Years of merchandising and
reunion tours have kept face-painted rockers Kiss in the public eye, but Gene
Simmons and co. weren’t the only ’70s FM-radio favorites to weave elements of
classic horror movies into their stage shows. Vincent Damon Furnier, better
known by his stage name Alice Cooper, actually preceded Kiss in the practice of
blending ballads with bloodshed. Like Kiss, Cooper eventually traded the fake
gore for PG-rated thrills, the better to please the young children who became
part of his fan base. By the time Cooper released the concert film Welcome to My Nightmare, his antics were
about as threatening as the average episode of Scooby-Doo. Nonetheless, Welcome
to My Nightmare is fun to watch because it captures Cooper at the apex of
his popularity, and because the concert tour that’s documented in this movie
was so ambitious. Dancers!
Monsters! Special effects! Vincent Price’s voice on a recording! Most of this
stuff is pure camp, of course, but the tunes are fairly strong, and the overall
presentation is entertaining.
A little bit of context is necessary. In the
early ’70s, Alice Cooper was the name of both Furnier’s stage persona and the
tight rock band he fronted. Alice Cooper, the band, earned fame with
attitudinal hits including “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out,” while their stage
shows often climaxed with a fake head getting chopped off by a guillotine. In
1975, Cooper went solo and released Welcome
to My Nightmare, which features the ballad “Only Women Bleed.” To promote
the album, Cooper and choreographer/director David Winters created an elaborate
stage show telling the story of the album from start to finish. (In the songs
and the show, a young man named Steven becomes trapped in a phantasmagoria of
demons, monsters, and spiders.) The team shot the show twice. First, they
videotaped the performance on a soundstage, adding even more elaborate costumes
and effects and sets, to create the Emmy-winning TV special Alice Cooper: The Nightmare. Then they
shot part of the tour, complete with real audiences, to create this feature
film. Overkill? Sure, but restraint wasn’t exactly the guiding principle of
Cooper’s ’70s career.
The separation of Cooper from his old backing band means
that during many scenes, Cooper is alone onstage except for dancers, resulting
in a high kitsch factor. The sequence of Cooper wearing a white tuxedo and a
white top hat while high-kicking with dancers wearing skeleton costumes is silly.
Yet the lengthy sequence during which two dancers dressed as spiders crawl up
and down a giant web while Cooper’s guitarists engage in a shrieking six-string
duel is a treat for the ears and the eyes. Cooper runs through the expected
hits (“I’m Eighteen,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “School’s Out”), as well as
playing all of Welcome to My Nightmare.
The material is uneven, and Cooper’s croak of a voice is unremarkable. However,
there’s a lot to be said for an artist willing to work this hard in order to
keep his audiences amused.
Today, rock bands seeking to create spectacle have
arsenals of digital technology at their command. Back in the day, folks like
Alice Cooper and Kiss made their wonderments by hand. Especially since Kiss
never made a proper concert movie in the ’70s (a shocking oversight by the
entrepreneurial Mr. Simmons), Welcome to
My Nightmare might be the best artifact we have from the original, low-tech “shock-rock” era.
Welcome to My Nightmare: FUNKY
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