19 August 24 - 30, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Mr. Nice Guy Ahead of his stop in Dallas on tour with Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper promises a high-energy show with “warts and all.” BY GARRETT GRAVLEY “W e’re not worthy. We’re not wor- thy. We’re scum. We suck.” This was famously said by the greatest rock ’n’ roll public-access hosts in SNL’s history (Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar) to an appropriate recipient: Alice Coo- per. It may read like a press release for the rock legend, but even the most objective culture outlet can’t help but speak reverently in re- porting on the oft-proclaimed “Godfather of Shock Rock.” When your theatrical and in- novative take on hard rock has influenced KISS and the Sex Pistols and, therefore, the lion’s share of metal and punk, being told “we’re not worthy” kind of comes with the territory. When asked how often people recite the iconic Wayne’s World quote to him, Cooper laughs: “Only about three times a day at every airport.” Such fan encounters at airports are espe- cially frequent considering Cooper’s prolific touring schedule. As we speak over the phone, Cooper is in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife, having just played a show with Motley Crue and Def Leppard that Sunday evening. Cooper begins the interview by explaining that while the band loves playing and visiting Nebraska’s largest city, the trek to the next destination faced a snag: Their car got towed and they couldn’t retrieve it from the impound lot until Monday morning. “Behind one of the buses, we have a trailer, and we always carry a Jeep with us,” Cooper says. “Three of us play golf ev- ery day, and [my wife] Sheryl [Goddard] and I go to the mov- ies, and we go to the mall and stuff like that, so instead of doing Uber or anything like that, we just carry our own car.” With a chuckle, Cooper continues, “The other bands [see] that and go, ‘Why didn’t we think of that?!’” Cooper’s unassuming routine of golfing, shopping and seeing a movie with his wife often comes as a shock to peo- ple who cannot see past the macabre spectacle of his artistry, but those in the know have read stories that hit on the same beats: After he released his 1983 full-length DaDa (the last of what Cooper has called his “blackout albums” for reasons that will become apparent), Cooper’s substance abuse reached its nadir. It’s well-documented that alcohol was a particularly re- lentless demon in this period, and Cooper said in a 2019 in- terview with pastor Greg Laurie that “the cocaine was speaking a lot louder than [my wife].” When Goddard said she would have no part in Cooper’s life for as long as he con- tinued on that trajectory, Cooper flushed his stash down the toilet. “I woke up, and I called her and I said, ‘It’s done.’ And she goes, ‘Right.’ She said, ‘You’re gonna have to prove it.’” From there, Cooper and his wife started going to church, and the two have since remained devout Christians. To Cooper’s most ardent fans, this story is familiar, but in defense of those who still find novelty in that aspect of his life, there was a time when Cooper was considered the em- bodiment of brazen transgression and occultism. Even a no- tably liberal member of Parliament, Leo Abse, demanded that Cooper be banned from performing in the United King- dom, saying, “[H]is incitement to infanticide and his com- mercial exploitation of masochism is evidently an attempt to teach our children to find their destiny in hate, not in love.” As Cooper would be the first to tell you, the character you see on stage is simply that: a character. Being upset at the Al- ice Cooper we see on stage is about as fruitful as being upset at Dick Dastardly, seeing as they are equally cartoonish. “I have always liked the idea of this condescending, arro- gant villain blowing it in front of everybody, and having to recover,” Cooper says. “I established Alice on stage as just being horrific, and then things start happening to him in the stage show that you can’t recover from. To me, maybe that’s my sense of humor, but Rob Zombie’s got the same kind of sense of humor.” From there, the conversation hinges on the former White Zombie member, with whom Cooper will play in Dallas at the Dos Equis Pavilion on Thursday. Cooper and Zombie have been friends and frequent collaborators since 1996, when the duo wrote and recorded the Grammy-nominated song “Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn)” for The X-Files. The tour, dubbed the “Freaks on Parade Tour,” is one of many collaborative projects the two have taken on since then. “Rob Zombie is like my little brother,” Cooper says. “I can hang with Rob all day, because we both see horror as com- edy. We both look at it as pure entertainment, never taking it seriously. I mean, there’s certain movies that are truly scary movies, but most movies are [are ones where] you can laugh it off.” Cooper last played Dallas with an artist whose take on the theatricalities of horror similarly and profoundly affected rock mu- sic: the Misfits. This fittingly took place on last year’s Halloween weekend and was quite the special occasion, seeing as it was the first time the OG Misfits lineup (Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only and Doyle Wolfgang von Franken- stein) played Dallas in over 20 years. But Cooper’s history with Dallas goes far deeper than that. Even with the legendary shows Cooper played at Dallas Memorial Au- ditorium in the early 1970s in mind, the most memorable of Cooper’s many Dallas appear- ances happened less than a decade ago at Good Records. This story is quite familiar to those in the Dallas music scene: What started as a book signing and Q&A session with original Alice Cooper band bassist Dennis Dunaway even- tually turned into a reunion show that was as fortuitous as it was intimate. The October 2015 show at Good Records remains one of the outstanding events in North Texas music history, and its legend is such that it spawned a 2018 live album and a 2019 documentary (which Cooper says he has never seen). “We were doing a show in Dallas, and we had a day off,” Cooper says. “And I got the call, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this thing at this record store. Do you want to come down?’ And I said, ‘Sure!’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re going to play.’ And I said, ‘Great, let’s do that!’” The reunion was the first of the original band’s shows since Cooper’s 2011 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Recalling the fabled Good Records show, Cooper says, “I hadn’t played with the band for a while, and so we did one run-through, and it was ragged.” But this was by no means a negative event for Cooper. In fact, recent live albums of Coo- per’s such as 2018’s A Paranormal Evening at the Olympia Paris and Hollywood Vampires’ (Cooper’s band with Johnny Depp and Joe Perry of Aerosmith) 2023 release Live in Rio garnered enough commercial success to influ- ence the direction of Cooper’s new album, Road, which will be released the day following the Dos Equis Pavilion show with Rob Zombie. “They’re not albums that are produced at all. They’re al- bums that are just the band playing,” Cooper says. “So that does tell me something, and that does set up what I did with the Road album. I told the band, ‘I want you guys to write a whole bunch of songs about the road. All different aspects of it: love it, hate it, funny, tragic … I don’t care what it is. We will shape that into an album with 12 or 13 little stories that make up one big story.’ “I get tired of hearing albums that are too perfect. I want to hear what the band really sounds like, warts and all.” Cooper’s voice has a tenor of invigoration and passion as he explains this, and the fact that he is even releasing albums and touring at 75 years old demonstrates how sincere his ex- citement is. After all, he could let his laurels carry him effort- lessly through a blissful retirement were he so inclined. But as he makes abundantly clear in this interview, he has no such inclination. “If [people] think there’s going to be any lack of energy in this show, they’re sorely mistaken,” Cooper says. “This is go- ing to be the highest-energy show they see all year. I’m so proud of my band. I mean, this band just kills it every night. When they come into the show, they better be ready for an Alice Cooper show, all out.” Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper: Freaks on Parade 2023 Tour comes to Dos Equis Pavilion at 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 24. Tick- ets start at $25. Jenny Risher “Rob Zombie is like my little brother,” Cooper says. “I can hang with Rob all day, because we both see horror as comedy.” ▼ Music
