January 19, 1978: Alice Comes Alive

Alice Cooper Circus Magazine Feature

First On-Stage LP Captures Alice Cooper's Best and Wildest Years

I n Autumn of 1974 Alice Cooper was sitting in a Toronto bar getting plastered, after he finished a recording session for Welcome to My Nightmare. He had some good reason: His old band was contemplating suing him and ending his solo career, a career which most people in the music business already held in contempt. There were legal hassles with Warner Brothers as well, and in his personal life his on-again-off again romance with model Cindy Lang was on the rocks. The prodigious amount of alcohol he consumed was itself a well publicized problem.

A group of college kids at a table next to him in the bar were fascinated that Alice Cooper was getting so drunk, and Alice, in his usual open and unassuming way, became an easy target for their snide and jealous barbs. When the college kids finally got up to leave one of the guys came over to Alice and said, "The tough life of a superstar, huh? You guys really suffer for your art."

Well, yes. Although Alice Cooper has received enormous financial rewards from the recording business, he's still considered a freak to the media, the punchline for tired and cruel jokes. Despite the fact that he has never failed his audience, or delivered less than promised (which sometimes is nothing) his work is

Yes, that's a dummy Alice is singing his sweet love songs to in his latest, greatest hits tour show.

by Steven Gaines

rarely held in esteem, including his catalogue of platinum albums or his last three gold singles.

And his personal life is still not in order. Last year, Cindy Lang slapped him with a six million dollar lawsuit when he married a 22 yearold dancer, Cheryl Goddard. After a fruitless year of therapy with an invogue LA psychologist, Alice still drinks too much. This past October he interrupted his filming of the role of Father Sun in the movie of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band to sign himself into a Westchester (New York) hospital for alcohol detoxification.

So, if you think it's ironic that Alice is singing "You and me ain't no movie stars, what we are is what we are," underneath the mirrored ceilings of his half million dollar Bel Air home, remember that sometimes you can see your reflection too much. Yeah, the superstars have it tough. They sometimes do suffer for, along with, and in spite of their art. But Alice Cooper is a trouper. A survivor of the decade of the hardest segment of the entertainment world. And in the truest sense of the word, Alice Cooper is a star.

It's almost a tender irony that after nine best selling studio albums Cooper is releasing the first live recording of his career, The Alice Cooper Show

on Warner Brothers. What's even more curious is that in Alice's salad days his live shows were far more talked about than his music. In fact, seeing him perform live was always recommended as a necessary evil to listening to the album. Why a live LP now?

"Every one of my albums has been a concept piece for the most part," Cooper explains from his Bel Air abode, just a stone's throw from Elton John's mansion. "For instance, the Killer album was an exact reproduction of the stage show, including the order of the songs. So was Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome to My Nightmare. Basically, I'd have been cheating my fans with putting out a live LP because it would be the same exact thing they already had on an album."

What Alice politely fails to mention is that the old band was hardly worth recording live. They had enough problems in the studio. At their best the original Alice Cooper group was loose and sloppy on stage, so much so that two sidemen musicians were hired to fake the real playing on their last famous Billion Dollar Babies tour. The more recent backup is a different story. Dual guitar work is handled by Dick Wagner (who just produced Mark Farner's solo LP on Atlantic) and Steve Hunter, generally Coop plays the mad inspector from 'Lace and Whiskey' and sings the machinegun toting chickens to death.