The Worley Gig
December-ish 2000

By Gail Worley

Night of the Living Rock God

"Man, you used to scare the Hell out of me when I was 9 years old," I hear David Lee Beowulf saying to Alice Cooper. "I'm thirty-seven now and I finally get to see you!" I can imagine the look of stoic contentment -- which is about as excited as Dave ever looks -- on his face, even though I’ve got my back turned to them. At the moment I’m fixated on the figure of Ace Frehley, who’s slumped against the wall of the room like an exhausted, cornered animal, although no one is paying any attention to him. (In the cab ride home an hour later, Dave tells me some whack shit about Ace that I really didn’t need to know, that he read in a book called Kiss & Tell). Now Alice is talking to Dave:

Alice Cooper: (Laughing) "You know, some guy told me that his dad used to keep the [Alice Cooper Goes to] "Hell" album in his closet and threaten to lock him up with it as punishment!"

"Yeah!," says Dave, "that green face of yours is terrifying!"

(Background story: When Dave was 9 to about 12, his best friend, Rick Olson's oldest brother, Pete, who was over 18 at the time, was a huge Alice Cooper fan and used to leave his albums lying around. The album covers scared Dave, since he'd heard about all the freaky things Alice Cooper did in his live show.)

My version of how I tripped-over Alice Cooper’s dark genius isn’t much different from Dave’s. I was a wee lass, and my best friend Vicky’s older sister, Wendy, had Billion Dollar Babies playing on her record player (they were called record players back then) one day when I was at their house. I will absolutely never, ever forget the moment when I heard Alice sing:

"We go dancing nightly in the attic,

while the moon is rising in the sky.

If I’m too rough, tell me.

I’m so scared your little head will come off in my hands."

I had no idea what Alice was talking about, but I knew this song was really out-there and alien to anything else I was likely to hear. And, although my musical diet up to that age consisted mostly of The Beatles and whatever was on the radio, I was fascinated with the visual concept of someone’s head coming off -- twisting off of their body in a bloodless, Barbie-doll sort of way -- in my hands. Other songs on Billion Dollar Babies were about falling in love with transvestites ("MaryAnn") and necrophilia ("I Love The Dead"). But there was one song tucked away amidst the camp horror and faux controversy, called "No More Mr. Nice Guy" which resonated with me like a bell in my heart. "I used to be such a sweet sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me," Alice Cooper sang. To me, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" sounded like "I Wanna Hold Your hand" or something -- like a total pop song. I knew my parents would freak out of their minds if I came home with an Alice Cooper album, but I made a mental note to keep an ear out for whatever this man with -- gasp! -- a woman’s name might do next.

I have dozens of favorite Alice Cooper songs but if someone put a gun to my head and made me pick just one, it would be "Blue Turk" from the School’s Out LP. It’s a pretty obscure song and I’ve never heard anyone talk about it, but it reminds me of Alice impersonating Frank Sinatra doing a floorshow-for-the-misbegotten version of "New York, New York." On "Blue Turk," Alice’s phrasing is really everything, but the lyrics on their own are so beautiful and creepy.

The first verse is:

"I'm hurtin,’ I'm wantin’

I'm achin’ for another go

You're squirmin’ wet, baby

Nothin bad comin’ very slow

(And it's burnin’ holes in me)"

And the last verse is:

"One spastic explosion

Two pressure-cookers go insane

It makes me act crazy

I shiver but I love this game."

"I shiver but I love this game." Marilyn Manson couldn’t write lyrics that effortlessly cerebral and deliciously slick if his bony ass depended on it.

Anyway, fast-forward twenty-some-odd years and I’m with Beowulf at NYC’s Roseland Ballroom, on Halloween, waiting to see Alice Cooper play live for the first time. We are in the VIP mezzanine, so when the lights go down, we’re pressed right against the lip of the balcony with the entire stage before us, the capacity ballroom below, and a night of enchantment ahead.

In this show, Alice mixes seven of the songs from his new record, Brutal Planet, in with a killer greatest hits package and the new stuff rocks even harder live than it does on record, a testament to the solid band he put together for this tour: Pete Friesen and Ryan Roxie on Lead guitars, Teddy Zig-Zag (who toured with Guns ‘n’ Roses) on Keyboards, Greg Smith on Bass, and Eric Singer, who was in Kiss at one time, on drums. Ryan Roxie is an amazingly talented guitarist who gave up his position in Slash’s Snakepit to go on the road with Alice for this tour. He’s played with everyone and has an extremely fluid style and showmanship up the ass, not to mention (but you can see I am about to) the fact that he is absolutely fucking gorgeous. I’ve been fortunate to become friendly with Ryan after doing shitloads of press for his other band, the great Dad’s Porno Mag. I just adore him.

"I’m pretty proud to be part of this band," Ryan told me. "I think every musician that Alice hired, all the way from Teddy to Eric to Greg and Pete, puts their vibe behind the music and it comes across pretty powerful. Everybody is doing their own part and it all comes together to make one big massive sound." Ryan said it’s not just the musicians on stage, but everyone behind the scenes, the lighting guys and the sound guys, who make the show such a huge success. "I was pretty blown away to be part of something that so many people worked on for one common cause," he said. "That’s the reason I decided to do the tour in the first place, because the crew are top notch guys and they’re always working and striving behind the scenes to make us shine, and that’s totally cool."

