Go Ask Alice, 10/20/06

Everybody has one: an artist they've been following since early in their musical development, sometimes against their better judgment, even when most of their tastes have changed. For me, that's Alice Cooper. I grew up listening to him, suffered through albums like "Trash" and "Hey Stoopid," and will defend much of his output to anyone who'll listen. Plus, he still puts on a hell of a show, which I just caught for the seventh time since 1990 on Saturday at the House of Blues in AC. Before that show, I got the chance to speak with the Coop for a Metro piece (see 10/27, below, for link). But here's the complete (more or less) transcript, with my questions roughed in from memory.

Over the years, I've heard you discuss how the Alice character has changed. Where do you see Alice in 2006?

AC: Well you know, I stay out of politics. I try to stay in the classic vein of what Alice does, which is really pretty much some kind of a cabaret vaudeville. Pure entertainment as far as I look at it. That’s why I don’t get into political issues and things like that. I always wanted Alice to be an escape from anything like that. Come to an Alice Cooper show and escape your daily reality. Because he’s gonna take you into this different reality. And I think that that’s the fun of the show, is that you come and there’s 28 songs, 26 of which are gonna be hard rock songs. And every single song is gonna have a theatrical bit to it. One just might be a sword with dollar bills on it, one might be something as elaborate as an entire guillotine scene, with the audience being the townspeople. But every single song has got a theatrical bit. I really challenge the audience’s imagination. I want them to get lost in the show. It bothers me if I look down and I see people talking. Because they’re not watching. So I kinda want an audience that’s totally wrapped up in the show. Even though the first, I’d say, first fifteen songs is almost just like a shotgun blast of hard rock. You know, we had fourteen top forty hits, so I try to hit ‘em with all that stuff right up front and then take them into the heavier theatrics at the middle to the end of the show.

How difficult is it to construct a set list given how many songs you have to play each time out?

AC: Oh, I know, you’re exactly right. It’s the same thing with the Who and the Stones and anybody like that. We’re doing shows with the Stones, you know, and I’ll sit down, I’m listening to the set, and I’m going, ok, ok, ok, ok, boy I wish they would do… and every once in a while they throw me a song that I’d never expect them to do. Something like “Fortune Teller,” you know, that was was like a B-side, 1964, you know. And for the real Rolling Stones fan, that’s a really big deal to hear a song like that and I take a cue from that, and I said ok, let’s do all these hits and then let’s do “Drive Me Nervous.” So the real fan will go, ah, I never thought I’d hear that song.

There's always one or two like that, whenever I've seen you.

AC: Yeah, see, that’s it. And I can tell who the real fans are when you start that song. And then there’s the other ones that they sing along to. It’s so funny to hear them singing along to “Welcome To My Nightmare,” like a sing-song. Or “Steven.” Here’s this song about this psychotic serial killer and everybody’s going with their lighters, you know. I want to stop and say, “You know, this is about a serial killer.”

You must be especially gratified at things like that around now, with Halloween so close.

AC: See to me, I think comedy and horror are so close. There’s just a very thin razor line there between Jack the Ripper and Clouseau. I mean, in my show, Alice might slit your throat, but three steps later he could very well slip on a banana peel. And so you’re horrified at one second, and then laughing your head off the next. You kind of feel embarrassed about laughing, because this poor girl just got her throat slit, but Alice just slipped on a banana peel.

Are people who only know you by reputation surprised by the goofy humor of your radio show?

AC: Well, I think so. Because Alice never talks to the audience. The character never says thank you, he never says here’s a song that we did in 197-, he never does that. Because he’s this arrogant, villainous bastard. He’s Captain Hook. You know, he’s the dominatrix, so he doesn’t feel he has to lower himself to say thank you. But that’s the character. And if he did let it go, if he went up there and started talking to the audience, they would go, ‘Aw. Well, there’s no mystery to that.’ That’s why I keep Alice, when I play him, I really make sure he’s this overbearing sort of villain that you don’t like but you really do like. But you’re right. When I – I just listened to Bob Dylan’s show. To his radio show for the first time. And I thought 'How weird is this, for him to be playing songs?' Because there’s so much mystery around Bob Dylan. And I’m listening, and he goes, [in nasal Dylan voice] ‘Well, right now, I would be remiss to not play this song for all the graduates out here. It’s a song by Vincent Damon Furnier, who slapped some make-up on and called himself Alice Cooper.’ And the song starts and he goes, ‘No more pencils. No more books. I can’t even think of a word that rhymes.’ And I went, that is the weirdest thing I ever heard. Because it’s Bob Dylan, that’s the poet laureate, the same guy that you sat around listening to his lyrics, going, ‘Wow. This guy’s out there.’ So when I do my radio show, I let them know right up front, I’m Alice, but this isn’t the Alice you see on stage. This is the matter-of-fact Alice, this is the Alice that’s gonna insult you. And insult himself. And the great thing about the show is since I know everybody, everybody I play, I know, so I have no problem saying that “Come Sail Away” is the gayest song ever written. And then Tommy Shaw will come on and say ‘What do you mean by that? "Only Women Bleed" is the gayest song!' And then we argue back and forth about it. But I’m allowed to say that either Sting or Bono is a candidate to be the anti-Christ. You know, because they’re trying to save the world, and that’s biblically what the anti-Christ is gonna do. But I hope they understand my sense of humor, because nobody’s complained yet. We figured it out anyway, that if Dr. Phil and Oprah have a baby, that’s the anti-Christ. That has to be it.

