Couper-Trooper

The between-set music was Carole King and late Byrds and Dylan's Greatest Volume II, all favorites of Howard Stein, I'm sure, but about as appropriate at an Alice Cooper concert as Doris Day at an Alan Freed teenorama. The opening acts, electric gut Wet Willie and jive king Dr. John, were more to the point, for Alice is the drag king of electric jive. Alice-the-person was born in Phoenix and got it together in Detroit, passing through Frank Zappa's freak show sometime in between, and aside from the assumed first name and a heavy application of eye makeup, is about as feminine as Mark Farner--slinky costumes, after all, have been a predilection of rock misogynists since the early days of English fop. Alice-the-group makes music that at its best is pure rock and roll, and I mean pure--not blues or rhythm-and-blues and barely blues-based, with no overlay of surfer harmonies and not a hint of folkie sentiment. A similar will to power energizes groups like Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk and Black Sabbath, but whereas they depend on overwhelming displays of amplifier expertise, Alice Cooper's musical approach is closer to that of two one-shot groups of the midsixties, the Count Five ("Psychotic Reaciton") and the Music Machine ("Talk Talk"). Neither showed the slightest understanding of the (blues) emotion that was part of early rock and roll--they just plastered your brains to the ceiling with sound. That's Alice's approach, and to an extent it's fine with me.

Alice's good songs are structured like singles, with clearly audible lyrics in the male-rebel tradition and the music tightly constructed around one or two hook riffs. Where your average heavy group goes in for boring solos, however, Alice substitutes theatrics, which unfortunately are also boring. He goose-steps; he plays with a boa constrictor; he chops up a doll; he is hanged by a black-hooded executioner; he throws Alice-Cooper-is-hanged calendars to the audience. Despite the fact that the hanging was patently bogus, without any saving suggestion of parody, the audience, which was medium young, seemed to get off on all this stuff. Not ecstatically, though--my fourteen-year-old companion described it as "interesting." I suspect I might have been disturbed if it had been better done, since it seemed to suggest the death-tripping and authoritarianism that I'm afraid will be the first youth fads of the seventies. What I felt instead was a curious alienation, even though the music was intelligent and original rock and roll. Perhaps its intrinsic coldness encourages alienation, but I think the real reason I felt alienated is that I didn't understand what was happening there, and I wonder what Howard Stein's choice of between-set music indicates about his understanding. One reason Bill Graham closed the Fillmore was that he no longer understood why people liked the music they liked, although, of course, Graham didn't put it so politely. The Academy of Music is a good hall, and there has to be a heavy teenorama somewhere, but I'd feel a little more comfortable, somehow, if I thought someone I trusted really knew what was going down.

Village Voice, Dec. 1971

Any Old Way You Choose It, 1973

Adventures of the Dean of Long Island Rock Critics

All My Friends Call Me a Fool