ALICE COOPER Talks About His New Stage Show; Audio Available

David Burke of the Quad-City Times recently conducted an interview with legendary rocker Alice Cooper. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On "Theatre of Death", Cooper's newest concert-and-stage spectacle, directed by New York director and visual artist Rob Roth.

"I think they kill me four times in the show. If you don't do those things right, you can actually get punctured.

"[Rob] went through my songs and said, 'If I were gonna tell a story, I would take it in four parts. These lyrics are the ones I would use to bring these stories alive.' Lucky for us, all of the hits were in there. You always want to do all the hits, no matter what the show is. Every single one of the hits is woven into the show.

"The first thing I do is listen to the show and I go, 'Does this just rock the audience?' I'm not talking about the theatrics. Does the music rock the audience? Yeah, it does? Then we're really home free. The theatrics is just icing on the cake."

"It's a journey with Alice Cooper, through delinquency, through the mental hospital, through hell. Alice kind of takes you through four stages of Alice."

"I think anybody who's seen my show in the past 10 years knows the rhythm of my show and they know how it works. But this is upside-down and backwards. All of a sudden, they're going to be hit with a song that's usually at the end of the show at the beginning of the show."

"I always feel like I have to prove something. Maybe that's my motivation, the fact that is there is that inner need.

"I'm sure audiences are thinking they're getting a watered-down Alice Cooper who's 60 years old and 'Isn't it nice he's still up here doing this.' They get this show and they go 'That was exhausting.' I want the audience exhausted. I figure if we're exhausted, they should be exhausted, too."

On how going sober helped separate himself from his character:

"It used to be a gray area. There was this gray area of who Alice was and who I was. I never knew where he began and I ended. That was because of the alcohol and that my big brothers in L.A. were Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and Keith Moon. All the people who burned out at 27 were the people I was kind of looking up to.

"When I got sober, I realized this Alice character, this vile, arrogant villain, doesn't want to live in my world and I don't want to live in his. It's fun to jump into his skin every night for an hour and 45 minutes and kill the audience with being this person that I'm not. When I get offstage, I leave him up there. But trust me, it's fun to play him.

"When that show's over, he's gone."

Listen to Cooper talking to the Quad-City Times about his new stage show using the audio player below.