Alice Cooper at 77 is still selling out shows. His brand of theatrical hard rock still rocks the house. Cooper has always surrounded himself with blue-chip musicians to support his stage antics, and his extended world tour is no exception.
Cooper also has a new addition to his “Alice’s Attic” radio show market: 95-5 KLOS-FM in Los Angeles, one of the premier stations in the U.S. It’s in collaboration with Superadio, which syndicates “Alice’s Attic” as well as several other radio programs. Introduced early last year, “Alice’s Attic” plays on 73 local radio stations throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
We had the rare chance to chat with Cooper this week about all things Alice. Following are edited excerpts from a much longer conversation. (This is Part 1 of of a series.)
Jim Clash: Let’s first talk about your radio show “Alice’s Attic,” syndicated by Superadio. It sounds like an eclectic program format.
Alice Cooper: On radio, you can still make an audience imagine what’s going on, like old radio did with comedy, drama. They made you picture it. The whole idea with “Alice’s Attic” is the characters in it. You’re coming up to Alice’s attic, right? And sure, he’s going to play all kinds of music for you, but what else is up there? Different characters who bring to life stories.
Clash: You were on the cover of Forbes way back in 1973. What did that mean to you personally, and did it help bolster your then-budding career?
Cooper: Before that when I’d get on an airplane and sit next to a business guy, I could tell he was like, “Oh brother.” After that cover, the guys would say, “Sit here…no no, sit here,” because that magazine is their bible. There’d be whispers, “That’s the guy on the cover of Forbes, we’ve got to know what he’s doing.” It was just funny to me. We wrote the album, “Billion Dollar Babies,” making fun of ourselves. We went from living in two rooms at Motel 6 to being at the Hotel Crillon overnight [laughs].
Clash: So, in a sense, you were suddenly validated?
Cooper: In this business if you have a hit record, that’s the Willy Wonka golden ticket, because everybody now has to pay attention, all of the record companies. If you have a second hit, now you’re a trend. All of a sudden Alice Cooper had five or six hits in a row, “School’s Out [For The Summer],” “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and so on. It made everybody turn their heads and go, “We need you to be listening to these guys.”
Clash: Do you remember the first time you heard one of your songs on the radio?
Cooper: I’ll tell you what – it was so crazy. We were living in Detroit. CKLW was the biggest station in the midwest at the time. If you had a record on that, you were up against the [Rolling] Stones, The Beatles, Simon And Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, even Frank Sinatra.
We’re driving along and all of a sudden we hear, “I’m 18,” which did not sound like anything else on the radio. It was very punk, but the lyrics [resonated] – “I’m 18 and I LIKE it.” Every kid in the world went, “Yeah, that’s me.” Rosalie Trombley, who ran the station, loved the record. They told her not to put it on, that it didn’t fit. She put it on anyway, and it was a big hit. We owe Rosalie a lot.
Anyway, we pulled the car over and were stunned. We’re sitting there saying, “Are you kidding me?” We had no idea that anybody would ever play that record.
Clash: I know you’ve addressed this many times, but what’s the deal with you and the chicken someone threw on stage? I’ve heard so many versions. Did the attention help or hurt you?
Cooper: It solidified what I was thinking at the time. When I was up on stage and threw that chicken back at the audience, they tore it apart. The next day in the papers it’s, “Alice Cooper tears chicken to pieces.” I immediately became the villain of rock. Frank Zappa called and said, “Did you kill a chicken on stage last night?” I said, “No.” He said, “Don’t tell anybody [you didn’t] because they all love it.” That was the nucleus of Alice Cooper right there. There were too many Peter Pans, and they needed a Captain Hook. So we just kept making Alice Cooper the villain of rock.
But we really didn’t have to do much because people were making up their own stories. We’d get to a town and they’d say, “You can’t set any German Shepherds on fire on stage,” and we’d go, “What?” Every story got crazier. We just didn’t deny them. If you’re going to have that kind of reputation, run with it. Getting banned in London was the best thing that ever happened to us. They told the audience they couldn’t have us, and the audience said, “We’ve got to see that.”