Alice Cooper - Hard Rock legend.
By: Dominick A. Miserandino
There is much more to Alice Cooper than meets the eye. Before interviewing Alice, I was not aware of how much thought and energy was put into the creation of the character of Alice by Vincent Damon Furnier. Alice Cooper is the combination of a musical act, a theatrical show and an expression of a Salvador Dali painting.
DM) The new DVD really seems to get across the theatrics, that come across during your show.
AC) It's always been a fact that we were the first to do theatrics and one of the first to do video. The Nightmare show was one of the first videos. You're going to find a lot of influence, especially with the image, attitudes; you're going to find a lot of our influence with bands as close as Good Charlotte and bands as far back as David Bowie.
DM) Is it different for you in recording a DVD or an album?
AC) No, the technology changes, the show doesn't. I do the show at the level that it's a live show and there's an audience there. How they record it and what they do with it afterwards is basically out of my hands. My job is to get on stage and perform and let them capture it on movies, tapes, DVDs. My job is to make the performance correct.
DM) Some people have described you as the originator of bringing theatrics to the musical world...
AC) And they would be right. I don't think anybody did anything as elaborate or as commercially successful as Alice Cooper. Even as far back as the Killer Show, that was probably one of the very first ones that was groundbreaking. It had hangings, electric chairs. It got us on every magazine cover in the country. And from there we only went bigger.
DM) Are you getting more and more theatrical as time goes on?
AC) It's absolutely built into what I do. I do a show now and the first 50 minutes of the show is 10 rock and roll songs straight out. And when I do 10 rock and roll songs like that, it's already more theatrical than most bands. Because Alice is the character, he can't just be a lead singer. He's a gunfighter in one. He's Zorro in another. He's constantly role-playing. When it comes to the theatrical part, giant dolls and snakes, then it really kicks in.
DM) You just described Alice in the third person. Do you see Alice as a character apart from yourself?
AC) It's always the third person. I look at Alice the same way I look at Hannibal Lector, Zorro or any other literary character. Alice is a little bit of Macbeth, and he's a little bit of Bela Lugosi. He's all of these characters rolled into one. He's rock's resident villain.
DM) What are the similarities between Alice and yourself?
AC) Not much, except for the fact that he's my creation. If you were going to compare it to anything I would say look at "Jekyll and Hyde" or Dr Frankenstein and the monster. There's always a positive and a negative side to the these things. My life is a very positive lifestyle, Alice on stage is just the opposite. He's the negative to everything I do. Nobody wants to see me on stage, they want to see Alice.
DM) How different would it be if you were on stage?
AC) I wouldn't even go to see that. Who wants to see a well-adjusted family guy with three great kids, a wonderful wife and a healthy marriage? To me, that's great. That's the plus side. That's the part that I live in. Then I get to play this character that is arrogant, sadistic and funny. The only thing that Alice and me have in common is our sense of humor. He has a dark sense of humor. That may be the only thing we have in common. Other then that, Alice is probably all of the things that I'm not and which I fantasize being.
DM) Does this help get out your dark side?
AC) Absolutely. If we all had an Alice, there would be no need for psychiatrists. He's truly a catharsis for me. How draining for Anthony Hopkins to play Hannibal Lector. To get in the mindset of a genius cannibal and when he goes home, from his own lips, he's a surf bum, and on top of it he's a Shakespearean actor. Our life outside of our characters is very different sometimes.
DM) I don't know if it's a good or bad comparison, but is it similar to the Osbournes where he's taking out the garbage when he's home?
AC) I've seen Ozzy all of the time and I've never seen Ozzy when he wasn't Ozzy. Ozzy on stage isn't scary at all. What does he do, he gets on stage and gives the peace sign and throws water on people. He's not on stage doing dastardly deeds like Alice does. He's not cutting Brittney's head off like Alice does.
DM) It sounds like if MTV followed you home it wouldn't be the most exciting TV show.
AC) It wouldn't at all. I've always said that. The charm of Ozzy's show is that it's the Beverly Hillbillies. It's a fish out of water. The Osbournes may not belong in Beverly Hills. That's the funny part of it. They try to live there and they may not be part of Beverly Hills.
DM) You look at things in an intellectual way, but yet you're in a genre of Heavy Metal,which some might not consider as intellectual of an art form as others.
AC) If you want to look at art- Alice as an artiste'. We've created more than one genre. We've created this shock genre, the theatrical genre. We were the first to do the glam genre. If you ask the Sex Pistols, we were one of the first punks. There are four genres that Alice is the spearhead of. I think that is pretty artistic. When you do a show like Alice Cooper and people like Salvador Dali say, "This is what I would do if I were a rock star." And Groucho Marx would say, "This is what I would do if I were a rock star." That's a lot of classic support.
DM) What else did Dali say?
AC) He used to come to my shows all of the time. He would say that Alice Cooper is like one of my paintings coming to life. It's the first time he saw a show that was surrealistic. Alice is on stage with crutches and snakes, and they don't make any sense at all, which is very similar to a surrealistic painting. Well, what was my biggest influence in school? I was an art major and I specialized in surrealism and Salvador Dali was my hero, so I used a lot of Salvador Dali in my show.
DM) Is the show truly an extension of your Salvador Dali painting side?
AC) Absolutely. Take Salvador Dali, and then you throw in a little RKO Horror Movies, and then a little James Bond, and then an awful lot of British Hard Rock from the 60s, and then some Clockwork Orange, and mix it all up, then you got Alice Cooper.
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