Alice Cooper rocks on with vaudevillian show

By John Benson

Straitjackets and baby carriages filled with little vampires.

Yeah, it’s just another tour for classic rock and shock rock artist Alice Cooper. However, this Detroit native and Arizona resident admits even he’s, well, often shocked by the make-up of the audience attending his Psychodrama Tour, which comes to the Lakewood Civic Auditorium on Tuesday.

“We started the tour last year and you have to do your hits, but then there’s a big section that is the theatrical section where all of a sudden it starts getting very dark,” said Cooper, calling from his Arizona home. “If you have a dark sense of humor, you find yourself laughing because I don’t think you can do horror without a little bit of comedy in it.

“So it ends up being really this dark vaudeville and the audience loves it. It’s like family entertainment. And sometimes I go, ‘Really?’ Because people are bringing their kids and families, and there’s really nothing in there that a kid couldn’t see, but it does get pretty dark in some places. Still, it’s pure Alice Cooper. It satisfies the Alice Cooper fan and the non-Alice Cooper fan.”

Satisfying rock fans is something Cooper (born Vincent Furnier) has done since 1971 when “I’m Eighteen” was his first big hit. While many platinum albums (“Billion Dollar Babies,” “Welcome to My Nightmare” and more) and hit singles (“School’s Out,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and more) followed, it has been nearly 20 years since his last million-selling effort, 1989’s “Trash.”

Optimistic he still has one more mainstream album left in his future, Cooper is excited about his recently released 25th studio effort “Along Came a Spider,” which was based off a short story he wrote years ago. The 11-track concept album, which acts as a diary with each representing a different chapter, revolves around a serial killer that Cooper feels America can rally behind.

“We seem to have a fascination with fictitious serial killers,” Cooper said. “Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, Darth Vader. They seem to be OK. We all seem to like them. Nobody really can get behind a real serial killer — Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy. They’re really despicable, but we seem to like our fictitious ones.

“So I made this guy really colorful. Let’s make him classy and he has a sense of humor, he even has a sense of worrying about his soul. He falls in love with one of his victims and he can’t kill her. He collects legs from his victims and wraps them in silk like a spider would. So he’s pretty colorful.”

Cooper fans can look forward to the 2009 “Along Came a Spider” tour, which will feature the “Only Women Bleed” singer/artist performing the new album in its entirety with a full theatrical show to boot. In the meantime, Cooper said he’s looking forward to coming back to Cleveland, which once boasted one of his Cooperstown chain restaurants.

XAlice Cooper will perform at Lakewood Civic Auditorium at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Check Ticketmaster.