Another piece from the 2012 Bonnaroo Beacon…
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Alice Cooper takes over the late-night tent at Bonnaroo tonight for one of the weekend’s most highly-anticipated performances. “If you’re in the first 20 rows, you’ll probably get some blood on you,” says Cooper. “When we get up onstage, my band has the instruction to kill the audience.” At 65, Cooper is still actively touring and recording, having released his 26th studio effort, Welcome 2 My Nightmare, in the fall of last year. We caught up with Cooper to talk about his debut appearance at Bonnaroo, which he will precede with an appearance in the Cinema Tent at 6:30 where he will introduce the Marx Brothers classic, Duck Soup.
Do you have family or friends who have attended Bonnaroo in the past?
I know a lot of people who have been to Bonnaroo and it’s funny because I was recording in Nashville and we kept coming in and out of Nashville and I was on a flight. There were a bunch of kids who had just come from Bonnaroo and, I was listening to them and they were mentioning all these bands that I had never heard of, you know, young bands. And then one girl says, “I like the old, blind black guy,” and I went “Who is that?” and she goes “Stevie…is it Stevie Wonder?” It was just so funny to realize that these kids don’t know somebody as classic as that is to us. You know, that’s a brand new artist to them. We forget that. We forget that a younger audience doesn’t know who Paul McCartney is.
I remember hearing a couple months ago when he performed on the Grammy’s, a number of people were tweeting “Who is Paul McCartney?”
I think that when they see us they’ll be kind of shocked, because as much as it is sort of a legendary thing to be at a Cooper show, I think they might think that it might be a low-energy show. It’s gonna be the highest-energy show they see all year.
Who are you personally excited to see at Bonnaroo? Are there any acts on the bill that catch your eye?
Well you know, I looked at the lineup and you know, of course, I grew up with The Beach Boys. As a kid, the first album I ever bought was All Summer Long by the Beach Boys. And from what I understand, their tour is really amazing right now. I mean, they’ve got 14 people on stage. So all of that background singing and all of that stuff that’s on their records sounds like the record. So I would be excited to see them. And almost everybody that’s on tour I’ve either worked with or had seen before, so it’ll be fun.
You’re also going to be introducing Duck Soup at the Cinema tent. I’m just curious as to how many times you’ve seen the movie and what you would say to someone who’s at Bonnaroo and has yet to watch a Marx Brothers movie?
Well some types of comedy are timeless. The other day I was sitting…Sunday morning I got up and turned on the TV and Laurel and Hardy were on. And I found myself laughing out loud. That movie was made 70 years ago and it still works because a certain amount of slapstick, you don’t need to interpret it. It’s not slick humor, it’s just broad humor. Somebody gets hit in the face with a pie, you know. Or the Three Stooges, they still work, because no matter what you’re doing, when you see the Three Stooges poking each other in the eye and doing all the stuff that they do, it’s funny. Now, the Marx Brothers would, I would say, comparable to Monty Python. I guarantee you that the guys in Monty Python watched the Marx Brothers. They’re just classic comedy. They started in vaudeville, you know. It’s almost impossible to not like the Marx Brothers
Groucho was a very good friend of mine. He would call me every single night, we both lived in Beverly Hills. He was like 86 years old and he would call me up and say, “Alice, I can’t sleep, come on over and watch movies.” So I’d come over and I’d sit there and he’d have a six-pack of Budweiser for me and I would sit and watch old movies until he went to sleep. We got to be really good friends.
Speaking of films, you also appear in Dark Shadows. Can you talk about your experience on that set?
Well, you know, I’ve always been a horror fan and Dark Shadows was the most unlikely hit in the early ‘70s as a soap opera. It was on in the ‘70s and people would rush home from school to see what was gonna happen. It was like “All My Children” or “Guiding Light” or any of these really horrible soap operas except they were vampires. It was really a very unlikely hit, but it worked. Now the only person that would ever drudge up some show like that would be Tim Burton. Tim and I are like separated at birth. We have the same sense of humor, the same background when it comes to horror movies. If I mention a movie he can tell me who directed it, if he mentions a TV show from that era I could tell him who was in it. So we’re very, very close on our backgrounds and same with Johnny Depp. Johnny is another guy that really knows his history when it comes to that era. So when it came to the fact that in 1972, in this movie, Barnabus Collins comes back after 200 years being buried, it goes back to 1972. So Tim Burton said, “Well, who was big in 1972?” Alice Cooper was the biggest band in the world then. So that’s why he called me up and said, “It would be great if you played at the party that Barnabus Collins throws.” So I had to play Alice Cooper as Alice Cooper 1972.
It was great, and Johnny, by the way, is a great guitar player. He came up and played guitar with us in London and then he played with us in Los Angeles and, I’ll tell you what, he could probably play with any band that’s playing at Bonnaroo. He’s a really accomplished guitar player.
