ROB ZOMBIE To Induct ALICE COOPER Into ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME

Rob Zombie will induct Alice Cooper into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in a ceremony at New York City's Waldorf Astoria Hotel on March 14. The ceremony will be televised on the Fuse cable music channel on Sunday, March 20 at 9 p.m. ET. Zombie has long acknowledged Cooper as a major influence and the pair toured together for the first time last year, first on a short spring run and then on the longer "Halloween Hootenanny" tour last fall.

Zombie told The Pulse Of Radio at the time that getting the chance to finally tour with his idol was a real treat for him. "I mean, I've known Alice for a long, long time, for 16 years or so, and, you know, I love Alice and I love watching him play and his show is better than ever, and everything about it was great," he said. "I mean, this is no disrespect to anybody but, you know, I've played a million shows with a million people, but that's the only person I've ever played with that it was really meaningful to me."

Alice Cooper admitted that he was always confident that the Hall Of Fame honor would come his way, telling Billboard, "I've always felt the same way about this whole thing. I kind of sat back and said, 'It will happen eventually.' It did get to be kind of a joke, not being nominated. I got to the point where I was saying, 'OK, I'm the Pete Rose of rock n' roll!' So now that it's a reality, it's a different take on it. Now I sit there and go, 'Wow. Wow! We've got to really get up and play, and assume the position of being in the Hall of Fame.' It'll be great."

Cooper told Rolling Stone that he'll be performing with the original ALICE COOPER band at the Rock Hall induction, saying, "We're trying to figure out if we do 'School's Out', do we send balloons of confetti into the audience? I doubt there'll be a snake there though. . . If you look at the list of past inductees it's all of my heroes, from Pete Townshend to THE YARDBIRDS to THE BEATLES to the STONES. It's everybody that we listened to in order to become Alice Cooper, so it's pretty amazing that those are the same people that actually voted for us."

Alice Cooper told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that at the end of the day whether he was in the Rock Hall or not didn't seem to bug him much. "I've kinda put it in my head that if it happens, it happens, if it doesn't — the longer it goes, the more obvious it is that I'm not in it, and 99 percent of the people in the world think I'm in it anyways — even people on the board that vote on it," he said. "Toby (Mamis, Cooper's manager) talked to one of the guys and he says, 'Y'know, what is this thing with Alice? Is there a blackball or something on Alice?' And the guy said, 'What are you talking about? Alice is in the Hall Of Fame.' And he (Mamis) said, 'No, he isn't.' He (the Hall Of Fame rep) said, 'He's not?!' I think people assume that I am."