It was time to tour, and do so with the most extravagant stage set Alice had devised in some years. With the guillotine returning one more time, the set was created by an organisation called Distortions, who had already staged a show of their own in Denver, built around the Brutal Planet concept.
“[It] was a walk-through, but it was the best walk-through haunted house I’ve ever seen in my life,” Alice raved to Rue Morgue. “You walked in, the doors close, you’re standing on this steel grate and it was like being in the Nostromo from Alien. The floor started shaking, the heat for the lights was up – all your senses were attacked in the first five seconds and you really wanted to get out of there, and that was the beginning of the ride! They also had bodies that looked like they’d been nuked, bodies that had been melted into toxic waste cans. So when we decided to put Brutal Planet together as a show we went right to them and said, “OK, we want the stage to be like the haunted house.”
Yet Brutal Planet, both the album and the show, was only the first stage in Alice’s 21st century reinvention. Barely had the stages been cleaned from that tour than he was back in the studio, narrowing the last album’s focus even further, and taking his listeners deeper inside, on a day trip to Dragontown.
Dragontown itself, he explained, was “the worst town on Brutal Planet“, and with Bob Ezrin back in the production chair the wide open vistas of Brutal Planet were to become even more grandiose. He told Get Rhythm, “When I finished work on Brutal Planet, I was really pleased with the way it had turned out, but I sat back and thought the story was not finished. I could think of at least 10 or 11 more things I wanted to say to finish it all up, so when I started to write the next album it just sort of turned into part two.” Dragontown itself was “like [Brutal Planet’s] capital. It’s a whole lot deeper and the whole Dragontown show will have a very different look, it will finish the story.”
It would also people its streets with some surprising characters. He revived Nurse Rozetta from From The Inside, renaming her Sister Sara but really not altering her personality much; and created some new devils from archetypes that mainstream society had long since accepted, the opening Triggerman, the surreal Fantasy Man and the foreboding Sentinel.
He also toyed with rock mythology, and the cult of sentimentality that builds up around rock’s tragic fallen. “I was tired of hearing things like, ‘He died and went to rock’n’roll heaven.’ I went, ‘I don’t think so’.” Did John Lennon go to rock’n’roll heaven, he asked? Elvis? Janis Joplin? Jimi Hendrix? His own fallen friends Jim Morrison and Keith Moon?
He didn’t think so. And so a swaggering, dissolute Elvis enters the picture for the buzzsaw rockabilly ‘Disgraceland’, a song that took the old ‘Slick Black Limousine’ and transformed it into a tabloid requiem for Presley’s demise; Morrison drawls through the urban squalor of the title track, and there’s a distinct Beatles bounce to ‘It’s Too Late’. “I did my own little impressions of them all,” Alice smiled, although the latter pair, at least, were scarcely impressions that would be readily recognised.
Even as it retained its predecessor’s dental drill guitars and a vocal on the far side of furious, however, Dragontown was also capable of surprises. ‘Every Woman Has A Name’ was a gorgeous ballad, up there with any of the more sainted love songs in Alice’s repertoire (without really being the kind of love song you’d want to be the recipient of), while ‘Sister Sara’ slapped its metallic instincts with a mocking vocal straight out of the Beastie Boys. And for anybody who missed Special Forces, the closing ‘I Am The Sentinel’ opens his mad manifesto with a lyrical reminder of ‘Model Citizen’.
The stage show, too, would draw in tighter. In his own mind, Alice pictured Cleveland “after it got hit by three or four atomic bombs. There’s no morality or technology, just Roadwarriors.” On stage, he took the costuming of some bizarre hybrid warrior, half samurai, half biker. The stage was strewn with rubble and wreckage. And if the parallels between that vision and the nightmare that unfolded over New York City just weeks before the album’s November 2001 release were painful for the audience to contemplate, that did not make them any less real. The horror of 9/11 was not a touchstone for the decay of Dragontown. But perhaps, in its audience’s mind, Dragontown was a reminder of that awful day.
