The most surprising thing about his recently released box set, The Life And Crimes of Alice Cooper, is how many of the songs spread across the four CDs have become staples of classic rock radio-- “I’m Eighteen,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Under My Wheels,” “School’s Out,”-- the list goes on and on. With a tour in the works for this summer, Cooper took some time out to talk about his legacy, his views on the current state of rock ‘n roll, and why golf doesn’t suck.

I saw you on ESPN in a celebrity golf tournament. Didn’t anyone tell you golf is a sport for old, rich, white Republicans?

(Laughs). The old, white rich Republicans are the ones that I’m looking for on the first tee. Because I’m standing out there with hair halfway down my back going, “Can you play this game for money? I didn’t know that.” Where I play golf, I see a lot of white, rich Republicans, a lot of long-haired guys, a lot of black guys, a lot of just about everybody. Every band I know plays golf--Offspring, Metallica, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed. ‘Scuse me? Yes, you heard me, Lou Reed. I don’t really think golf is that much a disgrace as it used to be. None of us are out there with checkered pants on.

Does rock seem as rebellious and dangerous as it did when you started out?

Well, at this point, what are you rebelling against? If you’re 70 years old, you’re a rock ‘n roll fan,

“There were so many rock heroes, we wanted to be a rock villain.”

because you grew up with Elvis. If you were 20 years old when Elvis came out, you’re 70 now. The other day I was in the airport, and I’m walking by this guy shining shoes -- he’s about 65 -- and he’s going, (in high-pitched whine) “Give it to me baby, uh-huh, uh-huh!” He’s doing Offspring! He’s not humming Frank Sinatra! So it’s pretty hard to be rebellious around rock ‘n roll now since it is our national music. I think maybe the only rebellious thing in rock ‘n roll right now is rap. It’s one type of music that a lot of people hate. Either you love rap or you hate it. There’s no middle. It’s more dangerous than heavy metal for sure. So that’s probably the most dangerous music you have right now. That’s the closest thing to real rebellion.

If it’s not about rebellion anymore, for you, what is it about?

Y’know, I don’t think rock music has changed very much at all. I listen to bands -- even Offspring, the Wallflowers -- bands I really like, there’s very few original things coming out. Rock ‘n roll really is only so many chords. You only have that many chords and there’s 20,000 albums coming out. Every once in a while something like a Jane’s Addiction will come along with a record that you go, “Wow, what was that? That was different.” Nine Inch Nails maybe, with a little industrial rock, but still, where does it go back to? They splinter these bands up and say, “This is industrial, this is contemporary industrial, this is soft-industrial” -- it’s all rock ‘n roll. In other words, if a band comes out right now what are they gonna do that’s gonna shock me or make me hear something new? Not much.

Well, if you were 18 and starting a band today, what do you think you’d be doing?

Y’know, I’m glad I’m not because I would be racking my brains to try to think of something. No matter which direction you go in you’re gonna bump into somebody. And that happened with us too. When we first came out, we realized even in 1970, that we were bumping into the Yardbirds and the Who and a little bit of Stones and a little bit of West Side Story and a little bit of James Bond, every once in a while. But as far as I was concerned, that was cool. We were inventing something that hadn’t been done right then. I feel sorry for a band now, because who can you sound like? No matter what you do you’re gonna sound like a little bit of somebody. If I were an 18 year-old band, I’d try to invent a new instrument or something. That’s about all you can do.

Guys like Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie have really taken your mantle and run with it. What do you think of they’re stuff?

I think they’ve done something that I appreciate, they’re doing theatrics. And I think people appreciate that they are paying 25 bucks to see a show and somebody’s actually going to the effort of giving them a show. I applaud them for that. I applaud anybody that actually spends time rehearsing a show, because it just doesn’t happen very often. Most times they just go, “We’re just a band. I just want people to love us for our songs.” Well, that’s the easy way out. That’s just like saying, “We haven’t got any ideas, so we’ll just say that we’re just a band and we’re honest to our music.” Well, that’s nice. What that means is, “We have no imagination and we don’t really want to go to the effort.” I mean, I just saw No Doubt. A band like No Doubt, who obviously have rehearsed their show, I give them a lot of credit. They’ve got the music and they’ve got a great stage presence. So to me, that’s terrific. Anybody that does that is good in my book.

Do you ever look back on some of the things you did 20 or 25 years ago and think that you went too far?

I think the one thing that was built into the Alice show was the sense of humor. I think that people always got the sense of humor. Okay, maybe there’s that one-tenth of one percent that actually took it seriously. That’s the same guy who takes Dragnet seriously so I don’t know what you can do about that. I think that most people would walk away from the Alice show going, “That was fun.” Because we always ended the show in a party. No matter what they did to Alice, if they cut his head off and the blood went squirting all over the audience, the end of the show was always Alice coming out in a white top hat and tails, confetti, balloons, “School’s Out.” Everybody went home with a good, up, attitude. I never left them on a down. And that was part of our theory -- to make sure we entertained the audience and let them know that what we did was fun. I never wanted to leave them with a negative thing.

Do you think you were glorifying sex and violence to a certain extent?

I don’t think so. I never took the cheap shot. I never involved nudity. I never involved bad language. Because to me that was the easy way. If you want to get well-known, sure, you could swear every other word, but Alice never once did that. And nudity or anything like that, if you had to resort to that it means you weren’t very clever.

