Welcome to my nightmare? More like welcome to my blushing erotic fantasy! Talking to a 56-year-old ALICE COOPER this week was an electric thrill, even if Detroit’s Vince Furnier generally referred to his sleazy, sinister, rock and roll nom de plume in the third person. Playing a show tonight at the Winspear which sold out in less than an hour, Cooper has come full circle in his career, which began on the Michigan streets worshipping guitar licks in a band called the Nazz, evolved him into the first full-time, impossibly influential horror-rocker, then saw him descend into booze, drugs, rehab and showy ‘80s metal, finally escaping to where he is today, reconsidering his plugged-in roots.

FISH: My roommate and I love your new album. I dig What Do You Want From Me? and everything from This House is Haunted on. All of it, really.
ALICE: For Halloween, we’re probably going to drop that one in. We’re doing about four or five songs off the album.
FISH: You’ve gone from a metal band to a rock band, which is where you came from. What brought it on?
ALICE: We have always been a guitar-driven rock and roll band. I can push it towards metal if that’s what the subject is. The last two albums, Brutal Planet and Dragontown, I did definitely push towards a metal feel, because I wanted them to feel very apocalyptic. I wanted them to be dark and heavy. But I’d say the feature of all 25 or 26 Alice Cooper albums is always guitar rock. It’s just then what attitude you want to put in it. The attitude on this one is, let’s go back to Love It to Death, let’s go to Killer. Let’s be a really great garage band.
FISH: I came about your music through my dad. I’ve had it in my veins the entire time I’ve been alive.
ALICE: Oh, well that’s very sick!
FISH: He used to chase my mom around the house with the spider on Welcome to My Nightmare. That’s kind of a horrible story, actually.
ALICE: (Laughs hard.) So you’re one of my true fans.
FISH: Oh, for real. I really like the way you incorporated horror into your music. I know you’ve said it’s tough to shock people because it used to be a more innocent time. I’ve find the idea that the ‘70s were more innocent than now kind of insane. What the hell’s going on?
ALICE: It was different, a time of change, with the sexual revolution, the drug revolution. But still, people were still pretty innocent when it came to horror. That’s pretty much when the splatter movies started. When Halloween and those movies came about. Late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and we were just a little bit before that.
FISH: What’s your favourite horror movie?
ALICE: If I were going to go to the rental place right now and get a scary one, I’d say Suspiria. It’s just so creepy. It’s not necessarily graphic horror, it’s just creepy as hell. All-out best horror movie of all time, for good reason, is The Exorcist. You can write off a movie with Jason or Freddy Krueger, with, ‘Well, that’s just the boogieman, and that doesn’t exist.’ But, when it comes to things like possession, soul possession, that doesn’t really speak to your brain, it speaks more to your soul. And that’s a deeper scare.
FISH: I thought The Passion was a horror movie; it’s a superhero being ripped to pieces!
ALICE: Really … exactly! And the horror behind that - especially if you come to it from a Christian perspective - you know how it ends, and you know that it ends right. And it was all planned. But, you’re right, it’s one of the goriest movies of all time.
FISH: I like The Thing a lot, too.
ALICE: I’ll tell you what, I’m interviewing John Carpenter. I have this classic rock radio show called Nights with Alice Cooper, and I’ll be interviewing him and Wes Craven next week. The Thing is really one of those movies that was way ahead of its time.
FISH: Every line in that movie is hilarious …
ALICE: Especially when the head drops off the table and the legs grow out of it and it crawls away … that was pretty good.
FISH: No one forgets that. Are you familiar with GG Allen? He obviously took things to the edge.
ALICE: Oh yeah, sure. Sorta without the talent. Iggy, back in the Detroit days, I did the stupidest thing one time. I was going to Germany and he said, ‘Bring me back a switchblade.’ I brought him back one and of course that night he cut himself all to pieces onstage and in the hospital I said, ‘Remind me not to give you sharp objects any more.’
FISH: Speaking of Iggy, have you seen the movie Coffee and Cigarettes?
ALICE: Not yet.
FISH: It’s an interesting movie because it takes these people who are all very jagged personalities and rewrites them in kooky ways. You kind of have that same power, with Alice as a character.
ALICE: I invented Alice to be very functional in the rock business. Whereas … for every Dave Matthews, for every Peter Frampton, for every Peter Pan, there was no Captain Hook. And I went, why not? There was no definitive rock villain. I went, that’s what I’ll design Alice to be. I saw Barabarella, and I remember the Black Queen, and I said, that’s what Alice should look like, only with some modifications. A male version of the Black Queen is really who Alice is.
FISH: That movie’s such a freak show.
ALICE: It really is. They’re remaking it now. I forget who’s playing her. It was Uma Thurman or somebody like that.
FISH: They’re remaking Logan’s Run, too.
ALICE: Yeah, I heard about that.
FISH: Maybe they’ll remake you someday …
