I caught up with Alice while he was on tour with The Hollywood Vampires. We spoke about his then new album Road as well as a short dive into his past.
Hello Alice how are the Hollywood Vampires dates going?
Oh my gosh, I have never been with an audience that you have to tell them to stop applauding. I think what it is, is they are not expecting the band to be as tight as it it. Basically we are the world’s most expensive bar band (laughs).
It must be hard to keep the band going with you, Joe and Johnny having other commitments?
The hard thing about the Vampires is that Joe has got Aerosmith, I’ve got my band and Johnny is doing movies and directing. So we have to carve out a year in advance two months where we clear our schedules. This time I had just finished 25 shows in the United States with a brand new show, and I came right over here for 26 shows with the Vampires. When I leave here I go right back to do the Alice Cooper show. So I don’t get home till November.
A lot of your contemporaries have either slowed down or stopped making new albums, but you seem to be able to keep going.
I am very old school about that. I love to write songs and record them. Almost every one of my albums is like a concept album, so it’s almost like writing a novel. I put together 12 or 13 songs that tell the story. The new album is about the road you know? I told the band: ‘Every kind of concept that you can think of about the road – write a song about whatever bothers you, whatever you love or whatever you think is moronic. Then Bob Ezrin and I will go in and we will do surgery on it and turn it into an Alice Cooper song.
Bob’s been with you off and on since 1970. What does he bring to the music?
Bob is very versatile. I mean he’s done opera and every kind of band you can think of. But he knows Alice Cooper better than anything else, because he started with us. He actually developed our sound; when we first met him we really didn’t have an Alice Cooper sound at all. In fact he came to us and he said, ‘Why is it when you hear The Doors that you know it’s The Doors?’ And he explained that it was because they have a signature sound, you know it has to be them. Or The Rolling Stones – it has to be The Rolling Stones. He said, ‘What you guys don’t have is that signature.’ So when we did Love It To Death, the first album with Bob, that was the first time people said, ‘Oh, that’s Alice Cooper.’ He’s amazing, he’s the only one who really understands Alice. He and I will listen to something and say Alice would never say that. We both know what Alice would and wouldn’t say so we go in and change those lyrics, or ‘That chord is wrong with that lyric.’ That’s how we do it you know.
Does Vince Furnier ever come through in the lyrics or is it always all about Alice?
You know there are two things that Alice and I agree on. Mostly I write for his attitude, I know what I want Alice to think. This sounds a little bit funny but when I created Alice I created him to be my favourite rock star, so I kind of put myself in the audience and said, ‘What do I want my favourite rock star to look like?’ Oh yeah, I want him to be slim, wearing all black. I want him to look vampiric but I want him to be sexy, I also want him to be funny. So I created this overblown condescending villain. But I know how Alice thinks; Alice may slit your throat but he would never swear at you because he’s too much of a gentleman for that.
Let’s talk about the new album Road. It’s great to see the live band all on a record at last.
I had never done an album with my touring band. This band is so tight and everybody is best friends. There’s never ever an argument backstage, everybody’s laughing. I said to them: ‘The trick to this album, or the thing that’s going to be different, is that we’re gonna write the songs and then we’re going to record them live in the studio and then I’ll put the vocal on after that.
There are so many excellent songs on it. That riff on Dead Don’t Dance, for instance, is a monster!
Absolutely, it’s a great riff. When Kane brought that one in we just went, ’Yeah!’ When you get a riff like that, the challenge is to write a lyric as good as the riff. So that was a very kind of abstract song.
Rules Of The Road has that ZZ Top feel.
Yeah it’s a very American, Texas kind of sound. Here’s Alice telling a young band all the wrong things to do. You know, if you do all this you’re gonna die!
It amused me that on the cover of Magic Bus there’s a drum solo, whereas Keith Moon didn’t get one on the original.
