When I was just a pint-sized towhead, my mother would bring me and my brothers to a great, dusty little video store near our building. In retrospect, it was really a cool little place. This was a time before Blockbuster and Hollywood Video monopolized the video rental business. Ages before netflix. Ages before people even had computers at home. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. I know. I feel old too.
From what I remember, this place was about the size of my current bedroom. It was filled wall to wall with VHS tapes of all genres. It was run by a couple of old creeps who also ran a fix-it shop for electronics in the back of their store. My mom claims they were usually watching porno on their TV back there. I also heard they sold drugs back there, so you shouldn't feel too bad for them and how they fared during the death of the old fashioned video store. They seemed to have plenty to fall back on, between fixing your stereo speakers or selling you a bag of weed. I was oblivious to all of this though, on account of being a little kid. I was too busy looking at all the horror movie boxes when my mom wasn't paying attention. Actually, toward the tail end of our patronage of that fine establishment, before Hub Video became the new video store for our family, I remember being mesmerized and staring at the Jason Takes Manhattan poster they had. It was awesome. In fact, here it is!
That poster is so much cooler than the movie. But that is another story for another time . . .
Even though the store was pretty small, they crammed a lot of options in there. Judging by the two guys who ran the place it wasn't surprising that the children's section was about eight videos on a bottom shelf by the counter. And of course directly across from them were the "adult" videos. It actually made sense in such a genius way. I never noticed there were pornos there because I was facing the kid videos. And since they were right by the counter, the weird video guy could just reach over and grab a tape with boobies on it for his VCR. It was so simple and it apparently worked. The rest of the store was populated by everything else a dingy eighties video store had to offer. If I had a time machine I would enjoy that place a lot more now. Then again, if I had a time machine I would hopefully be stopping John Wilkes Booth or something instead of visiting a 1980s video store, but whatever. I don't have a time machine and neither do you so get off my back.
So what does this have to do with live music? Well I'm glad you asked. The video selection for kids was pretty limited. Of the few videos for my age group half of them were girly, so that really left me with minimal options. Rather than delve into videos about ponies or rainbows I stuck with my gut instinct: socks with eyes. There were two tapes that were repeatedly rented by my mother at my behest. It alternated between an episode of Fraggle Rock (in which Boober and Wembley played hide and seek) and an episode of the Muppet Show with Alice Cooper. As a kid I was fascinated by anything Halloween-y (not much has changed) and this Muppet Show tape was the cat's pajamas. Check out this clip:
Tell me you don't get at least a little excited when his freaky muppet band materializes out of nowhere as the music kicks into gear. This tape was my only exposure to Alice Cooper for most of my childhood. I didn't really start buying his albums and listening to him until my late teens. People sometimes let his theatrics overshadow the songs and just lump him in as some gimmicky performer, but the songs and the musicians deserve more credit than they get. The music was always changing like a chameleon with the times, so it is one of those cases where each album is almost like a pop culture time capsule.
Albums like Brutal Planet and Dragontown came out in the early 2000s. They are not bad, I like them and listen to them, but they just didn't seem as fun. There are obvious exceptions, like "Disgraceland," but the atmosphere of these albums felt a little more pessimistic. One of the songs is actually called "Pessi-Mystic." There are probably reasons for these thematic changes. It gets harder to shock the public after years of exposure and desensitization. And with guys like Marilyn Manson infiltrating the mainstream, Alice probably felt the need to harden his style. But it really shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. He was just putting out what the pop culture was already saturated with: angry sounding industrial-ish songs.
In 2003, maybe because of the rise of garage style rock bands, or maybe just because he felt like it, Alice Cooper got some guys together and recorded a pretty straightforward rock n roll garage album, The Eyes of Alice Cooper. It's pretty good but not as good as its 2005 follow up, Dirty Diamonds. The band is great and so are the songs. It was while he was touring promoting this album that I finally got a chance to see him play live.
Now onto the actual show!
