The Alice Cooper Thread

[Susan Foreman]

July 2016

Originally Posted by Susan Foreman

Hollywood Vampires Guitarist Joe Perry Collapses on Stage in New York - NBC News

Rock legend Joe Perry stable after mid-show collapse | Page Six

Today

Looks like Joe's back in hospital after collapsing during a Billy Joel show

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/joe-p...letter_4572276

[Susan Foreman]

Alice and Stan Lee

[Susan Foreman]

Ryan Roxie plays three UK shows in February next year to promote his 'Imagine Your Reality' album

The dates are:
Friday February 22nd - Esquires, Bedford
Saturday February 23rd - The Asylum, Birmingham
Sunday February 24th - Cancer On The Rocks Festival, Nantwich

Tickets for the shows are available now, as are VIP upgrades which you can get at roxievip.blogspot. com and include a special three song set before the doors open amongst other things. Ryan will also be making an appearance at 'The Guitar Show' at New Bingley Hall in Birmingham on the Saturday, but this will be a guitar clinic and not a proper show.

[Susan Foreman]

Nita covers Queen on her new solo album 'Controlled Chaos', released today

[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by Susan Foreman

My Swiss is a bit rusty (?), but it looks like Alice is appearing at the Riverside Open Air Festival in Switzerland on Saturday, August 31st, 2019

https://www.riversideaarburg.com/alice-cooper

Another 2019 date has been announced, and it's another festival

Hope this isn't an indication of what the entire year will be like!

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Great bill. That's what i call a festival.

Skynyrd, Kid Rock, Nickelback, Alice, Cheap Trick, Lita and Lee Aaron.

[Susan Foreman]

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Gretchen Wilson as well as the Hollywood Vampires.

[Susan Foreman]

I'd be more interested in seeing Donald 'Buck Dharma' Roeser and Eric Bloom from B.O.C alongside Alice myself

[Susan Foreman]

A couple of new interviews

Ace Frehley Plans Tour With Alice Cooper | Ultimate Classic Rock

"Ace Frehley said he was planning to tour with Alice Cooper during the second half of 2019, though he wasn’t ready to supply full details.

The former Kiss guitarist recently fired his solo band in favor of the musicians used by Gene Simmons, but he didn’t confirm whether that lineup would be hitting the road together.

“I have two shows coming up in January on the West Coast,” Frehley told SiriusXM's Trunk Nation. “We’re doing Seattle, Sacramento, and they might even add some shows and bring us all the way down to San Diego. And then I think I might be doing some tour dates with Alice Cooper in the summer. My guys get along with their guys, and I’ve known Alice forever. So that’s always gonna be a lot of fun. I think they’re talking about July and August – it’ll be five weeks. So that can be a really special thing.”

Even though it appears Frehley won’t take part in the upcoming Kiss farewell tour, he said he was making arrangements just in case the situation arose. “There’s always a chance I might get that emergency phone call,” he said. “I told my agent to built into my contract, in the event I do get an emergency phone call and Kiss wants me to join the tour and take over for Tommy [Thayer], that I can get out of the dates that I’ve booked for the summer.”

He added he had “no plans” to join the tour, and that he hadn’t received any communication about the possibility."

Calico Cooper on growing up with Alice Cooper and finding her own voice in Beasto Blanco | AZ Central

"Calico Cooper was fresh out of high school when her father offered her a job as a sadistic nurse.

She’d seen her mother, Sheryl Cooper, in that same role countless times as part of Alice Cooper’s stage show. And it seemed a decent way to make some money, see the world and spend quality time with the family.

Her dad was set to launch the “Brutal Planet” tour and he wanted to bring back the theatrics of his earlier productions for the year 2000.

"Obviously," she says, "when you’re presented with, 'Hey, do you want to go around the world, get paid for it and perform in front of thousands of people and get to be with your family,' you know, the answer is yes. It’s the best of all possible worlds."

For the next 11 years, she toured as part of Alice Cooper’s show while developing the characters she played.

“For the first couple of years, I kind of minded my p’s and q’s,” she says.