You tend to shift sounds every three or four albums. Is that a conscious decision made before you start writing?

AC: That starts at the very beginning of the whole process of the album. When I did “Last Temptation,” that was a great storyline. I said, 'I want to do an album that’s sort of a parallel to “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Where the character is offering this 13-year-old kid everything, and in the end the kid doesn’t buy into it.' Just because it’s a great story, and I was trying to make the point of this: Hollywood tells every 13-year-old kid that if you’re not high or you haven’t gotten laid by the time you’re 13, there’s something wrong with you. I think that’s a bad message. So I wanted this kid, the geek that realizes he’s a virgin at 13, well, he should be at 13. That he’s not an outcast. Be your own self, don’t let any of these people tell you what you should be or what you shouldn’t be. That was the message to that whole thing. “Brutal Planet” and “Dragontown,” you know, were great stories about, here’s a society going towards a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour, and when it hits it, what’s going to happen? Well, “Dragontown”, here’s the finality of Hell. The most horrific thing in the world is the fact that Biblically, Hell is no way out. There’s no repentance. Once you’re there, you’re there. And I said, that’s a great horror story. So that’s why “Dragontown” and “Brutal Planet” were both industrial like that. I kinda wanted them to be good songs, but a little bit more brutal, a little bit more hardcore. When this came along, I said, we just did three conceptual albums. And then I heard the White Stripes. And I heard The Strokes and The Vines and The Hives and I said, listen to all these bands that are going back to the garage. And the reason I like them is that they remind me of “Killer” and “Love It To Death.” Let’s write that. Let’s go back and write that kind of song. And so, it was so much fun to go in and write a three-minute rock song. And let the band play it and no overdubs. Just say, I want the band to play this, I said 'I want you guys to be the best bar band in the world.' And we’re not gonna overdub. When we play a rock song, on some of the other stuff we’ll overdub, you know, the more intricate stuff, but when it comes to this hard stuff, I said we’re gonna just play it. If you miss a beat, if you drop a bass line, if you miss a guitar line, great. That’s what a band sounds like. Nobody’s perfect. I mean, I don’t want this Steely Dan album. I want this to be a good rock and roll Alice Cooper album. So that’s the approach we took. We did one album in fourteen days and we did the other one in fifteen. You know, “Love It To Death” took six months. But I learned all that stuff from Bob Ezrin, so I could transfer all that knowledge into doing the same kind of album in fifteen days. With Pro-Tools, that cuts everything in half. Unbelievable. Anybody can make an album in their house now.

It seems that in recent years, Alice has lashed out at pop culture, or celebrity culture.

AC: Well, you know what it is, is I think that Alice being the non-conformist, doesn’t like to be put into that 'Just because I’m an entertainer, I’m a liberal.' Alice doesn’t buy into that at all. Alice doesn’t mind a bit of violence, if it’s for God and country. And at the same time, I think that there’s a moral streak that runs through Alice, a strange, romantic moral streak. That he doesn’t buy into the fact that everyone should buy into Hollywood, what they say. I hate the idea that there’s fourteen-year-old girls on MTV half-naked. I sit there and I go, and Tom Petty said the same thing, 'Ten years ago, that would have been kiddie porn.' Now we’re sitting there going hey, isn’t that great? It’s entertainment. It’s ok. Not only MTV, but on any video show. It’s sort of like, if you’ve got a great song, the only way you’re allowed to sell it is by being half-naked. I kinda look at that and I have two daughters and I go, why is that right?

And you use one of your daughters onstage to demonstrate that.

AC: Oh, yeah. Well, Calico, she’s me times three. She could talk her way out of a sunburn.

Is it therapeutic for father & daughter to kill each other on stage every night?

AC: Oh, yeah. And it’s the funniest thing in the world because she’s really good. I mean, if I were going to cast somebody in this part, I would never have been able to find anybody with the comic timing that she has, or the one that can go from really vulnerable to totally vicious as quickly as her. But she’s got like four movies coming out, she’s a good actress. And she really knows how to play it, and she’s ballet trained, and she’s jazz trained, and she’s basically gymnastics, martial arts, everything. She can do everything.

