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Re: Alice Cooper interview (GNR/Bob Ezrin mention), 10/15/04
Puget Sounds: Alice Cooper sees all, and it's really good
2004-10-15
by Claude Flowers
Kings County Journal
Alice Cooper has released the album of his career.
The theatrical vocalist, who rose from Detroit's 1960s garage rock scene to stardom, is currently promoting "The Eyes of Alice Cooper," a supercharged masterpiece that offers all of the qualities that made his repertoire legendary in the first place: great melodies, raw power, tongue in cheek humor, a bit of sleaze and an element of monster movie-style horror. It's a terrific record, simultaneously modern and yet analogous to his vintage work.
Speaking by telephone from Virginia, Cooper said, "I don't listen to the radio a lot, only when I get in my car, but I have an 18-year-old son and a 23-year-old daughter that keep me pretty aware (of modern music). I'll walk by their room and go, 'What's that?' 'Oh, that's Franz Ferdinand.' I'll go, 'That's pretty interesting.' Or I'll walk by and say, 'What are you listening to?' My daughter will go, 'Listen to these guys.' If I hear of a band two or three times in a different context, I'll go, 'OK, let's find out what they're doing.'
"There has been an onslaught of garage bands, starting with The White Stripes, then The Strokes, The Vines, The Hives. Now, I think the best one out there is this Australian band, Jet. I'll listen to it and go, 'Why do I like this so much?' Well, it's because they're doing 1968 garage rock, Detroit style. I felt right at home with that."
White-hot musicians
Keeping this trend in mind, he created "The Eyes of Alice Cooper" with the same haste and spirit that propelled his earliest records. A team of white hot musicians (including current KISS drummer Eric Singer) added magic to the recording sessions.
"I said, 'What I want to do on this thing is put all the emphasis on the band and on the writing. I want everything low-tech.' So, the band goes into a room about the size of a small club, we turn on the amps, we get a great producer/engineer and cut these things, one song at a time. The album was done in 12 days, with no overdubs (i.e. corrections added later)."
The tracks vary in style but complement each other nicely. "I'm So Angry" and "Backyard Brawl" are crazed blurs of punk rock. "Be With You Awhile" is a tender ballad. "Love Should Never Feel Like This," "What Do You Want From Me," and "Novocaine" are energetic anthems.
Cooper said, "When you do songs in a small period of time, you capture a certain style of what the band is (inspired by) right then. That's what gives it a (consistency). If we had done the first song eight months beforehand, put it in the can, then recorded the rest of it, that first song and the last song would have sounded totally different. They wouldn't have belonged together."
Quietest is creepiest
The oddest cut is "This House Is Haunted," which suggests some indistinct, unnamed danger lurking just around the corner. It's the quietest track on the CD, but also the creepiest.
According to Cooper, "I came up with this idea. I said, 'What about a guy that lives in a house that's haunted (by the ghost of) his lover or his wife or his girlfriend, so he doesn't really mind that this person's floating around the house?' We sat down and wrote that in about 10 minutes."
The song profited from the input of veteran producer Bob Ezrin, a longtime associate who masterminded Cooper's 1971 breakthrough disc "Love It to Death" and still serves as an artistic sounding board.
"Bob Ezrin came in, listened to it, and goes, 'Clarinet.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'A clarinet's gonna give it this 1890s kind of feel. A clarinet's got a real lonely sound to it.' We tried it and I said, 'Oh, that's good.' It's almost Dixieland. It had that New Orleans vampire kind of thing to it.
"But that's exactly why I run things by Bob Ezrin. He and I think so much alike that I'll go, 'I know I'm missing something here, Bob. What is it?' We came up at the same time together. He was a classically trained kid from Toronto, and we were this sick, theatrical garage band ... Somehow, the two met, and we found he was as warped as we were. But then he could take all that classical training and plug it into what we were doing...
"I'm not the only one. To this day, really good songwriters that are ready to finish an album call me up and go, 'Do you have Bob Ezrin's number?' He did it with Jane's Addiction. He did it with The Darkness. He did it with Guns 'n' Roses. I know Axl (Rose, the lead vocalist of G 'n' R) called him up and said, 'I want you to listen to (the still-unfinished CD) "Chinese Democracy" and tell me what I've got (that's good).' Bob listened to it and said, 'Three songs.' This is after seven years (of songwriting). Bob's not going to be a yes man. He's going to go in there and tell you how many (decent) songs you actually have... He's basically taught me everything about how to write a song."
