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OTTAWA - Naysayers just don't know how to rock.
Between Alice Cooper and Helix, there was about a half-century of classic rock available for consumption last night at the Civic Centre.
Predictably, the week leading up to this summit of fossil-rock came with lots of teasing from collegues at seeing veteran shock-rocker Cooper, whom I first saw in 1972, and the over-achieving Canadian metal band from the 1980s on the same bill. There's a terrible prejudice against musicians over the age of 40, it seems, and this double-bill was clearly stepping into Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk territory.
The brat asked me which museum Cooper was playing. Children can be so cruel.
Too bad, too. This double-bill in front of 3,200 fans was one of the most fun concert free-for-alls I've seen since the last time Cooper was here in 2004.
So the only thing left to say to those who were too young and hip and jaded and cynical to attend this retro-rockfest is, who's laughing now?
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HEAD-BOPPING EXPERIENCE
The two-and-a-half-hour orgy of oldies was a surprisingly satisfying head-bopping, foot-pounding, sing-along-at-the-top-of-your-voice experience by rock icons still in peak form. Or at least close enough to not notice or care.
Even in his senior years, Cooper's proved to be a surprisingly resilient performer. Sticking closely to the greatest-hits setlist from those seminal albums of the 1970s -- Killer, Love It To Death and School's Out -- with which he refined his combination of power rock ballads and camp theatrics. And, too, there's the stage full of fun-house props and shocking images he's been having fun with since 1969.
Dressed in his trademark black leather, black eye-liner, top-hat and walking stick, Cooper really had little more to do than introduce each song and let the house take over the vocals on No More Mr. Nice Guy, Dirty Drivers, Be My Lover, Lost In America, I Never Cry, 18 and You Drive Me Nervous.
Midway through his set, Cooper restaged the same macabre bondage scene with one of the female dancers he did in 2004, giving him time to change costumes for the grand finale of Welcome To My Nightmare -- including Stephen, Only Women Bleed and The Ballad of Dwight Fry -- that hinted at the spectacular showmanship he pioneered, with strait-jackets and horrifying staged violence.
Opening band Helix were just as good as they were 20 years ago, when they were considered one of the best metal bands to come out of Canada since Triumph and Saga.
Fronted by heavy-rocking vocalist Brian Vollmer, the Kitchener-based band covered most of their hits in an hour-long set.
Predictably, the band -- Vollmer, Rainer Weichmann, Jeff Fountain, Cindi Whiteman, Jim Lawson and Brent Niemi -- covered Wild in the Streets, The Kids Are All Shakin', a slightly queasy cover of A Foot in Coldwater's Make Me Do Anything You Want and Heavy Metal Love, which is going to be featured in this summer's Trailer Park Boys movie. They closed with an uncombed version of their anthem Rock You that indeed rocked, regardless how old it was.