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It wouldn’t really be Halloween time in Central New York without an Alice Cooper concert. And sure enough, everybody’s favorite ghoulish rock’n’roller returns to the region with another balls-to-the-wall fright freakout. His brand-new “Raise the Dead” tour premieres on Friday, Oct. 19, 8 p.m., at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino’s Showroom (tickets are $60, $65 and $75; call 361-SHOW for details), following several days of intense rehearsals at the Verona venue. Expect plenty of Grand Guignol gore effects, of course, along with some setlist surprises to accompany Cooper’s catalog of hits.
“What we’re doing is putting together an entirely new show, so it will actually be the first showing of it at Turning Stone,” Coop enthused during a recent phone interview from Phoenix, Ariz. “And then we go right to Europe and all over the place after that.”
In addition to revealing tour information, Cooper also dished on his funny cameo appearance in director Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows (now available on Warner Home Video), as well as the long-aborning project known as Alice’s Deadly Sins, an unlikely collaboration between Coop and frequent Disney composer Alan Menken (The Little Mermaid) that began in 1999 but has yet to be completed. He also had fond memories regarding the late Dick Clark, who helped in the creation of the nightly radio show Nights with Alice Cooper, which, alas, only airs locally on Canton’s WRCD-FM 101.5 on Sundays, 7 p.m. to midnight.
Cooper also digs his visits to Verona: “We do the Turning Stone a lot. We play there at least once a tour. It’s a good venue up there.” And what does the rocker, who plays plenty of golf during his downtime, think about the resort’s Atunyote Club fairways? “Oh, man,” he drooled in anticipation. “Are you kidding? Holes up!”
Q: Can you reveal some of the stuff that’s going to happen at the show without spoiling too much?
A: Well, it’s going to be in three parts. It’s gonna be like, you know, the glitzy, glammy Alice up front; it’s gonna be a very nightmarish Alice in the middle; and we’re gonna raise the dead at the end.
I had an awful lot of friends that died, and we were a drinking club called the Hollywood Vampires: Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. And we’re gonna do a tribute to those guys. So we’re gonna raise the dead on that one. And that’s gonna be a fun bit on the show because we’ve never done that before, we’ve never done other people’s songs. But it’s an honorable tribute because these are all guys I used to drink with {laughs} and we figure they deserve a spot on our show.
Q: Can you say what songs you’re going to be covering?
A: You know, it’s funny because I asked everybody in the band to pick two songs from each band, and I don’t know yet. I know which ones I want to do: “Break On Through” and “Back Door Man” from The Doors, I’d love to do “I Can See for Miles” and “My Generation” for {The Who’s} Keith Moon. But everybody might have different songs and I’m very democratic when it comes to this. If two or three people want to do a certain song and it wins the vote, then that’s what we do.
Q: And will you keep these selected songs in the show for the rest of the tour?
A: We’re gonna keep those in, and since the tour goes on until December, we’ll probably learn other ones and rotate them in. So if you saw the show at a certain time and you come see it a month later, and you say, “Well, all those songs are different,” it makes it fun for us, too, to be able to rotate songs in.
Q: Will the nightmare stuff in the second part of the show include tracks from both Welcome to My Nightmare (Atlantic, 1975) and Welcome 2 My Nightmare (Universal, 2011) albums?
A: Yeah, this is our chance to include songs from the old and new Nightmares, and some fairly spooky Alice Cooper stuff. I think that’s always expected this time of year. You need the Halloween stuff, and that’s always part of our show anyways. But incorporating it in the way that we’re going to be incorporating it, I think it’s going to be pretty cool.
Q: Will there still be a lot of lavish special effects? In the past you’ve had Hollywood makeup people design some of the effects.
A: Oh yeah. When we were doing the summer tour with Iron Maiden, they were building stuff for this tour, so we were already eight months in advance building stuff for this tour {laughs} so you have to think ahead because you don’t have much time. If you only have a month off, you can’t get that stuff all done. You have to have six months in advance
Q: Will there be a guillotine?
A: You know, I hate to not have a guillotine, but I’ve heard there will be some extremely devious ways of killing me this time. We’ll see; I always like to have the guillotine there just for security’s sake. I mean, I don’t know if a wood chipper is really going to work {demented laugh}, I’m not sure, as you kind of send Alice out into the audience in style.
Q: Do you have out-of-town tryouts before you really have the show locked down?
A: We’ll do four dates at the Turning Stone, two full-out dress rehearsals a day, and that’ll be a lot of work, because you’ll finish a dress rehearsal and then {music producer} Bob Ezrin and {longtime manager} Shep Gordon and everybody involved in the technical crew will be taking notes. And then we take the notes and go back and have lunch and do it again and then take more notes. So it’s like a Broadway show: You keep doing it until you get it perfected. And then at the very last dress rehearsal, we like to invite people in that are probably at the hotel and we start to see where their reactions are.
Q: Because you don’t want the show to experience the type of problems they had on the Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Broadway show.
A: It won’t be that complicated. I mean the stuff that we do, we know how to do. But a lot of times you wanna say, “You know, this bit is going too long, we want to cut that in half and add something over here. Let’s switch it up here.” Everybody knows the music, so it’s now just making sure that one thing’s not too long, this one’s not too short, or even should that song really come after that song, so let’s move that song over here. Those are just the little things that maybe only we would notice, but it’s still important to us.
