Alice Cooper - Talks about Road Lp, Touring, Parents, Alcohol & more - Radio Broadcast 26/08/2023
temperatures Rising [Music] it's an absolute pleasure to welcome back to the program the legendary Alice Cooper how are you I am great I'm in two bands now I wasn't expecting to be in two bands at 75 but both bands are really high power bands and the unique thing about being in both bands is that in one band I play Alice Cooper at the other band I'm the lead singer yeah so it's kind of going back to our bar days going back to the but for everybody um and at the same time both bands everybody in both bands are best friends yeah so I have never we've been together eight years the the vampires there's never been one argument in that band it's crazy there's you know I mean nobody wants to Art nobody wants to argue about anything which okay let's do it you know and in my band the reason I made this band called the road was because I wanted to show them off you know here's a band that doesn't argue they just get up they do their job and they're every night they're fairly spotless every night and they give me everything they've got and I said I really want to feature this band then uh on a record and the way we're going to do it is we're going to write an album about the road because that's where we all know each other from you guys all bring in songs about different aspects of the road Bob Ezra and I will do an operation on them and turn them into Alice Cooper songs and I want to do them live in the studio I don't want to do layers I don't want to put bass and drums on and I mean there was no fancy trickery and no overdubs you just went in there everybody yeah and then yeah and there was like a few overdubs I'm not going to say we did totally live because it you know might say hey that Baseline let's do that Baseline again or that could be a better solo guitar solo but I'd say 90 of the album was live in the studio wrote is just 22nd Alice Cooper album and you know being on the roads you know and life on the road as you head from City to city and town to town in venue to venue it's not everybody that can handle it but you've been doing it since you were 15 years of age how can you handle it what do you enjoy about touring so much it's just a state of mind you know you understand what the road's going to be you know you navigate it especially now that you're sober my wife and I have the same kind of brain waves on this we look at being on the road as being on a big vacation but you know during the day I get I might play golf or we get up and we go shopping I never sit in a hotel room ever and you played golf this morning you roasted local women yeah played at Loch Loma 75 four birdies thank you but and it's first I've only played on this tour three times because it's just been too hectic but it's a different way of approaching your day you know everything depends on that last two hours of the day the show and everybody knows that in both bands that doesn't matter what they do during the day be ready for that show and I know how I do that I make sure that there's a rest period of time I did this way back a long time ago though an hour and a half even if you don't take a nap just lay down in a dark room and that's your that's kind of plugging you back into the wall you know getting you uh recharged and and then when you go out to do the show you really believe in this show and you give it everything you have one of my favorite songs from the new album which once again is called road is a track called all over the world and you talk about losing your third pass in Paris and waking up in the training you talk about going to jail in Hong Kong of all the Touring that you've done over the years have there been any moments where you've thought is this actually happening to me I mean what kind of tight spots have you get into over the years that is not really tight spots but things that were so surrealistically crazy Sao Paulo Brazil we played the very first rock concert in Sao Paulo Brazil and they had no idea what a rock concert looked like so they have a place there that's about 10 times bigger than Madison Square Garden and we did 158 000 people indoors indoors that's the Guinness book of records for the biggest indoor audience that's a city indoors if they all go at the same time it's like a nuclear bomb going off inside okay there's 158 000. drunk stoned Brazilians at the top of their lungs our apps were the size of these walls I mean you know and I couldn't hear one thing that was going on it was so loud in there and then the the very funny thing about it was about 80 percent of people below the equator believe in macumba which is a little bit Catholicism a little bit Voodoo a little bit this and that all mixed together so here I am on stage and I got the makeup on I have a giant snake around me this is the picture in the paper the next day you know it says is macumba it should have said Baptist [Laughter] well let's hear the track now then from his brand new album this is my special guest Alice Cooper in his band and a great new song called all over the world foreign [Music] this is Billy schlawn on BBC Radio Scotland you join me in conversation with my special guest Alice Cooper and let's go back to the very beginning Alice because Bruce Springsteen once famously said that in his career he'd written a whole load of songs about you know putting on the working jacket and going out in the morning and going to work but it was something that he's never ever done he's never had a proper job and you were exactly the same because when you were 15 years of age you started playing in bands and you've never known anything else that was it I've always been the lead singer in a band all my life and uh and and luckily it was with the