Cooper takes latest nightmare on road in 'Psycho-Drama' tour

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After 33 years, Alice Cooper is once again welcoming fans to his nightmare.

With the release of “Along Came a Spider” in late July, Cooper made a return to the concept album, a format that dominated his early solo releases, such as 1976’s “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell” and his 1975 solo debut, “Welcome to My Nightmare.” The focus of “Along Came a Spider” may not be a nightmare, but the story is certainly nightmarish, following an arachnid-obsessed serial killer named Spider who documents his murders in a diary. The album’s songs each represent a diary entry, with Cooper taking on the role of the killer.

So far, the return to this familiar territory has resonated with Cooper’s audience.

“This album has charted higher than anything [I’ve released] in the last 15 years,” Cooper said during a recent phone interview from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a stop on his “Psycho-Drama” tour.

“I think it’s because it’s such a great, traditional Alice Cooper album; it’s very much like ‘Welcome to My Nightmare,’ which was great because you can do anything in a nightmare.”

When his “Psycho-Drama” tour hits Proctors in Schenectady at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, only a few of these new tracks will be on display, however. The “Psycho-Drama” show, according to Cooper, is all about the hits, classic tracks such as “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out” that helped make him one of the forefathers of shock and hard rock. Now in his fifth decade of performing, Cooper, 60, knows there are certain songs that the audience expects in his live show.

“I’m at that point where if I don’t do those 15 songs, they feel like, ‘How come you didn’t do the hits?’ ” he said. “And I feel the same way; if I see The Rolling Stones or The Who, I better hear those 10 songs, 15 songs, otherwise it’s like, ‘What happened to “Brown Sugar”? What’s going on?’ ”

The 200-city “Psycho-Drama” tour began last year and has taken Cooper around the world, including visits to South America and Australia. He is now finishing up dates in Canada and the U.S., and will be heading to Germany at the end of October to close out the year.

After the release of “Along Came a Spider,” he added a few tracks from the album to the show’s set list, including the doom-laden “Vengeance is Mine” and “(In Touch With) Your Feminine Side.” However, performing new material alongside older songs can be a daunting task, he said.

“The awful thing is, as much as I should know this, I opened up for The Rolling Stones three times last year, and I’m sitting there, they do an hour and a half, just rocking, ‘Wow, these guys are rocking,’ ” he said. “But when Keith Richards does his two songs, it’s like, ‘OK, popcorn time.’ ” With the songs off the new album now, when I’m onstage, I want everyone to hear those new songs, but people want to hear the tried-and-true stuff.”

With 25 albums under his belt, ranging from the scrappy garage and glam rock of his ’70s band to industrial-tinged tracks from the ’90s, he has quite a back catalog to choose from.

Early days

Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Damon Furnier, started out as the lead singer of a band called Alice Cooper. That group released seven albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including classics such as “Love it to Death,” “Killer” and “Billion Dollar Babies,” before breaking up in 1974, with Cooper carrying on the group’s name as his own stage name.

With 1971’s “Love it to Death,” which included one of his signature themes, “I’m Eighteen,” the band began to develop its theatrical stage presence, in a show that over the years has included many gallons of stage blood, guillotines, hangings and a boa constrictor. The “Psycho-Drama” shows continue Cooper’s penchant for theatrical rock ’n’ roll.

“This show is one of the shows that’s actually fun to do every night,” he said. “Any time that you’ve got everything from Chinese assassins to zombies to [John] McCain and [Barack] Obama, and touches on just about everything else . . . you’ve got a full show.”

In May of next year, Cooper will embark on a full tour based around “Along Came a Spider,” which will include ballet, a giant spider web and “somebody being torn into eight pieces.” The show will loosely follow what’s going on in the serial killer’s brain.

“I try to keep it surrealistic so that the audience has a chance to make up their own story,” he said. “You have to use your imagination some.”

His solo career has survived through trends such as hair metal and grunge, with Cooper taking tips from these genres along the way. He enjoyed a revival in the late ’80s, thanks to the hair and glam metal scenes, and again revamped his sound for the ’90s. His more recent albums, beginning with 2003’s “The Eyes of Alice Cooper,” have seen him return to his garage-rock past.

Full circle

“Along Came a Spider” brings things full circle, drawing from Cooper’s earlier concept albums while not entirely ignoring his ’80s or ’90s output. He got the idea for Spider’s story after realizing that America has a “love affair” with fictitious villains.

“Everybody loves The Joker, everybody loves Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter, but when it comes to real serial killers, you don’t have people saying, ‘Yeah, I’m a Jeffery Dahmer man myself,’ ” he said. “We hate real serial killers and mass murderers. There’s no way of defending them; they’re horrible people. . . . So when it comes to fictitious serial killers, if you’re going to create one, create a really good one.”

The story follows Spider as he goes through eight victims, collecting a leg from each in order to become a spider. As the story progresses, he falls in love with his final victim and cannot kill her (“The One That Got Away”), and begins to question his motives and morality (the power ballad “Salvation”). The album even includes a twist ending.

“He’s not just crazy, he has human problems too,” Cooper said. “I always really liked O. Henry, where the twist at the end totally changes the whole meaning of the story.”

The album also includes one other tidbit for longtime fans — the return of the character Steven, a young boy who was the main character in “Welcome to My Nightmare.” On this album, he turns up as a pet spider in the epilogue.

“He is sort of my Kilgore Trout,” Cooper said. “If you read Kurt Vonnegut [Jr.], you find Kilgore throughout all of his books. The character is in every book, but doesn’t serve a purpose. I feel obligated now that Steven should show up in the story; if I don’t, someone will say, ‘What happened to Steven?’ ”

When Cooper begins the “Along Came a Spider” tour, he will once again slip into the Spider character, but for him, touring always involves getting into character. As a married man of 33 years with three kids, who occasionally teaches Bible studies, his real life is about as far removed from his musical persona as one can get.

“I always tell people I’m more Ozzy Nelson than Ozzy Osbourne,” Cooper said. “That’s what makes Alice really creepy. I play the Alice thing, get in the skin of this guy and I have no idea who he is, but he’s still my favorite rock star.”

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