On October 29, 2006, I got to see the kind of concert I had seen videos and dvds of for years. And it delivered. It had to. It was his Halloween show. It wasn't as sloppy and riotously dangerous as some of the shows from the 70s, but it had all the right elements of musicianship and showmanship. Not seeming restrained by age or sobriety, Alice Cooper put on a great show.
The show was at the Orpheum and our seats were up in the balcony. Great spot for people watching which can be as much fun as the actual show you go to see. Before the opener, Wednesday 13, went on we were all scoping the crowd counting "Alices." I'm not sure if it was because it was almost Halloween or if people do this at all the shows, but there were quite a few Alice impersonators roaming around. My favorite was "Fat Alice Cooper." His costume wasn't necessarily the best but his presentation was just so eye grabbing. He was enormous, had long curly black hair, the eye paint, and a little black top hat. As I surveyed the crowd I spotted a dead ringer for Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2. I should probably have a camera with me at all times to document things that nobody but me finds amusing.
The crowd was filling up with mostly middle aged people who probably used to rock at some point. Some of them were still hanging on to it but others had clearly settled down years ago. This didn't bode well for Wednesday. Theoretically Wednesday 13 and Alice Cooper go together like fat guys and buffets but there was no way the majority of this crowd was going to appreciate Wednesday's excessive uses of the F-word and flagrant disregard for morals! The band played great. The sound was a little problematic at times but they had it all sorted out after a few songs. This was about two years ago so my memory is a little blurry. I remember seeing some middle-aged eye rolls but overall the crowd wasn't bad. I think Wednesday won them over for the most part. Those he didn't win over were as shocked as their parents probably were when they saw Alice Cooper on the news thirty years prior.
For a guy who was (I think) 58 at the time, Alice Cooper put on a great show. He put on a great show for a guy any age. Full on stage show with the guillotine and everything people would expect and want when they bought a ticket. I always found it interesting to hear Alice's 80's band play slightly more metal-centric versions of the old songs in live recordings, and now I was able to hear his current garage style band playing songs like "Feed My Frankenstein" (and I think they played "Poison") more stripped down and without synths. They did a great job and played a lot of old stuff. They did the "Steven" story which I did not expect but totally welcomed.
The stage show was exciting, full of costumes and props. You could see the guillotine looming ominously on stage, draped in black, waiting to be unveiled. Alice's daughter Calico was the main dancer throughout the show and she did a good job, particularly during "Sunset Babies" and "Wish I were Born in Beverly Hills," where she played a Paris Hilton character obnoxiously parading around the stage. I think she was also the one who had the honors of beheading Alice on stage. I was psyched to see the guillotine live and in person. Unfortunately it was one of the only disappointments of the night. Even though Alice Cooper has had his head cut off in a guillotine a thousand times, he jumped the gun and dropped pretty early so his "severed" head lowered out of sight well before the blade fell. It didn't look that good. Oh well.
In addition to the on-stage theatrics, there was a show going on in the crowd as well. Our seats had a good view of both. The second show I'm talking about was played by drunk "sexy" dancers who would stand up between you and your view of the stage to slither and gyrate. When I say "'sexy' dancers" I do not mean to imply that they are dancers who happen to be sexy. In this case I mean middle age ladies who are too inebriated to realize that they shouldn't be wearing what they are wearing because they are not actually as visually appealing as their blurred senses of reality might lead them to believe. Classic sights. This one repeat offender in the front row of the balcony went on an epic journey of annoyance and dancing that I could write a small book about. So many elements were involved in her story: a drunk jealous boyfriend who had a ticket for a different section who kept coming over to grind and make out, angry people in their 40s complaining that her dancing was impeding their enjoyment of the rock n roll theatrics, several warnings by a mustached usher, and finally her ejection from the theater after baring a bit too much of her rear end (all of it). Hilarious stuff. I would have been mad if it ruined the show, but honestly it made the whole thing even more fun.
The whole night was a lot of fun. I saw some great bands and some entertaining people. And looking back on it, I'm surprised how many stupid details I remember about the night, but couldn't even give you a set list if I tried or lied. Well, I guess I like stupid details. I better go work on that time machine.
