Alice Cooper recalls near death experience before touring with Motley Crue, and says reality of ISIS is scarier than any of his stage antics
ROCKER Alice Cooper has recalled his near death experience and defended his onstage guillotine antics, saying the reality of ISIS is more shocking than him.
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DESPITE his best efforts, Alice Cooper is still alive. At the peak of his fame though, it was a close run thing. After being institutionalised for alcoholism in 1977 the shock rocker developed a massive cocaine addiction that brought him to the threshold of death by the early ‘80s. In last year’s rock biopic Super Duper Alice Cooper he revealed the turning point came when he saw his skeletal form in a mirror after a three day bender. “My eyes were bleeding and I realised that was what my make-up looked like and I had a second of: ‘what insanity am I in right now?’” he recalled.
“It was a point where I realised I was either going to die right there or I was going to live.”
He flushed a rock of cocaine “the size of a baseball” down the toilet and headed back to Phoenix to recover in hospital with the support of his family and friends.
MORE: Why Motley Crue are quitting
Clean and sober for three decades now, many of his rock star buddies from his legendary 1970s drinking club The Hollywood Vampires weren’t so lucky.
“Jimi (Hendrix) and Jim (Morrison) and Janis (Joplin) and everybody started dying at 27 years old and none of us ever really thought about reaching 30,” Cooper says (his friends call him Vince). “None of us realised we’d still be doing this at 67 and 68 years old and doing it better, in some ways, than we did it then. Right now I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been.”
Cooper’s been working on a covers album paying tribute to his fallen comrades, with the darkly funny working title “All My Dead Drunk Friends”. The idea came from legendary producer Bob Ezrin, a George Martin style figure who masterminded both Alice Cooper the band, and Alice Cooper the solo artist’s best work.
“We decided … the album would be a tribute to all of our dead drunk friends, all of the guys who used to drink with us back in the day which was John Lennon and Keith Moon, and Jimi Hendrix and all of the guys who were sort of like our big brothers,” he says. “We all just seemed to end up at the same bar every night, at the Rainbow. We all drank and it was sort of last man standing. We became known as The Hollywood Vampires because we stayed up all night drinking and never saw the daytime.”
You can still see the plaque commemorating the club at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, featuring “President Alice Cooper” and “Vice President Keith Moon” among others.
“We started adding it all up and found like 12 really great songs that we could cover,” he says.
Those covers will get their first live outing when the newly formed Hollywood Vampires band play alongside Faith No More at the massive Rock in Rio concert in September.
Aerosmith’s Joe Perry is the chief axeman for the group with Johnny Depp also playing guitar. Depp’s played with Cooper in concert numerous times since they met on the set of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.
“Johnny is a really good guitar player,” says Cooper. “He’s a real student of that music so when he comes up and plays with us we just think of him as a guitar player, we don’t really think of him as “Johnny Depp” or Captain Jack Sparrow.”
With John Lennon and Ringo immortalised as members on the drinking club’s plaque, it’s only fitting that at least one Beatle helped out on the new album.
“I’ve known Paul (McCartney) for years and years and years … but you never really think about being on record with a Beatle,” he says. “He’s not just ‘A Beatle’, he’s ‘The Beatle’. But he’s just a guy who sits down at a piano and says: ‘OK well how does this thing go?’. And then you realise you’re in a band with a guy who just happens to be the best in the world.”
Cooper, who is heard across the country on his classic rock radio show Nights With Alice Cooper, returns to Australia in May supporting Motley Crue. By contractual agreement, it’s that glam metal outfits final ever tour. Not content with outlasting his own rock heroes, Cooper’s also been bidding farewell to the band’s he inspired for years now.
“They said well you were a big influence, we’d love to have you sort of send us off in style,” he says.
Now a respected elder statesman of rock, Cooper was as well known in the 1970s for generating controversy as for his music — from that urban legend about him biting the head off a chicken to his stage performance where he’d chop up baby dolls and ‘hang himself’ on stage. But even those who’ve modelled their careers on his — we’re looking at you Marilyn Manson — have trouble generating much outrage these days. Cooper says it’s because the world’s a much scarier place.
“With ISIS going on and all this other stuff, how shocking can my (onstage) guillotine be when people are really getting their heads cut off?” he asks. “Reality is much more shocking that anything Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson or Rob Zombie can do. I understand I’m not shocking the audience the way I used to, now it’s pure entertainment.”
See: Alice Cooper and Motley Crue, Rod Laver Arena, May 12, livenation.com.au
Originally published as Alice Cooper recalls near death experience before touring with Motley Crue, and says reality of ISIS is scarier than any of his stage antics
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