Go ahead, ask Alice.
Ask him just about anything, because, behind that famously ghoulish exterior, Alice Cooper is a famously approachable guy.
It's an oft-told tale: The guy who brought mock executions to the rock stage in the early '70s is, today, an expert swinger who lives much of his life in the service of golf. Sure, he cracks out the bullwhip, the boa constrictor, and the guillotine for the odd tour. But Alice Cooper is dead nice for a former antichrist and architect of shock-rock anthems like Dead Babies and Welcome To My Nightmare.
At 51, the Coop, as he's been known to fans since his group adopted the Alice Cooper Band moniker in 1968, is looking back through zombie make-up, with his definitive career-retrospective CD box set The Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper.
Or at least, he's trying to look back. Over the phone from his home in Phoenix, Alice is more concerned with giving future audiences a good, old-fashioned freaking out.
"It's funny, I didn't know how I'd react to having a box set in my honour," he says. "Now I realize I'm not very nostalgic. I probably will be when I'm 70, but now when I look at 80 songs from 25 albums, I'm going, 'Which of these songs are going to be good on stage?' "
It's a question Alice has been asking himself and various bandmates since the mid-'60s.
As thoroughly detailed in the liner notes to The Life And Crimes, compiled by Toronto writer Jeffrey Morgan, the man-who-would-be Alice was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit in 1948 and grew up in Phoenix.
He hooked up with future Alice Cooper Band guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce and bassist Dennis Dunaway in high school. Together, they became The Spiders, a storybook teenage rock 'n' roll band: Pranksters, wiseguys who played in mod cover bands on weekends and wrote for the school newspaper.
Furnier and his buddies were also popular jocks, four-year track lettermen who weren't the kind of misfits who typically forge a career in shock-rock stardom.
"I say this proudly," Alice says now. "I was Ferris Bueller -- the dark side. I nearly ran my school. I got away with anything, but I knew my boundaries."
The Spiders moved to L.A., mutated into The Nazz and, after legal noises from an East Coast group of the same name -- featuring one Todd Rundgren -- consulted a Ouija board for a new moniker. As the story goes, young Furnier became possessed by the spirit of a 17th-century witch named Alice Cooper.
The band's show, and behaviour, went from goofy to over-the-top. "If it wasn't something people were going to talk about, I didn't want to do it," Alice recalls. "To me, that's a better response than applause."
And it was pretty much a recipe for success.
After early work with Frank Zappa on their debut Pretties For You album, the newly-dubbed Alice Cooper led his group to Detroit, and then to Toronto for a time.
It was here that the band began a crucial, multi-record relationship with Canadian producer Bob Ezrin. "Our George Martin," Alice calls him.
Perhaps even more significant was at a Varsity Stadium gig in 1969 that an alleged live chicken was thrown on stage and torn to shreds, feathers and all.
The sight of five drunken rockers in drag singing horror-pop tunes was enough to seriously irk people in 1970.
Alice's theories about word-of-mouth were proven correct when he was promptly demonized by the "straight public."
A new era in rock-provocation was born.
"We were a shock to the system," Alice says. "We were really outrageous and we were dangerous because we had big hits so people had to deal with this character.
"But there was more to it than just shock tactics.
"We were always in a battle with the press and even with other bands in our circles. I was insistent that you could be a theatrical act and be a good musical band. Most people just would not believe that. The only way that you prove that was to make hits.
"So we did. We spent 90% of our time on the music and 10% on the theatrics. That's something that probably nobody knows.
"Once we had hits, people had to swallow the belief that you could have good theatre and rock 'n' roll."
Interestingly, Alice doesn't see a link between his theatrics and shock-rock's Marilyn Manson.
He knows what it's like to be held up as a scapegoat, but he sees his work as sensation, not suggestion.
"People probably expect me to rush to the aid of the artist, but I honestly believe that the artist still has a responsibility for what they say," he explains.
"We were pretty classic horror. We were Edgar Allan Poe for rock. I never had an agenda other than to entertain. I always wanted to leave the audience with a good taste in their mouth. They'd leave with confetti all over them, walking away from the best party they'd been to in years.
"I think if you look at it closely, we began and ended shock-rock. After 1975, there really wasn't much left that was shocking. When you can't be more shocking than CNN is when you have to quit trying."
The singer will resurrect his stage act for a Life And Crimes tour this summer.
"It's always been a morality play for Alice," he says. "We're going to put Alice on trial."
He's also teamed with Ezrin and Disney musical hitmaker Alan Mencken for a rock opera based on the Seven Deadly Sins, which he ultimately hopes to take on a theatre tour.
"I just want to do it the way no one else has before," he says. "The way only Alice would."