“I knew the Alice fans would compare it to, ‘Well, Sheryl used to do it this way.’ But after a couple years, I really caught my confidence. All of a sudden, instead of the nurse just being sexy or provocative, I was like, ‘What if I made you hate her more than you hate Alice? I bet I could do that.’”

So she ran it past her dad.

“He gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted,” she says. “And as the tours went on and time went by, this nurse character became a hit with these fans because you actually wanted her to die. I felt like I had done my job. They hated this character.”

It was on the road with Alice that she bonded with Chuck Garric, who joined the Cooper band on bass in 2002.

They’re bandmates now in Beasto Blanco – a situation she had never dreamed would happen.

“I had said, and loudly, ‘I cannot imagine being in a band,’ ” she recalls, with a laugh.

“I just thought as a kid, and especially a celebrity kid, OK, well, my parents have succeeded in this. And the limiting thought process is, ‘I’ll never be able to do it on that level.’ He’s, you know, become a rock icon. They’re a power couple in the rock world. It’s like how do you put yourself up against that? It wasn’t until Chuck presented the idea of doing something that was so different from what they’ve created that I went, ‘Oh, oh, it’s not a competition, it’s a creative process.’”

The birth of Beasto Blanco

Garric formed the group with lead guitarist Brother Latham in 2012, inviting Cooper to join.

As she recalls, “He said, ‘I have this vision of ‘Natural Born Killers’ set to music. And I said, ‘Good luck with that!’ But then he came to me with a clear, concise idea and said, ‘Look, I want you to play this part.’ I said, you know, ‘I’m not a singer.’ He goes, ‘Yet! But you’re a good actor. So you’re gonna act your way through this.’”

At this point, Cooper’s parents interrupt.

“She’s a singer,” says Sheryl.

“Everybody in my family sings better than I do,” says Alice, clearly selling himself short on that front.

"Listen, Calico to me is the definition of rock and roll," says Garric. "I knew she had it in her. She just needed to have the material and the concept put in front of her and she could just take it from there. She’s one of those people, as soon as you give her an idea, she just runs with it and makes into her own, you know?"

By the end of 2012, they had an album out, "Live Fast Die Loud."

"There was something about Beasto Blanco that I wanted it to have this wild unpredictability about it," Garric says. "I didn’t want it to be real thought-out and perfect. I wanted it to have a real edge and curves and sometimes destinations that we didn’t even know where it was gonna go and neither did the audience."

By the time they started touring, Cooper says, "I saw people reacting and I thought, 'Ahh, this is why people do it.'”

And as Garric says, "We're in this for the show. There's so many rock-and-roll bands. You could name 1,000 bands that have influenced Beasto Blanco. But it had to be something a little bit different than what those bands were doing. And adding Calico was exactly what we needed to make that happen."

Six years into Beasto Blanco, they're about to make their first appearance on a bill with Alice Cooper, at his annual Christmas Pudding concert, which benefits his Solid Rock Foundation.

"We just kind of had the mindset," Cooper says, "of 'We know Alice fans support us, but we also want to see who else would.' We don’t want it handed to us. So we went out and did it old-school, started off in a van in the snow playing to 100 people a night. And now we’re still playing those cool theater shows every now and again but we’ve also been blessed to be able to play arenas."

Garric's original plan, she says, was to use her as a backup singer.

"That was his idea, that I was gonna kind of be, you know, a sassy little snotty voice in the background," she says. "I said, 'Sure.' And within the first day of recording, I think it was really evident that our voices just clicked together and our sense of this sort of Mickey and Mallory-esque story we were trying to tell, we both got it."

Mickey and Mallory Knox are the characters Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play in "Natural Born Killers," a 1994 Oliver Stone film with a script by Quentin Tarantino.

Their names come up a lot when Cooper talks about her band.

"So as the record kept going, he had me sing more and more and more until I was all over it," she says. "And then the next record, I was having my own songs. This record, it’s a 50-50 split. We really have become this dangerous dynamic duo, like Mickey and Mallory. Sometimes I joke and say Thelma & Louise but he gets mad."

As her Beasto character developed, she began to understand a little more of how the Alice Cooper she calls "Dad" became the Alice Cooper that struck fear in the hearts of the '70s PTA.