What's your stage show like this tour?

AC: Well, I give the audience a pretty good blast of rock and roll - I would say the first half of the show, is hit after hit after hit after hit, and mostly hand props for Alice. And then the show starts turning. And all of a sudden you realize the show has changed into a much more theatrical venue now. And all of a sudden now, every song has got a lot of theatrics in it. And there’s three or four more people on stage, and pretty soon you’re really involved in this production of what this thing is. So I kind of do that morph into the big theatrics right in front of the audience. And my best reaction from the audience is sort of, remember the reaction of the audience in "Springtime For Hitler?" That kind of jaw-drop, eyes wide open, in disbelief? I get that a lot.


They must know what’s coming.

AC: Well, you know, we’ve played two or three cities we’ve never played before on this run, and I can always tell those cities because I look at the audience and it’s like, ‘What?’ Because you know, Philadelphia, New York, everybody’s seen the show and they know it’s going to be this and they know it’s going to be that, but when you play a city that’s never seen you before, we forget that they haven’t seen us. So we look at this audience and they are just dumbfounded.


Do you write songs with the show in mind?

AC: Not necessarily. At points we’re writing the song and all of a sudden, when we’re playing it, all of a sudden I’ll go, 'Uh-oh, this is a stage song.' And at points I’ll go, 'This is a great song but I don’t think this is gonna read on stage.' A song like “Jesse Jane,” as funny as that song is, I tried to picture it on stage and I went, it’s too broad humor. It’s too funny on that level where it’s not Alice enough. But with a song like “Woman of Mass Distraction,” or “Dirty Diamonds,” or “Steal That Car,” oh yeah, that’s a total stage song. And that’s the difference. You really can’t tell till you hear the band play it and you go, oh yeah, this is gonna be huge, this one is.

With all the recent reissues, like "Good To See You Again" on DVD, does seeing old stuff spark new ideas?

AC: Well, I forgot about that stage show. And I was watching Alice, which was a different Alice. That was more the alcoholic Alice, and I noticed his posture was different, the take on it was different. He was more the whipping boy for society. When I came out sober, I was suddenly this much more defined villain, who would stand up straight with his different posture, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. So there were two Alices. There was that Alice and then there’s the new Alice. The new Alice is much more fun to play.


Can you see a portrait of yourself in the character over time?

AC: No, not really, because the character is a character that was built for rock and roll. He was rock and roll’s villain. I don’t really personalize Alice very much at all. I kind of look at him as being a character that I use. There’s not many of my psychosis things going on in Alice, I don’t think. There’s many more social things going on with Alice. He’s more of society’s dartboard. But I don’t really think that I confess too much up there.

Not-So-Massive Daily News Update, Sept/Oct '06

Ok, so I don't do quite as much work for the DN as I do for my other regular outlets. But here's the couple of items that ran recently:

Sept. 26: A piece on Tania Katan, who had breast cancer twice, and a double mastectomy, by the age of 31, and turned the experience into a very funny book and then into a (supposedly very funny, though I didn't see it) one-woman show.

Oct. 2: "The Funny Side of Poe," a feature on comedian Grover Silcox's one-man Poe show, running throughout October at the allegedly haunted Old Mill Inn in Hatboro.

Oct. 27: a story about Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars, a band of musicians formed in a refugee camp in Guinea and now touring the world.

Massive Citypaper Update Sept/Oct '06

Part two of the catch-up posts, seven weeks' worth of missed CPs.

Sept. 14: Lots of stuff in this issue - the Fall jazz calendar; a review of the recent eight-film Pedro Almodovar retrospective; a review of the animated baseball flick Everyone's Hero; a Cold Open for the pretty-boy warlocks film The Covenant; a preview for Slate.com writer Fred Kaplan's lecture "Are We in the Midst of WWIII?"; a feature on Philly organist Trudy Pitts' inaugural jazz run of the Kimmel Center's new organ; a Pick for a pair of shows by Lebanese saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui; and two Soundadvice previews, for Vijay Iyer's Fieldwork and for the Nels Cline/Glenn Kotche duo. Whew.

Sept. 21: A review of Jackass: Number Two; a preview of a retrospective of the work of self-mutilating performance artist Gunter Brus; a feature on trombonist and denture wearer Grachan Moncur III (ignore the misidentified pic of Khan Jamal, who played with Moncur that week); a Pick for the Tranestop Jazz Festival, which brought Archie Shepp to town; and two Soundadvice previews, for the Wally Shoup Trio and for saxophonist Don Braden.

Sept. 28: CP's glossy, full-color 25th anniversary edition included my review of Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep; a review of the British black comedy (?) Keeping Mum; a preview of Winterthur's Fashion in Film exhibit; a Pick for the Print Center's Camera Obscura project; a Pick for a talk by Ashley Kahn, author of the recent histoy of Impulse! Records, The House That Trane Built; and a Soundadvice preview for Gene Coleman's Ensemble Noamnesia performing with visiting Chinese musicians.

