ALICE IN SUMMERLAND: WHO THE BLANK IS ALICE? BY LEX JONES

Alice Cooper has the dubious honour of being the first artist for whom I bought an album. I was around fourteen years old, and I’d started to embrace my teenage goth/rock phase (which, as I write this in my red and black living room full of gargoyle ornaments, hasn’t quite ended yet). This was in the era of CDs and Cassette albums. Vinyl was still around but was becoming increasingly rare, and music downloads hadn’t really become a thing yet. I’m sure they already existed in some format at that point (we’re talking mid-late nineties), for those not hampered by legality or an actual user interface via a website. But sites like I-tunes and Spotify were a long way off. Buying an album meant actually walking into a shop and walking out with a physical copy of some music. Presumably one that you’d paid for, but I hear that Woolworths in my native Sheffield was ridiculously easy to shoplift CD’s from because they kept them right by the entrance, and this was before those white rail things that trigger an alarm at the exit. But I digress. Shoplifted or otherwise, an album was a physical thing, full of art and lyrics and informative dates and credits. And the first of these for me, was Alice Cooper’s ‘Hey Stoopid’.

The reason for choosing this album was a mixed bag really. I’d gone into HMV….this being that nice era when HMV were quite cheap, before they got greedy and started charging £18 per album, then crashed and burned and blamed it all on amazon before coming back humbled and somewhat cheaper once again….with the express purpose of choosing an Alice Cooper album. This was to be the first time I would spend my own money on an album. I already owned music, of course. Random birthday or Christmas presents from aunties and uncles resulted in “Now” compilations and the like, but they were rarely listened to. The music I liked, that I responded to, was always that which had come slightly too early for me. Although born in the eighties, I arrived in the middle of that decade, so by the time I was really old enough to be appreciating music as a thing, the nineties were here. And holy Christ did I hate nineties music. I still do. Most decades have a good mix, when you look at them. The sixties, seventies and eighties all have some great stuff to be found in rock, pop and even the more “out there” genres of the time. But in the nineties it was all awful. All of it. The stuff I liked was from the eighties, at that stage, with a particular focus on rock.

I was at that “before really owning music but still enjoying it” stage of life where I knew what kind of thing I liked and would seek it out on radio stations or my parent’s collections, but this wasn’t how I came to Alice Cooper. Strangely, my first encounter with him was via a comic book. I was massively into comic books as a teenager (still am really, although I don’t  buy the volume that I once did) and I would snap up more or less any title that was within my price range. Whilst browsing the boxes at my regular comic book shop, The Sheffield Space Centre, I found a comic book that was all about Alice Cooper. The cover, I half-recall, was of him being dragged away by men in white coats. Even then I had a vague idea of who he was from having seen him on retrospective music programmes and such, but it was only the faintest of recognitions. But still, I bought that comic book. And twenty years later I remember absolutely nothing about it, save that it spurred me to ask my mum if she knew who he was. As it turns out, she did, as she had owned some of his albums on vinyl back in the early seventies. She told me how he was famous for his stage shows, combining horror with rock music. My paternal grandma even told me about him, explaining how Alice would famously use a guillotine on stage and seemingly behead himself. She was very fond of this, because as she put it “you pay a lot for a concert, it’s nice to get a bit of a show.”

The stage was set up now, the guillotine loaded, and when I decided not long afterwards to purchase my first album with my own money, I knew exactly which artist I’d be looking at. ‘Hey Stoopid’ was chosen not because I’d heard it was the best album, or that I was familiar with any of the songs. In fact none of the few songs of Alice’s that I knew didn’t appear on this track list at all. Rather, it was chosen for price. It was five pounds, and I had five pounds. Not the grandest of revelations, but an honest one. I played that album over and over, immediately after getting it home. Thankfully the stereo I’d been bought as a birthday gift the year before had a CD deck, allowing me to listen to it more privately than playing it through the massive (ridiculously massive. It looked like Alan Turing built it) eighties Hi-Fi system that my mum and dad had in the dining room. From the title track through to “Wind Up Toy”, I loved every track on that album. Whilst the horror themes Alice was supposedly famous for weren’t quite as strongly present on this album as I might have hoped, there were still touches of them to be found. But I knew I wanted more.

