As the founding father of shock rock with a catalog well into the double digits, Alice Cooper -- nee Vincent Damon Furnier -- could easily rest on his laurels, or retire altogether to a leisurely life of celebrity golf. But then, that wouldn't really be Alice, would it? With the release this week of Brutal Truth, his twenty-fourth album, Cooper proves that he's still got plenty of surprises left in him. The Bob Ezrin-produced concept album, which examines the nature of evil set against the harrowing backdrop of a future gone terribly awry, sheds the self-parody and gallows humor of Cooper's late Seventies efforts. And, rather than treading the same mascara-ed territory trod by his Nineties clone Marilyn Manson, Cooper reveals a harder, reinvigorated industrial sound that recalls the best of Korn and Rob Zombie.

RollingStone.com caught up with Cooper at his Cooper'stown restaurant, a sports bar-cum-rock paraphernalia emporium, where he was rehearsing for his world tour. The man who wrote "Welcome to My Nightmare" spoke candidly about his new sound, his later-day paranoias and his genuinely God-fearing family values. "Right now," he says, "life is very cheap. I always am at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, but I think that technology and atheism and the lack of family is killing us. It sounds archaic to talk like that, but I'm almost positive I'm right."

Brutal Planet sounds right at home between Korn and Nine Inch Nails. In other words, nothing like vintage Alice.

It's such a surprise to people. I was trying to kind of capture the energy of those bands. That's the kind of energy that I have right now. It's an album I've been trying to make for a long time, but I think that you need a subject in order to motivate it, to sort of put the gasoline in it. I got to a point of saying I don't really want to do just the twelve rock & roll songs anymore. There's a glut of music out there, so if I'm going to put an album out, I want it to be about something. I want it to have impact, I want it to have a show that backs it up, and I want it to say something. This may be the first actual, deliberate social consciousness that Alice has ever shown.

The new song "Blow Me a Kiss" offers a typically chilling Alice point of view on Columbine. What's your take on the tragedy?

I think we walked right past the real problem on this thing. I'm a believer in God and the Devil, and in "Wicked Young Man," I said it. I said some people are just evil. Some people were born evil, some people are tools of Satan, and I believe these guys were. And people will kind of look at me and laugh and say, "How archaic," and "How can you think like that?" Well, I'm sorry -- that's what I believe. I believe that we just keep looking past the fact that it comes from a classically dark, evil place.

Brutal Planet is all very dark. Some of the lyrics are pretty dire.

They are dire because the place is so desolate. When you see the stage show, you just go, "Oh, no. I don't want to be anywhere near this place." It's technology gone crazy and destroyed itself. I'm a very optimistic person, but Alice is very pessimistic, to the point of being nihilistic. When I started writing for Alice, if I started writing, "Well, everything's going to be OK, because technology's going to be fine and everybody's going to get some sort of spiritual uplifting and we're all going to be in Nirvana. . ." Well, no. Alice says, "Absolutely not. Everybody is going to go insane, technology's going to eat itself and we're going to be left with road warriors, we're going to be left with people that will kill for food. And the people they kill, they may eat." I mean, this is really a dire, horrible place that he's going to take us to.

But you know, the trick is to make a point of it and entertain at the same time. You can't just put a hammer on their heads and leave them there. The music has got to be entertaining, and the stage show has got to be really pleasing, even though it's something that's dark. But the end of the show is like a party. You can't leave an audience down, and I think a lot of bands that are around now do. They leave the audience with a bad taste in their mouth. I want the audience to walk away saying, "That was the best party I've ever been to."

And then they think about it later. I still think about the time you got your head cut off.

They brought that back. I play a warlord at the beginning of this show, and I definitely get my just desserts.

So where do Alice and Vince meet? Is there any common ground in your subconscious?

No. The only thing I know about Alice that's for sure is that he hates golf. I would never put a golf club near Alice because he'd kill somebody with it. To him, everything's a weapon.

But still, after all these years you've never "met" him?

Oh, in the old days, yeah, when I was drinking. You have to remember who I was trained by. My best friends were Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin. I was the new kid on the block, and they were my big brothers. Every time John Lennon would get in a fight with Yoko, he'd come to L.A. and we had a club called the Hollywood Vampires. It was a drinking club. And he would end up with us, because we were all drunk every night. All the stuff was just insane. And it was back in the days when all that was just an everyday event.

Do you have any friends from the old days?

Every once in a while I run into somebody. Harry Nilsson was one of my best friends, and almost all of my friends from that period are dead. And I think maybe the reason I'm still alive is because I was the next generation and I learned that I didn't have to die to be a legend. I think it was more important to stay alive.

Speaking of old friends, is it true you've retired your snake?

The snake is not in this show. The snake didn't make the cut. There was so much stuff in the show, it did not need anything else.

So it wasn't because he relieved himself all over the floor of the House of Blues in Los Angeles the last time you used him?

No. In fact if we could get him to do that every night, we would. I never expected there to be eight piles the size of a Doberman Pincher, and this thing just kept going and going. And Johnny Rotten was in the audience, and he says, "God, do you do that every night?" And I said, "Yeah, I know just where to touch the snake." He was very impressed. That was one of the great moments on stage. There's hardly anything that compares to that, because there was nothing I could do. He just kept going and the audience was laughing and I couldn't do anything about it. It was all over -- my whole stage costume was covered -- and I had ten more songs to go, and it smelled so bad I was gagging. In thirty years the snake had never done that.

Do you think your 1976 autobiography, Me, Alice, has withstood the test of time?

I don't know. I'll have to go back and re-read it. I know at the end of it I said I'm going to finish it off in the next ten years. I really do have to wait until a lot more people die before I can expose anyone.

JAAN UHELSZKI
(June 7, 2000)