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My interview with Alice Cooper
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Posted by Jen1180 Fri Aug 1, 2008 14:35:49 MDT
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0 responses 1 comment Wednesday, July 30, 10:30 a.m.

ISJ: Hi, how are you?
Alice Cooper: I’m great, I lived through an earthquake yesterday.

ISJ: Oh yeah, how was that?
Cooper: We were in L.A. doing a video, I was right in the middle of strangling a  nurse and the floor started moving and I thought, ‘whoa, this is more powerful than I thought.’

ISj: So you had to re-do the whole thing?
Cooper: No, no, no, actually, hopefully they kept it because it’s like a special effect you can’t get again, ya know?

ISJ: True, true, I hadn’t thought about it that way! I’ve heard the new album, it’s very nice, very dark . . .
Cooper: Thank you.

ISJ: Tell me a little bit about it, it’s told from the point of view of a serial killer?
Cooper: Yeah, it’s from his diary, they find his diary. Each page is like a description or some kind of account of these murders, and you realize that he has fashioned himself after a spider. In an interesting, classy way, he is talking about how he wraps them in silk because a spider would do that. He even goes to the point of matching the color of their eyes to the silk. He doesn’t have any particular person that he kills, but he needs the eight legs, he always removes a leg because he needs eight legs for a spider. As a writer I think that it’s OK to get behind a fictitious serial killer because we’ve done it for a long time ya know, there’s nothing wrong with Darth Vader, we think Hannibal Lectar is interesting and cool, on the other hand it’s almost impossible to get behind a real serial killer. It’s really odd to sit there and go, ‘ya, Ted Bundy, that’s my guy!’ ‘Ya, I’m a Jeffrey Dahmar guy myself!’ So we really abhor real serial killers but for some reason we love our fictitious ones. This one of course, I tried to make him as interesting as possible, and then there’s a love story involved, where his eighth victim, he can’t kill, he needs that last leg but he can’t kill her because he is in love with her. That’s where “Killed by Love” comes in, he never saw that one coming. The twist ending of course is at the very end where he’s talking about, ‘they found my diary today.’ And then he goes, ‘we’ve been in this mental hospital for 28 years, we couldn’t have done any of this, then you realize that all these murders in the diary were part of a fantasy, they never happened, so that does give you that kind of sigh of relief and at the same time you go, ‘wait a minute, I gotta go back and listen to this again from that point of view.’

ISJ: Yeah, that’s true, I had to go back and listen to it again.
Cooper: I learned a little lesson from the “Sixth Sense.” After I saw the “Sixth Sense” I went, ‘Now I gotta go see it again!” Because, how could he be having a conversation? Then you realize nobody was talking to him. I like the twist ending, I try to do, I would say half of my albums, I try to make them a little Stephen King story, where there’s definitely some warped bad guy doing something, but there’s always that satisfying thing that he gets it in the end. If you can do that now, and do it to great music and really write great songs, to me, when I’m writing an album the story line’s written already so being the lyricist, I can make those lyrics do anything I want them to do. The hard part is making sure those songs are written well, making sure that the verse and the beat section and the pre-chours and the chorus are all saying the same thing that the lyrics are saying. When you can marry those two things together you’re gonna have a lot of good songs.

ISJ: So it’s one of those things that’s harder than it looks?
Cooper: Yeah, and then when you take the aspect of saying, ‘K, now I’ve got 12 songs that tell a story, what would happen if I take the seventh song and pull it out of the story? Does it still work?’ That’s another little trick to writing like that. Like say, in “Westside Story” you know the story about the two gangs and Tony and Maria and the whole thing, but if you pulled the song “Tonight” out and put it on the radio, it works. You don’t need to know the story to know that song worked, or “Maria” or any of those songs. Well, it’s the same with mine, on “Welcome to My Nightmare” we pulled “Only Women Bleed” out, and it worked, it totally worked on its own. You do have to be able to write and make sure that you keep it obscure enough it could work on its own. Especially when you are writing a specific story, if you make it too specific . . . certain songs on that album I know will not be radio songs so I can go way, really explicit with the lyrics to tell the story. There are other songs where I want to keep them really pretty general.

ISJ: So you have to kind of plan it all out ahead of time?
Cooper: Yeah, if you hear “Killed by Love” on the radio, you go, ‘Oh, what a great love song.’ You plug it into the story and you go, ‘Oh, this is sort of the soft side of this guy.’

