ALICE COOPER:  WELCOME TO DRAGON TOWN...A LITTLE TASTE OF HELL!

by Tom Lounges


     Before Kiss first powdered their noses, before Marilyn Manson reached
puberty, before Slipknot and Mudvayne applied their garish make-up – there
was Alice Cooper!

      This Detroit-born son of a preacher started it all as far as theatrical
“shock rock” goes.   He was cross-dressing, lynching himself, decapitating
himself, cavorting with a boa constrictor and allowing us to peer
voyeristically into his personal nightmares.  All at a time when
squeaky-clean acts like the Bay City Rollers and Donny Osmond were the norm
in America.

     To say the least, ol’ Hard Hearted Alice was responsible for putting a
few extra gray hairs on the heads of our parents with songs like “Raped and
Freezin’,” “I Love The Dead,” “Ballad of Dwight Frye” and the ultimate
youth anthem – “Eighteen!” 

     I relish every opportunity to speak with the man who became a personal
hero of my youth (thanks to my seventh grade science partner Tom Crnkovich)
and one who so drastically altered the face of rock ‘n’ roll forever with
his imagination. 

     Still pumped up about my chat with him last year during his Brutal
Planet tour, I was thrilled to hear that sardonic voice once again burning up
my phone lines.  This time Alice was calling to talk up his forthcoming new
album – Dragontown – which brings him to Star Plaza Theatre on Oct. 5 with
special guest... LENNON.

     Here’s the highlights of that conversation...

BEAT:  Has the Dragon Town tour actually started yet?

ALICE:  No, it starts the 29th of September in Vegas at the Aladdin.  There’s
five or six new songs to put in the show.  It’s one of those things where
we’re taking Brutal Planet and adding part two to it now. It flows great.

BEAT:  Are you pulling out mostly older stuff then?

ALICE:  No, I’m pulling out a few songs from Brutal Planet and throwing in a
few from Dragon Town and I’m even adding one song (“Sanctuary”) from Brutal
Planet that we wanted to do last year, but we just didn’t have a place for
it.  And then there’s a few songs I’m pulling. It’s a show with 24 songs and
I’m working to arrange them so that they all work together.  For those who
missed seeing the Brutal Planet tour, it gives them much of that show and yet
for those people who did seen the Brutal Planet show it gives them a whole
other look at it, because Dragon Town continues the journey.  It’s part two
of Brutal Planet, taking us all deeper into the abyss so to speak.

BEAT: How is the show structured regarding the old hits?

ALICE:  Well, the concept part comes first. I always give the audience the
concept portion first. Pretty much the first hour of the show is the
conceptual part of the show with the newer material.  The second part of the
show is then party time.  That’s when you hear hit after hit after hit, but
its still done in the same concept of the show.  I mean it’s not like you’re
never really out of Brutal Planet, but it’s certainly a little bit of a
relief.

BEAT:  What older songs are in the set?

ALICE:  This year we’re putting in a couple songs we haven’t done in a
while.  We’re adding ‘Raped and Freezing,’ we might be doing ‘Nurse
Rosetta.’  We’ll probably take out ‘My Generation’ and put in ‘Let Me Stand
Next To Your Fire.’  I always like to do one classic song from somebody else
that I think Alice could do a good job on.  There’s so much material to deal
with that once you get into the show, the band has input on what they think
would work better here or there. This is not a dictatorship where I go in and
say, ‘No! It has to be like this!’ In the end, I have the final say, but I
enjoy hearing other’s ideas for the show.

BEAT: How does one get the most out of an Alice show?

ALICE:  I give the audience a show filled with energy and activity. That’s
always been the idea behind what I do, but I think when you come to see
Alice, you need to really listen to the lyrics.  I always ask people to
listen to the lyrics.  They’ll get a whole different thing out of the show if
they just concentrate on the lyrics a little bit more.

BEAT:  The stage show from Brutal Planet was designed to look like the
aftermath of nuclear war. What’s this one?

ALICE:  It’s still gonna look like that, only this is gonna be a little bit
more Chinese Militant.  The idea here is that we saw Brutal Planet and now
we’re going deeper into the interior, to the capital of Brutal Planet which
is Dragon Town.  The worst part of Brutal Planet is Dragon Town. There’s a
whole new set of characters down there and all of them have the same question
– ‘How did I get here?’
    This place is like a little touch of Hell. It’s my personal ‘Dante’s
Inferno’.  In fact on this album I took it upon myself to send Elvis, John
Lennon and Jim Morrison to Dragon Town.  Everybody says there must be a great
rock ‘n’ roll heaven…what a great band…and I’m like I don’t think so.  I
think that they’re probably all here.

BEAT:  Where to Jim, John and Elvis fit in?