Q: Who is really directing this show?
A: I have final say on what happens, but I really do let everybody have a voice. I’m not one of those guys who says, “My way or the highway.” If somebody in the band says, “I think it would be a great idea if we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” I would say, “OK, let’s try it.” I’m not gonna sit there and go, “No, you’re just the guitar player.” I’ll take ideas from any source.
Q: Let me requote you from a Syracuse New Times interview in December 1986: “We’re like the Ice Capades, only sicker” and “You have to set up the audience the same way Hitchcock did.” Is that still true today?
A: Well, yeah, because all magic is based on misdirection. It’s not necessarily magic, but there’s a lot of illusion involved. If you want something to happen, you show them something over here and get their attention, and then switch what you have to switch over there {laughs} and by the time they come back over there, they go, “How did that happen?” Well, it was pretty simple; it was right in front of their eyes, but they were looking the other way. All magic works like that, and we have people like the Amazing Randi work with us, and we try everything.
Q: Is your daughter Calico {who has performed with her dad on previous tours} part of the “Raise the Dead” show?
A: No, Cali broke her foot doing Parkour, the diving through windows and up walls kind of thing. She was second in her class but she tried something a little bit too ridiculous and she broke her ankle. But she’s writing a movie now and she’s done two or three films and she’s always busy. But now that she can’t move around I said, “Well, use this time to finish the movie.”
Q: Will Alice’s Deadly Sins ever see the light of day?
A: It’s sitting in my drawer and in Alan Menken’s drawer. Both of us have got a ton of projects to do, and every time I talk to him I say, “Hey, why don’t we get together and finish that bit?” and he goes, “Yeah, yeah,” or he’ll call me up and say, “Why don’t we get together and finish that?”
It’s 80 percent written, and it’s just one of those things where I’m hardly ever between projects, there’s always something else going on, and we just have to be at that one place at the right time where we can both say, “OK, let’s get this done.” And it can be so many different things; it can be a cartoon or a stage play, it doesn’t even have to have me in it. It’s written so that anybody can play the part of the seven deadly sins, it just works that way.
Q: You did a great cover of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at the Bonnaroo music festival {which can be seen on YouTube}. Is there any thought of incorporating that song into your tour, or was that a one-off?
A: I think if we did a gig with Gaga, we would definitely do it. It’s all teenagers at Bonnaroo; it’s not so much rock as it is sort of like an environmental sleepover {laughs} and the bands are not necessarily way rock’n’roll. So with us being there, I said, “We should liven this up a little bit. Let’s play at least one thing that they all know. And at the very end of the show, after we finished “Elected” and “School’s Out,” and they knew all those songs, we did a rock version of “Born This Way” and we brought out our 14-foot Frankenstein with a blonde wig on and police tape all over it. And it was crazy, but they totally got it.
Q: The Turtles’ Flo and Eddie were at the New York State Fair a few weeks ago {as part of a nostalgia show with the Buckinghams, Micky Dolenz and others} and they opened with a Lady Gaga song and they wore blonde wigs.
A: They are so funny, they are still the best. I see Mark {Volman} all the time in Nashville. I think Mark and Howard {Kaylan} have probably sung on 12 of the last 15 albums. Any time when it comes to backup singing, Bob Ezrin and I always go, “Call Mark and Howard.”
Q: Dick Clark was a Syracuse University grad. What was his connection to get your Nights with Alice Cooper radio show started?
A: He called me and asked, “If you did a radio show, what would it be?” And I said, “Well, I would almost take it back to loose FM radio, where the deejay plays the songs, he picks the music, and there’s no such word as demographic.” And he said, “OK, why don’t we do that?” And also if you think about it, with every single band that I play with and that I know, so I’ve got a story about everybody. {Laughs} And so for nine years now, it’s been doing really well.
Q: In the Dark Shadows remake, it made perfect sense that you were in a movie about immortal ghouls.
A: You know, Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton both called up and said, “Hey, you really need to be in this film.” And I was a big fan of {the 1960s ABC-TV horror soap opera} Dark Shadows, so I’m way into that. And the funny thing was that they said, “Well, it happens in 1972 so we’re going to have to do some computerization to make you look like 1972.” And I said, “For what?” and they said, “Well, we gotta smooth out your skin and this and this.” And I said, “Go the other way. In 1972 I was a mess! Now that I’m 64, almost 65, I look more like I’m 40, so you gotta go the other way.”
Q: Your Aug. 28 Huffington Post blog concerned American Idol and The X Factor and how reality TV shows are ruining music. What about Top 40 radio? Forty years ago you used to have singles that charted and now it’s practically impossible for bands to do that because all the songs sound the same.
A: You know, I hate to say that technology is ruining music, but what we have is a glut of music. Anybody can go in their garage and make an album, but what they call rock’n’roll now is, oooh, pablum. I hear things like, “Oh man, see the cover of this rock magazine; there’s a picture of this new band that’s the best new band in the last 20 years.” And I’m expecting something like Guns N’Roses, you know, and I look at it and there are six guys in Gap golf shirts, corduroys, little beards, short hair and an accordion. And I go, “How is this a rock band?” And then I go, “Well, maybe they’ll be hard rock,” and you listen to them and you go {dead silence for several seconds}. The best new band? Come on! And honestly, I’m all for young, snotty rock bands, but some of these bands need a good shot of testosterone.
