Remember my post a few months ago asking for research help with a magazine piece about Alice's Last Temptation album? I found plenty of stuff at www.sickthings.co.uk , threw in a few of my own observations and this is what I came up with.
Enjoy 
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,W
ALICE COOPER: THE LAST TEMPTATION
(Epic Records, 1994)
I: WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE
Alice Cooper, a.k.a. Vincent Damon Furnier, was born on February 4th 1948 in Detroit, Michigan. The son of an electronics engineer turned Methodist preacher, he lived the life of a typical American teenager until the music of The Beatles, The Who and The Yardbirds (amongst others) spurred him onto greater heights of rebellion. He abandoned a short-lived career on his high school athletics team when the lure of rock n' roll stardom proved too strong to resist. "I remember thinking," he told Michael Bonner in the Autumn 1994 issue of Comics Forum, "that when I started a band, I wanted to make the Stones look like saints."
After humble beginnings as The Earwigs and then The Spiders, the quintet of Furnier (vocals), Michael Bruce (guitar/keyboards), Glen Buxton (guitar), Dennis Dunaway (bass) and Neal Smith (drums) decided to call themselves The Nazz. When Todd Rungdren gave his new band the same name, The Alice Cooper Group was born. They went on to become the most controversial rock stars since Elvis Presley was caught swivelling his hips on television.
Stories behind the moniker are many and varied. Depending who you ask, Alice Cooper was either a selection of letters chosen at random while playing with a Ouija board, the reincarnation of a girl burned at the stake during the Salem witch trails, or picked just because it sounded like the name of an all-American blonde folk singer. Furnier himself, as group leader and consummate frontman, was synonymous with the Cooper identity, and still uses it to this day.
They put on larger than life stage shows as far back as 1968, gender-bending while David Bowie and Marc Bolan were still masquerading as hippies and experimenting with rock theatre years before KISS detonated a flash bulb. The music was just as loud and obnoxious as their live performances, with which Frank Zappa was so perversely impressed that he signed them to his record label. Pretties For You was released in June 1969, followed by Easy Action in March 1970. Neither made much impact on the charts, but it wasn't long before Warner Bros. and Canadian producer Bob Ezrin came to the party. Love It To Death and its single 'I'm Eighteen' started the ball rolling in 1971, with Killer not far behind. Darker moments on both these albums helped introduce elements of comic horror into the stage act, and before long it was impossible to think of Alice Cooper without also thinking of mock executions by electric chair or guillotine, live boa constrictors or the decapitation of plastic chickens.
The outrage attracted by such antics gave Alice and friends all the publicity they would ever need, even if the headlines threatened to eclipse the quality of School's Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973). When the group reconvened to write and record Muscle of Love (also 1973), the stress of being everyone's favourite scapegoats had begun to take its toll. Glen Buxton wasn't in the best of health, and the rest of the band felt overshadowed by their own theatrics. Michael Bruce and Neal Smith in particular wanted to embark on solo careers, keen to be perceived as serious musicians rather than part of a circus troupe. This led to an amicable split in 1974, which coincided with the release of Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits.
Alice marked time with a memorable stint on the quiz show Hollywood Squares and contributed two tracks to a rock opera based on Flash Gordon. These ventures kept him in the public eye while he toiled on his next opus. Co-written for the most part with Bob Ezrin and guitarist Dick Wagner, Welcome To My Nightmare hit the shelves in February 1975 and was nothing short of a masterpiece. It boasted a guest appearance by Vincent Price, spawned a surprise hit in the shape of 'Only Women Bleed' and even led to its own TV special.
Nightmare may have been the extravaganza that Alice had always dreamed of, but its success left him at something of a loss for what to do next. Alice Cooper Goes To Hell (1976) plodded along the trail blazed by its predecessor, and Lace and Whiskey (1977) is perhaps best remembered for the formula ballad 'You and Me'. The rise of punk and disco meant that Alice, like many of his hard rock alumni such as Aerosmith and Black Sabbath, struggled to find a place on radio station play lists. It was a difficult time that left our hero looking for solutions at the bottom of a glass. "Disco drove me to drink" he quipped, but the reality of Alice's alcohol problem was far more serious. He checked into a rehabilitation clinic in 1978, emerging with a clean bill of health and enough raw material to inspire his next album From The Inside. Given the diversity of the tracks included (each one drawn from the experiences of patients Alice met during a three month stay), it's unfortunate that the chosen single was yet another ballad, 'How You Gonna See Me Now?'
Flush The Fashion (1980) and Special Forces (1981) were attempts at a new wave sound, while the lyrical schizophrenia of Zipper Catches Skin (1982) laid the foundation for the unsettling creepiness of DaDa (1983). Some fans hail these albums as underrated cult classics, but they were perhaps too abstract for the mainstream audience. Alice learned from this and took an extended break to consider his options. By the time he returned to the stage in 1986, the music scene was flooded with groups he had helped to inspire. He signed to MCA and recorded two full-throttle heavy metal albums with guitarist Kane Roberts (Constrictor and Raise Your Fist And Yell) that showed young upstarts like WASP and Motley Crue who was boss. The subsequent concerts garnered plenty of attention, most of it from hysterical moral watchdogs who fretted for the safety of America's youth now that Alice was back in the limelight. He responded to their disgust by securing a new deal with Epic Records and releasing what was to be one of his most popular efforts.
