Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 78

AE4 SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 201 1 FROM THE COVER THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC Alice Cooper helped inspire Arizona artists -fl- 1 1 fete' 2s 'v' By Larry Rodgers The Arizona Republic Alice Cooper, or Vince Furnier to those who have known him since high school, has touched the lives of many fellow Arizona musicians, both on and off the stage. Here is what notable Arizona artists have to say about their musical compatriot, who lives in Paradise Valley when he's not on the road staging his over-the-top concerts: Cris Kirkwood, Meat Puppets "Alice always has held a pretty special place in my heart because I grew up in Sunnyslope in north Phoenix (not far from Cortez High School, which Cooper attended). He is on the same level in Phoenix as (local TV icons) Wallace and Ladmo. The first concert I ever went to was Alice, on his 'Welcome to My Nightmare' (solo) tour in the mid-'70s." Scott Johnson, Gin Blossoms "I remember I was still kind of young, I think in junior high. Alice played here around 1977.

Our old- pr hrnthprs wprp all From left: Shep Gordon, manager, bassist Dennis Dunaway, Alice Cooper and drummer Neal Smith gather Pudding charity concert at Comerica Theatre on Dec. 18 in Phoenix, jim louvauspecial for the republic Bandmates recall good times backstage at Cooper's Christmas and bad Svk I going to the show. It wouia oe nKe uz coming now. He was that big. I also remember when he was, on 'Don Scott Johnson Kirshner's Rock Concert' (on 1970s television).

It wasn't like now, where there are all those music channels." Steve Larson, rock and roots guitarist and singer "Alice always had a great band, stage presence and great songs. He has the ability to leave his ego onstage, where it belongs. He has a spectacular, over-the-top, bigger-than-life persona onstage and is a super-intelligent, down-to-earth nice guy offstage." Dennis Rowland, jazz and singer "He rocks in a number of ways. He involved with charities around town. His shows might be a little strange, but you have to go with an open mind.

I saw him (perform) once. Whoa!" Chuck Hall, the Chuck Hall Band Dennis Rowland ALICE COOPER Continued from AE1 Pioneering theatrics It took some work to get from that high-school talent show to "Billion Dollar Babies." Long before they'd hit the mainstream with their breakthrough single, "I'm Eighteen," Cooper, Buxton and Dunaway honed their chops in the cafetorium, rocking the sounds of the British Invasion as the Earwigs. The ghoulish theatrics that be- came their calling card already had taken root at their first proper gig a Cortez Halloween dance. "In our journalism class, we had a guillotine," Cooper recalls, with a laugh, "and any- body that was late with an assignment got put in the guillotine for five minutes as sort of a laughable punishment. So when we went onstage that day, I said, 'Let's bring the They also made some giant spider webs from clothesline and coffins from cardboard.

"We were just trying to be who we were, but it was in our DNA to be theatrical. So when we did get the chance to be more and more theatrical, we just kept inventing stuff. "I said, 'As long as we keep doing things nobody's ever done and we're a great band? I think that's going to work in our Retaining the web as a backdrop and changing their name to the Spiders, they recruited Bruce, a North High football player, and scored a big regional hit with a single called "Don't Blow Your Mind." After changing their name yet again, to the Nazz, they relocated to Los Angeles in 1967, where Smith, a Camel-back High grad who'd been in art classes with Dunaway, Cooper and Buxton at Glen-dale Community College, joined on drums. "There were thousands of bands that had migrated there, and the competition was tough," Dunaway recalls. "The only way to stand out, as we saw it, was to come up with something different.

So we started pushing the limits." That made them a natural signing with Straight, a label run by limit-pushing rock iconoclast Frank Zappa. "The guys in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band told us Frank Zappa was starting a label," Bruce says. "They said, 'Frank likes weird stuff. Maybe he'll like you bodyguards were erecting a wall between the singer and his longtime friends. "Alice didn't know," Dunaway says.

"He was deep into the bottle, and they hired bodyguards that wouldn't let us in to see him. They would tell us that he wasn't there when I would call his room. And then I would go walking down the hall, the door would be open and I'd see Alice sitting there. "But I still didn't believe the band was breaking up. I didn't think it was possible." Then Cooper cut a solo album, "Welcome to My Nightmare," in part because Bruce had decided to do a solo album.

