Oh, Alice!

Should you find that the Alice Cooper Psycho-Drama Tour is coming to your area of the world, you would be doing yourself a great disservice if you choose not to attend.

The first time I saw Alice Cooper in concert was 30 years ago.  Time has only perfected his craft.

With a very tight band, the combined age of which is probably less than Alice’s 61 years, Mr. Cooper delivers a sight and sound experience like no other.  The stage is in the proper macabre setting, the props are violent and bloody and the cast of actors, most of who are members of Mr. Cooper’s immediate family, are enthusiastically bizarre.

My family and I attended the show last night.  Now while there are some grandparents and other family relatives who believe that because I took my children to an Alice Cooper concert, that is proof enough that I am need of a lengthy visit from Child Protective Services, I disagree and am confident I did the right thing.

The concert was at the local county fairgrounds located in Redmond, Oregon next to the airport.  Most residents of the area say we are from Central Oregon as the towns kind of run together and none of them are all that populated.  Bend, where I live, is the largest with around 75,000 people but since most people don’t even know Oregon has a high desert area, we just say Central Oregon. 

That’s why you could tell the audience was a bit taken aback when Mr. Cooper changed the lyrics to Be My Lover from “Detroit City” to “Redmond City.”  People stopped clapping and looked at each other and you could read their lips (it was a rock concert) as they said, “I don’t live in Redmond.”  But the general consensus reached was that even if you lived in a different part of Central Oregon, the residents of Redmond tended to be more on the rural side and thus, had access to large, sometimes, sharp farming implements and as a rule, it is really best not to agitate those kinds of people, we agreed that, if only for the evening, we were, indeed, from Redmond City.

However, many folks in the audience were from Redmond and other parts further away from city life and you could tell that maybe, perchance, perhaps, they weren’t exactly prepared for an Alice Cooper Concert.

Now some of the audience members were your basic knuckleheads who considered a once-in-a-lifetime concert event as the right time to get so plastered, you end up wearing your pants as a hat.  These included those in the mosh pit, the flashers, the dog-collared, pierced and tatted partiers and one woman by some friends of mine who decided that midway through the concert; it would be a good time to “rinse.”  That is, as in raising one’s skirt and using a water bottle to cleanse that special place that is the last part of the body to feel cold. 

Really.

We were sitting, well, standing in front of our seats, in an area that included many people who were there as guests of the corporate sponsor.  I was dressed in proper rock concert attire (black) and my daughter had made up my face with Alice Cooper makeup.  Before the show started, another member of the audience said he liked my makeup and I said, with as straight a face as I could muster, “Oh, I always look like this.  It’s a tattoo.” 

The conversation kind of stopped short at that moment.

These people who were not so much Alice Cooper fans as they were company staffers who were anxious to see and be seen at the main event were pretty easy to pick out.  They complained when people stood up for the entire concert and nearly came to blows over debating whether it was permitted to stand on one’s chair.  When some of the chairs started to literally fly through the air during a song, that question was rendered moot.  They also kvetched over the volume of the concert and, as you know: if it’s too loud, you’re too old.

But then things started to get bloody.  When Alice pounded the stake through the baby’s heart, (it was a doll, you pinheads, so don’t write me to complain) well, they were a bit stunned to say the least.  In fact, it would be an understatement of the highest degree to say they couldn’t get out of the arena fast enough.  The only thing slowing them down was when they tripped over their own jaws which had landed on the floor quite some time earlier.

But why, many would ask including the previously mentioned relatives, why would you want to take your children to such an event?  What were you thinking?

Rock on.