Their is seeing Alice Cooper, ahem, live on stage bucket lists and then there is Alice Cooper's guillotined head falling in a bucket list and I crossed both off my list, Friday night at the Prudential Center.
The good news is that Alice's greatest hits filled setlist could've come at just about any post- Welcome To My Nightmare period, the bad news is so could the special effects and the good news is that the cheesiness of Cooper's special effects are part of the charm.
In a fun filled hour, Cooper, in full Alice drag and therefore looking completely ageless, rolls out everything you ever wanted to see from him. Throwing money to the audience during "Billion Dollar Baby" having his head chopped off for "I Love The Dead" and, scariest of all, dancing across the stage in skintight leather pants everywhere else.
The problem with Cooper, who has been in bands since 1963, is, well, except for maybe five songs, his material is kinda lame. Sure, I'll take "I'm With Stoopid", " No More Mr. Niceguy", "I'm Eighteen" -even his great ballad (not played tonight) "Only Women Bleed" but otherwise, there is decades of dross.
Li=Luckily, that is what Alice is playing tonight and it is irresistibly creaky and cheesy. I went to an English seaside resort out of season once, this was just post-dance hall, and that's what Cooper was like: a little old fashioned and a little sad and about as scary as the Frankenstein monster, a sort of papier machete fella on stilts.
The audience adore him and though Todd Leibowitz mentioned he sounded off at Jones Beach last week, Alice has subsequently fired his drummer and the sound is perfect. Alice isn't tough to get along with; there is a simplicity to his song structures that goes along with his earliest years and if he wrote better tunes the songs would stick like glue. But I remember getting "Greatest Hits" in 1974 and being disappointed and three songs made it on to this set list so you gotta think, right?
The band is fine, and Cooper, given his age of 64, is in fine health, voice and energy, good songs. And I do like him, he is really true to his vision, and it is strange he is so doing and hasn't really seemed to change. Alice ends the set with his greatest song, "School's Out" and segues into "Another Brick In The Wall" safe in the knowledge, his song is better. But it is just all a little depressing. It's like dreaming about somebody you love who has died: there is something wrong though they look right: they shouldn't be there
Grade: B+