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Profile/Copyright © 1973, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Alice
Cooper (God help us) isn't just another rock 'n' roll raver, he's the rock 'n' roll Raven. A walking death wish. Tiny Tim's
alter ego. Public Animal Number Nine. The joker in the (not too full) deck. Part-time vampire. Citizen Hearse.
Paint
him black. And sign your name in red.
He comes on like a Salem warlock whooping it up on a weekend postponement from
his turn at being the sacrifice.
Or like something that just slithered out of the Hudson River's New York side. Herman
Munster on bad acid. And that's on his good nights.
He's the not-so-pleasant doorman to rock music's Twilight Zone.
They call it Glamour Rock or Glitter Rock, but the tag should be Graveyard or Gooseflesh Rock—all skull-and-crossbones,
stake-through-the-heart, flesh-eating stuff.
Alice is the Leader of the Graveyard Pack. He's Teen Angel's perverted
twin, up for the weekend from Teenage Hell, restored to life at a prime 18 with no class, no principles, no innocence.
And
he likes it.
What goggling spectators like is that Alice Cooper must not be seen to be believed. His make-up
man has got to be the toothy Count himself: cadaverous eyes, pallid lips, deranged expression.
He looks so out of place
without a steam swamp under him and a howling, torch-wielding mob after him, you get to wondering whether his mother used
to tuck him in at night or tie him in. See, one night there was this explosion in a Transylvania laboratory and . . .
It's
a marvel how the bolts in his neck don't show. Much less the bites. My guess is he keeps a shroud over his face in the day
time. If it was human, they'd hang it. For real.
Then again, onstage, Alice knows the ropes. You're sure he doesn't
have arms, but two tentacles seething with neurotoxic venom.
When he wears a cloak, he has the largest testicular
span of any bat in creation—too many nights on the old rack . . . and don't say your mother didn't warn you, Alice.
You
sit there through his exhibition, but your flesh goes skulking under the seat. If s/he doesn't win a 1973 Woman of Achievement
Award, there's always the Warlock of Achievement compe¬tition.
I mean, he looks so much like a goblin struck
by lightning, they say he doesn't play guitar on stage just because people might mistake the instrument for a broom. His coat
of arms is a blood clot mounted on a box with handles on it.
One way or the other, though, his nine-and-a-half-foot
mummy with light-up eyes already has this year's Best Dressed Corpse title wrapped up. (Alice will probably rewrap it in these
pages.)
Speaking of mummy eyes, department stores across the country are starting to carry special Alice Cooper mascara
called Whiplash.
I don't know how it's selling, but even if Whiplash doesn't do well, Alice is raking in so much money
these days he doesn't have to worry. It's no skin off his back. They already got his back skin at the whipping post.
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Stare
at Alice Cooper long enough—mascara on his face, murder in his heart—and you get to thinking that this particular
Alice has the story all wrong, inside out—that he lives in Wonderland and visits the real world on
concert dates.
After all, he looks like he not only gets dressed in the dark, but lives there. While most people
Alice's age wear ties to work, he shows up in a noose. Or an electric chair. Or a dagger.
His favorite headgear
is a ten-foot boa constrictor. Time, you'll note, isn't the only thing killed during an Alice Cooper concert.
Sick
Thing, that Alice. Encaved in opiated shapes and colors, he flounders around his stage like a tottering corpse clawing at
the mossy walls of its dank decaying tomb.
You go to his concerts and you feel like a guy checking into a morgue. He
loves the dead, and his fans love him to death. Half his show isn't so much a rock 'n' roll concert as it is a death watch.
All of which suggests unhinged doors, limbs, and minds, skeletons wearing monks' cowls, portraits stepping out of
frames, statues dripping blood.
His biggest worry on stage must be that someone in the audience will have a genuine
fit and upstage his act.
You see, Alice Cooper, in convincing you beyond a shadow of a death that he's possessed,
doesn't suspend disbelief, he obliterates it. He puts a spell on you. There's no doubt when he's performing who's the phantom
of his rock operas.
Like, every song in his mausoleum sounds as if it were written in a country churchyard. The
ones that work (and sell) best toll out-and-out rebellion as well: Alice Cooper clutches a stage microphone like Hamlet clutching
Yorick's skull, and shrieks, with a seemingly deathbed fever, about class and principles and innocence.
"Son,"
moans dad to his 17-year-old kid who has just rolled in at 3 a.m. from Alice's June 3, 1973, concert at Madison Square Garden.
"Son, when are you going to learn good grammar or good taste?"
Quoth the Raven: "Nevermore!"
God help us.
***
CD: Alice Cooper, The Best of Alice
Cooper: Mascara and Monsters. Rhino, 2001.
Book: Alice Cooper, as told to Steven Gaines, Me, Alice: The Autobiography
of Alice Cooper. Putnam, 1976.
Websites: http://www.alicecooper.com, http://www.alicecooper.co.uk
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