SUPER DUPER ALICE COOPER BY ERIC IAN STEELE

The first time I saw Alice Cooper was on a TV “documentary” about life after death. The show used rock music videos to illustrate its points. We’re talking about the late 1970s, when the mysticism of Woodstock still hung in the air like incense. One part of the show featured the story of a man who claimed he had “died” only to have visions of a hellish afterlife, until a bright light called him back to his body and he woke up on a mortuary slab, much to the surprise of the staff.

The rock video chosen to depict this was Welcome to My Nightmare. In my memory, we see the spirit of a rather bewildered, innocent-looking Alice who gets separated from his body, a wandering soul doomed to intangibility and tormented by the damnations of Hell. At the end of his ordeal Alice is reunited with his body and returns to the land of the living. At least, that’s how I remember it. To my five or six year old brain, this was a truly haunting experience. One that has forever coloured my perceptions of Alice Cooper.

Cut to the 1980s:

Alice has a genuine renaissance thanks to hits like “Poison”. No longer Mr Not-So-Nice-Guy, he becomes a horror celebrity, a sardonic showman able to poke fun at his own image.

Cue a montage of tongue-in-cheek moments – Alice playing a homicidal tramp in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness; Alice in Wayne’s World 2 singing Feed My Frankenstein on a stage worthy of Spinal Tap. In the new millennium Alice appears with cosy British comedian Ronnie Corbett in a TV advertising campaign where they both act like an old married couple, drinking tea in an English drawing room.

How did we get from point A to point B? How did Alice go from the dark, surreal icon that outraged the hippies to the comedic boogeymen of today?
Alice’s personal story is the classic arc of rock’n’roll temptation and redemption. But it’s one I only found out about recently by watching the movie biopic: Super Duper Alice Cooper.

Alice was born Vincent Fernier, son of a pastor in Detroit before heading out west to L.A. in the late 1960s with the band that would become Alice Cooper. Somewhere down the line the band fell away, Alice took the name, and became a superstar. The film documents Alice’s early life, subsequent rock stardom, battles with alcohol and drugs, and his rehabilitation into the grinning ghoul we know today.

Is it fascinating? Sure. It’s packed with factoids and photographs. A nice touch is how the movie is interspersed with scenes from Jekyll and Hyde, showing how Vincent created the domineering character of Alice only to have it gradually swallow him up, plunging him into rock’n’roll excess before he came out the other side with the Hyde personality under control…. as long as he is allowed to vent on stage.

One memorable highlight is the notorious “chicken incident” which involved the brutal murder of said fowl when the band opened for John Lennon at Toronto in 1969. Another is the meeting between Alice and Salvador Dali, who made a hologram entitled Alice Cooper’s Brain. And of course, there’s The Muppets.

There are also scenes that are quite hard to watch. After a bout of alcoholism, Cooper got sober only to fall prey to a more lethal variety of temptation in the shape of cocaine. It’s quite distressing to see him appear on camera, skeletal and obviously dying, until he somehow claws his way out of the pit of addiction. Fortunately, the story ends happily, with Alice’s resurrection in the ‘Eighties into the sly horror rocker we know today.

There are significant gaps in the story, though. Vincent’s early life is mentioned, but his relationship with his family is never examined in detail. And while his split with the original band isn’t glossed over, the truth is hard to find amid all the conflicting accounts. Alice’s marital breakup is also alluded to but never explored. I got the sense there was a whole lot more to Alice Cooper than meets the eye. But I guess even rock stars deserve some privacy.

I met Alice at a convention last year and I have to say he’s a thoroughly nice chap. Pleasant, sociable, gracious, and brimming with tales about the many celebrities he’s met over the years. His Elvis Presley story is a corker. When a young boy asked him to sing School’s Out to celebrate summer break, the convention host excused Alice from performing, but Alice ignored him and rattled out a few bars, to thunderous applause. That was class.

Watching the movie, I was left wondering if this sensitive preacher’s son found the only way to deal with constantly playing the bad guy offstage and on was to intoxicate himself. To his credit, he found a way out by himself. Alice says he decided when young that if he became hugely famous he wanted to be one of the nice guys. Ironically for the prince of horror rock, that is exactly what he has become.