Cooper Tires?

Alice Cooper hosts Evanescence Livestream

Alice has teamed up with the ‘Cooper Tire & Rubber Co.’ "to scour the nation and identify three talented American garage bands.” The three band finalists were asked to submit an original song, plus a cover of ‘Under My Wheels’ and you can check out their versions at the official site here. Alice also recorded a promo video for the event which is quite amusing. Not quite sure where they originally advertised this thing as this is the first we’re hearing of it and they are already down to the final three… There’s also an Alice-hosted free livestream performance from Evanescence on May 13th at which the winner of the competition will play an opening set.

The annual Detroit Music Awards named ‘Our Love Will Change The World’ as "best national single" and ‘best major budget video’ at last weeks ceremony, while ‘Rock’n’Roll’ was also nominated. Alice briefly appeared on the livestreamed show at around the 1.46 mark, after which Suzi Quatro announces ‘Rock’n’Roll’ as winning the ‘national single’ award! The awards website however confirms it was
‘Our Love Will Change The World’.

Alice will be a guest on ‘Liz Kershaw’s Legends In Their Own Lunchtime’ on BBC Radio 6Music on April 25th at 1PM. Afterwards you will be able to listen to it here.

There’s another new Alice Cooper book just out but this one is different. It’s a ‘Where’s Wally’ style book with cool Cooper themed colour illustrations for you to search out Uncle Alice. You can see illustrations here, and it is listed on AmazonUK but so far they don`t seem to have any available.

Dennis Dunaway and Blue Coupe were guests on ‘Talk Shop Live’ on the Rock’n’Roll Channel last Thursday and you can watch the hour long show now here.

Alice and Dennis Dunaway’s appearance on ‘Keith Roth’s Electric Ballroom’ has been postponed to Sunday April 25th at 8pm EST, and will be repeated May 2nd. You’ll find it here.

Ryan Roxie was a guest on the Envy Marshall Show which you can watch here.

Shep Gordon is in the Hawaii news again at KITV with a short interview and photos.

Coopstock!

Alice Cooper announces first live appearance since lockdown

Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock have announced ‘Coopstock’, a one day live event on April 24th at Las Sendas Golf Club in Phoenix. To quote the press release:" Join Alice Cooper for CoopStock – Music on the Green on Saturday, April 24th at Las Sendas Golf Club from 6 to 11 p.m.! Alice will be joined by Lou Gramm, the original voice of Foreigner, Tommy Thayer of Kiss, and ASIA featuring John Payne for a groovy night under the stars featuring live entertainment, food trucks, auctions, and more, all to benefit the new Alice Cooper Rock Teen Center opening May 2021 in Mesa!" This will be Alice’s first live appearance since the ‘Rock Meets Classic’ collapsed last year due to the Covid crisis. It’s unclear if the band will be there or whether he’ll be using local musicians which seems more likely. Tickets are available here.

The recent Classic Rock interview with Alice is now online here. He also shows up for an hour on the ‘Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll Show’ which you can listen to here.

Alice and Dennis Dunaway will be guests on ‘Keith Roth’s Electric Ballroom’ next Sunday (18th) on WRAT 95.9 at 8PM EST. You’ll be able to listen in here.
UPDATE: Postponed to Sunday April 25th, repeated May 2nd.

Alice is listed to appear at the annual ‘Patrick Warburton Celebrity Golf Tournament’. Although of course it won’t feature an actual golf tournament they will hold the traditional ‘Songwriter’s Night’ on April 20th and a "star-studded" Jam night the following day with as a live stream with Alice scheduled to appear. It will be free to watch (donations encouraged) and you can get more info here.

Alice pops up briefly in a new documentary about French fashion icon Pierre Cardin called ‘House Of Cardin’. Alice Cooper played Cardin’s theatre in Paris back on November 2nd 1971. You can see Alice in the trailer here.

Learn more about guitarist Garret Bielaniec and how he came to be all over the new ‘Detroit Stories’ album in a new article on the Livingston Daily.

Ryan Roxie’s next ‘In The Trenches’ guest on Tuesday will be LA Guns’ guitarist Tracii Guns. You can check this out and previous interviews on YouTube.

Nita Strauss was back on WWE wrestling this week delivering the American national anthem at the ‘NXT Takeover’ event and you can check it out in the video below. Nita also shows up on the ‘Cultaholic Wrestling‘ podcast ahead of the event.

New Interviews

New Alice Cooper Interviews

This week Alice has been doing quite a few interviews. He was on WNNX-FM which you can listen to here, the ‘Mistress Carrie Podcast’ which is here, and the ‘Neil Jones Rock Show’ on TotalRock which is here at around 1.03 mark. There’s also a new print interview at Grammy.com, and Alice picks his favourite 80s tracks for the BBC which you can find on YouTube.