”My first couple years of Beasto, I was Calico doing Beasto Blanco," she says. "And then something started to shift and I became this creature. It started to show in pictures and videos. And people were responding to it better.'

Part of what those people are responding to is the real sense of danger on stage.

"I feel like it’s something you can’t teach but I got it from my dad," she says. "I learned how to put that out there and Chuck gave me a platform to do it. And as it went on, it got more and more twisted and strange."

Garric knew she could sing, he says. "It was just finding out what she was comfortable doing. And it turned out to be just about anything. She can have the sultry smoky voice for 'Feed My Frankenstein' (their brooding reinvention of an Alice Cooper song) or this over-the-top CBGB punk-rock approach. You’ll hear a lot more of her range on the new record. It's just always growing, ever-changing."

They recently recorded their third studio release, "We Are," which Garric says should be out by the first week in April.

“I was listening to the tracks,” Cooper says, “and I’m going, ‘That’s it, we hit it.' I needed that character to click into the music. I’m so blessed from a teenage kid being able to tour with Joan Jett, Dio, Motorhead and get to know these people and watch how they do what they do, and also blessed with knowing how to take it off. That’s so important. I watch videos of me onstage and I go, 'Who is that?!’ ”

Her Beasto character is based, she explains, on “that part of you that’s feral. That part of you that’s just a cannon, that is indomitable. We’re nothing like the characters we get to play on stage, but it feels right. Beasto is a werewolf set loose on the stage. It’s so exciting. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

Her father sees that spontaneity as an outgrowth of her work as an improv comedian.

“It’s sort of like when we first started, if I found a mop backstage, that was gonna be my prop that night,” he says. “I could ride on it. It was a girl. It was a weapon. It’s the same thing with her. She finds whatever she can find and goes, 'OK, that’s gonna be the show tonight.' ”

He’s clearly proud of Calico and Dash, his son, who cracked the Billboard rock charts this year with his band Co-op.

As Cooper recalls of her father's initial reaction to what they were doing, “The very first time he saw Beasto was the (National Association of Music Merchants) Convention. We came out blazing, right? We just went for an hour. Afterwards, I walked offstage and said, 'What did you think?.' And he said, 'I taught you everything you know.' ”

Alice says he knew his daughter had the goods to inhabit a character from an early age.

"Calico, when she was seven, could talk her way out of a sunburn," he says with a laugh. "It was one of those things where I would listen to the creative way she was talking herself out of something she was obviously guilty of. And I would go, oh, that’s really good. That’s really creative how she came up with that."

She moved to Los Angeles straight out of high school with the hope of breaking into acting but spent most of the next decade on the road with Alice Cooper.

"When I got home from 11 years of touring," she says, "I said, 'OK, I need to know how to get a job. I need to know how to provide for myself. I mean, I had money saved up from touring. But I never had a job. So I got a job at a coffee shop and walked around asking actors, 'Hey, what is the best acting class in Los Angeles, the most impossible one to get in, where the odds are stacked majorly against you to even get in the door?' "

They said Ivana Chubbuck. So the next day, she enrolled with her.

"I started at the very bottom," she says. "And now I’m in her master class. I said, 'What do you need to do to get work?' They said, 'A lot of times I hire right out of the Groundlings or Upright Citizens.' Great. Audition. Got in both."

One thing she didn't want to do, she says, is use her father's name to get ahead.

"It’s always been a matter of not throwing my last name around," she says, "Going, 'Who wants to hire me because I’m this incredibly talented guy’s child?' I started out being an extra on 'Seventh Heaven.' I got up at 5 every morning to Central Casting. I was the first person in line. I would work all day for 50 bucks. I was a barista. I was a waitress. I worked in retail. Because I wanted to earn it. I wanted to know that I was good enough to do it on my own and not that people were just handing me jobs."

And so, she took her acting classes, got in Groundlings, got in Upright Citizens.

"And now," she says, "when somebody goes, 'Oh yeah, Alice Cooper’s kid, put her on the show,' I don’t care that you put me on the show because of that. I feel like I deserve to be there."

Alice says, "I always said, 'Once you get there, even if that’s why they have you on the show, deliver and they’ll have you back.'""