It's a safe bet that most everyone is familiar with the heavily made-up shock rocker Alice Cooper, who brings his latest stage project, "The Psycho-Drama Tour," to Davenport's Adler Theatre on August 23.
Perhaps less familiar is the Alice Cooper who finds the time to play golf nearly every day - even while touring - and who hosts the Alice Cooper Celebrity Golf Am, now in its 11th year.
To understand just how serious Cooper is about this pastime, I began a recent phone interview by asking why he prefers belly putters to traditional putters.
"Just to have more control" is his immediate response. "By far. I think if you use your stomach or your chest as a fulcrum, and just let your putter be a pendulum, that's the easiest way to putt. I just played yesterday with John Daly and Lee Trevino and Fuzzy Zoeller. I made about a 75-foot putt [with a belly putter], and all of a sudden they started looking at it ... ."
He chuckles. "Daley was saying, 'Boy that works.'"
Cooper is so passionate about the sport that he recently co-authored an unusual literary hybrid - a golfing manual slash autobiography - with 2007's Alice Cooper: Golf Monster.
"It was such an interesting idea to me," Cooper says of the book's inspiration. "Here was the scourge of rock and roll. Basically a character that was, you know, deemed the 'please don't let our kids turn out like this' guy in the '70s. I was probably more notorious than Marilyn Manson in my time. And all of a sudden he's playing golf with Arnold Palmer? To me that was such a great juxtaposition.
"But," he continues, switching to third-person, "I always liked to put Alice in places he didn't belong."
A Whole World Full of Rock Heroes
Probably like many of you, I first remember Alice Cooper from the '70s. On The Muppet Show.
But aside from his guest appearance there and a few appearances on Hollywood Squares - and, if you were allowed to stay up that late, The Tonight Show - that was about all that my friends and I did see of him. We did know, however, that he was a rock star that most of our mothers wouldn't be caught dead letting us listen to, which, Cooper says, was sort of the original idea.
"I looked around and I saw a whole world full of rock heroes," says Cooper of the character's beginnings, "and no villains. I thought, 'Where is Captain Hook?', you know? 'Where is Jack the Ripper?' There wasn't any personification of a villain in rock and roll. So I said, 'Well, I'll design Alice to be that villain.'
"And it was fun," he adds. "Who doesn't want to play the villain?"
For the musician born Vincent Damon Furnier, playing the villain led to quick notoriety and great popular success, and during the early '70s, Cooper (who had his name legally changed in 1974) was able to parlay that success into meetings - and subsequent friendships - with many of his musical inspirations.
"I knew all the rock stars," he says. "Of course, it was very important to meet the Beatles, you know. And the Rolling Stones. That was something where you just went, 'Wow, okay ... the only reason I'm in this business is because I saw these guys on television and I bought their records, and ... they changed my life, you know? And the same with Dylan and the same with Elvis."
Yet Cooper also befriended numerous luminaries outside the musical realm, and formed close attachments with the likes of Mae West and Groucho Marx. And, eventually, the Muppets.
Regarding his frequent TV appearances, Cooper recalls, "People would say, 'What is Alice doing on The Muppet Show? What's Alice doing on Johnny Carson?' You know, most rock stars didn't do Johnny Carson. But I found that when I got on I was funny. And they wanted me back, so that was great."
Cooper adds, "That was just a part of my personality that I used to hide, because I didn't want Alice, the character, to be thought of as being funny. Now I like the idea that Alice is scary funny, and this, that, and a bunch of different things. I don't want him to be just one thing.
"I don't think you're ever expecting to become an iconic character," he says. "And I don't think of myself as an iconic character. I think of the character. 'Alice Cooper.'"
Play All Day
Yet during his heyday in the '70s and early '80s, Cooper had a problem.
"I was a classic alcoholic," he says. "When you're an alcoholic, you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is drink. I couldn't walk from here to the bathroom without taking a drink with me."
By 1983, when Cooper was 35, his addiction had appeared to take complete control of his life; in Gary Stromberg's 2005 book The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories of Addiction & Recovery, Cooper is quoted as saying that in a typical morning, "I'd have two or three drinks, go into the bathroom, and throw up blood."
Faced with losing his family - Cooper told author Doug van Pelt that he and his wife, Sheryl, "almost broke up because of my drinking" - and losing his life, the musician checked himself into a sanitarium for treatment, and after his release, relocated with his family to Phoenix, where he had lived for much of his youth.
