Metal godfather and handy golfer Alice Cooper talks to Russell Baillie about playing the long game
The most alarming thing Alice Cooper the man thinks that Alice Cooper the shock-rock star can do on stage these days is simply show up.
"The shocking thing about the Alice Cooper show now is people are kind of expecting me to go up there and just walk through the show," chuckles the man who introduces himself on the phone as "Coop".
"But they walk away going 'what the hell was that? I saw Alice in 76 and he didn't have that much energy'.
"So it's kind of cool that I haven't lost that excitement about what I'm doing."
No, by the sound of it, he hasn't. A chatty Cooper is on the phone from his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, a city that is home to more than 200 golf courses.
He's already been out for a round that day and shot even. He has a celebrity tournament in Palm Springs the following day.
You can bet that in one of the many road cases bringing his tour with Motley Crue to New Zealand this week, as well as a guillotine and other ghoulish props, there will be a set of clubs.
"She's great ... I knew Michelle Wie when she was like 14 years old and she finished second at the Nabisco and I think she's just coming into the best part of her game now that she is 24 or 25. But this girl Ko is some kind of weird oddity -- she's that good, that early. She has a lot of poise, she's handling it very well."
Yes, there is something strangely amusing that the 67-year-old whose first 1970 big rock hit was I'm 18 is talking about a high-achieving sportswoman in the game he loves who has just reached that age.
Cooper - born Vincent Furnier and eventually adapting the band name as his own -- was in his early 20s at the time of that breakthrough.
He doesn't remember much of what happened afterwards as he battled drink and drugs before getting sober in 1983.
His addictions, he said in his 2007 autobiography Alice Cooper, Golf Monster were overcome by becoming obsessed with golf.
Alice Cooper, on a fairway to heaven (AP)
He's remained the nightmare Alice Cooper on stage and on record, though, having figured out how to separate the grim reaper persona from the Christian family man on the fairway.
"All of my best friends and my mentors and my big brothers and sisters - the guys I used to drink with, they were all dead at 27. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson - these were literally my best friends and I just watched them drop off, you know, because they were trying to be that character that they were on stage all the time.
"When I got sober I decided my character is going to be a lot more intense than Jim Morrison's or Jimi Hendrix's. How am I going to do that? When I walked down the street I am not going to have a snake around my neck. I am not going to have makeup on.
"I am going to have to literally be two people. I am going to be that guy when I am on stage and when I get to Auckland will probably go play golf and I will probably go shopping. I will probably go have lunch somewhere. That night I will become Alice and I will be anything but the character you saw that morning. Because when I assume that character, man, I play him to the hilt.
"So when you are playing a character as villainous as Alice, you can't just play him -- you have to be him. But when the show is over, I leave him up there."
But despite touring with Motley Crue, a band a generation behind him and who started their own addictive habits about the time Cooper was quitting his and which has declared this is their final outing, Cooper isn't thinking about retirement.
"Yeah, quitters," he laughs about the band he's opening for who invited him along on their last hurrah.
"They said, 'You were a big influence on us and it would be great if you could send us off in style'."
" I think they had more of a drug abuse problem than we did. A guy who is now 50 years old is probably more like 70. But they are all in really good shape ... the guys in Motley they got through everything and stayed together. That's pretty cool."
"Both bands bring it every night. I mean, it's really an exciting show because our band has got its own brand of theatrics and Motley has got their own big production."
Cooper has had a profile boost in past years with two movies touching on his career. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon was a doco about his long-time manager. It was directed by Mike Myers - who as Wayne in Wayne's World once prostrated himself in front of Cooper, declaring "we're not worthy".
Another, Super Duper Alice Cooper looked back at the singer's 1970s heyday, telling of how the Phoenix minister's son found his calling in life as a rock 'n' roll Jekyll and Hyde.
"It was the weirdest thing," Cooper says about the double feature. "Shep and I have been together for 46 years so they were asking Shep things like 'how did you guys get together?' and he would tell a story and they would ask me and I would tell a completely different story.
"The funny thing is you have to remember 46 years ago - I don't remember anything about 46 years ago, except that Jimi Hendrix introduced us and that was the only thing I can remember.
"I always remember laughing when I see books like Keith Richards' book - how they started and how they got together and I am going 'he can't remember yesterday, how can he remember 50 years ago?'
Super Duper Alice Cooper did have its uncomfortable moments.
"I had never ever talked about the cocaine problem. Of course, I was in LA where it was a blizzard of cocaine at the time. If you lived in Alice Cooper takes his golf seriously. Picture / AP
At 67 I have never been in better shape... I am in 100 times better shape because I haven't had a drink in 32 years.LA it was impossible to avoid it. But I thought it was an important part of the story to not avoid that. To say, yeah I got into it way too heavy and with the wrong people and then I had to dig myself out of it and re-emerge as a different Alice Cooper -- that was a very good part of the story, even though I didn't like admitting to that part of that. I thought it was not cool for Alice to fall into that."
Still, he survived and seemingly thrived both professionally - becoming a favourite uncle to a generation or three of metallers - and personally.
He and wife Sheryl Goddard, a onetime dancer in his show, married in 1975 and have remained together and raised three children: Calico, Dash and Sonora.
Yes, their dad may have had a career as one of rock's many princes of darkness but they appear to have turned out okay, says their proud father.
"The funny thing about my kids is that all three were basically born while we were on tour, so they grew up backstage. They knew how the guillotine worked when they were 3 or 4 years old. They knew how the lighting worked. At 10 years old, my daughter would sit out there in the audience during rehearsal and go 'Dad, for the third song the lighting is all wrong ... it's a scary song. You need up lighting with a little bit of a fog on the ground'.
"I would go out and look at it and go 'yeah you're right'."
"None of the kids were ever in trouble for drugs, alcohol, sex, shoplifting -- none of that ever happened. They were just all really good kids and that, to me, was really like an oddity in our business. The rock 'n' roll kid usually falls into some sort of trouble, whereas my kids never did."
Maybe that's because Mum and Dad were kind of normal (and well-off), even if every night on tour was Halloween.
"They felt very secure and they had a great time. They saw the fact that I didn't take my fame that seriously. I took the show seriously and I took the character seriously but I never took the adulation that seriously."
And after nearly 50 years on stage, Alice Cooper, theatrical rock star, isn't yet getting in the way of being Alice Cooper four-handicap mad golfer. The two are now complementary.
"I'll you the truth. Here's the weird thing. At 67 I have never been in better shape. I actually weigh less now than I did when I was in my 20s and 30s. I am in 100 times better shape because I haven't had a drink in 32 years. I get up on stage and it's 'jeez, you look exactly he same as you did 30 years ago'. I haven't had any work done, I tell you that -- I am terrified of needles and scalpels."
Which is funny for a man whose fake head has ended up in a guillotine basket many times as part of the Alice Cooper show.
