​ALICE COOPER IN SUMMERLAND: CONSTRICTOR BY SHAWN MACOMBER

 
To be resurrected, you must first suffer death—at least of a kind.
 
And, while not quite an always-a-ghoulsmaid-never-a-ghoul scenario, from the release of Pretties for You in 1969 straight through to DaDa in 1983 Alice Cooper just couldn’t let himself not rage, rage against the dying of the stage lights: Only once during that period—amidst the tumultuous collapse of the Alice Cooper group into a solo act between Muscle of Love (1973) and Welcome to My Nightmare (1975)—did a full year pass without Alice putting his freak on wax. Even then he made himself a regular on the ol’ boob tube circuit, hamming it up on Hollywood Squares, The Smother’s Brothers Show, Dinah!, and The Mike Douglas Show.
 
You want an argument in favor of literally decades of manic compression? The Coop embodied it. I mean, Love it to Death and Killer both dropped in ’71. Billion Dollar Babies hit shelves just after Valentine’s Day ‘73 and before Thanksgiving Muscle of Love was vying against it for turntable time. Think about that. Think about what you accomplished in your twenty-third and twenty-fifth years on the planet. Was it releasing two unfuckwithable albums that will still be blaring through whatever brain-music interface is lodged in our cyborg skulls the day the sun finally goes full red giant and incinerates every last goddamn molecule of human history out of existence?  
 
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
 
Point is, for decades Alice had every right to tell anyone who laid some namby-pamby you-gotta-chill-and-slow-your-roll-enough-to-do-a-bit-of-self-care rap on him, “Look friend, the proof’s in the blood pudding. Get the fuck outta here and go bother Harry Nilsson!”
 
Alas, in the early eighties the tab on which Alice put his health and sanity in order to pursue rock n’ roll greatness came due: September 1983. Cooper returns to rehab after a relapse into alcoholism so serious he not only nearly destroyed his marriage, but also obliterated in real-time any memory of writing, recording, or touring behind the records Flush the Fashion (1980), Special Forces (1981), Zipper Catches Skin (1982), and Dada (1983). “You’ve heard of lost weekends—well, those were my lost years,” he writes in his autobiography Golf Monster. “I ambled through those albums and tours in a foggy haze.”
 
A funny—not to mention miraculous—thing happened on the way to becoming yet another rock n’ roll cliché, though: “In the past, I had left rehab full of fear and cravings,” Cooper marvels. “This time it was a much different story. After I checked out of [rehab], I never went to a meeting. I didn’t feel one single craving for alcohol. It was as if the alcoholic demons were gone. Expelled!”
 
As that “haze” cleared, however, it quickly became clear the demons weren’t the only monsters that had been exorcised: For Vincent Furnier to save himself he’d had to muster the courage to shove Alice over the most precarious edge of the metaphorical grave the alter ego had been insisting they both dance along—without any real idea whether his Dexter-esque “dark passenger” would ever be able to ascend out of the abyss it contained.
 
Imagine this. Imagine the sacrifice…
 
Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
 
And in point of fact amidst this rejection of the rock n’ roll “kingdoms of the world and their glory” which had been so fully his domain Alice did not jump back into existence Pazuzu-style snarling, trademark makeup immaculate, demanding to know who or what was next.
 
Instead Vincent stuck around, focusing on his growing family and teeing up for 36 holes a day. No songs, no tours, no guillotines—just recovery and love.
 
The resurrection of Alice, it should again be stressed, was hardly a given. Cooper tells a story in Golf Monster of performing his first show in five years. The opener was unsigned band called Guns N’ Roses—never an easy act to follow, but especially not in 1986 when they still had the elements of surprise and youth on their side.
 
“Before going on, I walked around in a vicious circle in my hotel room for about five hours,” he writes. “One of my biggest fears…after gaining sobriety was no longer the drinking—rather, if I were healed, would Alice leave me and disappear? My head was exploding with ‘what if’s. What if I’m dressed in all this black leather and I’m Don Knotts instead of Bela Lugosi? What if it’s over? I had no idea what was going to happen.”
 
Alice, of course, was—in Cooper’s words—“reborn.”
 
This is the context in which the subsequent record—1986’s anthem-heavy glam-tinged hard rock juggernaut Constrictor—must be situated. In essence, the vessel regained equilibrium of a phantasmic entity to which he had long ago ceded control—and both of them were more powerful for having undergone the tribulation.
 
As it happened Alice serendipitously sat out the early eighties—a time dominated on the rock tip mostly by long-lumbering, awesome-in-their-own-way AOR stadium behemoths who had big enough to survive New Wave and pop comet strikes.
 
The hyperbolic, flashy hair metal rising in the mid-eighties proved a much more apropos fit for the tan, rested, and undead ready Alice. Backed by uber-sick six-string shredder Kane Roberts—“notable for his Rambo-like appearance and physique and his usage of an electric guitar shaped like a machine gun,” Wikipedia helpfully tells us—soon to be superstar in his own right Kip Winger on bass, and virtuoso drummer Dave Rosenberg (Madonna, Bob Dylan, Chaka Khan), the Constrictor line-up may not have broken new ground sonically, but it had swagger to burn as it distilled the pop metal zeitgeist into steady stream of catchy-as-fuck riffs and spirit-enlivening, fist-pumping choruses.
 
And Alice? Dude sounds about fifteen-feet tall and full of piss and vinegar—his best, most assured performance since Alice Cooper Goes to Hell a decade before.
 
Yes, the two singles—“Teenage Frankenstein” and the Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives tie-in “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”—are solid as hell, but if that’s all you know of Constrictor that’s a damn shame: It’s on deep cuts like “Simple Disobedience,” “The World Needs Gut,” and the power ballad-y “Life and Death of the Party” that the album really puts its full squeeze on listeners.
 
If Cooper had spent the last several albums fucking with audience expectations, Constrictor marked the beginning of a victory lap era in the living legend’s career which continues to this day. Which is to say, the emphasis on this and subsequent releases has been not to slyly disorient listeners, but, rather, tap into something more primal and inclusive.
 
Constrictor—appropriately, considering its provenance—is a vibrant celebration of life after death, its darkness delivered with tongue firmly in cheek as it shines the brightest, most galvanizing light on devotees this side of the Heaven Cooper would very shortly seek out and embrace.

BIO:
Shawn Macomber is a writer, editor, and noted pug wrangler in the Greater New York City Area. (i.e. Jersey.) For more information visit his online repository at www.stopshawnmacomber.com

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