ALICE COOPER
The Nightmare man talks Detroit, Lou Reed and the beast inside.
“If Fred Astaire and Bela Lugosi had a baby, that’s Alice.” ALICE COOPER
FREED FROM Covid restrictions, self-confessed “road rat” Alice Cooper is back touring the US. Four shows in, he has a day off in Louisville, Kentucky, and is entertaining MOJO at (his) 8am, after his daily round of golf. Back in 1970, Detroit’s Alice Cooper band were a ragged, pioneeringly gender-neutral tour de force touting such lean, mean anthems as I’m Eighteen and School’s Out, plus on-stage mock executions and shameless python action. The momentum continued when Alice went solo in 1975 with Welcome To My Nightmare, and after a relatively fallow ’90s and ’00s, 2011’s Welcome
2 My Nightmare sequel triggered a renaissance; 2021’s back-to-basics Detroit Stories went UK Top 5 and was his first Billboard Album topper. And the stories he can divulge, even at 8am: Alice Cooper, super-trooper. What was it like not being able to tour? Like coming off of a drug. Every night, you get a shot of adrenaline which can’t compare with anything else. The last show before it all closed down was with Queen and 95,000 people in Sydney. When we restarted touring last September, we were like giddy little kids just rehearsing.
The current show is bookended by Feed My Frankenstein and Teenage Frankenstein. What’s the fascination with Frankenstein? We wanted to get back to songs we hadn’t done in a long time. It’s different pieces from different albums, all sewn together like Frankenstein. We have a giant Alice Frankenstein, and a giant baby who comes out for Billion Dollar Babies… Executions? Poor Alice, he cannot avoid the guillotine. But Alice is always reborn in a white hat and tails for School’s Out. That’s my favourite Alice, the leader of the circus.
Does your love of horror predate Alice?
Even when I was 10, I’d go to the movies to see Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Thing That Couldn’t Die. I saw humour in them, and those classic ’30s horrors, Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman, they’re like old friends. I’ve never been into torture rock or movies with someone on the operating table. For me, it’s the idea there’s a monster inside us, and Alice brings that monster out. Alice’s monster happens to be very showbizzy – if Fred Astaire and Bela Lugosi had a baby, that’s Alice.
Detroit Stories paid tribute to your home city and where the band finally got its break.
Bob [Ezrin] and I have done something like 15 albums together, and we’re working on two more. We said, “Let’s make a really good hard rock album, but where? The home of hard rock is Detroit, let’s go there.” And once we did, it was, “Let’s make the record
about Detroit. Not just hard rock but Motown and blues. Get [MC5’s] Wayne Kramer on guitar.”
Presumably you covered The Velvet Underground’s Rock & Roll in tribute to Mitch Ryder’s version.
Bob produced that version too. Lou [Reed] was an old friend, we both lived for a time at the Chelsea Hotel. The Velvets were kings of the underground and we were the young upstarts. Laurie Anderson heard our take and said Lou would have loved it.
Circa 1971, Lou Reed famously said, “Alice really doesn’t make it as a drag queen, he’s so ugly.”
(Laughs) I was! I can totally imagine Lou saying that. I wasn’t trying to be pretty.
It was more, what is that? We’d come out on-stage, I’d be wearing ripped black tights and my girlfriend’s slip, covered in blood. The audience is like, “What happened? How did he get covered with blood already?” It brought them right into the story, and then you never slowed it down.
Talking of slowing down, is there any sense of you taking stock with a view to retiring?
That word has never come up. I’ve never been in better shape. My beautiful wife [Sheryl] is in my show, as the Dead Bride and Madame Guillotine, so when I tour, I bring home with me. Our life is on that stage.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.
The fact is, my dad was a pastor and my grandfather an evangelist, but I went as far away from the church as I could – but I returned. That’s when I got sober. People ask, if I could change anything, would it be my addictions? I always answer no, because it’s part of who I am now.
Alice tours the UK with The Cult from May 23 to June 1.