Alice Cooper: ‘You Can't Set German Shepherds On Fire On Stage Tonite'
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - FEBRUARY 16: Alice Cooper performs during Fire Fight Australia at ANZ Stadium on February 16, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by)
Alice Cooper at 77 is still selling out shows. His brand of theatrical hard rock still rocks the house. Cooper has always surrounded himself with blue-chip musicians to support his stage antics, his extended world tour is no exception.
Cooper also has a new addition to his "Alice's Attic" radio show market: 95-5 KLOS-FM in Los Angeles, one of the premier stations in the U.S. It's in collaboration with Superadio, which syndicates 'Alice's Attic' as well as several other radio programs. Introduced early last year, 'Alice's Attic' plays on 73 local radio stations throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
We had the rare chance to chat with Cooper this week about all things Alice. Following are edited excerpts from a much longer conversation. (This is Part 1 of of a series.)
Jim Clash: Let's first talk about your radio show 'Alice's Attic,' syndicated by Superadio. It sounds like an eclectic program format.
Alice Cooper: On radio, you can still make an audience imagine what's going on, like old radio did with comedy, drama. They made you picture it. The whole idea with "Alice's Attic" is the characters in it. You're coming up to Alice's attic, right? And sure, he's going to play all kinds of music for you, but what else is up there? Different characters who bring to life stories.
Clash: You were on the cover of Forbes way back in 1973. What did that mean to you personally, and did it help bolster your then-budding career?
Cooper: Before that when I'd get on an airplane and sit next to a business guy, I could tell he was like, "Oh brother." After that cover, the guys would say, "Sit here...no no, sit here," because that magazine is their bible. There'd be whispers, "That's the guy on the cover of Forbes, we've got to know what he's doing." It was just funny to me. We wrote the album, "Billion Dollar Babies," making fun of ourselves. We went from living in two rooms at the Motel 6 to being at the Hotel Crillon overnight [laughs].
American singer Alice Cooper (left) performing on stage at the Rainbow Theatre, London, 7th November 1971. (Photo by)
Clash: So, in a sense, you were suddenly validated?
Cooper: In this business if you have a hit record, that's the Willy Wonka golden ticket, because everybody now has to pay attention, all of the record companies. If you have a second hit, now you're a trend. All of a sudden Alice Cooper had five or six hits in a row, "School's Out [For The Summer], "No More Mr. Nice Guy' and so on. It made everybody turn their heads and go, "We need you to be listening to these guys."
Clash: Do you remember the first time you heard one of your songs on the radio?
Cooper: I'll tell you what - it was so crazy. We were living in Detroit. CKLW is the biggest station in the midwest at the time. If you had a record on that, you were up against the [Rolling] Stones, The Beatles, Simon And Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, even Frank Sinatra.
We're driving along and all of a sudden we hear, "I'm 18,' which did not sound like anything else on the radio. It was very punk, but the lyrics [resonated] - "I'm 18 and I LIKE it." Every kid in the world went, "Yeah, that's me." Rosalie Trombley, who ran the station, loved the record. They told her not to put it on, that it didn't fit. She put it on anyway, and it was a big hit. We owe Rosalie a lot.
Anyway, we pulled the car over and were stunned. We're sitting there saying, "Are you kidding me?" We had no idea that anybody would ever play that record.
Clash: I know you've addressed this many times, but what's the deal with you and the chicken someone threw on stage? I've heard so many versions. Did the attention help or hurt you?
NAPA, CALIFORNIA - MAY 26: Andrew Zimmern (L) and Alice Cooper attend a Guiness world record event for chicken tossing during BottleRock Napa Valley 2019 at Napa Valley Expo on May 26, 2019 in Napa, California. (Photo by)
Cooper: It solidified what I was thinking at the time. When I was up on stage and threw that chicken back at the audience, they tore it apart. The next day in the papers it's, "Alice Cooper tears chicken to pieces." I immediately became the villain of rock. Frank Zappa called and said, "Did you kill a chicken on stage last night?" I said, "No." He said, "Don't tell anybody [you didn't] because they all love it." That was the nucleus of Alice Cooper right there. There were too many Peter Pans, and they needed a Captain Hook. So we just kept making Alice Cooper the villain of rock.
But we really didn't have to do much because people were making up their own stories. We'd get to a town and they'd say, "You can't set any German Shepherds on fire on stage," and we'd go, 'What?" Every story got crazier. We just didn't deny them. If you're going to have that kind of reputation, run with it. Getting banned in London was the best thing that ever happened to us. They told the audience they couldn't have us, and the audience said, "We've got to see that."
