ‘Detroit Stories’ and his legendary theatrics
For over 50 years, the “Godfather of Shock Rock” has wrapped a boa constrictor around his neck, and taunted audiences with his own personal brand of rock ‘n’ roll. Starting in 1964 as The Earwigs, transforming into The Spiders, and ultimately settling on the name Alice Cooper, the band had a difficult time finding their footing until they moved to Detroit and started belting out hits like “Under my Wheels,” and “School’s Out.”
In 1973 they released the album “Billion Dollar Babies,” and it went to number one on both the US and UK charts. In 1975 the band broke up and lead singer, Vincent Furnier, legally changed his name to Alice Cooper, and started a very successful solo career.
Fast forward 50 million record sales later, and Cooper releases, “Detroit Stories,” an album celebrating his musical roots in the Motor City. The album incorporates aspects from many walks of musical life in Detroit, and a few covers of Detroit artists like The MC5, Bob Segar, and Outrageous Cherry.
We spoke with him about “Detroit Stories,” his name, and his own personal favorite Alice Cooper records, ahead of his upcoming concert at the Mohegan Sun Arena on March 23.
Jay Honstetter for The Morning Call: On your latest album “Detroit Stories” you pay homage to your roots, and some of your Detroit influences and contemporaries like Wayne Kramer, Iggy Pop, and Ted Nugent. How did the idea come about for the album and what it was like bringing it to life? Cooper:
Bob Ezrin, my producer, and I generally work in concepts. Almost every album we’ve done — “Paranormal,” “Welcome to My Nightmare,” — were conceptual albums with a storyline. And on this album, we said, let’s not do that, let’s do a hard rock album. Just twelve gems, really good rock ‘n’ roll songs.
So where are we going to do that? LA’s not right for that, Nashville’s not right for that, New York’s not right, let’s go to the home of hard rock, Detroit — which just happens to be my hometown. Once we got there we said, let’s do this album about Detroit. I mean, that’s really where all hard rock came out of. We said, let’s use all Detroit players. It just kept getting deeper and deeper into it, and finally we realized that it became a concept. And we were surprised more than anybody that it debuted at number one.
Q: It’s great, I was kind of surprised to hear it start with a Velvet Underground cover, but then I heard the lyric changes and it made perfect sense. A:
Lou (Reed) was a friend of mine, and Bob Ezrin produced a couple of his albums, so we knew that he wouldn’t mind us changing New York to Detroit. We knew the song and we just said, why don’t we take this song and put a V-8 engine in it? The Velvet Underground’s version was so … It was sort of a heroin chic kind of thing. I said let’s just take this and make it a really hard rock song.
Q: If you had to pick one Detroit artist or band that has influenced you or inspired you more than any other, who would it be? A:
I think every single rock ‘n’ roll band, from The Beatles to The Who, has to pay homage to Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry was the first guy to really introduce guitar-driven rock ‘n’ roll. You heard the record and it was a guitar record, he would sing to the guitar. And that’s what inspired a lot of The Beatles songs, a lot of The Rolling Stones songs, everybody covered Chuck Berry.
He’s not a Detroit guy, but if I was going to think of a Detroit artist, the hard rock bands that came out of Detroit were pretty amazing.
You got The MC5, The Stooges, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Bob Segar, Suzi Quatro, I mean so many
bands came out of there. I would say maybe Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels were sort of everybody’s band at the time. They were really the only band that made it nationally when we were kids in Detroit. When we went back there in 1969 or 70, they were the only band that had hit records. We kind of looked up to them.
Q: When you’re making a record what is the process like? Do you write the songs first or do you tend to come up with an idea or concept first?
A: Sometimes it’ll be what you call the anchor song. Like when we did “Welcome to My Nightmare,” we wrote that song first. That was the foundation for what else was going to happen. And then you’d sit there and say, what would happen in this seven-year-old kid’s nightmare? You start going OK, well he would meet “Cold Ethyl,” we’ll write that song, and he would end up in a spider museum in a nightmare with Vincent Price.
All those things kind of write themselves, you just have to sit down and construct them. Now on an album like this, we wrote the songs first and basically taught them to the band. Bob and I had already worked out a whole bunch of these songs. And I worked with the original band on some of them, Dennis, Neal and Mike. We did a couple of songs on this album, “I Hate You,” and “Social Debris.”
And they’re great, we still do a lot of writing together and a lot of recording.
Q: Can you tell me where the name Alice Cooper came from? A:
It would’ve been very easy to come up with a really nasty name, “The Husky Baby Sandwich” or some really ridiculously heavy name, “The Death Squad” or something. I said, let’s go with the opposite of that, let’s give ourselves some sweet little old lady’s name.
Alice Cooper sounds like she would be the lady who lives at the end of the block and makes cookies for everybody. And then later on I became Alice Cooper because people called me Alice all the time. But the idea was the shock value of thinking you’re going to get a blonde folk singer and you get us.
Q: Thinking back on your 28 studio albums, is there any, not including your latest, that you’d consider your favorite? Or one that sticks out for any reason? A:
Every one has such a different personality, and every one represented a different period of where I was at. There were three albums I did that I don’t remember doing cause I was drinking and doing cocaine, I was doing all this stuff back in the 70s. There were albums like “Zipper Catches Skin,” and “Special Forces,” and people listen to those albums and I listen to them, and they go, those are my favorite albums. And I’m going, how weird is that?
I listen to them and I go, wow the production could have been a hundred times better on these, but the songs are really good. When I got sober, that’s when I started making what I consider to be more cohesive albums. Albums like “The Last Temptation,” and “From the Inside” are favorite albums, and “Trash” was fun to make.
Q: Your live shows always incorporate theatrics into them, something you’ve been doing since you started, and something that has influenced generations of artists. Where did that idea come from? A:
It was one of those things. I thought, why can’t you make these lyrics come to life? If you’re going to say “Welcome to My Nightmare,” give the audience a nightmare, don’t just say it, produce it on stage.
You’re basically treating it like a Broadway show, except that it’s hard rock. The audience is getting something that, at that time, nobody’s ever seen before. No one had ever seen a theatrical production like that where the music is still in your face. Blazing rock ‘n’ roll. We certainly didn’t water it down, we made it even harder.