Any time you can do a tip of the hat to Keith Moon! I said, ‘I want to do at least one cover on here, I said, Magic Bus, we live in a bus for three months so let’s do that. The Who never made it heavy, it was made for the radio and I always wanted to make that song heavier. We did the drum solo for Keith. We also covered one of our own songs, Road Rats Forever, because it just fitted the album so well.
I like the little nods to your past work that pop up in the songs, such as Elected referenced in I’m Alice.
Yeah, there’s another one where we do a little tribute to Eighteen also. (All Over The World). I don’t mind referencing my own songs.
Tom Morello just destroys White Line Frankenstein. He’s an incredible guitar player.
Yeah he really is. A lot of times when you hear him with his own band he doesn’t really get to do that. It’s a different kind of sound he does when he’s doing that. With this one I said, I just want you to kill it, I want you to be Tony Iommi on this and he just nailed it. I love surrounding myself with gunslingers, really great guitar players.
Did you have more songs to choose from that weren’t used?
We always write at least 20 songs. And you always find that you think, ‘this one is really gonna work and you listen back to it and you go you know what I don’t think this works. And then a song comes along out of nowhere and it works perfectly.
Big Boots is good fun and I love the piano on it.
It’s Bob Ezrin – he’s always our go to keyboard player and he does a lot of singing on the album also. Bob’s an all purpose guy, he can play guitar, he can sing, he can arrange, he can do the whole thing. The idea about the song is everyone thinks it’s about big boobs, but boots is even funnier.
I think that Baby Please Don’t Go is your best ballad in a long time.
That’s the one song that is not overblown. I know guys that live on the road. The truck driver will go from our tour to the next tour and I don’t think he ever gets home. So I said lets make that guy so he lives in this truck, he is the God of this truck – that’s his world. Now with Baby Please Don’t Go I said here’s that one moment (which every single guy or girl has gone through) where it’s that morning where you have to leave for the tour and you’re gonna be gone for four months. And even though you and your lover or your wife knows that that has to happen you get right to the door and she goes, ‘baby please don’t go.’ It breaks your heart knowing that you have to go. I wanted that feel on there and it’s probably what I would call the only really human song on there.
That was a co-write with Keith Nelson of Buckcherry. He also co-wrote Go Away.
We’ve worked with him before. He’s great, we went to their studio and started writing. That’s another thing that happens to almost every band back in the 60s, 70s and 80s – there were a lot of one night stands. Then there’s that one girl that doesn’t get it. You go OK we both kind of know that I’m leaving tomorrow and she won’t have that. She decides that she is now a part of you. Now I never had that happen to me to be honest with you, but everybody else I know it has happened to. I said, that’s a funny idea for a song. This guy is going, ‘can’t you just go away?’ You know, I could shoot myself into outer space and somehow you would be there!
100 More Miles has a really fabulous kind of spectral introduction.
Chuck Garric, our bass player, wrote that song. I told him, ‘why is it that when you’re going home after a long tour the last hundred miles seems to last forever. You know, a hundred miles feels like 500 miles because you just can’t get there. That’s what we were going for on that.
Choosing which, and how many, of these songs for the live set is going to be difficult.
You know the hardest thing about my whole show is the setlist because there’s thirty albums and you want to please everybody, but you know you have to play the hits. So you’ve already got like ten songs you have to do. Then there’s another five songs that are theatrical hits with the guillotine and the straitjacket. So you don’t have much room to add one or two or three new songs. I think that I’m Alice has got to open the show, Big Boots I think will be in too. I always allow the band to come up with any ideas for songs for the show. They’re not afraid to come to me and say, ‘you know what that song doesn’t fit the show right there’. And I’ll go, ‘OK let’s switch it around then’. Nothing’s written in stone until it’s absolutely correct on stage. Ryan Roxie and Chuck Garric are the two that have been with me the longest. Roxie I think is just one of those guys that is such a glam guitar player. At the same time he can play anything. The guy is such a strong guitar player and brings a lot to the stage. When I put him together with Nita, whose a total shredder, it’s a really good combination.