original guys and I mean did you have Ambitions to go and make a career doing something else I would have probably been an art major of some sort because I was an art major and I was a journalism major also so I understood the Press and I understood art and I and it just when the band started playing a Dennis Dunaway our bass player was also an art student and journalism student John Speer our original drummer was that it was automatic that theatrics happened in the show it was just natural for us just to go we'll put that on stage the very first earwigs show in front of the Letterman's club with fake Beetle wigs on parroting the Beatles in our track outfits because we were all on track and cross country there was a guillotine on stage and there was a guy in a coffin that popped out for some reason we thought that was a funny idea I mean was that a foreshadowing of what was going to happen that was to us a great idea that was the very first moment I was ever on a stage there was a guillotine and a and a coffin up there later it found its way back in the show and of course you it's very well known that you're the son of a pastor and your father once said you know I know that what you're doing is not satanic he says I get what you do he said that you know he had no problem at all with the theatricality it was the lifestyle they had a problem with do you remember the first time you know when you got famous and you started having records and the shows get bigger and bigger that you actually physically took your mom and dad to see Alice Cooper and All His glory up there on that stage what was the reaction one of the one of the things that sort of got my dad in trouble was that the night that they came to see us it was in Omaha Nebraska somehow I don't know why they were there it was the very same night that Rolling Stone magazine was traveling with us and of course Rolling Stone was after the groupies in the back seat of the limousine and this and that and there's my mom and dad who were just innocently watching this whole thing go down and you know I told my mom and dad I said this is all part of the facade of being a rock star people want rock stars to have this lifestyle extravagance they want the hope of debauchery they wanted us to do it for them because they were working in cubicles so the rock stars had to be in trouble all the time and what what did your mom and dad say to you when you come upstairs did they say we love the show son or what on Earth were you doing well the funny thing was it no no they were they were they saw what I was doing on stage and they realized like I said there was nothing satanic about it and there was it was just a big extravagant helza Poppin you know and it was interpreted so many different ways there was no internet then so everybody interpreted the the show the way they saw it I would read reviews or there would be three things in the review that never happened in the show but the review was just as much a victim of creating his own show as anybody else was yeah the mythology just grew down it just grew and you know and so we didn't have to do 50 of the things we were accused of you know but people saw it and they just went oh this and this and but my dad saw it my mom saw it and they saw us when we were rehearsing in the garage it's the same band just with a lot more stuff but it's very well known that you really embraced the whole Rock and Roll Lifestyle particularly when you started having hit records and the audiences get bigger and bigger oh yeah and and you embrace it didn't fight it you you you you embraced alcohol in a big way and you have said that you know you were not a drunk drunk you were more like a kind of lovable Dean Martin drunk or maybe you know Dudley Moore in the movie absolutely now I saw you last night on stage at the hydro in Glasgow you know with the Hollywood vampires with you know Johnny Depp and Joe Perry and you were celebrating all the people that we have lost like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Keith Moon and I have fond memories of these people yeah but I was not surprised when Jim Morrison died you know I really like Jim Jim was really such a great artist everything about their albums was great the doors were one of those creative bands ever because they had to follow Jim here's these three guys that Jim would go off on a tangent on this is the end or When the Music's Over and they would just follow him they never knew where he was going with this but musically they'd follow him I always thought that that was really one of the most amazing things ever how this band could do that you know and same with Jimi Hendrix we were in the Golden Age of real geniuses you know but they were all extremely self-destructive you know everybody thought well I'll live through this I can live through this but it could have happened to you because there was a moment in your life where you woke up one morning and you were vomiting blood yeah and your wife Cheryl took one look at you and she says right okay the party's over what was the kind of um apart from wanting to stay alive what was the incentive to not following the path of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin people like that because you could have ended up just another name on that long lost stuff he's rocking all casualties yeah I mean I I was destined for that 27 year old luckily I got married at 27. because you've seen the song Dead don't dance if I wasn't in a band I'd probably be a criminal or you'd be drinking all day so you know you really had to stop because you know you gave up in 1983 and we probably wouldn't sit and be sitting here talking at the moment would we no I was I was in a very dangerous Zone because I didn't know when to stop and to me everybody