lice Cooper is happy to talk about who he really is.
“I’m Alice. I’m the master of madness, the sultan of surprise,” he sings on “I’m Alice,” the lead track on his latest album “Road.” On track two, “Welcome to the Show,” he adds “I play the creature ‘cause I know how. My lips are red, my eyes are black. I’m as scary as a heart attack.”
On “I’m Alice,” Cooper maintains that he was created by the audience. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Alice Cooper came into being in the late ’60s, when Vincent Furnier took the name of the band he was fronting and transformed into the “shock rocker” who brought theatrics into the world of rock ‘n’ roll.
“I always thought that the lyrics should be the script for the show,” Cooper said. “In other words, if I say, ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ in the song, I don’t just say that. I give you the nightmare. Nobody was doing that. I couldn’t understand why other bands didn’t do that. So I created this Alice Cooper character to be rock’s villain, rather than rock’s hero.”
Cooper will bring his “Too Close for Comfort” tour to Park City Arena, formerly Hartman Arena, on Sunday, Aug. 11.
The Alice Cooper Band, which released a couple of largely ignored albums in the late 1960s, broke through out of Detroit in early ’60s, helping earn Detroit part of its musical identity. In 2021, Cooper paid tribute to the city on his previous album “Detroit Stories,” his first No. 1 album.
“Detroit was the hard rock capital of America,” Cooper said. “I was born in Detroit. And you know, we came out of Phoenix, Arizona, went to L.A. and we did not fit in L.A. at all. And we did not fit in San Francisco. And we didn’t fit in New York. We didn’t fit.
“We went to Detroit. And there was Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger, Suzi Quatro. Every band was a hard rock band. And we fit right in. We were just sort of like the missing link in that whole bunch,” he said. “If you didn’t play hard rock there, and not just play it, but play it with an attitude, you were never gonna last.”
Teaming up with producer Bob Erzin, Cooper landed his first hit “I’m Eighteen” in 1970 and piled up a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame career thereafter, riding a string of ’70s and ’80s hits and his theatrical live shows, which always finds him getting guillotined.
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