Alice Cooper rocks out with the ‘Too Close to Comfort’ tour at The Palace Theatre
ALBANY — School may be out, but Alice Cooper has only just arrived at The Palace Theatre on Wednesday, July 31 with the Too Close for Comfort tour. With evocative imagery, bold theatrics, and albums of music that have defined the genre of rock itself, Alice Cooper wears the crown as the “Godfather of Shock Rock.”
He can trace a direct path between this tour and his childhood, when he was first inspired to pursue music. “I was the perfect age for Beatlemania,” said Cooper. He listened to everything from The Beach Boys to Motown, but The Beatles struck a particular chord within him at just the right moment in his life.
“The songs were so good that, at fifteen, I went, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” he said.
Decades later, his career has exceeded even the wildest dreams of a young band just breaking into the industry. “Nobody expected any band at that point to last more than a year. You weren’t expecting 55 years later to still be on tour,” he said.
“At that point, you never even thought about being on tour; you were just going to play parties and bars. The next thing you know, you stay with it, you learn, and all of a sudden you’re on tour,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, records are selling. We were at the perfect time; we were at the golden age of making records and selling records.”
Cooper was born in Detroit, Michigan, as Vincent Damon Furnier, a name that serendipitously mirrors actor Vincent Price, an alluring figure of theatrical villainy that has memorably been incorporated into Cooper’s shows and work over the years.
These vaudeville, Broadway, and classic horror elements interested Cooper early in his career. When he first brought five of his friends together to start their band, he noted how, even early on, “there was always something very theatrical about us. It stayed with us until this day.”
With this drive as a deeply visual artist, just singing the songs has never been enough for Cooper or for his wife, dancer and performer Sheryl Cooper (née Goddard), who is a co-director of the show. “I try to make the lyrics come to life,” said Cooper. “If you say ‘welcome to my nightmare’, don’t just play it; give them the nightmare.”
He falls back on a word that hearkens back to this classic style of performing: “It was more ‘vaudeville’: a dark, comedic vaudeville,” he said. “It was just natural. I was a big fan of horror movies and swashbuckling. It just came out.”
He observed how in the 1970’s, it seemed easier to shock the audience; the mere presence of the character, with dramatic makeup and an ‘otherworldly’ disconnect from the world around him, was enough to inspire fear, mystery, and intrigue.
“Everybody was really freaked out about this character,” Cooper laughed. “Then, when they saw the show, they realized it’s a production. There’s a story going on; it’s not just a rock and roll show.”
The character of Alice Cooper, the shocking provocateur onstage, is a role that Cooper has spent decades learning how to play and understand. The character’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘condescension’ are “what you want your villain to be,” mused Cooper.
“To me, it’s so much fun to play a character that you’re nothing like. Alice is nothing like me,” said Cooper. “You want him to be sort of comically overblown.”
During the show, he draws and experiments with the line between reality and fiction. “At the end of the show, you let the audience in on the fact that now it’s time to talk to you… Alice never talks to the audience because if he did, he would be human, and I don’t want Alice to be human,” said Cooper. “People want Alice to be this mysterious character. He should be. When he’s onstage, he does what he does.”
After over four decades of sobriety and self-reflection that he credits to stemming from his Christian faith, Cooper made a vital realization about the persona. “When I got onstage, it took a while for me to understand that I was playing a character named Alice Cooper,” he said. “I invented this character, and I never knew where the gray area was, where I ended up, and he started.”
“I realized that the character does not want to live in this world. He wants to live up on stage. So I play him,” he added. “During the day, I’m just me. When I get onstage, I become this character. I put the makeup on and the show. As soon as the show is over, Alice is gone until the next show.”
To Cooper, the theatrics would feel empty if there wasn’t the music to support them. He firmly believes that an artist must have a catalog of work to elevate the performance to an even higher level of artistry.
“You can’t last this long in rock and roll if you don’t have the songs,” he emphasized. He praised the close-knit band that has toured with him during ‘Too Close for Comfort’. “That’s always going to be the number one thing that you have to have. You have to have hit records and a band that absolutely kills the audience every night.”
Cooper considers the tour to be one of their best yet. “This show is, in a lot of ways, a lot sharper than the others. It’s faster-paced and seems to move really quickly from song to song.”
Whether it’s ’Eighteen’, ‘Poison’, or ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’, the audience is passionate every single time, and Cooper loves to provide that experience for them. “I know that from Europe to Australia to South America to Canada— it doesn’t matter where you are; I know the songs they’re going to react to and what songs they’ll sing along to,” he said.
“School’s Out’ is the final song in the show, because you can’t get a bigger anthem than that. Everybody sings along to that,” said Cooper. “At the end, everyone walks away, going, ‘That was the best party I’ve been to.”
It’s that connection to the audience that keeps Cooper motivated to tour. He believes that the best review of the show is the audience’s response, and he has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.
“The ‘retirement’ word is not even in my vocabulary. I can’t even imagine retiring,” he said. “To me, I feel more at home onstage than I do offstage. My wife does, too. Show business is in both of our blood… It’s in your bones.”
