Life and Crimes in Las Vegas

Thursday, Sept. 2, 1999 | 5:13 a.m.

Nowadays it's hard to find anyone who isn't an Alice Cooper fan. In fact, admiration for the Coop may be the one thing that Pat Boone and Johnny Rotten share. The well coifed Boone covered "No More Mr. Guy," and old yellow teeth wrote (See, Johnny can read!) the introduction to the recently released box set The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper. "I know the words to every Alice Cooper song," the former Sex Pistols' leader brags.

"Johnny Rotten hates everybody and Pat Boone loves everybody and I'm right in the middle somewhere," Cooper tells me. It is the dubious fate of every successful revolutionary to become the establishment and though once one of the most controversial figures in popular culture, Alice Cooper has long past being surprised by this twist of fate. "If I had them both at a concert I'd sit them next to each other."

For over 30 years now, Alice Cooper (Vincent Furnier) has been making music and theatre. Starting as a garage band discovered by Frank Zappa and associated with the L.A. Freak Scene in the 60s, The Alice Cooper Group didn't find its identity until moving to Detroit, where the local talent included the Motown artists, Bob Seger and, of course, the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges.

The band hooked up with producer Bob Ezrin, who Cooper says, "took a bunch of guys that had a lot of image and a lot of attitude and needed a lot of psychoanalysis and somehow put the glue together that made Alice." Ezrin moved the band to a farm for six months and had them relearn how to make music. "He [Ezrin] said," Cooper recalls, " 'when you hear a record, you need to hear it and know that it's Alice Cooper." The album, Love It To Death, gave The Alice Cooper Group a sound as distinct as their singer's look. Love It To Death included "I'm Eighteen," "Is It My Body" and "Caught in a Dream."

The secret to Alice Cooper's initial success was a mix of hard rock guided by a firm pop sensibility. "Now when you put out a record, you're in a little target group," Cooper says. "When you put out a single in 1970, it wasn't a splintered kind of format on radio. We were up against Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, the Supremes, and Frank Sinatra." As a result, The Alice Cooper Group created a string of radio singles ("School's Out," "Under My Wheels," "Be My Lover," etc.) that to this day define the border between hard rock and heavy metal.

When the group disbanded in the mid-70s, Alice Cooper began a solo career with the theatrical masterwork Welcome to My Nightmare and has kept going ever since. In fact, he is about to enter the studio with Bob Ezrin again at the helm to produce an album that Cooper will only describe as a fitting send off for the century.

"I'm not nostalgic about my work," Cooper says. "I go back and listen to a song off Love It To Death and I wonder if it can make good theatre." Of course, it can, because Cooper has done it before. Now in the age of Marilyn Manson and Gwar people understand rock as theatre much better. But when Alice Cooper began beheading dolls, wearing a live snake and drenching the stage in fake blood, America was shocked and for years the freakishness of Cooper's stage show sparked false rumors that he drank spit from a hat passed around the audience or that he once bit a chicken's head off on stage.

Instead, Cooper--among many other accomplishments--brought drag to mainstream America, made a tasteless menstrual joke into a touching radio ballad ("Only Women Bleed"), and even turned up on the Hollywood Squares. How sick is that? He may have only been half as crazy as you thought, but Alice Cooper has always been twice as subversive.