alice cooper: the interview
Posted on 04. May, 2010 by Carrie in play
words > RED
Let’s not take up space with lengthy introductions. This is an interview with Alice Cooper. A few of the things he comments on are, well, of course, The Gruesome Twosome tour, make-up (it’s not Maybelline), and his attitude towards modern bands… not to mention Marilyn Manson. His show is May 9th (yes, on Mother’s Day) at the Hartman Arena. Be there or be scared.
Red: Well Alice, let’s promote your show a little and hopefully you can sell it out.
Alice: Okay, well we tour, usually, six months out of the year, every year, and this was the first time— I’ve been trying to get Rob Zombie to go out for about 10 years. He’s like my little brother. We both have the same sense of humor; we both have the same sort of appreciation for horror movies in that we see the humor in them, ya know? And I think that the two shows together are gonna be very amazing.
Red: Will you two be playing any songs together?
Alice: In certain cities we are. We are going to sort of pick what cities we’re gonna do it in. He’s actually been up on my stage 5 or 6 times and I’ve been up on his stage, so we’ve done it before. I think it’s gonna be sort of audible. It’s gonna be one of those nights of, “You comin’ up tonight?” “Yeah I’ll be up.” We’ll just see how it goes. The two shows are very well rehearsed apart from each other and then I think that’s it’s almost natural that we’ll do something together at some point.
Red: So, who wears more makeup?
Alice: Oh he does by far. It’s so funny, yeah . . . We use, basically, grease paint. I use grease paint. I wear probably more than he does, but I wear grease paint and a base. Ya know, just basically a base. Whereas the guys in KISS, they do the whole stencil thing; it’s all Kabuki and it takes them forever to put their makeup on, where it really takes me about 5 minutes to do mine cause I’ve done it for so many years I know exactly how to do it.
With Rob, the first time I was on stage with Rob, when they were White Zombie, it was like, if you stood next to them, there was, like, dust coming off of them. It looked like somebody had just dug them up out of the grave and it was, ya know, baby powder or whatever they put on themselves, but when they would stomp around the stage, dust would be coming off of them and it was like clouds of dust. And it’s the same with Rob now; when you walk next to him, it’s sort of like somebody just dug him up.
Red: What’s the Alice Cooper set-list looking like nowadays? Everyone knows they’re gonna hear the hits, but when you go to a show, the little treasures are the ones you don’t expect to hear.
Alice: And I’m very, very aware of that with my fan base. I know that they wanna hear the songs that they haven’t heard before or the ones that they’re not expecting. In this show we do all the hits. We do, like, 12 Top 40 hits that we had, and then on top of that we do some of the new stuff from the new album [Along Came A Spider], but it all fits into the show visually. It all runs as a visual thing going on at the same time. And then, ya know, and then I reached back and found a few things From The Inside [1978 album] like “Nurse Rosetta” and a couple things— “Wicked Young Man” [Brutal Planet, 2000] and things like that that were not singles at all, but that were, like, kind of fan favorites.
Red: That the fans are going to love.
Alice: Yeah, Ballad of Dwight Fry [The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, 1999] and things like that. Our normal show, we do 28 songs, so we do cover a lot of bases on this show. And once this show starts, there’s never a lull. From the first moment that we hit the stage we stay in fourth gear the whole time. That’s always the way that I’ve done it. I said, “Never give the audience a chance to breathe.” If they look away from the stage they’re gonna miss something. It’s sort of like a Hard Rock Vaudeville, but a really fast paced one. It’s got everything in it. People are laughing, people are scared, people, they hear songs where they go, “Awww, I love that song; that’s my favorite,” and Schools Out just rally calls so it’s got everything in the show. Literally everything… And they kill me 4 times in the show.
Red: Wow we get four, Mother’s day should have 5 though don’t ya think?
Alice: Yeah, maybe I should have somebody dressed like my mom coming out with a broom or something.
Red: What’s it like over the years to see all the mini versions of yourself?
Alice: All the Mansons and the Slipknots and the bands like that.
Red: Yeah. Is it all flattery or was there ever a hey-that’s-mine factor?
Alice: Every generation has their monsters. Ya know, Marilyn Manson’s generation recognizes me as some mythical creature because they’ve heard so much about [me], but their current monster is Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot, and those guys. Whereas I think the Ozzys and the Alices and the Bowies are kind of like, we’re the old vampires. We’re sort of like the eternal vampires, haha, where these are the new kids on the block. But I totally expected it. I would have been surprised had there not been somebody that came out and sort of picked up the theatrical flag the way Alice did but for this generation… I thought that it was a little odd that he actually named himself with a girl’s name. Because that was a little bit too close to, ya know— Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson– it just, it seemed a little bit too close.
And Marilyn and I are friends. I mean, we’re miles apart theologically, but, ya know, as a person we actually get along okay. I told him, I said, “Ya know, if you read the bible instead of tearing it up, then maybe you’d get a different view of it.” Hahaha.
Red: Anyone who watches your interviews or who has listened to your radio show can recognize your disdain towards certain modern rock bands, you said at one point that some bands, “had forgotten to listen to the Beatles.”
Alice: I make fun of corporate rock only because I felt that it was sort of, like, going under the safety blanket. In our day, I make it sound like in the 1800s, but in our day, Rock ‘n Roll was supposed to upset everybody. That was the idea. And it was supposed to be hard rock and loud guitars and then all of the sudden we got into this Rock ‘n Roll that was sort of really pleasing. It was sort of like, “Well that’s nice and that’s good and that’s very clean,” and there’s no edge on it at all. And I kind of went, “Well why would you want to be in a band like that?” The fun of Rock ‘n Roll is to kind of be the bad boys, not to be the good boys.
Red: So what are some modern bands that you do like, that you think are doing a bang-up job?
Alice: Oh I think that Jack White [White Stripes] gets away with murder. He breaks every rule there is to break and still it sounds great and he gets away with it. I like Foo Fighters because they’re encouraging. They never go on stage, they never do anything without a ton of energy. I think that a band like JET, from Australia, is great because they’re kind of a boozy bar band. They kind of remind me of the early Small Faces. And then I like the real garage bands. I like The Strokes and The Vines and The Hives and bands like that that are just pure garage rock. To me, those are the bands that are always gonna be— 50 years from now, hopefully there’ll be 5 kids in a garage somewhere with guitars and amps learning Alice Cooper songs, or learning Rolling Stones songs. To me that’s the heart of Rock ‘n Roll right there… Hopefully they learn Chuck Berry first cause he was the one that everybody should learn.
