Said D. Boon, singer of the American hardcore band Minutemen, that dying doing what really excites you is not even dying, that we would have to find a different word to describe it. Vincent Damon Fournier, better known as Alice Cooper (Detroit, 1948), is enthusiastic about faking his own death on stage, whether guillotined, electrocuted, dismembered, in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold, with a noose around his neck.
The papier-mâché performances have always been part of his peculiar way of conceiving rock as an electrifying and macabre circus show, an incursion into the lion’s cage designed to provide the public with an extra dose of adrenaline. This custom, already introduced at the dawn of his career, was taken to a paroxysm on his 1973 tour, 50 years ago, a “suicidal” journey in which the musician was “executed” up to 78 times, in places like Charlotte, Philadelphia, Vancouver or New York.
A decade and a half later, in April 1988, his umpteenth mock hanging nearly cost him his life in one of the most peculiar accidents in the history of live music. The Detroit rocker himself explained it in an interview much after Entertainment Weekly. The event took place at London’s Wembley Stadium, during the general rehearsal for the European tour. Raise Your Fist and Yell (Raise your fist and shout). Cooper, then 40 years old, had just returned to the ring after the cirrhosis he was diagnosed with in 1983. Upon his return, he had recorded a couple of albums by heavy metal “lugubrious”, filmed a movie, The Nightmare Returns (1987), and made a brief tour of North America. Rolling Stone He said of him that he had returned transformed into a “pale reflection” of what he was in his day, but “willing to inoculate a new generation with the virus of dislocated and demented rock.”
The tunnel of terror
All he needed to do was reconnect with his audience on the other side of the pond, those European fans who had contributed so much to elevating him at the dawn of the era of glam, when in the United States he was seen more as a grotesque clown. Cooper was convinced that the winds of fashion were blowing in his favor that spring of 1988. After a couple of “prosaic” years in which rock seemed to have lost “the ability to dream,” the vigorous irruption into popular culture of the genre slasherwith film sagas like Friday the 13th either Nightmare in Elm streethad awakened the thirst for blood, gore and truculence in a new batch of teenagers.
Cooper wanted to run to meet that new audience. Perhaps at that point in his career, with divorces and liver problems on his back, he was no longer in a position to release songs as fresh and forceful as I’m Eighteen, School’s Out, No More Mr. Nice either Under My Wheels, the masterpieces of his particular theater of the absurd. But he did feel qualified to offer an “energetic, controversial and scary” live show, like in the old days. In that context, recovering the number of the false execution on the scaffold, unpublished on European stages for five years, seemed a safe bet.
The number in question had been one of the stellar contributions to the tour of Billion Dollar Babies (1973) by the magician James Randi, the man Cooper describes as “the Gandalf of rock’n roll.” Born in the Canadian city of Ontario, Randi was quite a character, an illusionist who had made a living practicing “white magic” well into the sixties and then recycled himself as a professional skeptic, the scourge of false gurus, healers, parapsychologists. , hypnotists and psychics, whom he ridiculed in public with his exhaustive knowledge of the crude tricks on which their supposed powers were based.
Randi also had a remarkable capacity for escapism, in the wake of Harry Houdini, and had perpetrated feats such as get out of a shirt of strength suspended upside down over Niagara Falls. This last facet of the man known as The Amazing Randi is what caught the attention of the young Cooper in those early years of the 1970s. Obsessed with giving live music an ever-increasing dose of spectacularity and “magic,” the Detroit native found a formidable ally in the escapist on leave.
The almond tree trick
Cooper had “hanged” himself on stage before, in a much less convincing and somewhat precarious way, but Randi taught him to perform the trick with precision worthy of the best illusion shows. It consisted of the singer rising and “falling” using a harness attached to the ceiling beams by a thick piano rope. Thus, at the time of the execution, the rope was kept a short distance from Cooper’s neck, but without coming into contact with him.
The ritual was that, in the final stretch of the concerts, Cooper would be “judged” for his multiple outrages and outrages. The public invariably shouted: “Hang him, hang him!” And Randi’s souped-up gallows did the rest, providing the respectable with their moment of morbid stupefaction.