How do you react when people say, “Without all the theatrics, the music never would’ve gotten noticed?”

I don’t know if that’s true or not. I think we definitely did use the theatrics to get people’s attention. I don’t mind that. I think the gimmick is worth it as long as the music backs it up. I tell bands that all the time now. They always ask me, “Listen, we want to paint ourselves green, and hang upside-down dressed as bacon.” And I say, “Okay, yeah. Well let me hear the song.” And they go, “Well there’s no real song.” And I say, “Well, if you’re not going to do a great song about hanging upside-down as a bacon strip, then don’t do it.” I always compared it to if you’re Dennis Rodman and you’re getting 18 rebounds a game, then you can do leopard-skin hair. If you do leopard-skin hair, and you’re scoring two points a game, you’re a joke. So unless you can back it up, don’t do it. And that follows through with the music. If you’re gonna do theatrics, you better have the music to back it up or it’s not going to last.

You used to be executed at the end of all your shows. Did that leave any permanent psychological scars?

No. Because what I knew about it was the Alice show was always a morality play. Alice did bad things, the band did bad things, and what does he deserve at the end? Well, he deserves to be executed. And then what happens at the end? He always comes back in a white top hat and tails. It’s a party and everybody’s okay. Yeah, I think the executions were always kind of a symbolic thing. The Alice character, he was a villain and as much as he got away with, he never really got away with it.

How’s this summer’s show going to compare to the shows of old?

Well, we’ve never given up what we do best, and that’s to take an Alice lyric and make it come alive on stage. Alice Cooper will always be hard rock. We don’t profess to be anything more than hard rock, other than the fact that we do let the lyrics come to life. And if you’re going to do a song like “Welcome To My Nightmare,” you better give the audience a nightmare. And if the audience comes to see Alice Cooper that’s what they’re gonna see and at this point in my career, I’m not going to change it. I want the audience to walk away talking about the show and talking about how good it sounded and how it all worked together, and “How did they do this?” “How did Alice get from there to there? Wait a minute, wasn’t he just a clown? How did he get end up in the coffin?” To me that’s really important.

You pretty much brought the idea of theatrics into rock in a way no one had before you. What were the things you looked up to and were drawing on?

There was nothing in our way, there was nothing to compare us to, so we had no boundaries. If we were in rehearsal and we said, “let’s do this, let’s do this, and let’s do that,” and then we did it and the audience reacted, then we do that again tomorrow night. They didn’t react, we cut that out. So we had to experiment almost every night and things that I thought were going to work like a charm, a lot of times, didn’t work at all. Things that were accidents, blew the audience away. So it was sort of like, every single night, you would just keep whittling away at the show, until you had a perfect show. I got to a point where I knew exactly where they were gonna laugh, I knew where they were gonna scream, I knew where they were gonna jump, I knew when they were gonna get a shock. To me, it got to be funny. And it would do it, no matter if you were in Germany, Finland, China, they would react to certain things every night the same way.

What scares Alice Cooper?

I was an aficionado of horror movies and I guess there were a few

“I think the gimmick is worth it as long as the music backs it up. I always compared it to if you’re Dennis Rodman and you’re getting 18 rebounds a game, then you can do leopard-skin hair. If you do leopard-skin hair, and you’re scoring two points a game, you’re a joke.”

movies that really affected me, that actually did scare me. There was a movie called Carnival of Souls, that I watch now and doesn’t scare me at all, at the time it left a deep scar. A movie called The Haunting, was a scary movie. They’re remaking that by the way. I was never frightened by Dracula. I always saw him as a classy character. And when I invented Alice I wanted Alice to be a little bit Dracula, a little bit Joker, a little bit Zorro--he was a swashbuckling kind of villain. There were so many rock heroes, we wanted to be a rock villain. The thing that made it incredibly strange was the fact that it ended up that this Alice villain could have been gone in two weeks except for the fact that there were lots of hits. And the more hits we made, the bigger the stage shows got and the better we got at it. So we were finally a household name that wouldn’t go away. I think that shocked a lot of the press, because the press thought that we were a flash-in-the-pan. It took awhile for the press to finally say, “Okay these guys are for real.”

What do you think Alice Cooper has to offer that none of the bands that have come in your wake can?

I think the one thing is the fact that if you come to an Alice Cooper show almost every song is a hit. As weird as it is, and as off-center as it is, you can’t help from going, “Oh geez, I know that song.” That’s something that a lot of bands don’t have cause they haven’t had the time to have the history that we’ve had. There’s very few bands that have got 25 albums. So you have the fact that every song is recognizable, and the fact that I try to make it the most professional show out there. There’s no such thing as a night off. I don’t care how many people are in the audience, I don’t care where, it’s going to be the same show every night as far as the energy goes. And that’s for 35 years, I’ve never given that up. I think that that kind of commitment to the stage is what keeps me going. If I ever have to sit back and just fake it, than I really don’t belong out there. But when I get on stage, I don’t care who goes on before me, my attitude is to blow them off the stage. A lot of people don’t think music is competitive, but I believe it’s very competitive. I’m friends with all the bands but my attitude is still to blow them off the stage. I guess that’s old school but it still works.