Alice’s own vision of that landscape remained cautionary. He did not celebrate the Brutal Planet‘s brutality, he condemned it and, as the next decade progressed, so Alice became increasingly outspoken in his fight against his own reputation as a power of evil.
“I want people to worry about their soul,” he told Metal Edge in 2002. “And not in a cheap way, not in a [singing] Oh Devil thing, with the two fingers sticking up – Ya’ know, that black metal crap. I really want them to be very nervous about it on an Exorcist level. It presents a question where you can’t really say, ‘Well, it doesn’t exist,’ ’cause you don’t know. I believe it. I believe there will be a Judgement Day. I think a great way to scare an audience is to present it to them. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. What if I’m right?”
These thoughts were percolating as Alice considered his next move, a swift concluding third part to the Brutal Planet trilogy. It didn’t happen. Other developments elsewhere in the rock underground instead sent his ideas soaring in a different direction entirely, and when a new Alice album did come along, it was the dawn of yet another new age, created by attempting to relive an older one.
The Eyes Of Alice Cooper, he admitted, was built around his own excitement when he switched on the radio and heard a new wave of what he considered garage bands coming through, the Hives, the White Stripes, the Vines, the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and so forth, It was stripped down, bare bones, undiluted rock’n’roll and he admitted that, by comparison with their primitive thrills, his last few discs had sounded bloated. Three major concept albums, three trips into the apocalypse, three questions, querulous examinations of what truly makes the modern world tick. It was time, he decided, to put all that behind him and just make a good old-fashioned rock’n’roll record again. Which meant making a good old fashioned Alice Cooper record.
For promotional photos and the album cover, Alice returned to the spider eye make-up that had once been his trademark, and in the studio he schooled his band in the art of making a rock record, 1971 style. “It was an idea that the only way to get that is to act like the old band,” he told the Boston Herald. “The way we used to do it was, we would write a song, we would rehearse it for eight hours, take a dinner break and then record it. And then the band says, ‘Well, I want to go back in and fix those two notes there,’ and I’m going, ‘No. You can’t.’ ‘Why?’ “Well, because the guitar’s already leaked into the drum mikes, and it’s in the tracks. You can’t just go in and pull it out. It’s too hard to do that. You can add to it, but we’re not allowed to go back and mess around with the basic tracks.’ Which means that bass, drums, guitars, everything is already there.”
The whole thing seemed straightforward to Alice, but of course his reputation preceded him. Producer after producer, thrilled at being contacted in the name of Alice, then began planning what they could do with him; out-Ezrin-ing Ezrin with the bombast and barrage, because that’s what Alice likes best. Isn’t it?
Not this time. Alice wanted to be in and out of the studio lightning fast. Two weeks would be a long time, and he might even have been despairing before he finally met a producer who actually understood what he wanted. Andrew “Mudrock” Murdoch had worked with the likes of Godsmack and Linkin Park, he understood the value of the short sharp shock and he needed to listen to the material just once to know what it required.
“You should record this live in the studio,” he said, and Alice just smiled. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do….”
The accompanying tour, suitably titled Bare Bones, followed a similar recipe, and sticking with his now established patterns of seemingly recording albums in pairs, Alice moved straight from the tour to the studio again, to cut Dirty Diamo
nds, a tightly wrought reminder of its predecessor’s straight-edged slash that was destined to become his biggest American hit in a decade; at the same time as the Nights With Alice Cooper satellite radio show, broadcast for the first time on January 26, 2004, became one of that medium’s greatest success stories.
Indeed, in an age when most artists of Alice’s vintage were doing little more than treading musical water, Alice continued forging forward, with presentation and concepts if not commercial power. In fact, a DVD filmed on the Dirty Diamonds tour, Alice Cooper: Live At Montreux 2005, remains as powerful a document of an Alice Cooper concert as any vintage favourite from the back catalogue.
The drama doesn’t change, even when the songs do. Touring in 2007, the show opened with the seldom-aired ‘It’s Hot Tonight’ as two silhouetted Alices did battle behind the stage curtain, and a band of ridiculously young looking musos gurned and ground in the presence of a legend.
