It's a real treat when you get a chance to talk with a true rock and roll legend, even if the busy schedule only affords you fifteen minutes. It's clear that Alice Cooper grabbed their own proverbial fifteen minutes and turned it into one of the more infamous stories in rock and roll. As fans have known for a long time, behind the mask lies a clever man who cross-bred vaudeville, rock and roll and Broadway into a vision that imitators still cant get right thirty years later. Tongue planted in cheek so far that singing should have been difficult, Coop always made sure he entertained us.

No Budweiser or golf balls were hurt in the making of this interview. Matter of fact, Coop was sipping a lemonade to counter the 80 degree weather in Arizona, while I froze my ass off in upstate New York....



Cosmik: Alice Cooper, the box set - it's about time!

Alice: Yeah, thank you!

Cosmik: A lot of emphasis on the Cooper band, which I think is really great, a real golden era.

Alice: I think that it comes as a surprise to a lot of people, cause they forgot how many hits we had. And people that I talk to go "y'know I just heard something on the radio" - you know how they'll do a triple play or quadruple play, and they say "I forgot that you did "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and "I'm Eighteen" and was that you that did this-and-that?" and I go "YEAH!". So I think that we were a unique band that was a very visual, outrageous kind of band that had hits.

Cosmik: I know that when Frank Zappa signed you, he himself was doing a real avant-garde kind of show, that changed from night to night depending on whatever props they could find and who was in the audience, and I guess you were doing pretty much the same thing.

Alice: You know it's funny that you would mention that. I just drove back from Palm Springs - about five hours in the car - and all I listened to was Frank Zappa. We listened to We're only In It For The Money, Weasels Ripped My Flesh and, uh, Lumpy Gravy. And he's been on my mind recently, and I was listening to just how unique his approach to music was.

Cosmik: He was really amazing. Dearly missed.

Alice: Yeah, I think so. I just talked to Gail, his wife, the other day on the phone for about half an hour.

Cosmik: When he first worked with you, did he try to change you, or influence you in any way?

Alice: No. Actually, there was one change that he had suggested that we overruled. "Frank we love you, but we don't really want to call it Alice Cookies". (laughs). I said, y'know, Alice Cooper is just a little more menacing....

Cosmik: Well, which one of the various stories about how the name came about are you going to tell me today?

Alice: I'll tell you the true story, okay? The true story is I'm sitting at this band's house called The Weeds Of Idleness, and we had just decided that The Nazz...that we weren't going to be The Nazz anymore.

Cosmik: Is that because of (Todd) Rundgren's band, or -

Alice: Well, that, and well that was basically it, because we heard another band back East had that name. And actually we got our name from Jeff Beck's "The Nazz Are Blue", which was on a Yardbirds album, and we just liked the name "The Nazz". But anyways, I was sitting there, and I can remember the moment - I was eating a Dorito with cheddar cheese on it - and I said "y'know why don't we just call ourselves something like ___", and I could have said any name. And the first name that popped into my head was "Alice Cooper". I could have said "Mary Smith", I could have said "Betty Thompson", I could have said any name at all but Alice Cooper was the name that popped into my head at the time. And a few hours later, someone said "You know, if it was Alice Cooper,,," and then later "you know, if Alice...", and pretty soon there was no two ways about it, it just stuck with all of us.

Cosmik: When did you become Alice Cooper as opposed to the group being Alice Cooper?

Alice: When we first came out and did Alice Cooper, it was a lot easier for people to put the name on a person instead of a band. You know, sort of like Manfred Mann. I always wanted to know who Manfred Mann was! The guy on the keyboards with the glasses and the beard, well that was Manfred Mann!

Cosmik: Like Jethro Tull playing that mean flute!

Alice: Right! To me, that guy was Manfred Mann. Anyway, I was out front, I was the lead vocalist, I had the most make-up on and was doing all the insanity, so I was Alice.

Cosmik: At that time you were still in the Southwest?

Alice: Yeah, our first show as Alice Cooper was in Santa Barbara...the first show was with Blue Cheer and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band!

Cosmik: Oh, man!

Alice: Isn't that a weird combination? And then there was Alice Cooper! And then the next week, we played The Cheetah Club for Lenny Bruce's birthday party, that was with The Doors and all these different bands, and Zappa saw us there. And that's when we got signed.

Cosmik: And then you went back to Detroit.

