MUSIC

Alice Cooper on welcoming fans to his nightmare

Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral.com

It was 1973 when Alice Cooper introduced his most beloved prop, a guillotine, to rock and roll's most notorious stage show. He staged his own beheading every night on the record-breaking "Billion Dollar Babies" tour. And by that point, the singer had already hung from the gallows and otherwise pushed the theatrical envelope to shocking new extremes, including execution by electric chair.

Alice Cooper with his band in New York in 1973.

But the first time Cooper took a guillotine on stage was actually much earlier — at Cortez High School in Phoenix, where the future shock-rock legend was enrolled as Vincent Furnier and fronting the British Invasion-loving Earwigs at their first real gig, a Halloween dance. They'd borrowed the prop from a journalism classroom where the kids were made to spend five minutes with their heads in the guillotine as punishment for late assignments.

"So that very first night," Cooper says, "there was a guillotine on stage. And we had a guy coming out of a coffin. I have no idea why. That was our sense of humor. And it just kept going. I said, 'There's nobody doing theatrics. Nobody making the song come alive.' If you say, 'Welcome to my nightmare,' give 'em the nightmare. Why not?"

Giving them the nightmare helped establish Cooper as one of the most successful touring artists of his generation while paving the way for a more theatrical approach to rock and roll. In fact, it could be argued that the stage show is primarily what earned the original Alice Cooper band a well-deserved induction to the Rock and Roll of Hall of Fame.

As Howard Kramer, the rock hall's former curatorial director, frames it, "There were other people who were dramatic prior to Alice Cooper. Arthur Brown would certainly be one of the most visually dramatic. But the Alice Cooper band understood that to stand out, you had to cut a whole different figure. They loved comic books and movies as much as they loved music; so that's what they created, rock and roll meets the Saturday morning horror show on your local UHF station."

With the 40th anniversary of "Welcome to My Nightmare" just around the corner, Cooper is still bringing the nightmare to life. For the first time, he's about to stage the full production — guillotine included — at his annual Christmas Pudding concert next week. As Kramer says, "Who wouldn't want to see him chop his head off? That's his stock in trade. And it's a great act."

Alice Cooper with his head in a guillotine for his outrageous stage show in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles, California.

Like a Frankenstein monster, Cooper's theatrical vision was stitched together by mismatching pieces of this with bits of that, including many non-rock sources.

"We were all art students at Cortez High," Cooper says. "(Original bassist) Dennis Dunaway, myself and (guitarist) Glen Buxton. So we were all guys that were more into Salvador Dali."

A lot of their inspiration goes back to vaudeville. And the singer points to both the loopy humor of a 1941 musical called "Hellzapoppin' " and the hosts of late-night TV horror-movie showcases as further frames of reference.

"I always loved Zacherley, Ghoulardi, the Friday night horror guy that had the movies with the comedy in between," Cooper says. "So this was a version of that. I said, 'Horror, rock and comedy all go together.' They're in bed together."

Shep Gordon, Cooper's manager since 1969, recalls his first impression of the stage show. By the time Gordon saw them, Cooper and his bandmates had left Phoenix for Los Angeles and changed their name several times, from the Earwigs to the Spiders to the Nazz to Alice Cooper while adding two more Phoenix transplants to the fold, guitarist Michael Bruce and drummer Neal Smith.

"When I first saw them," Gordon says, "there were visual elements to the songs to help tell the story. Very primitive, done on limited economics, but the thrust was there. They did a song called 'Nobody Likes Me' and they put a little door up on the stage, and Alice sang it looking through the window of the door. And this was at a time when all anyone was doing was playing music in dungarees and occasionally facing the audience. As Alice's career developed, more and more theatrics came into it. And as we got some commercial success, we were able to have the economics to do bigger productions."

They were by no means an overnight success. Gordon recalls a show in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane that went over so badly that motorcycle gangs destroyed their equipment.

"We had this really theatrical thing that everybody hated," Cooper recalls with a laugh. "Except Frank Zappa. Frank loved it. Bob Ezrin, our producer, loved it. They saw the future of it. They said, 'If this happens, this is gonna be really good.' And they gave us a break. Frank Zappa signed us to his label.

"Later on, Bob Ezrin came in and became our George Martin. He was the guy that took all the good ideas and held them and let all the fluff out the window. He'd say, 'This is what works. Simple. I'm 18 and I like it. School's out for summer. I wanna be elected. Things that are really just right in your face. And really good hard rock. And then that image? You're gonna terrify every parent in America."

Cooper smiles at the memory before adding, "And we did."

A large part of what set their show apart, beyond the props, was Cooper's willingness to play the antihero.

"I said, 'There's no villains out there. There's just all rock heroes. Where's Captain Hook?' " Cooper says. "And I thought, 'I will gladly be Captain Hook.' We created this really horrific sort of character, but he had a sense of humor. And you had to have that sense of humor in order to give the audience a little relief.

"But it was hard rock. I saw what the Who did and the Who broke up their instruments. I thought, 'That's pretty cool. That's different.' But nobody else took that stage — there was that big blank canvas behind them — and made that stage come alive so that it was really like a Broadway show, only it was a band that was doing it."

