Legendary shock-rocker Alice Cooper to perform

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Sep 27, 2007 | by Jim Harrington

FOR THE MAJORITY of his nearly 40-year career, shock-rocker Alice Cooper has been associated with blood, guts, guillotines, snakes -- and an infamous yet erroneous rumor that he once bit the head off a chicken and drank its blood onstage.

More recently, however, Cooper has been linked with a much milder pastime -- golf. His passion for "a good walk spoiled" is well documented. He's played in several Pro-Am competitions, appeared in Callaway Golf commercials, hosted his own celebrity-charity golf challenge and even titled his autobiography "Golf Monster."

Yet, the rocker has a bomb ready to drop during any discussion of this subject -- a shocker that ranks along the same lines as, say, learning that he hated horror movies or that Halloween was his least favorite day of the year.

Are you ready?

"Alice Cooper, the character, hates golf," the singer says during a phone interview at a tour stop in Michigan, his home state. "If you were to put golf clubs on his stage, he would look at them as weapons. He has no love for golf."

If that makes little to no sense given his hefty involvement with the sport, consider that the man born Vincent Damon Furnier draws a strict line between his personal life and his stage persona. That way he can enjoy all the pedestrian things during the day, like golfing and going to the movies, and then gear up to be the bloody madman onstage at night. It's the latter that fans will see when the rocker takes the center spot in a heavy-metal triple bill with Queensryche and Black Sabbath offshoot Heaven and Hell on Sunday at the Sleep Train Pavilion in Concord.

"The great thing is the two sides never meet. I don't play Alice Cooper until night, so I'm going to play golf during the day," he says. "Three hours before the show I start getting into Alice. Then I've got to start thinking more like Hannibal Lecter."

Or, more appropriately, he's got to start thinking like Alice Cooper -- a character that was creeping people out a good two decades before novelist Thomas Harris gave life to Lecter in 1988's "The Silence of the Lambs."

After his family relocated from Detroit to Phoenix, Ariz., in the early'60s, Furnier did what kids did in those days -- started a rock band and began mimicking the Beatles. His tastes soon moved from the Fab Four, and the young singer began experimenting with dark theatrical elements as the leader of the Spiders, a band that scored a local radio hit with "Why Don't You Love Me."

By the late'60s, that band had changed its name to Alice Cooper - - with its front man adopting the same calling card. It then went to work on the Los Angeles club scene and caused quite a hubbub with its over-the-top stage spectacle, which included the use of guillotines and the lead singer dressed as an androgynous witch.

The buzz was enough to catch the attention of Frank Zappa, who signed Alice Cooper to a three-record deal on his new label, ironically named Straight Records.

That was the start of what's surely one of the most influential careers in rock history. Although Cooper has charted a few notable singles -- including "I'm Eighteen," "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and the anthem "School's Out," it's his live show that has really altered the direction of popular music. His

willingness to push the boundaries onstage, usually in dark and disturbing manners, helped create the shock-rock genre and pave the way for such acts as KISS, Motley Crue, the Tubes, Twisted Sister and Marilyn Manson.

Now, at 59, Cooper is far from ready to step aside and let young shockers like Manson carry the scary load. That much is clear from his latest studio CD, 2005's "Dirty Diamonds," which features such sweet love tunes as "Sunset Babies (All Got Rabies)." Plus, he says that his current stage show ranks among his most elaborate and spookiest to date.

"I brought on a guy from Broadway who has worked on 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Lestat,' and we put together a new production," he says. "We revamped everything. It's what Alice really is -- which is kind of a dark humor, vaudeville, dark cabaret."

That dark cabaret still plays well in 2007 -- especially outside the U.S. In Australia, South America and Europe, Cooper draws crowds of 20,000 or more. He pulls respectable numbers in the U.S., but they're a far cry from what he sees elsewhere. He credits the discrepancy, in part, to the plethora of entertainment options available to his fellow countrymen.

"In the States, you've got Bonnaroo and five-day festivals with 700 bands that you've never heard of. (Fans are) really not going to see the bands -- they are going to be part of the event," he says. "The U.S. market, right now, is very odd."

Cooper probably isn't the only classic rocker thinking those thoughts. Concert attendance for metal bands in this country is down almost across the board. That's why many older musicians are combining forces and heading out on multi-act tours.

Cooper has jumped on this bandwagon. He's toured with Deep Purple and with Ted Nugent and Cheap Trick. Now, he's joined up with Heaven and Hell, a group that consists of the early-'80s-era Black Sabbath lineup of Ronnie James Dio (vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass) and Vinny Appice (drums).