Prince of Darkness or Prince of Vaudeville? photo: Gabrielle Geiselman, courtesy Alice Cooper

"I played golf this morning and it was two degrees Celsius!" Cooper quips. "I had to wear thermal underwear!"

Still, "Coop" - as everyone has called Cooper since his old friend Groucho Marx dubbed him Coop over 35 years ago - managed to squeeze in nine holes.

But why Coop?

"It's what Groucho called Gary Cooper. But when Groucho met me he switched it over to me," explains Cooper, who regularly visited his Hollywood neighbour late at night to watch TV because Marx, who passed away in 1977, was an insomniac.

It was also because of Marx that Coop became a member of Hollywood's Friars Club, where he rubbed elbows and boozed with Old Hollywood royalty.

"All those old showbiz guys thought my concerts were the last existing vaudeville show," Cooper recalls. "They didn't relate to rock'n'roll but they could all relate to the guillotine, a trick first used [on a vaudeville stage] in 1927. So they took me under their wing. There was the Rat Pack, Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis. The Friars Club roasts were vile -the [Dean Martin] roasts you see on TV, those are pablum. You get the real roast inside the club."

But don't think Cooper, now 60, has morphed into a dinosaur. He's currently cross-promoting his new album, Along Came a Spider, about a serial killer who stalks women so he can fashion a spider from their limbs.

Often quoted in the media as a supporter of the Republican Party, Cooper sets the record straight for the first time. "I'll be honest, I go from Democrat to Republican. I vote for the person, not the party. [As for Sarah Palin], I think she's totally a breath of fresh air. When they say she has no experience, maybe that's what Washington needs. I still don't know who I'm going to vote for. But in a shooting war, I want a pit bull, not a poodle. I'm gonna go for the hawk."

Alice Cooper
w/ Econoline Crush
At Théâtre St-Denis (1594 St-Denis), Oct. 15





 
 

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