Being as theatrical as Cooper was can lead to the assumption that the music couldn't hold up on its own. But by the time they emerged from their first dates with Ezrin, in 1971, they had a breakthrough album called "Love It to Death." They followed it the same year with a second hard-rock masterpiece called "Killer." It was clear they had the goods to back up all the bells and whistles.

"Visuals will sometimes overpower the music," Kramer says. "It's the risk you take being an innovative performer. It's a tribute to Alice's success that both the visuals and the music have survived intact. His musical body of work is phenomenal and his visual body of work is still immediately recognizable."

It helps that Cooper knew the risks before he made those early records.

"We just had to be amazing," Cooper says. "We had to be where you could take it all away and we are still amazing. Now, add the character. Add the theatrics. Suddenly, we're totally unique to anybody else. You're way out on a limb. If it works, you're a genius. If it doesn't, you're a moron. It just happened to work. And Shep Gordon, our manager, knew how to spin it. He understood that the more the parents hated us, the more the kids loved us."

Alice Cooper sings to his pet boa constrictor during a concert at the Veterans Coliseum on Feb. 1, 1987.

Parents were ripe for shocking at the time of Cooper's breakthrough.

"This is after Charles Manson," Cooper says. "Charles Manson gave the hippies a really bad reputation. We were suddenly dangerous. We weren't just playing around. Now, here's this band with blood on stage, heads flying off. If you looked at it with the right sense of humor, you were going, 'Oh, this is great. Come on. The over-the-top violence is funny.'

"At the time, it was a sore spot. So the religious right immediately deemed me a demon. And there was nothing Satanic about what we did at all. It was pure 1930s RKO horror movie and comedy put together. But you have to remember, every time we got banned somewhere, ticket sales went crazy. The only thing I did deny, though, being a nice Christian boy, I said, 'There's nothing Satanic about our show. I grew up in a Christian home. I don't care if you don't like what we do. I don't care if you think it's stupid. And I don't care if you think it's inappropriate. It's definitely inappropriate. But it's certainly not Satanic.' "

It wasn't long before those early tours became the stuff of urban legend.

"There was no Internet," Cooper says. "When the kids went to school the next day in Idaho, they'd say, 'There was a 20-foot snake and it killed two people and Alice ate it.' So you'd get to the next city and already that urban legend had gotten to the radio station, and by the time we got on stage, it was an event."

There was some truth behind at least one early image-building story — concerning a chicken someone threw on stage at a festival gig in Toronto.

"I threw it back into the audience," Cooper says. "Because I figured it could fly. It had wings. I was never on a farm in my life. And I truly expected it to fly. But the audience tore it to pieces. This was at the Toronto peace festival. The capper to the whole thing is the first five rows were all in wheelchairs. They're the ones that tore the chicken apart, not Alice Cooper. But the next day in the paper, I was the geek, the guy in the circus. They wanted to believe it so much that it stuck. And Frank Zappa said, 'Whatever you do, don't deny it. They're pretending that they hate it but they love it.' "

It took a hit to bring the industry around to Alice Cooper as a viable commodity. That was "I'm Eighteen," the first single from "Love It to Death," which hit No. 21 on Billboard's Hot 100, followed by an even bigger hit single called "School's Out" in 1972.

"When you get a hit record, the world changes," Cooper says. "All the suits go, 'What?!' Because you're just an idea over here that might happen. We're sure the Stones are gonna sell records. We're sure the Beatles are gonna sell records. Do we take a chance on this? And "Eighteen" was a hit. "School's Out" was a massive hit. Then, everything changed. Kids on the street were wearing top hats. And these guys who run the music business, they only look at where the dollar signs are. All of the sudden, they looked at this and they were like, 'Wow. This is gonna be worth a lot of money.' If it wasn't a hit record, we would have been a nice novelty."

After the success of the "Billion Dollar Babies" tour, Cooper and Gordon started working on an even more elaborate production in support of "Welcome to My Nightmare," the singer's first solo release.

Gordon says, "Alice and I said, 'Well, why don't we try and tell a story from beginning to end? Let's make that our project and really bring the picture frame of a Broadway show to the rock-and-roll stage,' which had never really been done. We brought in David Winters, who had done 'West Side Story' and was a choreographer. This is way before anyone used choreographers for shows. We put in other characters just like a Broadway show or movie would have other characters. Dancers. And it just developed from there."

It's still developing, in fact. This year's tour marked Cooper's first use of pyro, a curtain of sparklers that parts when he makes his entrance. But there is one major difference between his latest stage show and the tours that put Alice Cooper in the Hall of Fame. And that's a matter of perception.

"Now, it's family entertainment," Cooper says. "I mean, you can't shock an audience anymore. It's impossible. They cut my head off on stage and it looks great. It's a really well-done guillotine. But you turn on CNN and there's a guy really getting his head cut off. So CNN is more shocking than Marilyn Manson or Alice Cooper or Gwar or Slipknot. People want to see it. They still want to see the guillotine. They want to see the snake. They want to see the straitjacket. They want to see the crazy nurse. So we're still doing shock-rock. But we know it isn't shocking."

Alice Cooper's Christmas Pudding

Details: 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 13. Comerica Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix. $38-$128.602-379-2800, livenation.com.