had a formula for how their success worked and I didn't realize this till later when I had to actually use it on somebody else I'd say hey I'm drinking and I'm making hit records and I'm never missing a show and I could do television and make Johnny Carson laugh and I can I can do all this stuff and the drinking was just part of my formula internally it was killing me though I wasn't sick but you know it was doing its magic with my pancreas with everything else going on there the doctor said if you would have had hangovers it would have been the best thing ever for you but you have to be sober to gather hangover and I never got sober I just stayed on this golden Buzz I'd wake up in the morning and have a beer and I was okay going I was going you know but I never saw the problem until the middle of the Welcome To My Nightmare show when alcohol became not alcohol it became medicine it became my way of dealing with the Press I had eight interviews to do and then a show that night so I would sit and I'd sip whiskey any Coke I'd probably would you you know back in those days um and it worked and it worked and it worked and it worked till the middle of the nightmare tour which was the most exhausting tour ever because that show was just exhausting I'd get ready to go look at the show and I'd look at my costume it was not fun then it was the first time it wasn't fun and I just put it up to the fact well too much touring it was the alcohol that was I knew I had to drink in order to put that costume on and put that makeup on and that combination and that I guess it was more of a ritual I saw myself dying a little bit every night on stage I saw and I didn't see an end to it well you have now been sober since 1983 and I commend you in the 40 years I think that's a greater achievement than any of the incredible wreckage but that's not a hard achievement for God yeah for me it was he just basically took it away from me because I woke up one morning and it was gone let's have another track from the album and I was surprised to find this at the very end of the record that's one of my all-time favorite songs from his brand new album this is Alice Cooper from the record Road and a great cover of the who's Magic Bus [Music] foreign on BBC Radio Scotland I'm delighted to be sitting in the studio with my special guest Alice Cooper and over the years there's been a lot of humor in what you do you would have to have a laugh every summer everything has a punch line somewhere in my show and one of the one of the standout moments I guess would be a way back in 1992 when you were asked completely out of the blue to take part in the movie Wayne's World alongside Mike Myers and Dana Carver and you turned up and they gave you something like eight pages of script and said we start filming in in 30 minutes just kind of tear that up for us how mad was it because it looks absolutely crazy on Saturday Night Live yeah it was a great bit because these two guys I knew these guys I've seen these I met these guys before you know and they were so good at these two characters in fact Garth I thought was taken as Glenn Buxton Glenn Buxton was exactly Garth except that he didn't play drums he played guitar I I kept looking at it looked exactly like Glenn he acted like Glenn and I thought I even asked Mike I think I said did you pattern him after our guitar player and he said no so he's just he's right on he's absolutely on but as soon as I got there they just wanted us to do the song yeah uh feed my Frankenstein and because I had that status of we're not worthy status you know they knew I was an actor also yeah but I wasn't expecting any dialogue so when I got there you know he says here's a little bit of dialogue and I went okay and there's all this stuff about socialist you know Governors and things and and I got into the middle of it and I realized I couldn't memorize it so I just start making things up yeah you just improvised it and it was it was a kind of the the ultimate history lesson in Milwaukee wasn't it yeah and what you couldn't see was Mike and Dana here on the floor with the were not worthy doing everything they could to make me laugh so I I found a point right in the middle of them and I did that whole dialogue to that point and they were just kind of here if you would have heard they were not worthy the length of it it went on another 10 minutes and it got vile it got I mean if anybody ever found out that tape they must have had it destroyed because it really got vile as we are recording you I've got you to say it so we've got it on tape how do you pronounce Milwaukee it's merelywaki and it is Algonquin for the good lab I love the fact that everybody in the band with all the tattoos were all like Jeopardy yeah uh you know my guitar player is going isn't that Algonquin for the good lent why yes it is Pete and I mean when you when you don't know about you know traveling around the world whether socially or whether you're working do you get people coming up to you in airports and shops and in the middle of you know Fifth Avenue in New York and dropping to their knees and saying we are not worth it it's actually happened to you only three times a day when I'm in an airport and you can see them coming they're looking at each other be ready and then go on there we go you know and when they do it of course they put my hand out yeah kiss the ring right you know and I try to pretend like nobody's ever done it before oh that's great that's very funny and I mean you're a big music fan yourself you know you're a big fan of The Beatles and the stones and The Yardbirds and people like that I mean have you had we are not worthy moments where you've come face to face with either a famous rock star that you've admired or a movie star or a politician