Alice Cooper wants to spend the night with Tucson on Friday, Aug. 26.
But before you get all warm and fuzzy and start dreaming up rock ’n’ roll romance, consider this: It’s Alice Cooper, the king of shock rock.
He’s not really into warm and fuzzy.
“This would not be curl up with your boyfriend. This will be, ‘Um, would you turn the lights on please?’ ” the Phoenix rocker explained.
His shows are more rock theater than rock concert, and “Spend the Night With Alice” runs through a setlist of 25 songs drawing from Cooper’s five-decade career and weaves the lyrics into something of a script that plays more like Broadway meets Vaudeville than strictly rock ’n’ roll.
“My show has always been a theater show. It’s a Vaudeville, hard rock extravaganza,” the 68-year-old Phoenix rocker said. “I let the lyrics to the songs become the script, and everybody knows every song we’re going to do. If we’re going to do ‘Cold Ethel,’ Cold Ethel has to be up on stage.”
Cold Ethel is a wind-up rag doll that wakes up and comes to life as a human. Cooper’s wife of 40 years, Sheryl, plays the role of the the doll during the show. She also plays an insane nurse and makes an appearance in the show’s finale as Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary and Trump show up at the end of the show. It’s pretty funny,” said Cooper, whose wife has been part of his shows since they married in 1976.
The scene is the only hint at politics in the show and it follows the rocker’s wink-wink announcement earlier this summer that he is running for president — he has run every presidential election since 1972. During a phone call from a concert stop in Oklahoma City last Friday, Cooper announced his new campaign slogan —“I Can Do Nothing As Well As They Can Do Nothing” — and concluded that the 2016 presidential race is more about voters casting ballots against candidates rather than for them. The biggest question, he said, is deciding “whose face do you want to see the most? That’s really what you’re voting on.”
“People seem to think that when a new president comes in, everything is going to change. A president gets dealt the same cards that the last president had. He gets the same economic problems, the same world problems, and it’s not just going to change,” said Cooper, who has a popular syndicated radio show and owns the successful downtown Phoenix sports bar/restaurant Alice Cooperstown. “Whoever gets in, if it’s Trump or it’s Hillary, (they are) going to have the same cards that Obama had when he left.”
“Spend the Night” follows the lead of previous Cooper shows, taking the audience on a little trip that traverses locales and emotions.
“We find that the audience gets mesmerized by the show because it keeps changing,” Cooper said. “And pretty soon it’s like watching a movie. You just get lost in it.”
He said he is performing with musicians that he described as “the best band I’ve ever worked with.”
“This band is so good: three guitar players. One of the guitar players is a girl named Nita Strauss. (Twenty-nine years old), looks like a model and plays like Jimi Hendrix,” he said of Strauss, a former member of all-female Iron Maiden tribute band the Iron Maidens. “There’s not a moment where we let the audience get their breath. And that’s what makes it fun, is that it’s old school hard rock, take-no-prisoners type of show,” he said.
Cooper has been playing shows in Tucson since he was in high school in the late 1960s. (“We were playing down there at the VIP Club on Speedway when we were 16 years old,” he said.) On Friday he will introduce the next generation of Cooper rockers, son Dashiell “Dash” who is lead singer of the Christian hard rock band Co-Op. Cooper said the band, which is opening for him Friday night, sings faith-based songs wrapped in hard rock along the lines of Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine.
“This band is really good; they are good enough that I wouldn’t mind being the lead singer in that band, but my son is the lead singer,” Cooper joked. “It’s take-no-prisoners hard rock. Actually, in a lot of places, it’s heavier than what we do.”