Over the next few years, my music collection expanded rapidly. I went from owning one album to owning over a hundred. The discovery of market stalls and tabletop sales brought with the realisation that five pounds could buy more than one album, if you weren’t fussed about a few scuffs on the CD case. And I wasn’t. Alice Cooper remained my target for a good while, and before long I’d snapped up more than ten of his albums. I now owned everything from School’s Out through to what was, at the time, his latest release “The Last Temptation”. I knew there were some earlier releases, even some from when Alice Cooper was the name of the band and not the lead singer, and when Vincent himself still had short hair and no makeup. But these proved quite difficult to find, and whenever I did come across them they cost far more than I was willing to pay. With my Alice Cooper collection complete for the moment, I started to branch out into other artists such as Kiss, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi and Queen. But Alice remained my favourite.
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When I look at my Alice Collection now (which I have very recently started to build up on Vinyl as well) I can see all the different eras in his music. The seventies psychedelic horror stuff, the eighties “slasher horror” stuff, the later eighties stuff that moved more into traditional “sexy rock music” but never quite enough that it lost what made it Alice, and then into the next era where he experimented with a trilogy of “Heavy” albums; Last Temptation, Brutal Planet and Dragontown. I liked, and still like, all three of those albums, but I always felt like they were an attempt to try and keep up with the popularity of bands like Marilyn Manson and Korn at the time. They still sounded like Alice, but like an Alice that had been amped up a little bit, given a shot in the arm that wasn’t necessarily taken willingly. To me it was reminiscent of superhero comics in the nineties, how they all had to suddenly become MAXED OUT TO THE EXTREME!!! Which meant bigger guns, more black leather, unnecessary spikes on their uniforms, and so…many…ammo pouches. Even characters that didn’t carry guns suddenly had ammo pouches. Superman had ammo pouches. The Hulk had them. Alice never got ammo pouches, but he did get a new sound. And it wasn’t a bad thing, as I said I do enjoy those albums. But even at my first listen, I remember thinking “I hope this is an experiment rather than something he’s going to stick to”. It was. The albums Alice has released since then have been more of a return to form. Still slightly heavier than the older stuff, perhaps, but getting back to a more fun form of horror mixed with rock music, rather than the bleak and heavy industrial feel of the Brutal Planet trilogy.

I’ve now seen Alice Cooper in concert on three occasions, and I was pleased that his set list always included as much focus on the classics as it did on his new releases. And of course, the theatrics. I’d been told of what sort of thing to expect, and even my own grandmother apparently enjoyed it when she’d seen it on television. I wasn’t disappointed. Giant skeletons, fire eaters, a zombie parade and of course the guillotine all made an appearance at these concerts. I’d have felt slightly robbed if I hadn’t seen his head hit the basket at least once. It’s now a part of the whole myth of the character that he’s become. A perfect blending of horror, glam, art and rock. He even posed for a photograph for Salvador Dali, for no other reason than Dali asked him to.
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Beneath all that, of course, is a man, and one who by all accounts is extremely pleasant. I know two people who’ve met him either once or on multiple occasions, and none of them have a bad word to say about him. Which whilst not essential….. I am not one of those who can’t separate the artist from their art. Hearing someone is actually a bit of a dick won’t necessarily stop me buying their music….does make me even happier to have spent so much time and money on his work over the years. And I aim to continue doing so, as long as he’s alive and well and releasing albums. Although with Alice, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he kept releasing music long after he was neither alive nor well.

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ABOUT LEX JONES 

Lex Jones was born and raised in Sheffield, north England, in 1985. A keen writer from a young age, he was always fascinated with the supernatural and is obsessed with stories. He loves films, books, theatre, videogames, graphic novels, anything with a good story that captures the imagination. His books tend to have a supernatural (or at least 'unusual') undercurrent, as this moves them away from the more boring aspects of real life.

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