Two new magazine covers to watch for in the UK are the new issues of ‘Viva Le Rock‘ and ‘Powerplay‘.

Dennis Dunaway was interviewed last week on the ‘Modern Problems Show’ which you can listen to here. Don’t forget you can ask Dennis your own questions by heading over the to forums!

KITV Island News have a story and photos of Shep Gordon and his young baby son Benjamin Robert Gordon.

Nita Strauss was interviewed on ‘The Sessions Panel’ which you can listen to here.

Interviews

‘Detroit Stories’ Interviews

Phoenix New Times has a new interview with Alice, as does Australia’s ‘May The Rock Be With You‘ and ‘Flood‘ magazine.

Also Australia’s ‘Heavy‘ magazine has Alice on the cover and a new interview during which Alice again talks about the next album featuring the current band.

Louder‘ has Alice answering questions that were apparently sent in on facebook. Many other news sites have picked up on Alice’s answer about his relationship with David Bowie. Alice is quoted as saying:

“David used to come to the show when he was a mime artist, he was Davy Jones back then. I remember at one of our Welcome To My Nightmare shows, he brought his band the Spiders From Mars and he was saying, ‘This is what we should be doing.’

This is basically correct of course, but unfortunately Alice has the time period wrong. Years ago in his biography ex-Spiders bassist Trevor Bolder talked about this happening but it was in 1971 at The Rainbow in London, not four years later on the 1975 ‘…Nightmare’ tour. This mistake is unfortunate in that it is easy for people to just discount Alice’s statement as false (The Spider’s From Mars were long gone by 1975) when in fact the basic story, according to several sources, is true.

According to a post on facebook Alice will be a guest at the ‘Days Of The Dead‘ convention at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas between May 14th and 16th. The organizers seem to be doing everything they can to make the event safe during this pandemic and tickets are on sale now. Of course as with anything at the moment it could be postponed or cancelled at any time.

Alice’s appearance on the BBC Radio 2 ‘Rock Show with Johnnie Walker’ can be heard here for the next months or so. The Alice section isn’t very long and starts around 35 minutes into the show with him talking about Jeff Beck.

Alice also showed up for 20 minutes on the ‘Jim Kerr Rock’n’Roll Morning Show’ on Q104.3 which you can listen to here.

AZCentral has a long article marking the 50th anniversary of ‘Love It To Death’ looking at the Alice Cooper band through the years with quotes from the band and some rare photos.They also have an article ranking the 28 Alice Cooper studio albums which has a few surprises.

Far Out‘ has Alice picking musicians for his ultimate band. The choices aren’t exactly a surprise – half ‘The Who’ and half The Beatles’ and add in Jeff Beck.

Dennis Dunaway was on radio station CFMU for almost an hour the other night and you can listen to the show online here.

The latest ‘In The Trenches’ podcast from Ryan Roxie features the "Metal God" himself, Rob Halford and can be seen on YouTube now with some bonus footage tacked on the end.

Nita Strauss is interviewed for an hour on the ‘Daily Stoic’ podcast which you can check out here.

#1 In Germany!

‘Detroit Stories’ Chart Positions

First week chart positions are coming in from around the world with the best being a #1 placing in the German charts! The UK mid-week #2 ended up as a #4 (although it’s been suggested it actually sold the most physical copies) and Billboard in the US have tweeted that while ‘Detroit Stories’ was the ‘top selling album‘ of last week, that only equaled #47 in the official ‘top 200 albums’. Work that one out…
Elsewhere the album entered at #17 in Belgium, #51 in The Netherlands, #7 in Sweden and #39 in Italy.

There’s been some speculation whether the images posted to the official AC channel of the Alice Cooper projections in various cities around Europe are genuine… well they were, and here’s a little clip of how they are doing it!

New Alice interviews have turned up at Loyola Phoenix, The Sun, and NPR (audio).

Ultimate Guitar have an article about ‘Love It To Death’ which was released 50 years ago this week.

2021 will also be the 50th anniversary of ‘Killer’ and Pale Wizard Records will be marking the event with an all new recreation of that original album featuring some of the best new underground bands including The Grand Mal tackling ‘Be My Lover’, Sergeant Thunderhoof on ‘Halo of Flies’ and Mos Generator with ‘Dead Babies’. The album also features 1968, Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Night, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and Ritual King. A Kickstarter campaign will launch this Friday to help fund the project, and the album is scheduled to be released in November.

Something new on YouTube worth checking out is professionally filmed footage of the full 2017 Los Angeles Greek Theatre show during the AC/Deep Purple US tour. The sound isn’t perfect but the multi-camera video is excellent and in HD!

