Alice Cooper at the Enmore Theatre
27 September 2011Last night was living legend night: Alice Cooper. I’ve never before seen the master of shock rock, the inventor of gig theatre spectacle, play live. But last night I saw a wrinkled, potbellied 63-year old do everything that rock ‘n’ roll is about.
Nice hat. Image from sezzles via Creative Commons license.
It’s always been clear to me that the best rock is big, dumb (but in a clever tongue-in-cheek way), brash, and ugly. And that’s Alice and his live show to a tee. He’s undoubtedly doing it by numbers now, but those numbers are hilariously bizarre and catchy. No one can tell me that “I’m Eighteen” isn’t one of the best rock songs ever recorded: it perfectly expresses the youth and alienation we’ve all felt.
He’s doing the same songs every night on this tour, but I thought it was a pretty good selection. Alice knows when his golden era was, and half of the songs come from Billion Dollar Babies, Killer, and Welcome To My Nightmare.
Highlights: opener “The Black Widow” with eight-legged jacket; “Only Women Bleed” followed by “Cold Ethyl” (with a loved/abused mannequin the object of Alice’s crooning); a full psychedelic version of “Halo Of Flies”; a monster-stomping “Feed My Frankenstein”; “I’m Eighteen”; the metal tune “Brutal Planet”; a selection from his New Wave phase, “Clones (We’re All)”.
What didn’t work: I’ve never liked the song “Billion Dollar Babies”; “Hey Stoopid”; the guitar mix (there were three) was pretty muddy, and the sound board often didn’t switch in time with the solos.
Alice sounded better than I expected, not that he ever had dulcet tones. He strutted, and swirled his cane, and was decapitated, and brandished a sword, and impaled a music journalist, and did all the amazing rock spectacle things that we wanted from an Alice Cooper show. Sure, a lot of it would be considered trite if someone else did it, but he invented this stuff.
The lesson: be more creative, and don’t take yourself too seriously. And songs about loving dead people are big crowd-pleasers.