Alice: Back in 1970, after failing in Los Angeles...we like to think that we were run out of town on a rail (laughs). The idea was LA was full of peace and love, and we played a show in Detroit and we were loud, we were obnoxious, and we were fun to watch, and we fit right in with The MC5 and The Stooges and all those bands, and I mean they loved us in Detroit.

Cosmik: That's the reason I wanted to bring that up, because I remember reading something where Lester Bangs said that the only two people that he respected on a stage were you and Iggy Pop, for different reasons. He said that Iggy would dare the audience to take the stage away from him, and Alice Cooper would dare the audience to get involved in the show and would not let them get bored.

Alice: Yeah, that was exactly it, and I always used to say that the only band that I didn't want to go on after was The Stooges.

Cosmik: "Under My Wheels" sounds like the perfect Stooges tune.

Alice: Yeah! I always wanted to do "Loose"! My favorite Stooges song. But I mean the first time I saw Iggy I sat there and I watched him and I said this guy is good, because I was looking at it from a performer's point of view. And I saw the ultimate punk, you know, something I had never seen anywhere else.

Cosmik: Well, that's what a lot of people said about you, too!

Alice: But it was totally different. Alice Cooper was always a lot more, uh, slick and glitzy, y'know, and contrived. I mean we knew pretty much how to handle an audience. The Stooges were just raw power. But the thing about The Stooges was that after the fourth of fifth song, (they) just kept doing the same thing, and that's when I began to say okay, now...we got 'em. You know. they're great, and they'll kill an audience and wear an audience out, but when they're done, we're gonna give the audience something totally different, and in the end they're going to remember Iggy and they're going to remember Alice, but for two totally different reasons. And we worked really, really well as a tandem act.

Cosmik: Well, you've given an audience not one but two anthems - "I'm eighteen", which I was when that came out, and "School's Out", which still today, and every year, captures every kids...burst -

Alice: I always say you know how every band is allowed to have a signature song? The Stones had "Satisfaction"...The Who has "My Generation", and we had "School's Out". And it's just one of those songs that will always be equated with Alice Cooper and will always work, because there will always be somebody graduating from school.

Cosmik: Or turning eighteen.

Alice: Exactly. With "Eighteen" there's always somebody who's going to turn eighteen, and it's saying "hey, I'm eighteen, I'm awkward, I don't know if I'm a man, I don't know if I'm a boy, but I love it!"

Cosmik: You played with a lot of great guitar players - Hunter and Wagner from (Lou) Reed's band, and later Kane Roberts. But who is Rockin' Reggie Vincent? I always wanted to know that - that guy smokes!

Alice: Rockin' Reggie was a friend of ours, in Detroit, that we met. He had done some writing and he just became a friend of the band, and he was the sixth...well, if you call (Bob) Ezrin the sixth member of the band, he was the seventh member of Alice Cooper. And he was just...well, if he would have lived in Phoenix, he would have been in the band.

Cosmik: Stuff like "My Stars" and other songs he played on were ultimate guitar songs.

Alice: He hung out with us, drank with us, he was one of the guys that we accepted. We would listen to him, we would listen to his songs, but we wouldn't listen to anybody else's songs. And we'd listen to Bob Ezrin.

Cosmik: What happened to him?

Alice: (laughs) He's a pastor now! He is an evangelist. And I still talk to him and see him every once in a while, he lives in Phoenix now. Matter of fact I have a restaurant here called Cooperstown, and we have an outdoor stage. And the other night Mike Bruce, Neal Smith, myself, Rockin' Reggie and about five other guys got up and did an hour on stage. And when Rockin' jumped up there and we did "Billion Dollar Babies" and all the stuff that he helped write, and it was a lot of fun.

Cosmik: And of course, we lost Glen recently.

Alice: Yeah, Glen was brilliant, y'know. He was one of those characters that you could never replace. He was Brian Jones. You know, he was sort of the character that no matter who you put in the spot...well, as good as Ronnie Wood is, and he's one of my best buddies, and he was probably twice the player that Brian Jones was, still the original Stones were the original Stones. And there's no way of replacing anyone as intricate as Buxton. He came up with the line for "School's Out", he came up with all that crazy noodling guitar stuff for the first five albums. And that was his job - to come up with guitar parts that people couldn't play.

Cosmik: I read where you felt like the ultimate garage band on a couple of those cuts (on Killer) and that's gotta be true.

Alice: Well, we were the ultimate garage band and became the ultimate stage band. But that was something that was very different. I mean people call themselves garage bands...that's literally where we rehearsed! That's actually where we did write a lot of our songs. I...I always wanted to put the smell of gasoline on one of our albums, because it always smelled like that when rehearsing.

