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.

Monster Dog 1984

It’s no secret that I love me some scary movies, particularly those dealing with werewolves. Lycanthropy, men who transform into beasts who prowl the moonlit nights. The curse of such an existence is pitiful and cruel, changing ordinary people to monsters who no longer distinguish between their loved ones and prey. Werewolves have been a longtime obsession of mine and I really can't pass up a werewolf flick, even if it looks a little cheesy, sometimes those are my favorite, so I jumped at the chance to share my thoughts about this Alice Cooper masterpiece.

I hadn’t sat down and watched this classic from 1984 until sorta recently. My mother of all people asked if I had seen it and when I confessed I hadn’t she was shocked so about a year ago I remedied the blasphemy I had committed by not viewing it. Yes, my mom is a horror fan as well and almost revoked my horror kid card for admitting this dark secret!

Monster Dog aka Los Perros de la Muerte is an Italian flick that was shot in Spain. Alice Cooper plays the role of Vince Raven, a musician who decides to shoot his next music video in his old childhood home. There's one problem though, the townsfolk believe his family is cursed with lycanthropy which really should have been the point Vince decided to go film somewhere a little more friendly but this was an 80's horror movie so those logical things were forgotten.

Vince, his girlfriend Sandra, and their crew set out on a road trip to shoot the video for See me in the mirror, a song that fits the ambience of a lycanthropy tale. Upon arriving there are things that just aren't right and the sheriff warns Vince that there has been several murders which are eerily similar to those that took place generations before. The authorities link them to packs of wild dogs but Vince isn’t so sure. His father was accused of being a werewolf and killed by an angry mob which hints towards what they plan to do with poor Vince and any of his friends who stand in the way. Things turn deadly and the crew are trapped in Vince's childhood mansion not only threatened by the monster dog but also by the violent villagers looking to end Vince and his cursed bloodline. There's some twists and turns, some mauling, big hair, popped collars and some beautiful damsels in distress.

Rumor has it that most of the meager budget was used to pay Alice Cooper for his staring role. His co-star and famous Spanish actress, Victoria Vera, was noted as saying even though the movie itself is wretched she had a great time with Alice on set. I know low budget isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I really have to say that Monster Dog out shines others in that category and should be given props for what they achieved on such small budget. The scenery is also beautiful, adding to the medieval atmosphere.

Since these articles are all about Alice Cooper’s music, let’s touch on the soundtrack for Monster Dog. "Identity Crisis" which features lyrics about a man conflicted with the many sides of himself and "See Me in the Mirror", the track Vince wants to shoot a music video for, is a creepy good tune. Both are haunting songs which go well with the outrageous eighties horror they are adding ambiance to and leave the listener singing along and conjuring Alice dressed in black, whisper-singing to himself in a hand held mirror, eyes darkened by eyeliner while mists float about him.

In my humble opinion, it's an 80’s classic to the bone. The film features creepy dream sequences, a group of free range murder dogs, conveniently placed books about werewolves when people need to find knowledge about said creature, a killer soundtrack and some special effects that border on cheese territory, how could any self respecting horror fan not approve? Alice Cooper’s acting isn’t the worst I’ve seen, he actually captures the feelings of a man who isn’t so sure if a beast lurks inside of him pretty well. The whole shindig is blood soaked and filled with great death scenes, especially when a posse comes to make sure Vince isn’t there to continue his father’s deadly legacy and shit gets bloody. I’m a huge werewolf fan and I’d say it ranks decently on my wolf-o-meter, particularly the transformation scene where his head bubbles outward a bit and he looks like a hairless rat beast. If you enjoy Alice Cooper, eighties horror and packs of wild dogs eating people then this one should be on your list!

AAAAAARROOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 
I confess that I’ve never heard this disc before. I see it’s a Bob Ezrin joint so I know it’s going to sound great and the music will be interesting.

1. Dada

This is good and spooky with bass synths and weird clean guitar and Alice rasping over the melody in his patented Evil Alice voice. This isn’t the arty Dada, this is Dada MamaFo.
It sounds vaguely like an outtake from The Wall with a surfeit of chord-coasting but the drippy sound and the baby voice make it ookier and way more fun.

2. Enough’s Enough

More words about papa – the details are kind of vague but dad seems to be a killer here. This is pretty punchless without that narrative focus. It has nice sounds and goes through the motions but doesn’t ring authentic.

3. Former Lee Warmer

His zombie brother plays piano, alone in his room. This is really creepy and good in a way that Enough’s Enough couldn’t be. Chilly little electric piano part and a tune that sounds like it was borrowed from early Genesis, but with Alice’s lyrics and conceit instead of Gabriel’s. Very sophisticated vibe. A bit like Some Folks crossed with Down the Dolce Vita.

