Great rock and roll is also great theatre, with larger- than-life personas required for some of its more transcendent moments. Elvis knew it, the Who knew it, and acts like KISS and Marilyn Manson depend on over-the-top theatrics to keep the crowds happy.

But when it comes to transforming a stage into a venue for something beyond your standard rock show, Alice Cooper pretty much wrote the book.

During the '70s, Cooper upped the ante in pop performance, combining hard rock riffs with horrific Grand Guignol productions that included guillotines, gallows and boa constrictors, while his demonic harlequin make-up made his face one of the most recognizable in show business.

Add to all that classic rock titles like I'm Eighteen, School's Out and No More Mr. Nice Guy, and you've got an act that never fails to entertain. That legacy is now preserved on the deluxe four-CD box set, The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, which chronicles his career from its roots at the end of the '60s.

"I felt that rock and roll at the time was all peace and love, everybody was a hero, everyone wanted to save the world, and I felt it was time for a rock and roll villain. But in a clearly fictitious way," says Cooper from his home in Phoenix, Arizona, which is where the story began over 30 years ago, when Cortez High School student Vincent Furnier started his first band, a Beatles take-off called the Earwigs.

Within a few years, that band would evolve into the outrageous Alice Cooper, with Furnier adopting the name for a stage persona that was part vampire, part drag queen.

"Rock and roll is fiction, the way movies are, so I created Alice Cooper, who was a combination of Bela Lugosi, Basil Rathbone, the Phantom of the Opera, and just about everybody else. In a lot of ways he was scary, and in a lot of ways he was pretty funny."

Part of the reason why Cooper's music stands up so well today is the way he and his band created their own world on stage and on record. Albums like Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome to my Nightmare were self-contained stories that didn't comment on the times.

When critics tried to identify Cooper's destruction of baby dolls as a statement about young men being set to Vietnam, the rock spectre said they were reading too much into it.

"I was extremely unpolitical," he explains. "The two things I stayed away from were politics and religion; they totally didn't belong in the Alice Cooper show. We did songs about sex, death and money. The three things that make the world go 'round. It was definitely social commentary, but it wasn't political. I didn't have an agenda, my only agenda was to entertain the crowds."

Cooper's outrageousness also made him a target, for outraged parents and community groups who hated his sinister look and anti-authoritarian songs. Now that similar charges are being fired at acts like Marilyn Manson in the wake of the high school shooting in Littleton, Colo., you'd think Cooper would be experiencing a feeling of deja vu.

"I am, 'cause a lot of these bands are reliving what we went through in the early '70s. We got blamed for everything. You just have to kind of bite your tongue and say 'Hey, grow up,' but at the same time you have to realize you're in the position where you're going to be the target.

"To me it was an act of pure insanity. Things were a lot more innocent in the '70s. I invented bad publicity, I made it a good thing."

Most of the stories about Cooper revolve around his insane stage shows, and the booklet accompanying The Life and Crimes is loaded with images of him in straight jackets, electric chairs, and swinging from a noose.

These gimmicks were carefully rehearsed and staged, but it wasn't unusual for things to occasionally get out of hand.

"Most of the insane things that happened on stage were accidents," Cooper recalls. "I had this rapier sword that belonged to to Errol Flynn, he used it in Captain Blood. It was the real thing, it was razor sharp on the point, and I used to use it on stage.

"I used to have my legs spread apart, and I'd stick it in the stage to prove it was a real sword. One night I jammed it as hard as I could, and I felt something . . . it had gone through my thigh and was literally coming out the other side. "I took my hand away and it was waving in the wind, blood was spurting out. I couldn't even feel it, but the band nearly got sick. Everyone in the audience thought it was a trick.

"After the show, the adrenaline was gone, and I went 'YEEEOW!'. Everyone said I had to go get a tetanus shot, and I said no way, I'm needle-phobic. I wondered what John Wayne would do, so I took a bottle of whiskey and poured it on the wound. And I hit the ceiling."

At 51, Cooper denies there's any such thing as being too old to rock and roll. At the moment, when he's not out on the golf course, he's working on two new studio projects, one of which he calls "the perfect rock record for the end of the century." The other is a concept album based on the Seven Deadly Sins, in collaboration with Allan Menken, famous for his work on Disney's The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.Cooper working with the bard of Disney? It's not so strange when you consider how he was accepted by the Hollywood establishment at the start of his career (after all, he even had his own episode of The Muppet Show). In fact, Cooper says the strangest moment of his whole career had nothing to do with snakes, dead babies or mock executions and occurred amidst the old guard of show biz.

"I'm sitting at a party at Steve Allen's house - I think it was Jonathan Winters' birthday party - and I realize everyone there is in tuxedos, and I'm in black leather. I'm sitting between Jack Benny and George Burns, and I see Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope . . . every famous comedian is at this party, and there's Alice Cooper.

"These guys just accepted me into their group. It was just the weirdest thing, that the comedians took me under their wing as their friend. They looked at what I did as vaudeville, and saw the humour in it."