Alice Cooper Live in 2024: ‘Like Something Out of a Time Warp’
by Thomas K. Arnold
Alice Cooper, Harrah’s Southern California Resort, August 2024 (Photo by Thomas K. Arnold, used with permission)
Alice Cooper’s August 15, 2024, performance at Harrah’s Resort Southern California, a popular casino in Valley Center, was like something out of a time warp.
We often hear that performers haven’t aged, but in truth, most of them have. Maybe it’s the makeup, maybe it’s the youth of his band members, maybe it’s his own good health (more than 40 years of sobriety), but Alice Cooper is one of those rare exceptions.
From the moment Cooper made his theatrical entrance with “Lock Me Up,” off his 1987 solo album Raise Your Fist and Yell, to the final encore of his signature “School’s Out,” the title track to the Alice Cooper band’s 1972 LP, it was a nonstop rock ’n’ roll circus where time was suspended. It was as though 76-year-old Vincent Furnier, aka Alice, was still at his glam-rock/heavy metal peak in popularity and the 2,000 or so audience members were back in high school, defiantly singing along at the top of their lungs, “I’m eighteen, and I don’t know what I want…”
Ah, such is the power of music—and with legacy bands continuing to grow ever more popular, it’s easier than ever for aging Baby Boomers to relive their youth and all those conflicting thoughts and emotions inherent in having a “baby’s brain and an old man’s heart.”
Accordingly, the songs that worked best were from the earliest years, when Alice Cooper was the name of a band, before Furnier adopted it as his own stage name. The Alice Cooper band broke out in 1971 with “I’m Eighteen” and, under Frank Zappa’s tutelage, was hailed as a pioneer of the heavy metal genre as well as the increasingly theatrical stage shows of what has become known as glam-rock. The Alice Cooper band fused what one publication at the time likened to the sound of metal trash can lids banging together with a stage show of horror dramatics, complete with mock executions, a guillotine, a baby doll that gets stabbed to death and lots of blood. Early Alice Cooper is credited with having influenced everyone from Kiss to Marilyn Manson.
At Harrah’s, Cooper and his band followed “Lock Me Up” with “Welcome to the Show,” a riveting rocker off his most recent LP, 2023’s Road, that harkens back to his early, raw sound. Indeed, the emphasis at the concert was on high-powered rock ’n’ roll, with the band then performing a trio of early classics: “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” from 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies; “I’m Eighteen”; and “Under My Wheels,” from 1971’s Killer.
Related: Our Album Rewind of Billion Dollar Babies
Next came 1989’s “Bed of Nails,” off his widely acclaimed comeback album, Trash. It’s not one of the LP’s stronger tracks—despite a brooding, building beginning, “Nails” soon evolves into a stereotypical late 1980s hard-rock anthem that would have been right at home on a Bon Jovi album. (The same can be said of “Poison,” a Top 40 hit off Trash.)
Alice Cooper, 2024 (Photo by Thomas K. Arnold, used with permission)
The raw power of early Alice subsequently staged a triumphant return with “Billion Dollar Babies,” while the follow-up, “Snakebite,” off 1991’s Hey Stoopid, is a riveting rocker in which Alice brought out his beloved boa constrictor, a trademark of his live shows since the 1970s.
Next came another another Killer track, “Be My Lover,” with its “Sweet Jane”-like intro, followed by two more early 1990s songs, “Lost in America” and “Hey Stoopid.”
A crowd favorite was 1975’s “Welcome to My Nightmare,” off Cooper’s first solo album, which was released right after he disbanded the Alice Cooper group. By then he had adopted a more commercial, poppy sound, with even more emphasis on theatrics. The Welcome to My Nightmare album yielded the hit single “Only Women Bleed,” an uncharacteristic ballad that was conspicuously absent from his 90-minute at Harrah’s.
Cooper stepped up the theatrics with “Cold Ethyl,” also from the Nightmare LP, in which he fondles a life-size rag doll; “Go to Hell,” from his 1976 solo album Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, in which he dances with a gyrating dominatrix (his daughter, Calico Cooper) against a backdrop of crackling flames; and “Feed My Frankenstein,” off Hey Stoopid, during which he shares the stage with a giant monster.
The next song was one of the concert’s musical highlights: “The Black Widow,” also from Nightmare, which featured a blistering guitar exchange between the glamorous Nita Strauss, formerly of an all-girl Iron Maiden tribute band, and fellow guitarists Ryan Roxie and Tommy Henriksen, and bassist Chuck Garric. All have played with Cooper for more than a decade, Roxie’s stint going back to 1996.
Alice Cooper at Harrah’s Southern California, August 2024 (Photo by Thomas K. Arnold, used with permission)
The next two selections saw Cooper at his macabre best. On “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” he came out in a straitjacket, was tormented by a ghoulish nurse (Calico again), and wound up getting electrocuted. Next, he combined “Killer” and “I Love the Dead” into a gruesome stage show in which he places his head in his guillotine and his severed head is then held up by the dominatrix licking blood off a knife.
The final song, before the encore, was “Elected,” off Billion Dollar Babies, a tongue-in-cheek assault on the political process that saw Alice in an elevated podium draped with a red, white and blue banner.
The encore, “School’s Out,” which the band modified by adding a few lines from Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” had the entire house on their feet. If the early moments of the show had audience members feeling as though they were 18 again, the encore left them feeling liberated, free and defiant—at least, until the houselights came on and reality set in.
[A couple of weeks later, Suzi Quatro joined the band on stage in Clarkston, Mich., for “School’s Out.”]
Watch Alice Cooper perform “No More Mr. Nice Guy” at the Southern California show
Tickets to see Cooper perform are available here. His extensive recorded legacy, including many expanded editions, are available here.
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