Just like Cooper explained., at the Wembley rehearsal the gallows was set up as it had been done since 1973. But it was not taken into account that “even strong piano strings deteriorate over time.” The Gandalf of rock’n roll was no longer part of the crew, so Cooper performed the trick at his own free will, without taking the necessary precautions.
At the climax, the harness rope gave way. And the rope closed, for a moment, around Cooper’s neck, and he could hear “with chilling clarity” how it hit his chin. Luckily, it was not too tight, and Cooper, in a display of reflexes, was able to escape death’s embrace in the air: “I fell to the ground and lost consciousness, but I was able to live to tell the tale.”
The only physical consequences of this near-death experience were “some annoying grazes on the neck that lasted several weeks.” Given the circumstances, the singer was careful not to bring out from the attic another of the spectacular numbers inherited from Randi, the false step through the guillotine that had been all the rage on the 1975 tour. Despite everything, he gave the concert.
A macabre list
Cooper, in short, was about to join the fairly large list of rock’n roll martyrs whose recklessness or bad luck led to a premature death on stage. Les Harvey, guitarist of the Glasgow band Stone the Crows, was electrocuted by his microphone during a concert in Swansea in May 1972. Pedrag Jovivic, of the Yugoslav rock band San, was also the victim of an electric shock that shook the stage. in the city of Nis in 1975. Country Dick Montana, percussionist of The Beat Farmers, continued playing despite feeling the first symptoms of the acute heart attack that would cost him his life in a Canadian venue in 1995. To Mark Sandman, singer and bassist of Morphine , his heart also stopped in the middle of the concert on an unfortunate July 3, 1999.
Just like explains Matt Elliott in esquire, Cooper “had made simulated deaths an essential part of his show,” the extra ingredient that elevated his live shows to another dimension. When a well-executed but high-risk stunt becomes routine, “all the conditions are in place for a disaster to occur.” Cooper himself took the incident with sportsmanship. “When you go to the circus and see a trainer locked in a cage with 12 tigers, there is always the possibility that one of the tigers behaves the way they shouldn’t. Let’s say that danger is part of the show. You go into it knowing that you may be about to witness a tragedy, and that makes everything much more interesting and authentic. I have always wanted to integrate that point of uncertainty into my Show. “I want people to think: This could be Alice Cooper’s last night.”
Simon Reynolds said, in his wonderful essay Like lightning: Glam and its legacy from the seventies to the 21st centurythat he glam rock It was nothing more than a visceral and youthful reaction against how “sophisticated, boring and elitist” rock’n roll had become in the late 1960s. The generation of (crudely called) lipstick rock wanted to return to that source of primal energy that Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry had brought forth, but injecting it with an additional dose of theatricality, sexual ambiguity, aesthetic ambition, extravagance and danger.
Cooper, in Reynolds’ opinion, does not have a musical legacy on par with that of David Bowie, T.Rex or Roxy Music. But he rates very high on the last couple of elements of the equation, extravagance and danger. For the British critic, the 20-year-old Vincent Damon Fournier wanted to share with the world the fruit of an entire puberty and adolescence dedicated to being enthusiastic about loud and energetic music, horror and science fiction films, gothic novels or television. effervescent and delirious United States of the 1950s and 1960s. Armed with all that arsenal of fantasy references, he formed a band, created a subgenre (the shock rock) and offered some of the most delirious and fun concerts of the early seventies, a powerful flytrap for the adolescent fantasies of a new generation of music lovers.
Then, always according to Reynolds, he became “civilized and sweetened,” and would soon aspire to become “a respectable citizen.” But what he didn’t compromise on was his feverish, radical sense of spectacle. Hence, even in the transition to maturity, with a battered liver and a broken heart, he was willing to get into the tiger cage even at the risk of receiving a fatal blow. That kamikaze commitment to live theatricality is perhaps the most relevant (and attractive) part of his legacy. Theirs was rock’n roll made with a noose around their neck.
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