Alice moved as Alice always had, impossibly skinny, razor sharp movements, turning on a pin to raise his cane to the skies, as lean and lithe as performers half his age wish they could be, and still as dangerous as the dreams he danced through in his own youth, when the songs in the set were themselves in short trousers, and ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ was less a statement of intent, and more a statement of fact.
The thought steamrollers your head, that the boys in the band probably weren’t even born when ‘Under My Wheels’ was written and recorded. And then another one, that the AC monogram painted on the drummer’s kit looks an awful lot like the anarchy symbol that Alice was once accused of propagating. One year short of his 60th birthday, he sings of being 18 as though he were still 21, and when he serenades his own corpse in ‘Is It My Body’ (get it?), you could even forgive the fact that the new material wasn’t even half as catchy as the old, and the jokes aren’t as funny either (‘Woman Of Mass Distraction’ indeed), because he put just as much energy and conviction into it as he ever did
But ‘Lost In America’ was pure Detroit rock’n’sweating roll, just like he always said it was, just like ‘Be My Lover’ always used to be, and half an hour into the show you realise that the only special effects of the night have been two guys with a gurney and you’re utterly captivated regardless. Like the song says though, we’ve still got a long way to go, and when darkness envelops the stage for a Spanish guitar solo, a cat with no ears could tell you that something dramatic is finally afoot, the deathless swagger of ‘Desperado’ – still the greatest western ever set to music, no matter how hard the Eagles tried to outgun it in their pomp.
He flexes his ‘Muscle Of Love’, and dons a ‘Halo Of Flies’, and if anyone ever asks what was so special about Killer, the fact that almost the entire album is dragged out every concert he plays should answer that question. To be fair, no new band has ever nailed it as neatly as the originals used to, and no drummer has ever captured the Neal Smith solo in all of its glory, where the silent strokes that he doesn’t play are as much a part of the sound as the beats. But with the stroboscope dancing and your mind’s eye still conjuring the images which filled your head as a teen, none of that matters.
We’re into the final stretch now, fog choking the stage as we are welcomed to the nightmare, and a clutch of Alice’s own nightmares emerge from the wings to hack and harass him. ‘Cold Ethyl’ is reheated, women bleed and a blonde ballerina is summarily smacked around the stage; and even after all these years, has rock ever schemed a more nightmarish lyric than ‘Steven”s whispered promise to put pennies on your eyes, and hope you’ll go away?
He brings out a pram for ‘Dead Babies’, a ratty, moth-eaten, old pram, and serenades its contents with a grimace and a growl… contents that are hauled out on the blade of a knife, held aloft for the audience’s approval; and then the lunatic killer is bound in a straitjacket, and that voice pleads across the PA – “Mommy, where’s daddy?”
Alice performs ‘The Ballad Of Dwight Fry’ on his knees, broken, and you can almost feel for him. But then you remember that yes, it is Alice, which means he has at least one more trick up his white-wrapped sleeve, no matter how eloquently he promises to return the little girl’s toys. And now he’s standing, swearing his escape, raving and drooling, and he’s suddenly Harry Houdini, ripping off the straitjacket while his attendants hustle in search of him.
Captured again, bound again, he is led to his fate, a gallows whose shadow frames the drums. Hanged by the neck yet again, he is wheeled away, while the band celebrates his execution with a hamfistedly happy ‘I Love The Dead’, and the audience links hands above their heads to howl out the refrain alongside them.
It could have ended there; the show could have halted and we’d have all gone happy. But in top hat and tails, the monster is reborn, and ‘School’s Out’ is a mass singalong too. ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ is a magnificent encore, ‘Poison’ is a soaring monster, and just when you think he has no hits left, the whole thing ends with ‘Elected’, and everything Alice sang back then was still true tonight. The kids still need a saviour, they don’t need a fake. Alice Cooper for President!
