Jun. 29, 2017

Alice Cooper Webchat – Your questions answered on pranks, makeup remover and Bowie

SOURCE:  The Guardian

You can re-read Alice’s entire LIVE webchat with The Guardian HERE

Check out this excerpt!

Neville63 asks:

Hi Alice, I would like to know if there was any fun rivalry between you and David Bowie when you both were the top of the glam scene and did you go to see each others shows?

Alice Cooper responds:  “David Bowie used to come to our show when he was David Jones. He’d bring his band, the Spiders from Mars, and say “watch this”. Everybody pushed everybody which was good. People wanted there to be an animosity between Bowie and I, but there never was. He created characters, I created Alice, and we both wrote from our character’s point of view. We had dinner two or three times. I think there was a nice artistic push – when we heard each other’s albums we went “Oh, I see where you’re doing with this”. Rock is the most theatrical music in the world, so why not bring it alive on stage.

For me, all of my big brothers and sisters were characters that were bigger than life. Hendrix, Joplin … they died young. Because they tried to be their character off stage. I realised I couldn’t be Alice all the time because he was too theatrical. Pretty soon your character will kill you. I didn’t want to go out on the street with a snake around my neck! That character doesn’t belong in a bank! They only belong on stage. I didn’t want him to be in daily life. As soon as the curtain came down, I wasn’t him anymore.

Even to this day I can co-exist with Alice. I can play him onstage. I look forward to playing Alice, I can’t wait. But I know that pretty soon I will be off stage too. He never talks to the audience if you notice – that would make him more human. He’s an arrogant villain. I leave him where he belongs.

There were two Alices – the Alice when I was drinking, who was society’s whipping boy. He represented all the disenfranchised. The artistic kids, the gay kids, the kids who were too weird to be with other kids. They all flocked to Alice. Because he was the outsider, and got hung, and beheaded. When I got sober I realised that Alice was gone. This new Alice was going to be an arrogant villain. And he would look down on the audience, and have total control over the audience. That’s the way people love to see him now – he comes out mad and angry and dangerous. But I like him being vulnerable to silliness too. If you don’t have humour and horror together, you’re missing out on stuff.”