1989's Trash may have lacked the tongue in cheek satire of Alice's earlier output, but it gave him his biggest hit in years. Both album and single ('Poison') made the top five on both sides of the Atlantic. Hey Stoopid did almost as well in 1991, helped along no doubt by the inclusion of 'Feed My Frankenstein' in the film Wayne's World.
The Last Temptation, about which more later, was followed in 1996 by the live A Fistful of Alice. In 1999 came The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, a four-disc retrospective. Alice then signed to independent label Spitfire and worked with producer Bob Marlette on Brutal Planet (2000) and Dragontown (2001). He looks set to continue recording and touring well into the new millennium, showing all the modern day pretenders to his throne how it should be done.
II: ENTER THE SHOWMAN
Trash and Hey Stoopid were both commercial successes, but Alice felt there was something missing. As he said to interviewer Paul Sutter in the June 1994 issue of Metal Hammer, "I knew that I just couldn't write another album of pointless rock n' roll songs for teenagers making out in the back of a car."
Though Alice's place as spokesman for a generation had long since been taken by the likes of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, he could still make comments and observations about the world as he saw it in the angst-ridden nineties. He chose to do this through music, but first he needed help to develop a concept. One phone call to England and one very surprised Neil Gaiman later, he'd found the right man for the job. Despite the writer's initial doubts, not to mention his bemusement at the passing public's frequent cries of "we're not worthy", the pair soon discovered they had much in common. "I liked Alice the person enormously," Gaiman recalled. "And I liked the idea of creating a story with Alice the character- something that could be used to build an album or a stage show."
Their early conversations grew into a tangible idea, centred around a boy named Steven and a mysterious theatre he stumbles across on the way home from school. Over the next year Alice and his team of collaborators (including Chris Cornell from Soundgarden and Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw of Ted Nugent's Damn Yankees) shaped the story into a musical morality play of ten short acts. 'Sideshow' captures all the boredom of adolescent life in middle America, before the Showman dares young Steven to enter his Theatre of The Real. Here he tells him that 'Nothing's Free', that all the delights and wonders he will see inside come at a price. The show proper gets underway with 'Lost In America', the hopeless tale of one Johnny Blunder, who has tried and failed many times to break the monotony of his small town existence. "I can't get a girl 'cos I ain't got a car," he snarls over a guitar riff straight out of Iggy Pop's garage. "I can't get a car 'cos I ain't got a job..."
The Showman warns Steven that his own future will be no better than Johnny's. He will end up in a 'Bad Place Alone', with no other option but to live on the streets, join a gang and steal to support the drug habit that is now his only way of escaping the real world. Steven denies that such things could ever happen to him, forcing the Showman plays his trump card. 'You're My Temptation' is the boy's tantalising introduction to the pleasures of the flesh. It uses a character called Mercy as bait to lure him further in, but Steven refuses. He walks out of the theatre and tries to make sense of everything he's seen, offering up a 'Stolen Prayer' for the strength to resist it all. His wish is granted when he decides to go up against the Showman, declaring an 'Unholy War' against the forces of darkness and corruption.
In 'Lullaby' we find that the Showman is not so easy to defeat. "I'm the one who growls in your closet", he reminds a defiant Steven. "I'm the one who lives under your bed." 'It's Me' tells of the angel Steven dreams about when he falls asleep, who assures him that he's doing the right thing and who will be there to watch over him regardless of the choices he makes. Empowered by this, he returns to the theatre and burns it down, redeeming his soul and those of all the other children that the Showman has captured over hundreds of years. Feeling refreshed, renewed and 'Cleansed By Fire', Steven goes home and looks in the mirror. When the Showman's face stares back at him, Steven understands that he may have won the battle, but the war is one he will have to go on fighting for the rest of his life.
It was a lot of material to squeeze onto a 50 minute CD, so at some point during the recording, a decision was made to adapt The Last Temptation into another medium. Video clips were filmed for 'Lost In America' and 'It's Me', but even these couldn't give the story's themes the full exposure they deserved. A three part comic series seemed like the logical choice. It gave Neil Gaiman the chance to work in an area he was already familiar with, and allowed him to expand on some key ideas. "There were chunks of plot that hadn't made it onto the album...," he said. "It would be good to get it all down." The finished product wasn't quite as complex as some of Gaiman's other work, and that was just what he intended. "I wanted to create something that was essentially the comics equivalent of several pop singles: nothing too deep, nothing too ambiguous. ... A comic to read with the album playing in the background."
As luck would have it, three different comic companies were interested in creating music-related titles at the time. Alice had already worked with Marvel in the late seventies and was happy to repeat the experience. Michael Zulli agreed to do the artwork and the whole project was set in motion. Part one would be given away with the album and the next two instalments appeared on newsstands in the months that followed. All three were out of circulation for a long time until Dark Horse reprinted them in an omnibus volume in mid-2000. They removed the original colouring and gave the reader a chance to appreciate Zulli's pencils from a whole new perspective.
When The Last Temptation was first released in July 1994, critics praised it as Alice's finest work in many a year. For once they were right. The musical climate of the period may have been obsessed with all things grunge and alternative, but Alice stuck with what he knew best and reaffirmed his position as the undisputed king of shock rock. Long may he reign.
Stephen Lord.