ALICE: The thing about Alice is that 30 years from now, when I’m not playing Alice, I don’t see any reason why someone shouldn’t pick up the costume and play Alice! The way they would play Zorro. Alice is an American character. All the songs are written, all somebody would have to do is put on the makeup and do their version of Alice.
FISH: Do golf courses let you play free because you’re Alice Cooper?
ALICE: Oh yeah. I can’t remember the last time I paid. I come in and say, ‘I’ll play your pro for it.’ I’ve beaten about the last six in a row.
FISH: What’s the most expensive round you’ve ever played?
ALICE: Vegas, Shadow Creek. Pebble Beach is about $300, but again, you don’t pay at those. That’s the one great perk. It’s not just because it’s Alice Cooper (rock musician), but Alice has kind of got that iconic thing in golf now, too. It’s bizarre, because the character Alice hates golf. You put golf clubs on a stage with Alice, he would say, ‘Oh, look at these new weapons!’ He sees everything as a weapon.
FISH: I want to stray a bit here and talk about the Dada album, which is seriously one of my favourites of all time.
ALICE: Interesting. You’re one of those guys that goes deep. Dada’s one of those albums that was one of my blackout albums. That one, Zipper Catches Skin, Special Forces, were all albums I don’t remember writing, really remember recording - and probably toured with them, but I don’t remember that, either. I listen to those songs and I go, I must’ve spent a long time on them, because they were good songs. I was writing them totally off the top of my head, because I have no idea where they came from. I would love to go back and re-record every one of those albums.
FISH: My friend Craig and I did a Former Lee Warmer air guitar thing in junior high drama and got an A. Except the guy ‘out in the family grave,’ who just sat up and waved and lay down again for that one line. He failed.
ALICE: (Laughs really hard). Really? To me, that’s the best song on the album. That’s a great Halloween song.
FISH: Can you tell me about the worst nightmare you’ve ever had?
ALICE: You know how nightmares are. Nightmares are those things that are just bits and pieces. I lived in this house in Detroit. This old house that some old woman died in, five, six years before. I remember telling my sister who was a year older - I was about eight, nine years old - I said, ‘Go with me to the kitchen, I gotta get some milk.’ And she said, ‘Oh, just go yourself. Nothing’s gonna be in there. I dare you.’ And I went in there and I’m getting the milk and one of the cabinets is open. You know. I’m getting the milk and out of the corner of my eye I look over and there’s this, this … arm and hand in the cabinet. I went screaming out of there, then I woke up screaming! It’s so funny because I can’t remember making albums but I remember everything about that dream so vividly. It was a great scare, especially with that old woman who lived there …
FISH: You’re sending chills up my spine, that’s awesome! Is there anything about yourself that you’d like to set the record straight on?
ALICE: I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions about Alice. I think that when you go back and look at what Alice has always been, the best way – and the fair way – to do Alice Cooper is always stay in bounds. I could change what the boundaries were. But there was never any nudity in my show, never any bad language, never anything anti-Christian, never anything Satanic. I always thought I would rather be clever than smart. If I was smart, I would’ve done what KISS did, which, really would have been a lot dumber. When you can’t think of something, just blow something up.
FISH: Like Garth Brooks does!
ALICE: (Laughs). I always wanted to be more cerebral than that. I always wanted to be a little more Phantom of the Opera than comic book.
FISH: Well, you’re theatrical and you’re narrative.
ALICE: That was it. A lot of times I realized that I would write something and be laughing my head off and my wife would read and say, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ I’d say, ‘You understand, five per cent are going to get this. But still, I can’t *not* do this.’ She’d say, ‘You’ll sell more records if you say this instead,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I know, but I can’t not do this line here, it’s too good.’ So I *could* give up money for cleverness.
FISH: Thank God. I love most everything you did, and I’m a big fan and my roommate and I were really happy that the new album is so …
ALICE: Just the fact that you’re a Dada fan tells me that you’re a sick little puppy.
FISH: I’m a *little* sick.
ALICE: Did you ever get into the old Zappa stuff?
FISH: You way more than him. I had trouble with his bananas tempo changes …
ALICE: There’s a movie called Baby Snakes that’s an interesting little film. I worked with Frank back then, ’68-’69. He was like a brother to me. We had the same exact sense of humour.
FISH: I’ve seen The Amazing Mr. Bickford, that was an unbelievable trip.
ALICE: To me, that was great breeding, to come out of that Zappa thing.
FISH: It’s all genetics, huh? Hey, can you do me a solid and ID yourself, and say hello to my dad and sister, Con and Catherine?
ALICE: You got it. Con and Catherine: this is that moment. That moment when Alice Cooper says hello to you and you go … ‘Oh wow. Big deal.”
FISH: Great talking to ya.
ALICE: Hope I see you at the show, Mr. Fish.

- 2004.10.10

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