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All of the Stone's first taste of national notoriety began at the tender age of 19 when he produced the moody pop single, "Laugh, Laugh," for the San Mateo folk-rock band the Beau Brummels. As a teen guitarist, Stone's various gigs around San Francisco lead him to cross paths with Autumn Records' Tom Donahue, who gave the budding talent a shot at producing. "Laugh, Laugh" was one of Sly's first efforts and by early 1965, it had climbed into the Top 20. As Ben Fong-Torres said of the single in 1970: "Sly had produced the very first rock & roll hits out of… a city then known for little more than Johnny Mathis and Vince Guaraldi." The "San Francisco Sound" would soon be in full bloom, but here Sly was planting the seeds early Stone's brief stint at Autumn Records, he made use of their studios to mess around with his own compositions, including this funky, chattering instrumental, likely concocted in 1965. Stone self-taught himself how to play an array of instruments, including the organ that can be heard wheezing away on this track. "Rock Dirge" and similar experiments from this era eventually surfaced on a 1975 compilation of Stone's early work and the song was subsequently pressed onto a seven-inch that's become popular amongst breakbeat-crazed proceeds earned from Autumn, Stone set himself and his family up in Daly City, just outside of San Francisco. This is where the Family Stone band began to cohere in the mid 1960s and their first official release came on this single for the local Loadstone label. With its snappy, uptempo backbeat and layered vocal harmonies, the song now sounds like a prescient first draft for a style that would take full form on the group's later hits. 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As rollicking and aggressive as anything James Brown and his crew were pumping out, the song also found Sly playing with studio techniques, including stereo panning to split instruments into separate channels. Greg Errico – whose crackling drum work on the song would be liberally sampled decades later – told interviewer Eric Sandler in 2013: "The track was laid so down to the bone and we all knew it was. You could feel it."Elsewhere on Stand!, the Family Stone may have painted their social commentary in varying metaphoric shades but with "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey," they left little room for reinterpretation. Clocking in at nearly six minutes, the song is almost all hook (save for a short Rose Stone verse) and its stark, defiant tone stands in sharp contrast to the album's more optimistic vibes. 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Instead, Stone decided to postpone that recording while moving his base of operations to Los Angeles, the first of many decisions that began to fray relationships within the band. For the next year or so, Sly stayed in seclusion, frustrating bandmates, label reps and fans. Drugs and gnawing paranoia didn't help, but this "lost" period was also a fertile creative time for Stone as he tinkered with new toys, especially emergent drum machine technology. Beatboxes were still a novelty item then, nothing a serious musician would consider using as a studio instrument. But through Sly's own Stone Flower imprint, he began to explore its musical potential on the lone single by vocal group 6ix. In a rare contemporary interview for the liner notes of I'm Just Like You, a Stone Flower anthology, Sly told Alec Palao, "All instruments are real. Anything that can express your heart, it's an instrument, man." By 1971, those ideas would come into fuller fruition on the group's epochal There's a Riot Goin' Marcus famously wrote that There's a Riot Goin' On! "was no fun. It was slow, hard to hear, and it isn't celebrating anything." In short, "It was not groovy." These were all meant as compliments since the album's dark tones – literal and figurative – felt like an unflinchingly honest expression of both the Family Stone's internal turmoil and the state of America waking up from its late Sixties high and facing the early Seventies' bleak hangover. The group's last Number One single, "Family Affair," was a sobering retreat from the sunny positivity of "Everybody Is a Star," replacing it with a meditation on human strife and weakness, cleverly masked within the mesmerizing burbling of its drum machine rhythms. In a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, Sly insisted, "I don't feel being torn apart," but many around him wondered more than "Family Affair," "Running Away" felt like a song at odds with itself. The message was unambiguous – "running away/to get away … you're wearing out your shoes" – and the "ha-ha, hee-hee" laughter feels mocking in every stanza. But in contrast, the music feels light and luminous with a jaunty guitar and bright brass section that would have been at home with Earth, Wind & Fire. Cynicism never sounded so the time Sly had disappeared into his L.A. studio, he was experimenting with playing every instrument he could lay his hands on. Riot still featured the Family players, but in many instances it was all Sly, overdubbing himself playing the various parts. With each new layer, the sound quality would gradually deteriorate into the hazy, opioid sound heard on "Time," "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa," "Luv N' Haight," and other songs: all slurred and half-dreamed. The affect was as alluring as it was foreboding – a journey into the heart of funk's Family Stone came undone in the Riot era, amid a string of near-mythologically disastrous concerts. To work on his next album, Fresh, Sly headed back to the Bay, but began replacing several of the key players who had been with him since at least the "Dance to the Music" days. Despite the change in personnel, Fresh was a compelling sequel to Riot's funk explorations, albeit not nearly as dark or pathos-laden. "If You Want Me to Stay," the album's modest hit, still saw Sly keeping his audience at arm's length. As the singer explained on a radio interview, "That's exactly what I meant, what I wrote. If you want me to stay, let me know. Otherwise, sayonara."The most damning-with-faint-praise for Small Talk, Sly and the Family Stone's final group album of the 1970s, may have come in Billboard's July 1974 review where an uncredited critic offers "not really much new in the way of presentation… but… there really is no need for a successful star to have to come up with something new on each LP." They weren't wrong: Small Talk mostly retread the same stylings, but the formula still had legs, especially on the tightly wound "Can't Strain My Brain," one of many Sly songs of the era where he hinted at his gradually loosening grip on the last great Sly Stone song, "Remember Who You Are" wasn't a full-fledged return to the original Family Stone. Sly had jettisoned the band several years earlier, recording under his own name, including on 1976's Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, perhaps one of the worst on-the-nose album titles in history. Back on the Right Track, in 1979, sounds like a concession to the mistakes of the past and, at least for "Remember Who You Are," he reunited siblings Freddie and Rose Stone to share vocals, recapturing some of that old Family Stone magic. { pmcCnx({ settings: { plugins: { pmcAtlasMG: { iabPlcmt: 1, }, pmcCnx: { singleAutoPlay: 'auto' } } }, playerId: "d762a038-c1a2-4e6c-969e-b2f1c9ec6f8a", mediaId: "e4dc3aa6-3781-4d73-8332-8e311e2c5c59", }).render("connatix_player_e4dc3aa6-3781-4d73-8332-8e311e2c5c59_1"); }); Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