Cosmik: Well, you did give me the only album with a pair of panties.

Alice: Yeah, heh heh....we could have used some smell on that too (laughs).

Cosmik: I think at that time the packaging was starting to scare people as much as the music was.

Alice: It's an art form! It's something that's a lost art form. It's something that when albums became obsolete.. I mean we were nominated for Grammys for our album packaging, and that was something where when an Alice album came out, it wasn't just the music, it was the whole package. You knew you were gonna get an album. you knew you were gonna get a package, and you knew you were gonna get a show.

Cosmik: Well that was one I had to hide for a little bit. I don't think Mom would have appreciated that one.

Alice: Yeah, there were a lot of them. I mean look at them...everyone in the band were art majors, so when it came time to designing our album covers, we would get together with Pacific Eyes And Ears and would say okay, here's the idea, and then they would put it together. Warner Brothers just said you guys do it, because you do it better than anybody else.

Cosmik: Did it ever strike you as funny that "Only Women Bleed" or "How You Gonna See Me Now", the...I dunno, more ballad-ish songs, became such big hits?

Alice: Well, "Only Women Bleed" was recorded in thirteen different countries by thirteen different local stars in England and Italy and Spain, and all that, and was probably our most covered record. Uh, I still think that Willie Nelson should do "I Never Cry"...I hear a real twang on that; it would be a really great Willie Nelson song.

Cosmik: Was there ever anything that you did, songs that you thought were going to be really huge, and then they didn't?

Alice: Oh yeah! Every time I put a record out I thought it was going to be a huge hit! (laughs). But I'm the biggest positive thinker there is, I go way past reality sometimes. Well, "School's Out" there was no doubt, we knew that was going to be really something. "Eighteen" I never expected to be a huge hit.

Cosmik: There was a period there where everything you put out...well, it was like you could do no wrong. An amazing roll.

Alice: A-and that's...when that starts happening, that's when you find that you really do write your best stuff. I think when "Poison" came out, even as late as that came out, I listened back to that and said if this gets any airplay at all it's going to be a smash. And it was a huge, huge hit.

Cosmik: What do you think about current bands? Anybody you listen to?

Alice: I love The Offspring. I think Offspring are the most clever band, and a breath of fresh air for rock and roll. They are by far my favorite band right now. Um...I listen to this station in Phoenix that plays all this stuff that probably doesn't get played anywhere else. There's a song called "Too High For The Supermarket"; I don't even know who that is, but it's a funny funny song. I like The Refreshments. I like The Wallflowers, who I think are making some of the best records around right now, as far as actual songs. I'm a big Chris Cornell fan, I think he's one of the best writers out there. But I'm not one of those old fuddies who says you know, back in the seventies, when we quit making records that's when music died. I don't believe that at all. I thought the eighties and the nineties were full of good bands, full of good writers.

Cosmik: Well, you've obviously influenced a ton of them, plus your appearances on various soundtracks, and the tribute albums - I just got another yesterday -

Alice: Oh, did you hear the Huminary Stew album?

Cosmik: Yeah, just played it. There's some good people on it.

Alice: You know what's funny about that? The one that was the most striking to me was (Roger) Daltrey doing "No More Mr. Nice Guy", because...when we wrote "No More Mr. Nice Guy", I wrote that song to be sort of a carbon copy of "Substitute"! It was sort of my tribute to that kind of song. So when I heard Daltrey do "No More Mr. Nice Guy", it sounds like it was written for him!

Cosmik: What a cruel irony!

Alice: (laughs) Yeah! It sounds just like an early Who song! When I heard him do it, it just made it even more ironic... I mean, if there's anyone who can do that song better than me it's Daltrey.

Cosmik: Well, my fifteen minutes are up, but yours certainly aren't. I appreciate your time today.

Alice: Hey, that's a very good thing to say, I like that. Did you just think of that?

Cosmik: Well, sometimes I'm inspired.

Alice: (laughs) I like that - that's very good.

Cosmik: Alice, thanks very much. It's been a real pleasure. I wish you the best.

Alice: Well, thank you. And I hope it warms up back there. Take care.



The Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper, Rhino's four CD career retrospective, will be released May 1999, and mothers will be screaming all over again. Thanks to Cathy Williams at Rhino for her assistance, and Dr. Bristol for his transcription.

Interview (C) 1999 - Bill Holmes