Cooper Alice - Alice Cooper: welcome to my nightmare

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B ack in 1997, shortly before the death of his former Alice Cooper bandmate Glen Buxton that October, drummer Neal Smith was shooting the breeze with his old friend when the subject of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came up.

The Alice Cooper band had only recently become eligible for induction; the 25th anniversary of their late sixties formation was celebrated in 1994, and there were precious few bands of that vintage that deserved induction more than the Coopers. Maybe it did take them two years to really pick up steam, but still the run of hit singles (and LPs) that blasted Alice Cooper through the early seventies not only remains peerless, it also includes some of the seminal rock anthems of all time.

Im Eighteen, Schools Out, Elected, Hello Hooray, Under My Wheels, No More Mr Nice Guy, Generation Landslide, Billion Dollar Babies, Be My Lover you could stuff a greatest hits CD with the songs for which Alice Cooper are most renowned, and then you could stuff another with the songs for which theyre best remembered: Dead Babies, I Love The Dead, Black Juju, Killer, Sick Things, Halo Of Flies, Hallowed Be Thy Name.

Alice Cooper may not have been the heaviest band on earth but they still made everyone else look like lightweights, and the fact that the sainted heads of the Hall of Fame had not dragged the Coopers kicking and screaming into their marbled halls the moment that the group became eligible was well, it wasnt even inexplicable. It was contemptible.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, laughed Buxton, can kiss my Rock and Roll Ass.

That comment stuck with me all these years, Smith smiled 13 years later. So, about a year ago, I wrote a song about it and, as he worked towards the second album by his current Killsmith project, there seemed no reason on earth why he shouldnt include it.

Except one.

The day the telephone rang and it was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Coopers were in, and Smith was astonished. I never dreamed in a million years that we would ever be inducted. And, as for The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Can Kiss My Rock And Roll Ass Well, it was a good idea at the time but well see what happens. Nostradamus Im not.

Killsmith is one of the most enthralling of all the myriad bands to have emerged over the past three decades-plus from the wreckage of the original Alice Cooper band. Sexual Savior, the bands debut album, was released back in 2008 and proved one of the most challengingly perverse records of Smiths career, a litany of thrilling riffs, thunderous chords, monster percussion and the kind of lyrics that could make an Anglo-Saxon blush.

This time around, things were a little more level-headed. Killsmith 2, Smith laughed, was a lot more radio friendly than the first one. I got that off my chest, got all the x-rated words out. Killsmith 2 is a lot more radio friendly but with the power of the first one. Just the way songs are written catchier choruses. Twelve songs and theyre all brand new, although I guess Kiss My Ass, Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame I guess I cant put that one on.

He continued, Im the most excited for the fans who have stuck with us for such a long time. Within the last 10 years, theres been petitions circulating and these people just cant understand why we werent in there. Im still amazed that, in 1973, we had the number one LP with Billion Dollar Babies and, to me, that was the peak of our career in terms of things happening out of the blue that we werent even expecting. I didnt think it would ever get any better than that, and with the hesitation about us even getting a nomination to the Hall of Fame.

I know Alice has wonderful fans, but the original band has wonderful fans as well. Their support has been strong and non-wavering over these many years, and Im most excited for them. I think this is a great day for the fans, a great time for them. And the fact that the nomination itself was so overdue, in a way, only made it that little bit sweeter.

The only time I actually got excited about the nomination was when I realised I was very pessimistic that anything positive could come out of it, because it took 16 years to be nominated. And all the bands that are in there, I love, but I think theres been a handful of bands that have no place in there. You put them up against the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, the real monsters of rock and you wonder why theyre there. So I was a little disillusioned with that.

But then I started looking at the first time nominees, the bands that got in on the first nomination, and man, that was when I got excited. I thought if we were ever going to be nominated, and we ever got in, it would be amazing to get in on the first nomination. And thats what we did. In reality, it is a great thing and I am excited about it.

Especially pleasing, for Smith and for the bands fans, is the fact that it is the original band that is being inducted, and not Alice Cooper alone. That, after all, would not have been a shock even at the peak of the bands success in 1972-1973, people were more likely than not to refer to Alice Cooper as the individual singer, the lanky, face-painted, snake-wielding freak whom his parents had named Vince Furnier, and allow the remainder of the band to lapse into anonymity.

No matter that Smith, guitarists Michael Bruce and Glen Buxton, and bassist Dennis Dunaway were as much a part of the act as their frontman; nor that the vast majority of the bands greatest numbers were at least co-written by one or other of them. To the public at large, Alice Cooper was Alice Cooper, and its a misconception that history has clung tenaciously onto ever since.

Or maybe it isnt a misconception. For every band and every performer of note has that one transcendent moment upon which the remainder of their career hinges, and for Alice Cooper the man, and Alice Cooper the performer, that moment took place precisely 39 years before the Hall of Fame induction, at a time when both were more likely to be immortalised in a House of Horrors or Wall of Shame, than proclaimed an integral part of rocks DNA.

Hindsight and historys habit of creating neatly delineated eras from the tangled mass of rocknrolls chronology does not always agree but, as of spring 1972, what we now know of as glam rock was still an explosion awaiting ignition.

T Rex, Slade and the Sweet were all up and running, and the latters recently acquired penchant for make-up and costume certainly placed them into a visual ballpark they shared with the other two. But three bands do not a movement make, no matter how successful they might be, a point that is pushed home even harder when one considers just how vastly different were the musical fields in which they operated.