or a sporting hero and you've almost done we are not worthy yourself you've been told taken aback by who's been standing in front of you all many you know well because Groucho Marx came to the show and he wanted to see what the all this talk was about this show and he saw it as Vaudeville yeah yeah it is a dark Vaudeville rock and roll dark Vaudeville if you really want to look at it and he started bringing like May West Fred Astaire Jack Benny George Burns they're on the side of the stage watching the show the audience is freaked out totally by what we're doing and these guys are Graciela and I used to do this on an act of 1923 in Toledo with a guy with the guillotine they were not shocked in the least bit they'd Seen It All right but we're looking on the side I'm going Betty that's my dancers are going that's that's you know and he comes back and says your dancers are great and the in the course the dancers are just going he just said we were great no and when Salvador Dali saw the show it was surrealism you know and Dali took credit for everything so he says it's surrealism and it's based on me you know I'm glad we went well of course it is let's have another track from the album and it's a song that really does encapsulate your sense of humor from the album Road this is my special guest Alice Cooper and a great new track called big boots [Music] well you know what they say about big boots this is Billy Sloan on BBC Radio Scotland you joined me with my special guest Alice Cooper we're talking about this great new album which is his 20 seconds Studio release and it's a great new record called Road and we'll be talking about you know the different projects you get involved in and one of my favorites happened fairly recently Alice and it was in 2018 when NBC television did a kind of concert production of Jesus Christ Superstar with John Legend as the star of the show in the role of Jesus Christ and you were brilliantly cast as King Herod it was a it was a role that could almost have been written for you wasn't it yeah it was Mr rice did that uh he's always been a rule friend of ours you know and Tim was I actually did it on a remake of the original cast album uh playing Herod and so when this came along they said well who's going to play Herod and he says Alice Cooper you know and it was you know because because Herod was always a roly-poly kind of idiot you know this you know because he was being run by the the Roman so he was just a face King they said how would you play this I said well first of all I would play it as an arrogant villain as an arrogant condescending this is all about me not about him about Jesus Christ and everybody loved that idea there was three months of rehearsal I think I was only there for three days of rehearsal because I was on tour so I'd come in and they would block out the scene like okay and then I have to go back on tour and I come back in a week later and we would rehearse the scene but you only got to do it once you have one shot at it it's International global television one shot and there's Andrew and Tim Rice right there you know and one thing that that they kind of said to me before the show they said you're probably the only one that works in front of an audience every night without a net yeah you know and I said yeah yeah you got to deliver a multiple lines like proof to me that you're Divine turn my water into I know the the main theater critic the chief theater critique of the LA Times said that it was perfect and I can't pay dramatic and evil billion dollar babies kind of way you can't you can't get higher pressure I was kind of playing Alice in this whole thing and yet it bothered me a little bit because I'm Christian of course and there's John Legend you know on his knees and the attitude of this was when he walks out he sees the multitude he doesn't even notice Jesus until he goes oh him you know in other words he was minor to him this was about his ego and that we did one thing during the the actual shot that made them all laugh you know I'm walking by I'm your king he is not your king I am your king and I'm slapping hands and one guy comes up and he slaps my hand and I wiped it off let's have a little listen to Alice Cooper as King Herod right now I am Overjoyed to meet you [Music] Alice your latest single from the album road is a song called I'm Alice and it's probably your most autobiographical lyric for a long long time because you say let me make it clear I'm your creation and you constantly talk and interviews and in the song about Alice Cooper in the third person I mean you know can you ever really be Vincent Damon funnier this guy who was born in Detroit Michigan in 1948 or are you just always Alice Cooper whether you like it or not you're talking to Vincent right now yeah you know I write the songs for Alice Alice's attitude how does he see this and Bob Ezra and I always talk about Allison the third person Alice wouldn't say that you know let's let's change that lyric Alice would never say that I'd say that but Alice would never say that he'd never wear that Alice you know that doesn't work at all for Alice it's easier to write for a character I don't write Bob Dylan lyrics because Bob Dylan's talking about how he feels about things I'm talking about how Alice feels about things and so this is not me talking about me this is Alice talking about himself and he's an overblown arrogant villain so he's saying and then I disappear you know in other words you're so lucky to be here and see me but I have to explain to people that's that's Alice talking that's not me you know let's hear the song now then from his brand new album which is called Rude this is my special guest Alice Cooper and a song called quite simply I'm Alice [Music] yeah Billy Sloan on BBC