Cooper's Garage

ALICE COOPER - "THE ROLLING STONES Are The Ultimate Garage
Band"




More than three decades into his enormously successful rock
career, the Valley’s own ALICE COOPER is still reaching goals
he set long ago.

“Get a star on Hollywood Boulevard, have a platinum album, go
to No. 1 and open for THE ROLLING STONES,” Cooper says by
phone from a Connecticut stop on his tour after a round of
golf in which the scratch player shot a 75.

Cooper has his star in Hollywood, has hit No. 1 on the album
charts and has gone platinum several times over. On Sept. 23
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Cooper got to open for The Rolling
Stones, and he’ll do it again Wednesday when The Stones play
University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, AZ.

“It’s one of the things I get to scratch off my list,” Cooper
laughs.

Like millions of others, Cooper is a die-hard Stones fan and,
in a roundabout way, it was The Rolling Stones that got a
track star at Phoenix’s Cortez High School named Vince
Furnier and his teammates to form a band called The Spiders.

“In those days you didn’t play original material,” Cooper
explains of the Valley music scene in 1966. “So we were the
Rolling Stones band and it would say, ‘Tonight at the V.I.P.,
THE SPIDERS will be doing “19th Nervous Breakdown.” ’ That’s
all we did. We were expected to do Rolling Stones just like
the record and, honestly, that’s why people came. Everybody
was doing BEATLES, so we were the band that ventured out and
started playing the Stones.”

And when The Spiders undertook the task of writing their own
material, the Stones’ music was a touchstone for the young
band that would later change its name to Alice Cooper (when
the group split in 1974, Furnier legally changed his own name
to Alice Cooper).

“The Stones are so good — they are the prototype garage
band,” Cooper says. “And I say that in all great respect
because AEROSMITH is a garage band, Alice Cooper is a garage
band and The Rolling Stones are a garage band, but they are
the ultimate garage band. You take their band and you could
put them in 70,000-seat (arenas) or you could put them in a
club, and it’s still the same music and it still works.”
Cooper, who will begin recording his 29th album in January to
be followed by another world tour — he has done five global
treks in the last five years — after the disc is released in
April, is still influenced by The Stones.

“To this day,” Cooper says. “On my last album (2005’s ‘Dirty
Diamonds’) we did two songs — ‘Sunset Babies (All Got
Rabies)’ and ‘Zombie Dance’ — that were absolute, pure
Rolling Stones.”