And when "Nightmare" proved to be a hit, as Cooper says, "I was off in a different direction." As often happens in these situations, who did what and why can depend on who's talking. Cooper says, "We'd been working together side-by-side since we were sophomores in high school in 1965. So this was nine years of never being separated. And finally it got to that point where it just felt like I was going in one direction and everybody else was going in a different direction. "We got to the next project and I said, 'Well, I have an idea for I was going to do 'Welcome to My Nightmare' and it was going to be 'If they thought "Billion Dollar Babies" was outrageous, wait until they see And I kind of got the feeling of 'Why don't we just split the money Smith and Dunaway say "Nightmare" was a solo album from the word go, with the understanding that they'd all get back together and record another album after Cooper had a chance to do his thing.

But that's not how it all played out, with the singer enjoying continued success through such Top 40 smashes as "Only Women Bleed," "I Never Cry" and "You and Me." What made the breakup even tougher on his former bandmates is that Cooper's solo albums could be credited to Alice Cooper, whereas Paul McCartney records didn't say the Beatles on the cover. When Bruce, Smith and Dunaway tried to form their own connection to the Alice Cooper brand, releasing an album they'd written in anticipation of their singer coming back as Billion Dollar Babies, their efforts went largely unnoticed and the album disappeared By the time they auditioned for Zappa, they'd been through one final name change, finding inspiration in a Ouija Board. "We were over at our friends," Smith says, "this all-girl band from Scottsdale or Paradise Valley. Vince sat down and asked the Ouija Board his name in a previous life, and it spelled out Alice Cooper. I thought that was kind of funny." Their first two stabs at putting Alice Cooper on the map, 1969's "Pretties for You" and the next year's "Easy Action," failed to set the world afire.

But after relocating to Detroit and finding an ideal producer in Bob Ezrin, the Alice Cooper sound fell into place on the 1971 album, "Love It to Death," which spawned the single, "I'm Eighteen" and was reissued by their new home, Warner Bros. Alice Cooper's mainstream infiltration was complete when they kicked off the following summer with a Top 10 smash called "School's Out," a summertime anthem that still resonates with anybody waiting for that final bell to ring each school year. For as shocking as their onstage antics had become with Cooper strapped to an electric chair or hanging from the gallows after mutilating baby dolls the bigger shock may be that he could spend his nights like that and still have pop hits in the morning. "There's always an interest in that guy that doesn't fit in," Cooper says. "There were tons of Peter Pans in rock and roll and no Captain Hook.

And we would gladly be that. But that made our job a little harder, because we had offended everybody who could be offended." Wedge of fame Making Cooper's baby-killing Captain Hook the focus of the show had been a group decision, but with every passing execution, the spotlight seemed to shine less and less on his supporting cast. And not just metaphorically. "We used to take all these old theater lights on the road, these heavy iron lights," Dunaway says. "So when we hit the last note of a song, everything went pitch dark and you didn't see anything until the first note of the next song.

It was a major part of our show. "Then, all of the sudden, the lights aren't on us. They're only on Alice." At the same time, Cooper's "Alice is a big golfer, and so am I. Our band did an appearance on Channel 12 (KPNX) one time, the same day that Alice was there. They filmed him hitting golf balls off the roof of the building.

I wanted to go up there and hit some with him." Chris Hansen Orf, Zen Lunatics "My dad took me to see Alice at the Arizona State Fair in 1980, when I was a freshman in high school and I was just learning how to play guitar. I'd seen Boston a year earlier, which was my first concert, but that in no way prepared me for the show Alice put on. I had no idea rock and roll could be so theatrical, and to this day it's still one of the most memorable shows I've ever seen." Michael Johnnv without a trace. Bonds of friendship Whatever feelings of resentment or betrayal there were at the.time, they haven't let those emotions undermine the bonds of friendship they formed in their teens. Howard Kramer, curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, says that kind of friendship is rare among bands.

"The fact that they've stayed friends is a real testimony to the respect they have for one another," he says. In 1999, the four surviving members played a six-song set at Alice Cooperstown, the singer's restaurant in downtown Phoenix, their first performance since Cooper went solo in '75. Last December marked their second Christmas Pudding set. And Cooper brought them in last year to do some work with producer Ezrin on a sequel to his solo breakthrough, titled "Welcome 2 My Nightmare." For Dunaway, that session felt just like the old days or as much as it could without Buxton. "I was extremely pleased," he says.

