 | ||
 | ||
                        |
|
 |
|
Cooper's Brutal Planet
"It was definitely a modern-sounding album," Cooper says. "It was challenging Rage Against the Machine and Rob Zombie. I wanted to write social fiction like 1984 or Dante's Inferno. You know, if you're a classic musician, they want you to stay in your backyard or something. But I've always been a hard rock artist, so for me it wasn't that much of a stretch to make it more brutal." Brutality is nothing new for the original pre-punk rocker. First called The Spiders in 1966 Phoenix, followed by a short stint as The Nazz, finally in 1968, the Alice Cooper Group was born. Signing with Frank Zappa's Straight/Bizarre label, they released their first LP, Pretties For You. Cooper, who jettisoned out of the age of the strange, had always been sort of Zappa's evil twin, but with a darker sense of humor, personifying society's less mentioned flotsam as in his early "Ballad of Dwight Fry," an ode to the warped Igor-like freak squirming in a strait jacket. But his huge success didn't come until signing with Warner in 1971, successively unleashing the platinum albums Killer, School's Out, and #1 charter Billion Dollar Babies. Worn out on the hippy-dippy commercialism of the much-hyped Woodstock age, the been-there-done-that 1970s youth grabbed hold of Alice as the shocking answer to the void left in the failed wake of the love generation. After releasing the 1973 Muscle of Love, the Alice Cooper Group disbanded, and the Coop trailed off, staying the course of his Broadway rock spectacles with gruesome staged executions, guillotine beheadings, splatter-film backdrops, dismembering of baby dolls, and a five-year alcohol binge that caught up with him in 1978, forcing Alice into detox. It wasn't until his 1989 release of Trash, co-written with renowned wordsmith Desmond Child, that Alice enjoyed renewed success with the glam-era metal hit "Poison," which soon scored a #7 position in Billboard. But you won't find the Coop feeding the old demons. He's dredging up all-new levels of ugliness in his postmodern prayer. "I think people liked the fact that back in the old days I was drunk all the time," Cooper says. "The character seemed to be more of a victim. Twenty years ago when I stopped drinking, the character became more of a domi-natrix than a whipping boy. And so now he takes on a new character, more of the villain. But it's ok. With all the Peter Pans out there, I don't mind being the Captain Hook." Co-written with musical genius Bob Marlette (Black Sabbath, Tracy Chapman), Cooper's latest hell strikes more apocalyptic and controversial colors. If macabre surprises like snakes and spiders creeped fans out in the past, Cooper's knocking them flat lyrically in his recent incarnation as a doom-tripping social commentator, fielding morality play tracks like Brutal Planet's "Wicked Young Man," where Alice becomes a confused Columbine-inspired skinhead who hates the world, singing "I got a pocketful of bullets and a blueprint of the school I'm the devil's little soldier I'm the devil's little tool." Others include the mature and poetic lambasting rant on America's gluttony in "Eat Some More," which compares the rich waste of the first nations with third world starvation; and even the poignant "Pick up the Bones," a chilling brain nugget inspired by a CNN clip showing a man in war-torn Kosovo stuffing the burned bones of his massacred family into a pillowcase. And if the darkly and quasi-judicial Brutal Planet shoved all the world's futuristic ugliness into one big smorgasbord of indigestion, the upcoming Oct. 8 release, Dragontown (Spitfire), is Cooper's fantastic afterlife for the blasé and arrogant. In Brutal Planet, "I realized that I'd only said about half of what I wanted to hit on," Cooper says. "I thought it needed to go deeper into the character of this place, so Dragontown was born. It's my own personal parallel hell. Since it's fiction, I'm allowed to send anybody I want there. You know, I don't mind being the prophet of doom a little bit on these two albums." Dragontown is part two and the core hell of Cooper's Brutal Planet, where rock 'n' roll heroes and villains rot in eternity, along with other public hucksters of lesser renown. One song in particular that debunks the myth of Elvis worship is "Disgraceland," a eulogy to Elvis's final despair and the sequined