Or not. He still hasn’t run for political office, but the years since then can be read like a Powerpoint presentation regardless, a sequence of headlines underlining every new honour, every award, every new release. Or they can be seen as the steady and steadying output of an artist who suffers none of the pangs of regret that beset his peers; no need to constantly return to his past in order to validate his present.
Chapter Eighteen
Redemption For The Coop
As the 21st century got into its stride, so the rock industry was obliged to reinvent itself in the light of new technology and the realisation that things would never be the same again. In the early seventies, when Alice Cooper emerged into the popular consciousness, the record business was entering a period of growth that knew no precedent, and on and on it went, encompassing punk and new wave and all the other fads, until shiny silver CDs became the icing on the cake, the technology that enabled the industry to resell its wares again, at a higher price, to those who’d already bought it once. Then came the crunch – technology bit back in the shape of digital downloading and made records redundant.
Alice was lucky. He was of a generation of rockers who’d tasted the golden era, though like so many of his peers he’d seen the sales of his later work decline alarmingly. But he was a trooper – one of the best in the business – and therefore in a perfect position to take advantage of what was becoming known as Heritage Rock, a world where everyone was a ‘legend’, where deluxe upgraded box sets of cast-offs re-imagined as ‘rarities’ were the norm, and where huge tours were promoted on the unstated but implied threat that, in the words of the Stones’ song, “This could be the last time”.
Alice was feted by magazine writers not yet born when ‘School’s Out’ first hit the charts and who knew nothing about how Alice Cooper was actually the name of a group he once fronted. He was a genuine icon and, because of his theatrics, a unique one at that. His make-up hid the scars of age and his sobriety fitted in well with the prevailing trend amongst so many surviving rockers with a taste for overindulgence in their glory days: Elton & Bernie, Ringo, Clapton, Townshend, even Ronnie Wood (though the jury is still out on whether he remains dry) are all now as sober as judges, and probably much wiser too.
Alice’s professionalism stood him in good stead as touring became the principal source of income for rockers of his rank, and he didn’t disappoint. His shows were extravaganzas, reviewed in glowing terms by quality broadsheets and the new monthly rock mags designed to appeal to the mature rock fan. His sins, such as they were, seemed to have been forgotten, or at least forgiven with the passing of time. No longer would politicians with an eye for a headline stoop to the level of Leo Abse and his ilk, and call for Alice’s head on a plate. He never repented, of course – that wasn’t Alice’s style – but redemption had arrived on the back of recognition that Alice was really nothing more than a pantomime villain,
fabulously wicked for the sake of the show but quite harmless, and actually quite charming, when the face paint was removed.
Unlike many, however, he didn’t simply rest of his laurels, and 2008 brought another concept, another serial killer (or another arachnoid) in the shape of Along Came A Spider which emerged with a somewhat samey melange of alt-metal stylings. But still both the album and the accompanying Theatre Of Death (this time featuring four separate executions, and one of the greatest hats of Alice’s entire career, unveiled for ‘Go To Hell’) were as vital and valuable in their own time and place as anything Alice had done since Welcome To My Nightmare, and the only reason that divide is drawn is that his earlier work, of course, was a five man effort and not one man’s vision.
Yet that earlier work was not forgotten, and neither were its makers. In December 2006, the four surviving members of the original Alice Cooper band reunited to perform half a dozen classic oldies at the Christmas Pudding. “We played basically the greatest hits,” Neal Smith says of that show. ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’, ‘I’m Eighteen’, ‘School’s Out’, ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, ‘Is It My Body’ and ‘Under My Wheels’ tore out of the monitors and, though all may have been older and greyer, nobody would ever have accused them of being slower.
Originally they intended playing just two or three songs together. Instead, Alice marvelled, “We ended up playing for more than an hour, and it was just like the old days. I knew exactly where Dennis was going to be, I knew exactly what Neal’s fills were going to be and I knew exactly how Mike was going to handle it. The only thing that was missing was that insane little guitar of Glen… but I’m sure he was there playing in spirit if no longer in person.”
Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Page 36