One of my favourite songs has never made the setlist – Former Lee Warmer from Dada.
You know that may be the scariest song I ever wrote because it just depicts this guy (pauses). What is he, he lives in the attic, what do they feed him, you know – is he a cannibal, is he a vampire, what is he? I left it open to the imagination what this guy really is.
What about having it in for the slowdown section of the show?
You know what, that’s really not a bad idea. I’ve always told people the best song Wagner and I wrote was Might As Well Be On Mars, but we tried it on stage and the audience just didn’t react to it.
Have you thought of dropping the guillotine section of the show?
Well the villain always has to get it in the end and make everybody satisfied. And then he comes back with a white top hat and tails, reborn and life goes on. The satisfaction of Alice getting his just desserts at the end, you have to do something that’s sudden, you can’t do something that’s slow. We tried doing the electric chair and there’s zero impact to it. A hanging or the guillotine is immediate, It’s like pop and then it happens. So we are kind of confined to that.
Unlike many acts you haven’t played an old album all the way through live or done an Alice show with an orchestra.
I appreciate the past and I refer to it a lot but other people refer to it more than I do, that’s for sure. I’m not ashamed of the legacy of Alice Cooper. Every day somebody will tell me something like, ‘hey it’s the anniversary of Lace And Whiskey‘, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, really, that’s nice.’ I am always thinking two albums ahead. Right now there’s another album already done, and that’s one I can’t talk about because that’s gonna be a surprise album. I have started thinking about what the next concept is, I sit and write ideas down – like that’s a great title, it fits right in with what I’m thinking about for this album. It’s all kind of like swirling around up there till I find that one common denominator that will pull it all together. Once I find that its like OK that’s gonna be the story-line.
I wanted to finish off with talking about your early years with the original band. Did you know the Zodiac killer used the phrase ‘School is out’ in one of his letters?
I did not know that. That song is a perfect example. You hear an idea for a title and that writes the song. I was watching an old Bowery Boys movie from the 40s I guess it was and at one point Mugsy, who was the leader of the guys, goes ‘School’s Out’ and I went, ‘oh I get that, that could work on two different levels’. We wrote that song in about half an hour because it just wrote itself. Realising that every kid hated school at some point, and yet it was still saying wise up.
My first encounter with you guys was that Top Of The Pops appearance in 1972 – it changed my life. I just adored the band.
You know what, Neal, Dennis, Mike and I we never broke up on a bad level. We never had bad blood. We went to High School together, a couple of years of college together. We went through all of the insanity and made a big success out of it. But what we didn’t realise was we never took any time off and by the end of Muscle Of Love we were absolutely dysfunctional. We all knew it, we didn’t really divorce, we just separated. Neal, Dennis and I always stayed in touch. If Dennis was doing something for his band and he said, ‘will you sing this song?’, I would say, ‘alright sure’. Or I would say to Dennis, ‘I would love for you to play bass on something’. Or it would be, ‘Neal, let’s write some songs together’. The guys are my oldest friends. I would do anything to keep that friendship. It was just an unfortunate thing that finally we could not work together any more. I think we almost knew each other too well. We didn’t get tired of each other, we were just ready for something new.
Finally Alice – One thing I have always wanted to ask you is do you remember when you knew you had made it, that you were a star?
I think the first time you actually hear your song on the radio, that’s the very first crack in the wall. I’ve always said this – the three things that mean you know you’ve made it internationally are these. The first is if you’re an answer on Jeopardy (the quiz show). Secondly, in the United States Bob Hope used to have a big Christmas Special and it you were the butt of a joke on that, it meant everybody knew who you were. And the third one is being a Pez dispenser. If your head is a Pez dispenser (see below) you have made it! For me the reality was seeing your album on the charts and then the ultimate is someone walking in and saying, ‘hey your album just went to number one!’