4. No Man’s Land

Rockabilly follows prog, nice segue. Dumb tune though...a bad Santa riff with a little bit of wordplay. The song itself is cool and nicely uptempo but those lyrics, ugh.

5. Dyslexia

The lyric here doesn’t really describe any form of dyslexia but instead talks about disorientation. I’d bet most of the audience don’t know or care, but I do and it ruins the tune. The music here is good in an 80s-pop sorta way and there are great harmonies. I’d like it with a different title.

6. Scarlet and Sheba

A big old powerchord and we’re off into Blue Murder territory with atmospherics and percussion and squeaks and sort of Arabic-sounding legato stuff. This is a cool tune with nice touches. Very catchy. Kind of sounds like Hawkwind in parts. Hassa I Sabba indeed.

7. I Love America

The lyrics to this are a Tubes-esque scream as Alice ably skewers American pop culture. All that’s missing are Fee Waybill and a new Monza. The martial drum break is killer.

8. Fresh Blood

Alice’s version of a vampire yarn, creepy instead of eerie as is his wont, and clothed in horn-driven hard rock with a tinge of funk. I love the music even if the breakdown does sound like Toto. The combination of horror and funky beat is odd but compelling. This one even sounds inspired from time to time, as if Alice woke up for a while – this IS a ‘blackout period’ album.

9. Pass The Gun Around

Alice plays Russian Roulette in this final track, making explicit reference to blackouts. I gotta say, the band is very pro and sound great throughout. The tunes leave something to be desired from time to time, and Alice himself is less-than-inspired most of the time, but there’s no denying those chops and the lush production that make it all sound worthwhile.

And boy, is this track lush. It’s a Bob Ezrin production, with extra production and guitars by Dick Wagner. The whole album is. Those guys know what they’re about. Here they really shine, especially when Wagner breaks into a wonderful long bendy solo that evokes Dave Gilmour and then those choruses of female voices wail away into the breakdown and verse.
Ezrin uses his whole bag of tricks on this album, stuff he created or learned from working with Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd especially, and he almost makes this whole damned thing work.

If the opening songs hadn’t so patently been the beginning of a concept, the lack of cohesion here wouldn’t even be an issue. But they are, you see, and by that one can hear how far the original idea went afield compared to the relative brilliance of Alice’s more classic conceptual work.
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It’s all very smooth and professional, but that’smjust it. It’s zipped-up-tight and teflon-deflective, and no actual feelings were harmed here. It’s the aural equivalent of a hollow donut. Yeah, it tastes right, and even has chocolate, but there’s no creamy center.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about rock villain Alice Cooper’s 2007 autobiography is the title: Alice Cooper, Golf Monster.

Yes, the pioneering shock rocker, who made a name for himself with gruesome onstage executions and macabre songs about serial killers, domestic abusers, and other sick things, is also an avid golfer – a hobby he credits with helping him kick his near-fatal dependence on alcohol. “If rock’n’roll made my life, then golf saved my life,” he writes in the book’s introduction. Accordingly, Golf Monster (co-written by Cooper – born Vincent Furnier – and music writers Keith and Kent Zimmerman) is peppered with Cooper’s reflections on the sport, as well as wild anecdotes from the weird world of rock and roll.

In hindsight, Alice Cooper’s patented blend of edgy, tongue-in-cheek rock songs and shocking theatrics seems like the perfect formula for stardom. It may surprise some readers to learn that the original Alice Cooper Group began as a quintet of scrappy weirdos who were, in Cooper’s own words, “the band that everybody liked to walk out on, nothing more than a curiosity.”

After migrating from Pheonix to Los Angeles, The Alice Cooper Group hob-knobbed with rock icons like The Doors and Pink Floyd while playing dismally-attended club gigs; their abrasive music and strange apparel caused the hippies to run for the hills. They were eventually signed by transgressive rock mastermind Frank Zappa, who was intrigued only because the group baffled even him. Their first album Pretties for You was a bizarre, nearly unlistenable affair; one song, Alice recalls, “was a minute and a half long with forty-two changes in it.”

“Most of our early material didn’t make much sense to anybody, including ourselves,” he admits.

The day before they were set to sign with Zappa, guitar legend Jimi Hendrix presented the group with a potential manager – a former probation officer with no music industry experience named Shep Gordon. As the story goes, Gordon had run into Hendrix, along with Janis Joplin and the Chambers Brothers, sitting around the pool at the hotel where Gordon was living; Hendrix asked the down-on-his-luck LA transplant if he was Jewish, and immediately suggested he manage “that kid from Pheonix” who was living in the Chambers’s basement.