Radio Scotland you joined me with my special guest Alice Cooper we saw you last night Alice at the hydro in Glasgow with your band The Hollywood vampires and you kick off you're too close for comfort tour of America on the 5th of August and without giving the game away too much I believe that you have kind of sidelined both the guillotine and The Gallows and you now have a 12-foot Frankenstein monster that you're going to unleash on an unsuspecting public what's happening with the tour what's it going to be like oh they still cut my head off yeah there has to be an end to every villain in every story I think any novel any book any movie you see is only as good as its villain and you know Star Wars would have been nothing without Darth you know I mean he was the guy and so you have to end Alice's life on stage right the guillotine is so effective but this year the one cutting my head off is the funny I think the funny part he's already done what he has to do he turns around and there's Marie antoin death played by your wife yeah and she's the full the French outfit except she has white eyes she has a huge slit in her throat and she's pretty much the ghost of or or the zombie of Marie Antoinette and she just leads me to the guillotine looks at the audience of course gracefully and I don't think we can get rid of the guillotine I don't think we can get rid of the hanging because any other death for Alice we've tried it it has to be something that a hanging this you can't do electric it takes too long yeah yeah it's got to be something that's immediate you know and those are the two classic things and once you complete the American tour we're going to see the two close enough for Comfort show here in the UK particularly in Scotland yeah oh yeah we'll be over here next I think probably next summer we're doing America this year and then next year from what I understand we're doing Australia South America we always do Europe I mean you know Europe is is huge for us and you know we feel right at home here with a brand new show 2023 is the 50th anniversary of your Sixth and landmark album called billion dollar babies of course some of the great songs are things like elected and No More Mr Nice Guy and hello hooray and it's going to be repackaged and it's going to be released all around the country you know with the benefit of five Decades of hindsight what do you think the 75 year old Alice Cooper would have said to the 25 year old guy who made that record away back in 1973 well that I'll respect that there were two alices the first Alice say like on that picture down there was The Whipping Boy he was everything that was wrong with Society he every kid that didn't fit in with the other kids that was my audience we were not the Crosby Stills and Nash audience we brought something different to it and all of these kids that didn't fit in went finally a representative for us you know I was this thing that her parents hated I was this thing that was just didn't care and it was outrageous but the songs were good yeah if you didn't have those songs it's just a puppet show and I mean did you think that the 25 year old Alice could have envisaged even in as wildest dreams that you would be still doing this 50 years later oh my gosh never when I turned 30 my manager got me a wheelchair you know because we didn't see we didn't look past 30. nobody saw it but of course you know that was spearheaded by the
by the Stones I kind of looked at the stones and went well if Mick can keep doing this if I'm in good shape and the audiences keep coming and I can keep writing good songs and making good albums and doing great shows why wouldn't I do that I can't think of anything I'd rather do you know but once once I got sober this Alice that was sort of the hunched over alcoholic societies you just kicked him around and then they hung him at the end this Alice when I be when I became sober was going to be a different Alice I couldn't play that one anymore because I didn't feel like that anymore I had to I said I want this Alice to be really in their face and really dangerous now you know as always it's been a real pleasure talking to you we're glad to have you back in the program and we're going to play out now with the title track of that incredible album from 1973 which is celebrating his 50th Anniversary this year's and it was a collaboration between yourself and one of Scotland's favorite musical Sons Donovan how did your pass cross how did Donovan end up singing on an Alice Cooper record at the peak of your Fame and notoriety we were in Morgan Studios and Harry Nilsson was there and T-Rex was there and Ringo and everybody was in the other studio and we did the track a billion dollar babies with me singing and we wanted something else on it and somebody said like I go dancing nightly in the attic and they said well Donovan's in the next studio and I went oh yeah and I went over and I said Donovan I said you need to be on a hard rock record you know and he came in and he nailed it everybody was laughing because it was so perfect you know and to this day every time I see him we'd kind of do that together we do that little bit together and uh but he was so perfect for it and I really admired him from kind of jumping out of his world into my world and nailing it you know Alice it's always a pleasure to have you on the program thank you very much for joining us we look forward to seeing you in the band back in Scotland in 2024 with your too close for comforter and we close now with a one of the most unlikely musical collaborations of all time in the Red Corner Donovan from Glasgow in the blue Corner Alice Cooper from Detroit and this is billion dollar babies thank you very much thank you [Music] the one and the only Alice Cooper
2023-09-06 08:50