Cooper says he left the hospital with "absolutely no desire to ever drink again," adding, "I always tell people I was a healed alcoholic, not a cured alcoholic, because I think it was more spiritual than that. It was almost like it [alcohol] was just taken away."
He knew, though, that old habits are tough to break.
"When you're in a rock band," Cooper says, "you don't work 'til 10 o'clock at night, and so when I was drinking, I'd get up in the morning and I would just sit and watch TV all day. Well, then [when you're sober], you've got to substitute that with something.
"So I got up one day and said, 'I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna play. Play golf.' And my wife said, 'Play all day.'"
So he did. "I played 36 holes a day, every day, for a year," Cooper says. "And I was playing with pros, too, so that was like taking an eight-, nine-hour lesson every day."
By the end of that first year, the musician says he was "shooting seven, eight handicap," and that he's currently down to a five. Not that, as with all serious golfers, he isn't aiming even lower.
"It's like losing weight," he says of the process. "It's sort of like if you weigh 400 pounds, losing the first 200 pounds is easy. If you want to lose another eight pounds, you might lose one pound a year."
Cooper's daily routine, begun in 1983, continues to this day. "I'm on the tee every morning at 6:30," he says. "We play every day.
"In the States we do," he amends. "In Europe it's a little harder, South America ... you know, because you're traveling a lot more."
(Cooper, here, says, "I like traveling on buses, because you're only a couple hundred miles from each show, and getting to the airport an hour-and-a-half early, getting through all the stuff, getting on the plane, you know ... that's a five-hour deal. It's easier just to drive. You're on your own time.")
The musician, though, insists that "it's not that I need it [golf] to stop drinking now. But I did need it in the first year."
Understandable, then, that his life - his new life - is irrevocably tied to golf, and would lead to Alice Cooper: Golf Monster.
Yet while he seems to enjoy the dichotomy of the world's premier shock rocker associating himself with one of the world's more sedate sports, Cooper himself doesn't appear to find it all that unusual.
"I always saw Alice as Americana, you know? And now that I'm in the business 40 years, and I've done everything from movies to TV to radio, Alice just seems like he won't go away. He really is woven into the fabric of Americana, much like a Vincent Price.
"I've always looked at the character as a little American treasure," he adds with a laugh.
Wow ... That's Alice
He's likely to be a treasure to future generations, as well.
Cooper has managed to stay in the public eye through his nationally syndicated radio program Nights with Alice Cooper (begun in 2004), his commercials for Crowne Plaza and Staples, and his occasional, usually tongue-in-cheek film roles. (He played Freddy Krueger's father in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, but he might be best remembered by his cameo - wherein he expounded on the joys of Milwaukee - in Wayne's World.)
"I don't mind poking fun at the character," says Cooper. "I have fun with the character. And at the same time, when I walk into a room of rock stars, there's still a certain amount of, 'Wow ... that's Alice.'"
But in addition to his radio show and his acting work, Cooper, of course, still has his music; the musician reportedly has a new album due in the spring, and to hear the musician tell it, the timing of the new tour fits current musical trends - pardon the golf pun - to a tee.
"If you go to your local mall and look at five 15-year-old kids coming at you," he says, "look at their T-shirts. Black Sabbath. Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd. You know, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, David Bowie ... . Classic rock is bigger now than it's ever been. It's the first time in history that teenagers are listening to the same music as their parents."
Perhaps because, as Cooper will attest, a vast majority of their parents seem convinced that they know Alice Cooper personally.
"Apparently, I went to high school with everybody in every city," he says of the daily barrage of fans that claim a "six degrees"-like connection with him. "Every city I go into."
Cooper chuckles. "Even today - it happened today - a girl comes up and she says, 'Hey! You know my boyfriend! Joe Klypfshplark!'" (I'm taking a guess at that spelling there.)
"And I go, 'No-o-o ... ,' and she says, 'Well, he played guitar for you!' And I said, 'Girl, if he's lying to you about that, he's lying about everything.'
"Now if a 12-year-old boy comes up," he continues, "and says, 'My dad played drums for you,' and I say, 'What's his name?' and he says, 'Bob Franklin,' and I know he didn't play drums for me, I go, 'You know what? Your dad was the best player we ever had.'
"Because why not?" Cooper asks. "I don't want to ruin that relationship between that son and a father.
"But I definitely want to bust the guy that's tellin' his girlfriend that he played for us."
Alice Cooper - with musical guest Whitestarr - will perform the at the Adler Theatre on Thursday, August 23. For ticket information, visit (http://www.adlertheatre.com).
