Spend Halloween with Alice Cooper

Staff report

WARREN

The highlight of Halloween weekend will take place Saturday night when Alice Cooper returns to the Valley.

The founding father of shock rock is bringing his concert tour – dubbed A Paranormal Evening with Alice Cooper – to W.D. Packard Music Hall.

Cooper has been doing his thing for 40-plus years now, and his act is on the road for six months a year.

At age 70, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is still the ringleader of a show replete with ghoulishly fun stage antics. The guillotine, the maniacal nurse and other humorously horrifying theatrics remain the heartbeat of the concert – and a lure for new generations of fans.

Concertgoers can get an extra treat Saturday afternoon, when Ryan Roxie, the band’s longtime lead guitarist, stops at the Record Connection in Niles from 1 to 3 p.m. to greet fans.

Roxie will have copies of his new album, “Imagine Your Reality,” for sale at the shop in Pine Tree Plaza, which is in the McKinley Heights area of Youngstown-Warren Road. The riff-laden album includes a collaboration with Robin Zander of Cheap Trick on the song “California Man.”

As for Alice Cooper, there is also new music. The act followed up 2017’s “Paranormal” with a live release, “A Paranormal Evening at the Olympia Paris,” this summer.

And Cooper’s supergroup side project, Hollywood Vampires (which also includes Johnny Depp and Joe Perry), is also preparing its sophomore release.

The set list for the current tour includes a song from “Paranormal” and a whole lot of classic Alice hits.

Despite his stature and longevity, Cooper remains humble about his lofty place in the rock pantheon.

In a September interview with ultimateclassicrock.com, he spoke with sincerity about what was running through his mind the night he was inducted into the Rock Hall back in 2011.

“I stepped back and said, ‘Well, it’s very much like graduating.’ Because all of your teachers are voting on you,” said Cooper.

“When you think about it, all of those people... who are in the Hall, who we learned from, they get the ballots. They look at it and go, ‘Alice Cooper, well, yeah, we’ve got to mark him off.’ That makes you sit there and go, ‘Wow, they actually like what I’m doing.’

“You do think about that. It’s not an egotistical thing at all, it’s more of a humility thing, of saying, ‘Wow, I finally got the attention of these guys and they voted on me.’ You know, how cool is that that these guys got this ballot and marked my name down?”