ISJ: So the sound of this album, musically, is like a collaboration of almost everything you’ve done over the years, there’s songs that sound really modern and then songs that have kind of an ‘old school’ . . . (laughs) I don’t know what a better word for that is!
Cooper: That’s a good word because I think ‘old school’ works, it always does. Ya know, classic rock is so big right now. Maybe it’s because of Guitar Hero, I’m not sure. (laughs) At the same time I go down to the mall and I see kids walking down the mall, 15, 16-year-old kids, and I look at their T-shirts. Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and some of the more demented ones, Alice Cooper! (laughs) But, what are these kids doing listening to Deep Purple? They have their Blink 182s and their Green Days and their Panic at the Discos and yet their wearing these classic T-shirts. If you sit that kid down and say ‘Ok, here’s this new band called the Green Flamingos, they’re a brand new band, or “Smoke on the Water.’” Trust me, they’re gonna listen to “Smoke on the Water.”

ISJ: That’s true, very true. (laughs)
Cooper: That’s because . . . it’s all in the song writing. I wish more bands would sit down and direct the anger. I get it, you’re supposed to be angry at 16, 17, 18-years-old, but write a song abut it, don’t just yell at me. Ya know? I’m willing to accept the fact that you’re angry, but give me a song that I can get behind you on. You know, “My Generation,” “Eighteen” was an angst-driven song, but it was a song you could sing.

ISJ: Yeah, to me it seems like bands will come out with one song and they’re really huge for a few months and then they disappear whereas back in the day a band would come out with several albums and they would stick around for awhile.
Cooper: Look at the bands that are still here from that era: Bowie is still working, Ozzie is still working, Alice is still working, the Rolling Stones are perennial, they go on forever. Paul McCartney is still working. How many bands that are coming out today are gonna be working 45 years from now? None. The Foo Fighters if they want to stay together, they could be together forever, ya know, they are one of those bands that could do that because they write great songs. U2 has been together for an awfully long time, they could stay together for another 30 years, 20 years if they stay healthy. But there’s very few bands when you look around and you go, ‘Ok, how about this band here?’ and you go, ‘No, this is fast food, this is gonna spoil very quickly. It’s not gourmet food at all.’

ISJ: Why do you think that is?
Cooper: I just think they have to live right now. Ya know, ‘Give it to me now I gotta have it now because I know I’m gonna be gone tomorrow.’ We almost went through  a period  of gourmet rock, fast food rock. And everybody’s happy with the fast food rock because it’s immediate and it’s satisfying, but, OK, what’s next? And unfortunately that’s how we treat our bands. We go, ‘oh, that was good, what’s next?’ We don’t give that band a chance to make mistakes and to become a better band.

ISJ: It’s kind of a trend that’s happening with everything.
Cooper: It is, it really is. I would rather see a band stay together, ya know, I think we were together for six years before we ever saw a recording studio. I mean, we were playing bars and gigs and everything and so were a lot of bands. Aerosmith, bands like that were together a long time as a good stage band, live band before they ever recorded. These bands now they get together, they record before they’ve ever been on stage.

ISJ: That’s true, and they kind of burn out faster.
Cooper: But there is a good trend. The other day I gave the, I was doing the nomination awards in London for the classic rock magazine and one of the nomination spots was “Best New Band” and they showed video clips of these six, seven bands. Every band was a Guns N’ Roses type garage band. Low slung guitars, a lot of attitude, snotty, rock and roll, and I went, ‘that’s good!’ I want to see more of that, because that’s really the essence of rock and roll. The Rolling Stones were just snotty punks. And they still are! When rock starts getting too sophisticated I worry.  The thing about it is, when we go on tour and we do 28 rock and roll songs, the difference is when we do our show, we bring a lot more to it, we bring a lot of theatrics to it. It may be scary in points, it may be very funny in other places. I try to make it so that when the audience walks away they go, ‘That was the best party I’ve been to in a long time! And how did I get stage blood all over me? And how did I get confetti in my hair? And somehow I’ve got one of Alice’s writing props. What a party!’

ISJ: I can’t wait for the show, it’s gonna be great.
Cooper: It really is a lot of fun. When we get done with a show, I realize that every night I am having a really good time. If I’m having fun, the audience has got to be having fun.

ISJ: It’s great that you still love doing what you do.
Cooper: Oh yeah, and I tell the band, I say, ‘guys, this is the last and first show you’re ever gonna do. I want every bit of that excitement on this show tonight.’ So my band gives me 110 percent every night.

ISJ: Wow, that’s great!
Cooper: So it’s an all out high energy show.

ISJ: Ok, well I better get back to letting you do what you were doing, I know you’re a really busy guy.
Cooper: On our way to Portland tonight.

ISJ: Portland is a beautiful city.
Cooper: Oh yeah.

ISJ: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
Cooper: Well, thank you very much.

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Comment From: Portnuef

Wow. Good interview.