Originally PUBLISHED IN RIP IT UP Magazine Aug 21, 1997

Alice Cooper’s nightmare began when Vincent Furnier started looking at life from a different perspective. Over the years he has been surrounded by controversy in one way or another. Most people know about the ’Chicken incident’ but there are others that include one of Alice’s first trips to England where an old lady sitting next to him died of a heart attack. And then there’s the famous billboard sign of Alice wearing nothing but a snake. We caught up with Alice Cooper just as he finished a UK tour.

“The UK tour was a total sellout,” Alice proudly stated. “We couldn’t get another body in the building; in fact they were carrying bodies out. It was so hot and humid in those buildings and the show is like an hour and a half of non-stop Alice rock theatre. People were just passing out left and right in front of me, and they were literally being carried out on stretches.

“To understand the show you’ve got to realise I’ve got 24 albums to work with and you have to pick 20 songs to satisfy the audience. I know there are 10 or 12 songs that you have to do and if you don’t then the audience would be really disappointed. We have to do Poison, School’s Out, Only Women Bleed and other obvious ones”

“So we do all those songs, but try to find a way to do them so they’re presented a little different every time. The show that we’ll do in Australia will be a totally different show than the one we’ve just finished in England. That makes it interesting for you guys and makesin interesting for us – it stays creative that way.

“As for the band line-up just in case you were going to ask, I’ve got a band I consider to be the best rock band I’ve ever had. There’s Ryan Roxie on guitar – Ryan played with Gilby Clarke from Guns N Roses. Jimmy DeGrasso from Suicidal

Tendencies is on drums and Todd Jenson, who played with Ozzy (Osbourne), is on bass. I’ve also got Paul Taylor who was with me early in my career on keyboards, and Reb Beach from Winger on lead guitar.”

Now that the introductions are out of the way, let’s dig deep into Alice’s career. In an article in 1990, Alice stated that he had already scripted Welcome To My Nightmare Pt 2. If this is true, is that what The Last Temptation turned out to be?

“It actually ended up being a derivation of it and still might have been when I said that,” Alice explained. “I might have said that it would be a great idea to do Welcome To My Nightmare Pt 2 and then what happened was I started writing a series of short stories that I’m still considering doing for Television. Sort of an X-Files, Twilight Zone thing.

“So I wrote about 20 short story scripts and one of these ended up being something that sounded good for an album, Last Temptation started, from a short story. I thought, ‘what would happen if there was a little kid tempting him into all these things?’ So that’s what happened with The Last Temptation. We invented that story and the next one is going to be a different story.”

If the Steven character from Welcome To My Nightmare and The Last Temptation is the innocent victim of Alice’s imagination, then he will always be tempted with some type of fruit of passion. Obviously it depends on whether the temptation is too much to resist.

“When I write things, I always try to write about subjects which affect everybody. Welcome To My Nightmare – everybody on this planet has nightmares. I don’t care if you live in China, in the furthest province you have nightmares. Everybody has nightmares, everybody has temptations. I try to write about things that are haunting kind of subjects, that way it includes everybody.”

Those who read Alice Cooper’s three-part comic series for The Last Temptation and listened to the album would have expected a huge live production tour to come of it.

“We still do four songs from The Last Temptation in our live show. We do Nothing’s Free, Cleansed By Fire, Lost In America and Sideshow. There’s a bunch of songs that are in there that are just made for the stage. Even if you take them out of context and put them in any other show, they still work. That’s the trick. When you write a conceptual album you have to write something like say, Welcome To My Nightmare, and if you listen to it, it’s a storyline. But you can also take a song like Only Women Bleed out of content and it works on its own.”

When Alice Cooper came out to Australia for a promo visit in July 1994 everybody expected him to tour at the end of that year. But the next thing that we heard was that Alice had lost his deal with Epic Records.

“When it comes down to those things, it wasn’t losing the deal it was the fact that I’m a free agent and you have to make a decision from everybody’s level dealing with things like are you working well together. We’d done Trash with Epic and sold four million records. It was one of their biggest records of the year, and for me Hey Stoopid was a great record. I just felt that it didn’t get the attention it needed to get. With The Last Temptation, it was one of those things where you feel, ‘is it smart to stay here or do I move on to the next company?’ We didn’t leave with any sort of negative thing if that’s what you’re thinking.”