A chat with Alice Cooper

Documentary film on legendary shock-rock pioneer-turned-devout-Christian screens here tonight and Thursday.  (4-30-2014)

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Shock-rock pioneer Alice Cooper has long been known for his seemingly death-defying stage act, which has seen him repeatedly undergo his own hanging and beheading. But as his new “shock doc” movie, “Super Duper Alice Cooper,” makes vividly clear, his offstage antics — specifically, his nonstop drinking and, later on, cocaine abuse — brought him much closer to actually dying.

“The cocaine part I never, ever copped to before, because I thought it was so uncool to do coke,” Cooper, 66, said from his Phoenix home. “And, yet, I had an addictive personality. Alcohol was the bulk of my addiction. Cocaine was a small percentage; alcohol was my poison.”

“Super Duper Alice Cooper”

 The movie screens tonight and Thursday night at various theaters in San Diego County. Then comes what is likely the singer’s biggest concert here (or at least his concert here at the biggest area venue) in memory. On July 30, Cooper will perform at Sleep Train Amphitheatre with Mötley Crüe, one of many bands that cite his highly theatrical performances and gender-bending, convention-flouting approach as a key inspiration.

The movie suffers from an array of omissions, beginning with the fact that only two of the Alice Cooper band’s four other original members are interviewed (and only two are credited) in the movie, which appear to be a fairly low budget affair. Elton John, to cite another example, is heard singing Cooper’s praises, but not seen. Moreover, the movie abruptly ends with Cooper’s mid-1980s comeback, nearly a quarter-century before he and Alice Cooper (the band of the same name that he led) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Nor is any mention made of his love of golf (he plays six days a week, religiously, and has a handicap of 4), apart from a brief allusion by Johnny Rotten, who famously auditioned for the Sex Pistols by lip-syncing Cooper’s 1970 breakthrough hit, the teen angst-fueled “Eighteen.” Also missing is even a mention of the “Hollywood Vampires,” Cooper’s mid-1970s group of drinking buddies, which included Who drummer Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, erstwhile Monkees’ member Micky Dolenz and, at times, John Lennon (during the former Beatle’s infamous “lost weekend” period).

“It’s a bit of a mythological, legendary thing, because nobody can ever attest to what went on,” Cooper said. “It’s like Woodstock. People will say: ‘I was at Woodstock,’ but there’s no way to prove it.”

This seems a bit disingenuous. The booze-fueled antics of the “Vampires” was nearly as well-documented as the outrage Cooper created with such songs as “Dead Babies” and “I Love the Dead,” and with his band’s ability, soon after moving from Phoenix to Hollywood in the late 1960s, to almost instantly clear a room by performing just one song. (That quality, incidentally, influenced former San Diegan Frank Zappa’s decision to sign the Alice Cooper band to its first record deal.)

But Cooper’s candor on camera about his rise to fame and fortune in the early 1970s and his near-fatal fall, when the over-the-top stage character he created became an alcoholic, 24/7 reality, are what make “Super Duper Alice Cooper” a worthwhile (and very cautionary) tale about rock ‘n’ roll stardom. The movie concludes with his eventual return to the stage in 1986, after he regained his sobriety, his marriage and, quite possibly, his sanity.

“The fact is that my addictive personality almost ruined it all,” affirmed the veteran singer (real name: Vincent Furnier), whose father was a pastor.

“And, yet, I came back and… did the first show as Alice Cooper (sober). Well, there are two Alice Coopers. When I look at the (movie), I see the victim, Alice, the character, who was the alcoholic, beat-down, whipping boy they cut the head off, while I was wearing a straitjacket. And all the disenfranchised kids out there, who didn’t listen to Crosby Stills & Nash, were our fans. They were bullied — the artistic freak kids were our fans.

“Then, when I got sober, I couldn’t play Alice that way anymore. So, I decided Alice would be an arrogant villain. I wanted Alice to be Captain Hook, the Sheriff of Nottingham, this horrifically over-the-top, arrogant bastard. And the audience loved that character because he was the next generation Alice Cooper. People thought this (new) Alice Cooper would go down in flames, like all the others guys, now he’s back and he’s this strong, dominant guy. And, instead of the audience beating him up (like before), now he’s beating up the audience. I think my audience liked that.”

The movie kicks off with what might best be described as a redemptive mea culpa by Cooper. He has been a devout Christian ever since he became sober and often speaks to church groups with his wife, Sheryl, whom he married in 1976.

“In my heart,” Cooper says, as the movie begins, “I always knew what was right. I never had a doubt of who God was or who the devil was. Because of that, I had a moral compass. There were things I wouldn’t do and maybe I created Alice to do those things…”

While some rock stars may shy away from religion, he is not one of them. When asked to elaborate on his beliefs, Coper was happy to do so.

“I’m one of the only guys not trying to put a gray area on (religion),” said the man once accused of being a Satanist, a practitioner of voodoo, and worse.

“Everybody says: ‘It’s subjective about what this is, or that is.’ I grew up with straight Bible teaching: ‘This is God, this is the devil.’ It’s very plain to me. There’s a little more complexity to being Christian. Most people think it’s about worshiping the church, which it’s not. It’s about having a one-on-one relationship with God. I certainly believe in good and that the source of evil is Satan.”

Why, then, are his religious beliefs not accorded more time in the movie?

“We did 50 hours of interviews,” he replied. “What ended up with in the film is what is the best story, so many parts didn’t make the cut. But they made a great documentary, while leaving out all the stereotypical things, the talking heads, and connecting it with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is me and Alice, the character.

“I have the (Phoenix-based) Solid Rock Foundation, which gets kids out of gangs and off the streets, and learning (to play musical) instruments. We’re getting 100 kids a day at Solid Rock and it’s all free. And that’s basically what I’m called to do. I have the opportunity, as a rocker and a Christian, and I’m called to help out kids who would get shot, killed or be on heroin. It’s not a religious thing, it’s the right thing to do.

“When my wife and I talk in churches, we tell the same kind of story each time. I say: ‘Look, I did everything. I was the prodigal son. And in the end, I looked at how many houses can you have? How many cars can you have? What are you really looking for?’ Ultimately, I was looking for a way back to what I believed. It didn’t mean I had to stop being ‘Alice Cooper.’

“If somebody says: ‘Do you want to play Macbeth?’, nobody has a problem with that. But if you say: ‘Do you want to play Alice Cooper?, people say: ‘No, you can’t do that!’ And Macbeth is 100 times worse than Alice.”