Any Alice Cooper Fans?

[BaronLatos35]

Huge Alice Cooper fan.  Watched him this last Halloween hosting a Munsters marathon.

That is very cool.

[BlackLagoon]

Not a huge fan of his music--mostly the big stuff that everyone likes.

I am huge on giving him the respect he deserves as a musician and a master theatrical entertainer.

Seems like a good, solid dude too!

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

I believe it is the scene were I guy and his girl are driving her parents RV and Jason actually gets aboard before they take off.  They here noises outside and get spooked and take off and then Jason does what he does best and the RV lands on its side and Jason gets out.

She goes to bathroom,where Jason is lurking,struggle begins, and Jason  rams her face into the wall, leaving her face imprint on the outside of the rv.
He then goes to the driver(boy) and shoves a screwdriver thru the dude's temple, then rv crashes on it's side.....

[hammerfan]

Love Alice.  and I know Dennis  and Neal the original bassist and drummer. They are the cousins of my best friend and they are nice guys. I met ALice at Cooperstown restaurant in Phoenix years ago. He was cool and happy to sign autographs and  chat with fans. If you ever get to Phoenix, it is right next to the Diamondbacks stadium.  try the Big Unit,  a gigantic  hot dog loaded with goodies. Named after Randy Johnson of course.

[Scatter]

SCHOOOOOOOOOOOL'S OUT.........FOR..........SUMMER!!

[general gruesome]

I really enjoy his stuff alot

[Nicole]

I adore Alice Cooper. I still have my "Welcome To My Nightmare" teddy bear, lurking around here somewhere.

[Dr. Madd]

I am a big Cooper fan! I've liked his work ever since I first heard it in the early 90's.

[raycastile]

I was never an Alice Cooper fan until recently.  Gen. Terry suggested I give his music a try, so I started listening to some of it.  Then I heard he and Rob Zombie were coming to town for a double bill concert.  I wanted to see Rob Zombie, so I bought a ticket as soon as I found out about it.  I had about a month or so to prepare myself by boning up on Alice Cooper.  I bought some "best of" compilations and some individual songs off iTunes.  After weeks of musical study, I was prepared to appreciate Cooper in concert.  

From just listening to his music, I couldn't fully appreciate what made him so special.  I had to see him live to really "get it."  If you just listen to the albums, you are only getting half the picture.  You really need to go to one of his shows.  It is a package deal.  I enjoyed seeing him live much more than just listening to the recordings.  Afterward, I bought the album version of the concert, "Theatre of Blood."  In most cases, I prefer the live tracks over the studio originals.

Still, I would not call myself a huge Alice fan.  I'm definitely a Rob Zombie fan, no doubt about it.  Alice is growing on me, but I don't think he will ever thrill me the way Zombie does.

Alice fits the mold of the 70s male recording artist, the cool loser, the guy who is always down on his luck, drowning in alcohol, getting stabbed in the back by women, but still maintains his dignity as a man.  Lots of 70s male singers embodied this character.  Most of them had porn star mustaches and their top shirt buttons unfastened, dark gold shades and a blazer slung over their shoulder as they strutted into the bar to drink away their latest heartbreak.  Alice does not fit this archetype visually (in fact, his appearance seems a conscious repudiation of this character), but he does fit it in spirit.  His lyrics are dripping with self pity, apathy, despair, down-and-out resignation, mixed with a bitter defiance.  But his thirst for revenge is tempered with the knowledge that it will be in vain.  He has no hope of attaining restitution, but he will go down trying.  At least he tells himself he will, before he takes another swig.

He reminds me of male vocalists from this period that I love, like Gordon Lightfoot and Warren Zevon.  They sang about booze-soaked losers who somehow maintained a swaggering machismo in the face of emptiness and heartbreak.  Alice seems to fit this style more than the typical hard rock or heavy metal from the same era.  He certainly doesn't look anything like them, but the music is coming from a similar place.  It was an interesting era, when being a loser did not preclude one from being a man, at least not in popular entertainment.  In fact, how one dealt with being a loser seemed to be the measure of a man.  Not just in music, but in movies.  Think of all the classic films about down-and-out men from the late 60s through the early 80s.  You don't see those kinds of films anymore, because the cultural values have changed.