commercialism buffering the truth. "I think I'm gonna get a lot of hate mail from Elvis fans," Cooper says. "But I knew Elvis and spent some time with him, and I think he would have laughed. I felt like he betrayed me a little bit. Here was the coolest guy in the world who had everything, ending up dying on a toilet, fat and full of drugs. That's not how a rock legend dies." But will Alice end up in his own hell in the afterlife? "Well," laughs Alice's alter ego, 1948 Detroit-born Vince Furnier, the son of a Baptist minister, "my character might. I'm much more Christian-based. You know, my lyrics-and especially recently-are very anti-satanic. They say the album's political, but it's really not. It's much more moral. Anybody can live life happy and drink and have a wonderful time, but what happens when you gotta pay the price? Well here's the price. People say it's 'politically incorrect.' I say, 'Well, I'm politically incoherent.'" Competing with newer cutting bands, from speed thrashers to the evolving garage sound that Alice helped bring to America's placemat, Cooper has underwent many metamorphoses in his career, from freak to demon to glam-rocker and now to hell's front-line correspondent. As America's first king of shock rock for shock's sake, Cooper comes from a long line of controversial musicians, beginning with Russian composer Fyodorovich Stravinsky, once considered an anti-Christ whose ballet score, The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps), caused riots at its 1913 Paris premiere with its sexual overtones and paganistic sacrifices. Later Elvis dropped in with his thousand-dollar sweat beads, turning parents' hairlines a premature gray. And then came Alice. "Look through the ages," Cooper says. "I mean, people feared Sinatra. They feared anything the kids liked. And now everybody fears Marilyn Manson. And I'm sure there's some garage band right now that's gonna be worse. Cannibalism I guess is the next thing. It's just always been a part of rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll has always been the voice of the kids." But how does it feel to be the original? "I don't dwell on it," Cooper says. "It's nice to be that living legend status, but at the same time, when I put an album out, I'm going, 'Hey, I gotta make this album compete with Rob Zombie. I need this album to be as slick as an Offspring single, or as powerful as Trent Reznor." With a 26 albums notched into his guillotine, several soundtrack contributions, cameo appearances in films like John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Waynes World, and "Freddy's Final Nightmare," an appearance on the "Muppet Show," a mid-'70s stretch on "Hollywood Squares," and a recently-released Alice Cooper action figure complete with fiendish accessories (pictured above), the church-going, little-league coaching, theatric metal thrashing, pro-golfing restaurateur remains one of the most bizarre oddities to jar the mainstream consciousness as an angst-relieving rite of passage for the dubious Jones' kids busy taste-testing the world. Adds Cooper: "I think that Alice is such a household name now and I've stayed around long enough and made enough albums, that it's sort of like the circus coming to town. It's an American tradition. It's like an extra Halloween. But I'm one of those people that goes forward, not backward. I guess when I'm 75 or 80 years old and I'm sitting on a porch somewhere with Stephen Tyler and Ozzy, we'll talk about the good old days. I'm not ready to talk about the good old days yet."
|
Long before Gene Simmons was hurling gallons of phony blood onto armies of orgiastic teens, long before Ozzy Osbourne was sawing off bat heads with his incisors, or more lately, Marilyn Manson shredding bibles onstage, proclaiming "I'm God, lick me," there came a shock-rock advance man on the campaign from hell, Alice Cooper. 32 years after notoriously flinging a living chicken into that 1969 Toronto audience (who savagely ripped the beast to shreds), the granddaddy of ghouldom continues exposing the dark underbelly of an America eternally hungover on Pat Boone's white-gloved wave of California Dreamin'. If anyone has earned the right to drive the final nails into the rotting coffin of the American Dream, Coop's the man. And the first spike was last year's critically acclaimed release, Brutal Planet (Spitfire).