Those of you who don’t regularly check out the STUK forums may want to drop in again and check out ‘Dr. Dreary’s Secret Dungeon’. where Alice Cooper founder and Hall of Fame inductee Dennis Dunaway is answering YOUR questions about Alice Cooper, The Earwigs, The Nazz, Blue Coupe, and anything else he’s done during his career. A great opportunity to finally get the answers to all of your questions direct from a guy who would know them!

Detroit Stories Midweek Placing

‘Detroit Stories’ has been out just under a week now and seems to be doing pretty well. It currently stands at #2 in the official UK mid-week album charts (and #1 for actual physical sales) and is doing similarly well in other countries. Noise11 are reporting it could be Alice’s first #1 in Australia!

Alice has been all over the press and TV in the last few days. Even as I was preparing this post he suddenly appeared on the TV, on BBC1’s ‘The One Show’ for a short interview. It’s available now on iPlayer.
You can also check out the following:

Alice’s full interview on GMTV here.
The Guardian in the UK had an interview.
The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit Metro Times both have features.
Rolling Stone
has a album review.
NME have a video interview.
AV Club asks Alice "11 Questions"
The Telegraph has an interview but it paywalled, however it seems to have been republished here.
The Irish Times has an interview.
The NZ Herald has a recent interview from ‘Radio Hauraki’.
Radio station KKLZ’s ‘Rock Talking with Meltdown‘ has a podcast featuring Alice.

Coming up Alice will be on the Radio 2 Rock Show on Saturday March 13th which will turn up here after broadcast.

New Alice magazine covers to add to the collection include Metal Hammer in Spain, and ‘Spark‘ in the Czech Republic. Sadly the UK has been poor in this regard with Classic Rock putting Pink Floyd on the cover. despite having an 8 page article about ‘Detroit Stories’ inside.

At the weekend the band, including Alice and Sheryl, took part in a very special episode of Ryan Roxie’s ‘In The Trenches’ and boy was it a blast. Apart from being VERY funny, producer Bob Ezrin also showed up to announce that they are already working on the NEXT Alice Cooper album, which at long last will be written and performed by the current band! The plan is to write and record it on the road during the next tour, and in fact Alice is toying with the idea of calling it "The Road", or just "Road". Hopefully he’ll come up with something better… Chuck also revealed that he’s already writing material for both this and a new Beasto Blanco album. Of course plans can always change, but the fact they are already talking about it publicly is a good sign it will happen! Check out the full show on YouTube.

Dennis Dunaway and Blue Coupe can be seen in a new video by occasional Blue Coupe backing singers Tish and Snooky. It’s a version of ‘Pills’ in tribute to New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain who died a few weeks ago. You can check out the video here. Dennis is also interviewed by the ‘Metal From The Inside’ podcast which you can see on YouTube.

Nita Strauss has posted a video highlighting her new ‘Jiva Jr’ guitar, a budget version of her own signature Jiva guitars.

Chuck Garric turns up singing Alice In Chains classic ‘Would!’ in a new video and it’s amazing!

More Detroit Tales

New Alice Cooper Interviews and book

Lots of interviews are appearing now in the run up to ‘Detroit Stories’ on Friday. New ones have appeared at Forbes Magazine, and the Boston Herald.

Alice was also on the BBC 6 ‘Radcliffe and Marconie’ show yesterday morning and you can listen in around the 1.36 mark for the next month or so here.

Alice and Dennis Dunaway have recorded a zoom interview with Keith Roth for Sirius radio’s channel 38 ‘Ozzy’s Boneyard’ which is due to air on February 27th at 11am EST, with repeats at 7pm on March 1st and 9pm March 3rd. The show will apparently also be available on demand.

Alice is on two more European magazine covers, this time it’s ‘Rock Hard‘ from Germany, and ‘Popular 1‘ from Spain.

Watchonista‘ have an article about Alice’s collection of watches.

I mentioned a couple of months ago that Sickthing Chris Sutton has a new book on ‘Alice Cooper in the 70s’ on the way. Well, it now has a confirmed publication date of March 28th and can be pre-ordered from AmazonUK with AmazonUS to follow. Below is the official blurb for the book, plus the cover.

"In Alice Cooper In The 1970s, Chris Sutton, explores the story of Alice Cooper the band and the solo performer from the early years through to the end of the decade.

The book features interview material from key figures including Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith from the original band, plus their hired gun Mick Mashbir. Also interviewed are Prakash John, John Tropea and Allan Schwartzberg from the solo years, and Ernie Cefalu, whose company Pacific Eye and Ear designed the album covers Several other musicians, concert promoters and even the band’s first roadie have also contributed their thoughts.
All of the albums and singles from Don’t Blow Your Mind, until From The Inside are examined in detail, along with related archive releases and songs that didn’t make the cut.
An essential guide to Alice Cooper in the decade the band helped to define."