When he first came to Los Angeles, he didn’t come there as an actor, he came there as a guitar player. So his band came to Los Angeles and the next thing you know, he’s a good looking kid and all of a sudden casting directors were saying, “Hey, why don’t you try this?” and he goes, “I’m not an actor, I’m a guitar player!” And you know, $25 million of pictures later. I told him, “If this acting thing doesn’t work out, you can always play guitar for me.”
Let’s talk about your radio show. You host the syndicated program “Nights with Alice,” and I’m just wondering, when you put together the show in the first place, did you look to any radio icons for inspiration?
Well not necessarily an icon but what I did like when I was a kid was the freeform FM radio where a disc jockey basically played what he wanted to play. There was no demographics, there was no, you know, “We’re a hard rock station,” or, “We’re a modern station.” It was sort of like the DJ played everything from Melanie Safka to Arthur Brown. I like the idea that my radio show, I have full control of what I play. So, you know, I play AC/DC and Led Zeppelin and all the things everybody wants to hear, but I’ll also play Paul Butterfield. I’ll probably play the Yardbirds and Them and Love and artists that most people will e-mail me and go, “Wow, who was that?” And I’ll say, “That was the Yardbirds,” and they’ll say “Well it sounded like Led Zeppelin,” and I go, “Well, there would’ve been no Led Zeppelin without the Yardbirds.” And the good thing about my show is the fact that every single band that I play, I know personally. So I can tell a story about those guys or I can insult them, and even if they’re listening, they laugh because they know me. And sometimes if I don’t insult them, they call me up and go, “Hey, what happened, you quit insulting us?”
I guess no Alice Cooper interview would be complete without a golf question, so I was wondering if while you’re in Tennessee you’re going to slip in a round while you’re in the area...
You know what, we’re actually on tour. We go right from there to another show and another show. It’s going to be one of those weeks where I’m probably going to be on a run and I’m not going to be able to get on a course, but generally I play every morning. I play almost every single morning. And the funny thing is, I know some guys get up in the morning and they run, or they get up and go to the gym…I get up and play 18 rounds of golf. That’s how I start the day. And when I play golf, I never think of Alice Cooper. When I get on stage as Alice Cooper, I never think about golf. So they’re really two different worlds.
Speaking of Alice Cooper on stage, we were wondering what Steven’s up to these days and if you could talk about his ongoing development with Welcome to My Nightmare, and what frightens him the most in 2012?
Well, the funny thing about Steven that I have to explain about him sometimes is that people say, “Who is Steven?” and I kind of go, “He is the 7-year-old boy that lives inside of me.” I say, all of us men that have grown up now and are responsible and have families and everything, we still have that little 7-year-old boy in us. And that little 7-year-old boy likes being scared. He likes the idea of scary movies and that there’s a certain humor and fun in the act of being scared. So, the character of Steven, I allow him to show up in every single album, just because he’s like my childlike personality.
So what scares him the most in 2012?
The only thing that really scares me is boredom. I had one bout of depression when I was about 21 years old, right, and I guess the thought of depression scares me. So I stay busy all day. I probably sleep four hours a night, that’s it. I get up at 5 o’clock every morning. I’m awake the rest of the day, either doing the radio show or I’m on tour or playing golf or doing something like that. And I don’t go to sleep until 1 or 2 in the morning. So I stay so busy, I don’t have time to get depressed or bored. I think that’s really what it would be. I’m not one of those people that would like to go to an island and cool out. That would be hell. I hate isolation.
When Bonnaroo’s promoters came to you and asked you play at the festival, how did they describe the experience to you?
Well, we play a million different festivals, but I think that this is a younger audience. And I think that people at this audience have heard the legend of Alice Cooper but I don’t think anyone’s ever seen Alice Cooper. It’s sort of like, they’ve heard of David Bowie, they’ve heard of Alice, now they’re gonna get a real dose of Alice Cooper, which is going to be a full-out Alice show. There’s not one mellow moment in our show.
So for the people who haven’t seen your show, might be familiar, might not be, what type of introduction would you give them if they were reading this paper the day before you perform?
I would say that, when you come to see Alice, be prepared for a theatrical experience and very hard rock. We do 28 songs in our normal show and every one of those is “Billion Dollar Babies,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “School’s Out,” “Poison,” you know, every single song that you hear is something you’ve heard on the radio. And at the same time, we don’t give the audience a chance to catch their breath. I want that show to be so high-energy that the audience, if they turn away and say something to their friend, they’re going to miss something because we keep it going. We keep the theatrics and the visual and the music going at full-speed from the beginning of the show to the end of the show. So, it’s going to be an experience.