"It really jumped back to the original way the band functioned. We were missing Glen, but we set up a little shrine for him. I brought in one of his vintage Fender amplifiers and we set it on a stool with a little bottle of Seagram's 7 in front of it and a vase of red roses. So Glen was there in spirit. "We would throw out ideas and try them, and then we would decide whether everybody liked them or not.

It really picked up as if nothing had happened. "And that's how our friendships have always been. I enjoy being around Alice and he seems to enjoy being around us. We joke around just like we used to. And that's because we were all friends before we were a band." Cooper says he'd like to do more shows together after the induction not a 50-city tour, just a handful of dates for the fun of it.

And that's exactly what they're having. "To me, it's a lot of fun playing with Neal, Mike and Dennis again," Cooper says. "We're like lifelong friends." Reach the reporter at ed.masleyarizonarepubltc.com or 602-444-4495. farm near Pontiac, "I'm Eighteen" would become their first Top 40 hit, making "Love It to Death," their first album together, the breakthrough they desperately needed. Ezrin stayed on as producer through the Cooper band's entire run and well into the singer's solo career, resulting in singles as timeless as "School's Out" and albums as classic as "Killer." And as catchy as those hits were, they retained their eccentricities.

"There were still insane parts," Ezrin says. "But they were slightly less insane after I got through with them. I didn't want to homogenize them. I didn't want them to sound like everybody else. And I think we developed a sound that was unique to Alice Cooper.

"When they came on the radio, you knew who it was." Walker, Love Me Nots "I remember seeing Alice Cooper for the first time in 79 or '80. It was an extravagant freak show and a life-altering experience. I grew up listening to Alice, but seeing that group live made me want to play cuitar in a rock-and- Michael Johnny Walker roll band. I thought it was so cool that Alice was from Phoenix. He was one of the biggest acts in the world, and he belonged to us." Rich Brydle, Cold Short and the Hurricane Horns "I have been a big fan since the 'Pretties for You' album introduced to me in 1969 when I was an eighth-grader in Scottsdale.

Vince and the band have been a meaningful inspiration to Arizona musicians because, besides (playing) great and consistent rock and roll, the original bandmates grew up here and they have embraced their hometown. Vince continues to promote an 'arts and entertainment' awareness within Arizona and brings attention to our state." Producer helped the band turn crazy into commercial Bob Corritore, Rhythm Room All-Stars "On top of being a pop-music legend, Alice has done great things in our community with his Christmas Pudding benefit concerts. I had the pleasure of Bob Corritore dreds of musical moments that were special and unique and strung together in the most unusual ways unfortunately, not very accessible in their form to the general audience. "So that was my job. I wanted them to keep inventing and keep being crazy and keep coming up with insane, unusual, unique ideas.

And it was my job to help them coalesce that into something commercially viable." The members of the band were more than happy to oblige. They'd been starving, after all. As Bruce says, invoking the name of the Beatles' producer, "I think everybody in the band realized this was the guy who could be our George Martin." And he was. Recorded after woodshed-ding with Ezrin on a rented Ezrin recalls. "And somewhere in that big long jam, I heard that chorus.

When I met the band, I said, 'We're going to do this. We're going to work with you guys. And I love that song, "Edgy." Ezrin laughs. "They look at me like, I said, 'You know, "I'm edgy and I don't know what I want." They said, 'No, it's "I'm 18." I said, 'Well, even The problem, Ezrin says, was that the line he loved was buried in the middle of a free-form jam. "They were an art-rock band when I met them," Ezrin says, "with a very heavy emphasis on art.

They were unfettered by concerns of getting on the radio or fitting anybody's formula. "They'd created these hun By Ed Masley The Arizona Republic Things were looking grim for Alice Cooper and his band-mates after their second album, "Easy Action," failed to chart. They'd left Los Angeles for Detroit and, as guitarist Michael Bruce explains, "By that time, we had two failed albums. I wouldn't say but they certainly didn't sell. "So we were looking for a producer who could really make the ideas that we had for the songs come alive." As luck would have it, the producer sent to check them out in New York City was Bob Ezrin.

And they blew his mind. "The first show that I ever saw, in 1970 at Max's Kansas City, they played 'I'm Eigh playing at one with Jessi Colter. I admire how Alice puts an investment into his community." Adam Clark, Jazz drummer "If I could last half as long as that guy has, I'd be doing something right! We opened up for his son's (Dash) band one time, and Alice got up and sang with them. That was fun to watch. He seems like one of those guys who did not forget about people once he became a real star." Reach the reporter at lany.rodgers arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8043.

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