Alice Cooper Court

Detroit to have “Alice Cooper Court”

With just two weeks to go until ‘Detroit Stories’ things are starting to move. During an interview with Detroit station WCSX it was announced that Alice will be getting his own road somewhere in the city called "Alice Cooper Court’. Host Jim O’Brien announced the news as a special birthday present to Coop. The exact location is yet to be decided and they are running a competition to choose the right spot.

There’s a new Alice interview in Spin magazine, and AZCentral has a video of Alice confirming that he and Sheryl have now been vaccinated against the Covid virus, having contracted it themselves late last year. German magazine ‘Rocks‘ (which looks very much like a version of the UK’s ‘Classic Rock’) is another European mag to have Alice on their cover this month.

Variety has a short article about being sober in the music business and it has a few quotes from Alice.

Dennis Dunaway is the star of a new advert for RotoSound strings which should be appearing in musicians magazines any time now. You can see the advert below. DD is also interviewed by Max1on1 which is available via Facebook.

Dennis and Blue Coupe will also feature during the Valentine’s Day virtual tribute show to New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain who died last month age 69. Tickets for the livestream are on sale now here.

Ryan Roxie’s latest ‘In The Trenches’ guest was ex-Alice keyboardist Teddy Zig-Zag, and you can watch what happened here.

Nita Strauss is featured on the January cover of ‘Recovery Today‘ magazine, a "Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery" magazine.

Glen Sobel is interviewed by North Wales Drum Productions which you can watch on Facebook.

Lastly there is a new movie due out on digital platforms in a couple of days called "School’s Out Forever". It’s a comedy horror film which looks amusing, and while the trailer doesn’t feature the song there can be little doubt where they got the title from, so surely it will play at some point?

Catching Up

New Interviews

Another very quiet couple of weeks in Cooper-world. There’s not been much happening but here’s a few things to check out.

Alice has obviously been doing interviews to lead up to ‘Detroit Stories’ next month and a few have started to appear. AZCentral have a new interview revealing that Neal Smith, Dennis Dunaway and Michael Bruce appear twice on the album, on ‘Social Debris’ (co-written by Neal) and ‘I Hate You’ (co-written by Dennis). There’s an article in the March issue of ‘Uncut‘ in the UK and Alice appears on the front cover of the new issue ‘Rock and Folk‘. There also a substantial article in the new issue of ‘Sweden Rock‘, The last two in their local languages of course.

Rolling Stone have published a great article about the legendary 1971 press party at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that was used to launch Alice Cooper on the unsuspecting public.

Neal Smith is interviewed by ‘ChurchOfRock’ on YouTube, while Dennis Dunaway was chatting to ‘IndiePower’ which is also up on YouTube. And to complete the original band make sure you didn’t miss Michael Bruce chatting to Ryan Roxie for ‘In The Trenches‘. In related (pun intended) news Calico Cooper has been talking to ‘Metal From The Inside’ which you can find here.

Friday Update

Alice Cooper Appears On Kesha Podcast and other news

Alice will be at guest on the first episode of pop star Kesha’s supernatural podcast ‘Kesha and the Creepies‘. Alice and Kesha first came together one ‘Welcome 2 My Nightmare’ and have appeared onstage together a couple of times. The podcast launches today via iHeartMedia.

Goodyear has partnered with Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers for a live streamed concert tomorrow, November 21st, between 5pm and 9pm local time. For local bands will take part, and it’s always possible Alice will make a brief cameo appearance as well.
In other Solid Rock news the opening of the second teen center in Mesa, AZ has been delayed due to the pandemic and is now hoped to open in late January.

A few posts ago I mentioned that Alice shows up singing on a children’s record by ‘Splash & Boots’ called ‘Heart Parade’. Well now there’s an article in The Star explaining how it came about with quotes from Bob Ezrin.

‘Nights With Alice Cooper’ has a new video in which Alice chats to Jimi Hendrix producer Eddie Kramer and Hendrix bassist Billy Cox about the new Hendrix film "The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live In Maui" which is out soon.

The Marc Bolan tribute show which Dennis Dunaway took park in a couple of weeks ago will be repeated on November 29th at 8PM eastern time (1AM UK time) at iheart.com. Dennis chats about the legendary Morgan Studios jam session near the end of the show.

Rolling Stone gets Alice to name his top 10 albums of all time in a new video.

Local Spins recalls the night Alice Cooper played the Civic Centre in Holland, MI in 1972.

According to an article in the Worcester News UK Cooper fan Chris Sutton has a book about "Alice Cooper in the 70s" on the way via publisher ‘Sonic Bond‘. It’s due in March 2021 and seems to part of a series of books concentrating on bands at their peak in the 70s.