ALICE:  When you hear the song ‘Dragon Town,’ that’s pretty Jim
Morrison-ish. A song like ‘It’s Much Too Late,’ is very much John Lennon. 
And then you know, ‘DisGraceland’ is definitely Elvis!  Now the unique thing
is that I knew all three of these guys.  In fact, I drank with every one of
them, so I have that advantage over the audience, that I actually knew these
guys.

BEAT:  You did a DVD/Video of the Brutal Planet Tour. You are a master at
making concert films.

ALICE:  The fun thing about this show is the fact that it does take me back
to ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’ a little bit.  The actual show as far as the
physical part of it and the visual part of it does echo back to the big
productions of ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’ and ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ and
those shows.

BEAT:  Brutal Planet was the first part.  Dragon Town is the second.  Will
there be a third part to this?  Will it be a conceptual trilogy?  I ask
because on past albums like Welcome To My Nightmare, Goes To Hell and From
The Inside, you always escape at the end.  On Dragon Town, we are all still
trapped there at the end of the album.

ALICE:  Interesting you noticed that.  Brutal Planet and Dragon Town really
sound as if they’re connected at the hip.  And yes, tucked in the back of my
mind, somewhere in a deep crevice, there is a possible Part Three.  I don’t
know for sure, but there could be a third installment.  You’re right
though...I’ve kept everybody there.  It’s not like I said – ‘Okay, its time
to wake up and everybody’s home.’ – like I’ve done on most other albums.
Everyone is still there. There’s a little bit of a tension about – ‘Umm
Alice, aren’t you supposed to take us back to earth now?’

BEAT: You co-wrote Dragon Town with Bob Marlett who worked on Brutal Planet. 
He again produces.

ALICE:  Yes.  When you find somebody that really is fun to write with and you
can sit down and write two songs a day…that’s pretty special.  There is a
real connection between us creatively.
    When we sat down together it just was very easy to write with him.  The
one thing that really is consistent through all 26 of the albums I’ve done is
that they’re all guitar driven rock ‘n’ roll albums.  This is the first time
I’ve ever done two albums where every single song is a stage song. There’s
not one song on any of these two albums that couldn’t be done well on stage. 
I can’t say that about Last Temptation or even say about School’s Out.  Some
songs, good as they may be, are just not stage songs.

BEAT:  Anymore acting in your future?  Prince of Darkness was a pretty solid
film.

ALICE:  Yeah it was pretty good…I just did one called The Attic Expeditions
which as independent film coming out with Seth Green.  It’s a SCI-FI movie
where I play a mental patient.  It’s not a big part, but it’s a fun part
because I didn’t have to play Alice Cooper.
     I just saw a piece of it at the SCI-FI convention down in Atlanta and I
was surprised at how creepy the movie is.  The movie is actually pretty
scary, I thought it was gonna be a SCI-FI comedy thing, but it’s not.  I’m
sort of the comic relief in this movie, but the rest of it is pretty strong.

BEAT:  How much fun was Wayne’s World?

ALICE:  Wayne’s World wasn’t even work. We were just ending an American tour
and were on our way to Europe,  and they asked us if we could delay our
European trip by one day so I could come in and do ‘Feed My Frankenstein’. 
When I got there, all of a sudden they were like – ‘We’d like you to learn
this whole dialogue thing about Milwaukee.’  I couldn’t learn all the
dialogue in a day, so a lot of  the stuff I did was just riffing and improv. 
     It was a lot of fun.  I’ve got Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers standing in
front of me and I’ve got to look right between them and deliver these lines
and they’re doing everything to break me up.  They’re doing everything
except taking their pants off to make me laugh.  I had to look really serious
you know.  You’d think that they’d want that, but they just kept trying to
break me up.

BEAT:  Of your body of work what do you reflect most fondly on and point to
as high water marks?

ALICE:  I would say…if somebody was going to say what's your best musical
album I would probably say From The Inside was one of the best musical albums
we did.  If you were gonna say what album most represents early Alice I would
say Love It To Death and if you were gonna say what's the most consistent
stuff I would say probably Brutal Planet and Dragon Town.

BEAT:  What’s left that you would like to do career wise?

ALICE:  I would definitely like to dabble in a little bit with writing short
stories.  In fact, I’ve written maybe eight screenplays that are short
stories.

BEAT:  Are you talking of something like a Stephen King style?

ALICE:  Yeah.  Some of them are pretty good I just haven't had time to
develop them.  It's sort of like once you put that hat on you kind of have to
kiss rock and roll goodbye for awhile because it takes a lot of time.

BEAT:  How would you like to be remembered in the music history books when
it’s all said and done?

ALICE:  You know a lot of people say that I’m the Buzby Berkley of rock ‘n’
roll or the Vincent Price of rock ‘n’ roll… That’s not bad. I did bring
theater to rock so I think that’s kind of what I’d like to be acknowledge
for doing.


(Alice Cooper performs Oct. 12 @ Star Plaza in Merrillville, IN)