That brings us to Rob Zombie.  There is nothing sensitive or soulful in his music.  It is gloriously, defiantly unsentimental, unemotional, uncaring, inhuman.  It is devil music.  It wants to kill you.  Rob's not going to swagger into the low-life bar with his jacket slung over his shoulder and drink his troubles away.  He's going to kick down the door and murder every man, woman, child and animal in the joint.  Murder them, then eat their bodies.  Then set the building on fire.  He's not going to sing about the woman who broke his heart.  He already ate her.  She's dead.  He's not singing about the emptiness and injustice of life.  What does he care?  The world is on fire.  It's the apocalypse and he is the living dead.

In his stage show, Alice constantly portrays himself as the victim.  He is usually the one getting beheaded, hanged, poisoned, strapped into a straight jacket, etc.  Even when he kills someone onstage, it is done with a sense of emotional pain and frustration.  It is presented as a tragedy.  And he usually suffers some kind of consequence for it, like being imprisoned or executed.  Then his victim returns to take revenge.  Alice's show is never about him getting the upper hand.  It is about his decent into a personal hell from which there is no reprieve.

Rob's show is about blowing up the world and telling the universe to go F itself.

It sounds like I have a deeper appreciation for Alice's music and stage show, but no.  I prefer Rob.  

I like Zombie's thundering rage, his nihilism, his explosiveness, his poisonous, acid-spewing, meat-grinding, bone-crunching, gatling blasting napalm shower of evil.  I like that his lyrics have nothing to do with real life.  He sings about monsters, movies, TV shows, meaningless mental static.  There's no plot, no scenario.  Just monsters, monsters, monsters, destruction, death and the devil.  I love it.

Personally, I identify more with Alice.  I identify with those 70s losers.  But I aspire to be an atomic-breathing, planet-crunching, man-eating devil monster.  So I prefer Rob Zombie.

[MDG]

This may be of interest to Alice fans:

http://dryden.eastmanhouse.org/films/2010/10/born-to-boogie-and-welcome-to-my-nightmare/

[Nicole]

Raymond, I had no idea that you hunger for the annihilation of all mankind. Thank goodness we are friends, so when you finally snap and go postal, I can count on you to say, "Get behind me Nicole! I wouldn't want you to get hurt!"

Yeah, there is no getting around it that Alice and Rob are products of their time. I will agree that Rob is cool and more relevant to our generation (and I'll give him bonus points for being a Coffin Joe fan). But for me, Alice has a certain hard-to-define charm that Rob lacks. Maybe it's the aforementioned fact that Alice's stage persona is a sympathetic one who doesn't take himself too seriously, or maybe it's the fact that, even as a sexagenarian, he is still killing himself on stage four times per show. I don't know.

Anyway, my favorite years of Alice's musical output are between 69 and 73, when the original band was still together, as well as Alice's first solo album, "Welcome to My Nightmare." They were a weird band for their time- they had all those catchy songs about necrophilia, murder, and dead babies -coupled with campy, vaudeville-inspired live shows, full of bloody executions, bubble solution and fake dollar bills. And sure, it all seems very tame now, but it scared the $%^& out of parents in those days.

But Alice's later solo stuff is an entirely different matter. Out of his 80's work, I like "DaDa," and the underrated "Special Forces." But around that time, he also made some truly cringe-worthy ballads (Might as Well Be on Mars... cough), typical songs full of sexual innuendo, and the odd bondage song, or two. Somewhere in the early 90's, he started doing songs with a more religious and moral slant, using Alice as a sort of Devil's advocate. I haven't really listened to much of the stuff that he has done since then. His last "recent" song that I kind of liked was probably "Sex, Death and Money" from "Dragontown."

So I'm not going to deny that Alice has put out some terrible songs (and records), but he's also made some great ones too. Some of his older songs are still surprisingly creepy. If you don't believe me, I urge you to listen to "I love the dead" and "Gail," and try not to get goosebumps.

[Unknown Primate]

Hey Nicole, it's been awhile since we've seen you here!

[marsattacks666]

Alice Cooper live in Detroit 1971 - Is It My Body


This particular song is the one that started my off as a Alice Cooper fan.

[raycastile]

Watched Dog Day Afternoon tonight, and now watching a documentary about Johnny Cash.  Both remind me of the things I posted earlier. 

Johnny's dead and they don't make movies like DDA anymore.  But Alice Cooper is still here, still doing his thing. 

I'm glad I got a chance to see him in concert.  It felt like the first time I visited the Ackermansion, like I was completing a rite of passage for a monster fan. 

[RedKing]

Im a huge Alice Cooper fan, have been since I was a little kid in the late 70s believe i or not! I just saw him in concert a couple of months ago(on his own, not with Rob Zombie unfortunately as I would love to have seen them both) and he was as great as ever!!