T RM24
HE LAST TIME WE SAW ALICE COOPER, HE WAS HACKING THE LIMBS OFF OF DEAD BODIES AND USING THEM TO BUILD A GIANT ARACHNID.
Or at least that’s what his latest fictional character was doing on the 2008 serial killer
concept album Along Came a Spider. The fate of the Spider character was originally slated to be explored in a sequel titled Night Shift, but those plans were derailed last year when legendary Canadian producer and Cooper collaborator Bob Ezrin (see p. 26) reminded the aging shock rocker that it was the 35th anniversary of that other horror concept album – the iconic 1975 classic Welcome to My Nightmare. To make a follow-up worthy of the groundbreaking original, Cooper looked to his storied past, gathering up the pieces that made him both a mainstream music icon and a cult hero, in order to build another lasting rock ’n’ roll monster. Of course, any rock and horror fan worth his greasepaint knows a thing or two
about Welcome to My Nightmare, right? The album, with the Drew Struzan-illus- trated cover art that helped make it one of the most recognizable records of the 1970s, remains the ultimate intersection between horror and rock showmanship (see RM#48 for a Classic Cut on the record). Until its release, Alice Cooper was a band, not an individual. But when the rest of the group – guitarists Michael Bruce and Glenn Buxton, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith – wanted to take a breather from the increasingly over-the-top theatrics of their Grand Guignol-like stage show, Alice knew he had to go solo if he wanted to take the act to the next level of spectacle. “By Billion Dollar Babies, we were out-grossing the Rolling Stones,” says
Cooper, now 63, of his 1973 precursor to Nightmare. “The media said that was the biggest and most theatrical we could possibly get and I think the original
Photo © Ross Haflin
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