Oct. 5: A review of Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire, part of the retrospective I overviewed three weeks back; a feature on trombonist/electronics experimentalist George Lewis; a Pick for bassist Dave Holland; and two Soundadvice previews, for Ben Allison & Medicine Wheel and the duo of Han Bennink and Peter Brotzmann.

Oct. 12: The bi-annual Music Issue, for which I contributed a piece on Philly improviser Jack Wright and his house of musicians; and for the regular Music section, a feature on pianist Uri Caine (interviewed from the front porch of my friends' place in Glendale, CA on our last day of vacation); and a Pick for the duo of Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg; and another Almodovar review, this one for Matador.

Oct. 19: A Pick for atmospheric Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko; and two Soundadvice previews, for Mat Maneri's Pentagon and Eyvind Kang's Dying Ground.

Oct. 26: A feature on Philly tenorman and Saxophone Choir leader Odean Pope; a Soundadvice preview of Slought Foundation's Philly Jazz Fest; and a review of Christopher Nolan's not-really-quicker-than-the-eye magic-off The Prestige.

Massive Metro Update Sept/Oct '06

Ok, so I haven't updated this site in damn near two months. (Well, really, did anyone notice? Did ya?) Things got really busy there for a bit, then a nice SoCal vacation, after which things got even busier catching up from the nice SoCal vacation, which brings us to today. This whole writing thing has become the full-time gig in the meantime, so there should theoretically be more blogging time, which may end up meaning original content rather than just pointers to stuff other people have paid for. We'll see. For now, a couple pointer posts to bring things up to date. First, Metros for the last two months, starting with:

Sept. 13: An incestuous little interview with fellow Metro-ite Bruce Walsh, promoting his Fringe Fest performance (Pg. 14).

Sept. 14: Cross Pollination, first in a planned series of shows by local jazz guys bringing in friends from outta town, featuring an interview with trumpeter Bart Miltenberger of the Chance Trio (Pg. 15).

Sept. 15: A brief interview with jazz singer Nancy Wilson (Pg. 16) and a piece on a wine and beer fest benefiting the Crohn's & colitis Foudation (Pg. 19).

Sept. 20: An interview with Dylan-esque singer/songwriter Dan Bern (Pg. 11).

Sept. 21: The mysterious-for-the-hell-of-it Virginville Film Festival (Pg. 18) and Philly Brazilians Alo Brasil (Pg. 21).

Sept. 25: Buckethead! (Pg.19). Oh, and a reading of banned books (Pg. 20).

Sept. 27: Tesoros, the Art Museum's wide-ranging survey of Latin American art (Pg. 15).

Sept. 29: The Franklin Institute's second Grossology exhibit, this one focusing on the stomach-churning animal kingdom (Pg. 17).

Oct. 4: Eight-string guitarist Charlie Hunter (Pr. 13).

Oct. 5: International House's new-documentaries program Views of a Changing World, featuring Michael Glawogger's stunning Workingman's Death (Pg. 19).

Oct. 6: Iron Maiden, baby. I interviewed drummer Nicko McBrain, thereby satisfying the 15-year-old, long-haired, backpatch wearing me that still dwells somewhere inside my head (Pg. 24). I haven't been keeping up with the Maiden in recent years (I jumped ship when Bruce Dickinson did and never got back on), but in prepping for this piece I picked up their latest, "A Matter of Life and Death," which is great. A real flashback for old Maiden fans.

Oct. 9: The multi-cultural Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, featuring an interview with percussionist Jamey Haddad (Pg. 17).

Oct. 11: A documentary on various Sesame Street versions around the world (Pg. 13) and an interview with frank and long-forgotten soul singer Bettye Lavette (Pg. 14).

Oct. 13: Katrina-displace Nawlins saxophonist Donald Harrison, Jr. (Pg. 22).

Oct. 17: Documentarian Tigre Hill on his film about the Katz/Street mayoral election, Shame of a City (Pg. 21).

Oct. 19: Style-mixing rock/rap/reggae showcase Gen(r)e Splicing (Pg. 19).

Oct. 20: Actor-turned-singer/songwriter Jeff Daniels (Pg. 22).

Oct. 25: "The Muse of Mexico," Tania Perez-Salas, whose dance company put on a strikingly visual and cinematic performance at the Annenberg Center (Pg. 12).

Oct. 27: Four pieces today, the most exciting (for me personally, but more on that in a separate post) being my interview with Alice Cooper (Pg. 19); Secret Cinema's second annual All-Night Fright Fest (Pg. 15); Joe Piscopo's Frank Sinatra tribute show (Pg. 17); and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra (Pg. 20).

Which brings us up to date. Now do you see why I haven't had time to post?