Alice Cooper is telling me about a goat. At the Bloodstock festival,
which he has just been to, everyone, he says, was talking about a goat.
“The story,” he says, with a smile that shows his big, white, even
teeth, “is that someone's sacrificed a goat in their dressing room. And
I,” he says, and his smile gets bigger, “am going, 'why wouldn't you do
that on stage?'”.
The goat, it turns out, was already dead. It was actually just a
goat's head, from a local butcher's. But the goat sounds a bit like the
chicken that helped to make Alice Cooper Alice Cooper. It was thrown on
stage in 1969, when Alice Cooper was the name of a band and Vincent
Furnier was its lead singer. Feathers flew. Blood flowed. A myth was
born.
Vincent Furnier, who has called himself Alice Cooper since
the band broke up, didn't actually bite the head off the chicken. “I
threw it at the audience,” he tells me, “the audience threw it back and
the next day in the paper I read that I'd killed the chicken. I thought,
well, the deed's been done, and people love it. I never said I did it
or didn't.” Technically, that's true. Vincent Furnier, who I'll try to
call Alice Cooper, even though it does seem a bit weird to call a man
Alice, didn't say he did it, but he certainly let the world believe he
did. He did that because his agent, Shep Gordon, who's still his agent
43 years on, told him it would be good “for publicity”. And it was. Mary
Whitehouse tried to stop the band from coming to Britain. The Home
Secretary tried to get the British tour banned. But the fans loved it,
and sales soared.
The fans loved it, too, when Furnier and his
band members started performing with boa constrictors. The snakes didn't
die, or at least they didn't die on stage. One died of pneumonia.
Another spent its last hours in a toilet drain in a Tennessee hotel. But
most of the blood, and gore, and death on stage when Alice Cooper
performed wasn't real. The babies with their heads chopped off weren't
real. Nor were the live executions. Cooper (the man) has, he says,
returned from the dead “about 60,000 times”. He'll do it again in his
new tour, for Hallowe'en.
“We're doing better tours now than we
ever did,” he tells me, in the tones some Americans use when you ask
them how they are and they tell you that they're “great”. He looks
pretty good, it's true, sitting on this sofa, in a posh boutique hotel.
The black jacket, and black T-shirt, and dyed black hair, and crucifix,
don't make him look any less pale, or wrinkled. But for someone who has
been on the road for quite a lot of the past 48 years, he looks pretty
damn good.
But better tours now than he ever did? At 64? “Oh,
absolutely,” says Cooper, calmly. “When I was 30, I was a mess. I was
drinking a bottle of whisky a day. I did shows that weren't anywhere
near as good as the shows I do now...”
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