"Brutal Planet" is the first song of the two hour set, and it establishes the tone for a night of skull cracking rock and roll, with it’s heavy, thundering beat and Alice’s fierce and scary vocals. "It’s such a brutal planet," Alice screams, "It’s such an ugly world!" With the coming election and possibility of a Bush victory looming over everyone’s head like the Sword of Damocles, we’re all feeling the Brutal Planet vibe, but some hits come next to lighten the mood. During "Go to Hell" a woman appears on the stage’s raised platform, all tricked out in black leather and brandishing a whip. In a perfectly choreographed move, Alice climbs the platform, wrestles the whip from her and triumphantly pushes her off the side. I’d heard that this is Alice’s real-life daughter, Calico, a rumor which Ryan Roxie confirmed. "Some people pass the torch, but we say Alice’s wife has passed the whip to her younger daughter, because Alice’s wife used to be the whip girl. That’s how they met." Ryan said Calico is "more of a rock star on the road than any of us. You know, Alice has been through it all and Calico has been through it all since she was a little girl, that’s how she was raised, so it was totally, totally mellow to her." How cool would it be to have Alice Cooper as your dad?

"I’m Eighteen" is next and the crowd goes insane, singing along and pumping their fists in the air, because while most everyone here is far beyond the age of 18, it’s long been my contention that, in this song, 18 is more of a feeling than an age. I can completely relate to sentiments like "I’m in the middle, without any plans/I’m a boy and I’m a man" or "I’ve got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart." Just swap-out the gender and I’m there. To me, "18" is a metaphor for asking kids what they want to be when they grow up, because you’re looking for ideas. I’m eighteen, and I like it.

"Feed My Frankenstein," the song Alice did in Wayne’s World, is sandwiched between two new songs, "Pick Up the Bones" and "Wicked Young Man" which to me sound most like songs Alice could have written twenty years ago.

A medley of "I Love the Dead" and "Devil's Food" culminates in the whole guillotine act, where Alice gets his head chopped off. At that point in the show, Ryan told me, "We go to the back, he gets his head cut off and then we do our musical interlude. Then comes the drum solo during which I go get a beer. The other guys can do whatever they want," he laughed, "but I always got a beer."

While the band is off stage, Alice’s head is put onto a conveniently decapitated Frankenstein Monster left over from "Feed My Frankenstein" and -- in a poof of smoke and mirrors -- Alice emerges as the staccato riff from the intro to "No More Mister Nice Guy" (which is still a great, great song that I never get tired of hearing), starts up and the band return to the stage...in full-on Halloween costume. Ryan told me this was favorite part of the show. "Alice was totally cool with letting us do our costume thing. He had a heavy concept with Brutal Planet, and he wanted us to all look the roles and play the parts for that first half of the show. But then, for the second half, he said ‘Hey go do what you want to do, it’s Halloween. Dress the way you want to dress and express yourself.’ Pete Friesen dressed as a woman so," he laughed, "I think that tells you something right there. Our bass player dressed as a gay sailor, our keyboardist had, like, a multitude of costumes because he’d been shopping at costume shops for the previous two months for that night."

What was really funny though, was hearing the collective gasp when Ryan emerged and people all around me went ‘Oh my god, is that Slash?’ "People actually thought it was, the costume was so good," he said. "There’s been so much drama with Snakepit and Alice and all this stuff. I thought, you know what, as a total sign of respect to Slash I’m gonna dress up as Slash. As soon as I went out there everybody instantly knew who I was. When you have that sort of instantaneous recognition, it says a lot about you, about what you’ve done in your career." When you think about it though, all it takes to do a great Slash costume is the top hat, the dark, curly hair in your face and the cigarette dangling from your mouth. "For one," Ryan laughed, "I don’t know how he does the thing with the hair in his eyes because I was missing more notes than usual."

Then Alice goes into one of the few audience raps of the evening, and he’s talking about how "The other night," (although you know he says this every night) "some guy was in the front row of the audience, wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. And that really pissed me off, because It’s the Little Things that drive me wild." The band launch into the very tongue-in-cheek

"Little Things" also from Brutal Planet, which Ryan told me was added mid-way through the tour. "We added "Little Things" in the second half of the set because Alice thought the set needed a little pick up at that point, and we interchanged a couple songs. We were doing "Guilty" instead of "Caught in a Dream." But for the most part, Ryan admitted, it was the same thing on stage nightly, "because with an Alice show, with the way the lights and the way the staging are, as far as where he’s going to be on stage and what affect is going to happen and what little shtick he’s gonna use, you almost have to have the same sort of set every night. So there was a little bit of improvisational stuff going on, but that was pretty much my brain to my fingers," he laughed. ‘I fucked up different parts of each song every night."

