Flying the coup

Spencer Patterson

Friday, Aug. 1, 2003 | 8:58 a.m.

Who: Alice Cooper with Ted Nugent.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday.

Where: The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Admission: $65.50.

Information: (702) 693-5066.

Apart from his Detroit origins, Alice Cooper wouldn't seem to have much in common with the White Stripes.

As it turns out, however, the veteran shock-rocker sees the Stripes, and other like-minded, "retro-garage" bands, as kindred spirits.

"I'm so happy there are bands like the White Stripes and the Hives and the Vines, because that's a total backlash to the whole pop-idol thing," Cooper said. "That's just straight-ahead rock 'n' roll, and I'm glad there's a resurgence of that."

In fact, Cooper has been so impressed with such sounds that he has scaled back his own music, both live and in the studio.

"Usually we get to a hole in a song, and the keyboard kind of fills it and you lose that dynamic, the real punch of the song," Cooper said in a recent phone interview from his Toledo, Ohio, hotel room.

"So we got rid of keyboards, because I just wanted it to be real guitar rock. We got a little bit used to using the keyboard because of all our theatrics, so it would have that Phantom of the Opera' feel. But now we're taking the songs back to the basics."

Cooper's "Bare Bones" tour his first ever without keyboards stops at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel on Saturday night at 8. Another Detroit native, rock wild man Ted Nugent, opens the show.

"I grew up with Ted. In Detroit it was Alice and Iggy (Pop) and the MC5 and Ted, always playing somewhere," Cooper, 55, said. "Ted and I come from the same school of rock n' roll, so this will be a definite guitar night."

Early press materials about the tour also indicated "Bare Bones" would be performed without the theatrical elements that typically bolster Cooper's live gigs.

"No guillotine, no headless babies, no spraying blood ... nothing more than the instruments, the music and the musicians making it," a press release stated.

But Cooper said fans shouldn't believe everything they read.

"When we said, 'Bare Bones,' I think that got misinterpreted," Cooper said. "I'm doing the snake, I'm doing the straightjacket, Nurse Rozetta is in the show, doing a ballet. Everything except the guillotine, since we've used that six years in a row.

"Really, what I was talking about was stripping all the fat off the songs, and I think it got interpreted that we weren't doing any theatrics. But Alice would never go onstage without doing theatrics."

Still, the emphasis Saturday night will be on the music, specifically Cooper's intent to present his most popular material the way fans remember it from his studio albums.

Cooper's desire to do that was actually born last year in Las Vegas, when he saw Paul McCartney perform at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.

"What a great show! What I really dig is the fact that he does the songs exactly like the album (versions). If Paul had gotten up there and done a five-minute piano thing during 'Maybe I'm Amazed,' I would have gone, 'Come on, do it like the record,' " Cooper said.

"And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I don't do that anymore. I should really take '(I'm) Eighteen' and 'School's Out' and 'Billion Dollar Babies' and 'Only Women Bleed' and 'Poison' back to their original forms, so that's what we've done on this tour."

Cooper also took his stripped-down approach into the studio, where he recently recorded upcoming album "The Eyes of Alice Cooper," due out in September.

"The studio was the size of a garage, and I told the band, 'We're gonna play everything live. If you're lucky, you may get one overdub,' " Cooper said. "So now it's like the song has life to it, got blood in it. It may not be perfect, but I don't want it to be perfect. I want it to sound like a band."

The album will be Cooper's first since 2001's "Dragontown," the third in a conceptually related trilogy that began on 1994's "The Last Temptation" and continued on 2000's "Brutal Planet."

For the first time, his live set includes "Disgraceland," his much-discussed tribute to Elvis Presley from "Dragontown."

Hardcore fans of the King have taken offense to some of the lyrics ("He ate his weight in country ham, killed on pills and woke in Disgraceland"), but Cooper said it wasn't intended to put Presley, the man, down.

"Elvis the person and Elvis the image is like Alice the person and Alice the image," Cooper said. "Alice to me is a literary character that I created like James Bond or Zorro, and I can be objective about what he does.

"And Elvis, I think, had a sense of that too. He knew Elvis Presley shouldn't have done this, and Elvis shouldn't have done that. If he ate himself to death, well, he knows he did. I'm sort of doing a commentary on the absurdity of it, the fact that the greatest rock 'n' roll hero of all time died on a toilet.

"It just didn't befit the king of rock 'n' roll to die like that."

And based on firsthand experience, Cooper said Presley would not have had a problem with the track.

"I knew Elvis pretty well, and he would have liked this song," Cooper said. "He used to say (in an Elvis voice), "You're the cat with the snake, ain't ya? I think that's cool, man.' "