Unlike the predatory managers of so many other rock origin stories, Shep Gordon turned out to be instinctively shrewd and scrupulously honest. “To this day, Shep and I are still together, going on forty years, and we still don’t have a signed contract with each other. From the start, Shep was straight with me,” Cooper writes of his long-time manager, who has represented dozens of other celebrity clients since. An early Gordon achievement was securing the Alice Cooper Group a coveted spot between The Doors and John Lennon at the 1969 Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival Show – the site of an event that forever changed the band’s trajectory.

By 1969, the Alice Cooper Group had experimented with some stage antics, but they weren’t yet the concert demons they would come to be. Midway through Alice Cooper’s set at the Revival, someone in the crowd threw a live chicken onto the stage. Alice, reasoning that “since chickens have wings, it could fly,” grabbed the flightless bird and threw it into the crowd, where it was promptly torn to pieces by the audience. (The book reveals that in was in fact Shep who was responsible for the chicken, a fact that had been unknown even to Alice himself. “Only now, as this book is being put together, he’s finally confessed,” Cooper reveals.)

The Chicken Incident, writes Cooper, “was the beginning of national notoriety.” It also attracted the attention of Canadian producer Jack Richardson, who Gordon had been courting; despite being unimpressed with the group, Richardson decided to send his apprentice Bob Ezrin to work with them. Ezrin, a talented producer who would go on to work with KISS, Pink Floyd, and others, transformed the Alice Cooper Group from a bizarre novelty act to a genuine rock band with their own distinctive sound. “He came in (just like a great golf instructor) and, starting from the bottom to the top, he had us unlearn everything we knew and relearn it better,” raves Cooper.

A series of classic albums, hit singles, and boundary-pushing gimmicks followed. At the same time as their clever song-writing was earning praise from Bob Dylan and John Lennon, the band was also pioneering a controversial stage show that was part rock concert, part macabre magic act; each set featured simulated murders and culminated in the frontman being hung or beheaded before a screaming crowd.

Alice went solo in 1975 with his surreal concept album Welcome To My Nightmare, which was adapted into an elaborate stage show and a TV movie starring Vincent Price. Over the next four decades, Alice Cooper would release over a dozen albums, maintaining the character’s signature dark humour while dabbling in genres as diverse as heavy metal and new wave.

Golf Monster is populated with quirky anecdotes about the countless celebrities and cult icons Cooper hung around with over the years, including performer Liza Minnelli, actress Raquel Welch (who Alice rejected for his future wife, dancer Sheryl Goddard), surrealist Salvador Dali, and comedian Groucho Marx, with whom Alice developed a very close friendship. His strangest anecdote involves a night out with flamboyant pianist Liberace, who Alice claims adopted a completely different personality as soon as the fans left the room. He also recounts a disturbing meeting with Elvis Presley, who, Alice realized, was almost completely cut off from the outside world. “How sad this man was,” Cooper reflects. “He was such a big star that he had no life.”

Cooper also writes frankly about his life-threatening struggles with alcoholism. He was forced into a sanitarium after the end of his Nightmare tour and was sober for a few years before relapsing in the early 1980s. “I made four albums I hardly remember writing, recording, or touring on,” he admits. Faced with the potential dissolution of his marriage, Cooper re-entered rehab and gave up drinking permanently in 1983, after which he re-connected with his family and his faith.

Some of the book’s most interesting chapters discuss Cooper’s relationship to Christianity. Cooper, who was raised in a deeply evangelical home, occasionally incorporated religious themes into his music; after returning to the church in the 1980s, he released the more explicitly Christian concept album The Last Temptation, a hard-rock morality play which he calls “one of the best records I’ve ever made.”

“Ultimately, becoming a Christian became the most rebellious and risky thing I’ve ever done,” he writes, reflecting on the initially chilly reception he received when his religion became public knowledge.

Cooper himself initially struggled to reconcile his shock rock alter ego with his Christian faith – however, a conversation with his pastor convinced him that one didn’t negate the other. “The idea that I’m playing society’s villain is not inconsistent with my spiritual views,” he asserts. “In fact, both Alice and I maintain that what the world needs now is a gigantic hypodermic shot of morality and common sense, and satirizing the villainy in the world just might help.”

A preacher’s-kid-turned-shock-rock-villain who beat addiction; embraced religion; took up golf; and never stopped rocking, Alice Cooper has led an incredible, eclectic life. There was always more to Cooper than the murderous demon he plays convincingly onstage, and his book allows his humour, empathy, and moral convictions to shine through. Golf Monster is a briskly-paced repository of legendary stories, as well as reflections on addiction, religion, and Cooper’s musical philosophy. (And, of course, golf tips).