Two classics, "Under My Wheels" and the only anthem that rivals "Rock & Roll All Night" for sheer rebellious exuberance, "School's Out" round out a very satisfying set before an encore of "Billion Dollar Babies (Alice wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "Britney Wants Me" on the front and "Dead" on the back) and a cover of The Who’s "My Generation," with "Elected" as the final song. One week before the Presidential election, it couldn’t have been a more cruelly ironic ending. "I’m Yankee Doodle Dandy in a gold Rolls Royce." Ouch.

After the show, Dave and I went to the party, where I had a very stiff drink before asking Alice to pose for a picture with me, and you know what happened after that. The next morning there were some very positive reviews of the show in a couple of the dailies and online, but they just couldn’t fully capture or do justice to the feeling of seeing a living legend meet and exceed your expectations. The weekend after the show, I was on the phone with Ryan again and he gave me the final overview of his experience on tour with Alice Cooper. "The reviews all said really good things, especially about Alice. They were saying he still has the vibe of going for it, that he puts a lot of lead singers and front men, that are out today, to shame because that’s what he does. He’s a consummate professional, you know. There are a lot of people who come out expecting just to see a greatest hits show, but we basically do the two shows in one. Obviously, a lot has changed since ‘72, but his whole concept of putting on an entertaining show hasn’t. That’s what carries the whole thing, because some people don’t really even know about the old material. Some of the younger kids come out that only know the new stuff, from "Poison" on. I see such a spectrum, night after night, it just trips me out constantly."

The coolest thing, Ryan said, is that Alice wears it all on his sleeve. "If you come to an Alice Cooper show, you want to come to an Alice Cooper Show. It’s not an Alice Cooper ‘Collection of Songs.’ It’s not an acoustic thing -- you’ll never see Alice Cooper Unplugged. You’ll never see Alice Cooper spoken word. You want to see an Alice Cooper Rock & Roll Show, and that’s what he strives for. It’s influenced me so much because, after playing with Alice Cooper, whatever band I do next, I have to have the element of show in everything I do. He’s definitely influenced me to have the complete entertainment value. I mean, the shows they’re staging in Vegas now are incredible, and I think a rock show should be just as incredible. Fuck two pieces of incense and a candle. The whole reason I wanted to play music and became a guitar player at such a young age was that un-attainability thing. When I looked up at the rock stars that I was influenced by, there was this un-attainability to them. They were untouchable and I thought I could never even get to that level. What’s so trippy is that now, after all these years, I’m playing with one of those guys that I thought was unattainable. And I play cards with him. And every once in awhile," Ryan laughed, "I beat him."

"I shiver but I love this game."

CD Review of The Month

Self, Gizmodgery (Spongebath)

The idea of making an entire album using nothing but toy instruments seems a little too steeped in the realm of total novelty, one-joke band-ism. But Gizmodgery, the fourth long player by Tennessee pop rockers, Self, transcends that too-clever-for-their-own-good cuteness with its paeans to Bee Gees era Disco Fever ("Pattycake") and a cover of the Doobie Brothers’ "What a Fool Believes." It’s like they were born to it. The dreamy, Frankie Avalonesque crooner, "ILoveToLoveYourLoveMyLove" is thoroughly sublime and, in a different world, could become Self’s own personal "I Want It That Way." But the question that really begs to be asked here is: Do you or do you not want to own a Partridge Family - goes - hip - hop - after - running - over - the - Back-Street-Boys - with - their - psychedelic - tour - bus - while - Led - Zeppelin - rides - shotgun - sounding album that contains a song featuring the lyrics’ "Got a trunk fulla amps Motherfucker" while managing to name check Freddie Mercury, Glenn Danzig and ELO ("Trunk Fulla Amps")? The answer has to be a resounding "Yes!" especially when you factor in the bonus points earned by the foray into bosa nova during the song’s bridge. These guys are probably still slapping each other on the back for pulling this off. Possibly setting the stage for a huge increase in their level of popularity, Self’s Gizmodgery at the very least, should elevate the band to inclusion in a few critic’s year-end Best Of lists.

Rock Star Quotes of the Month

This month, The Worley Gig brings you the wit and wisdom of The Cult’s Ian Astbury.

"The food was so fucking good, I was trying to eat the plate."

- Ian Astbury discusses the tastiness of the food in Cuba.

"We should have "National Stop It Day" where people go around and say ‘Stop it! Stop this shit! Whatever you’re doing, stop it!’ I mean, whose fucking idea was it to put gold teeth in dog’s heads?"

- Ian Astbury proposes a new national holiday!

The Worley Gig: "What you had, and what you lost."

Identify the song lyrics above and win fabulous prizes. John Bailey of Los Angeles was the only one to correctly guess the closing lyrics from my last column, culled from Ratt’s immortal love song, "Round & Round." John wins the new Snakepit CD, Ain’t Life Grand, and an extra copy of the debut by A Perfect Circle which I found hiding under some books.

Correct guesses and slow wet kisses to pandomag@rocketmail.com

Coming in December, just in time for the Holidays: Toys In The Attic. More than forty Rock Stars talk about their favorite childhood toys, and reminisce about the present they always wanted but never got.

PLUS: Intimately revealing conversations with Slash and Rod Jackson of Snakepit, and Dweezil Zappa.

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Wild Boys Go the Way of Pop Trash
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