It’s a couple of hours before show time, and Alice Cooper is waiting for Alice Cooper to show up. It’s been more than three years since he last played a gig. Three years in which he hit rock bottom, addiction-wise, and then dragged himself all the way back up.
But today it’s January 2, 1986, and the singer is clean and sober and ready to get back out there. There’s just one problem: as he paces his dressing room in Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, there’s no sign of Alice Cooper – the sneering, spindly, subversive charactercum-alter ego he imagined up almost 20 years before, when he was plain old Vincent Furnier.
“It was the first ever show I’d done since I’d gotten sober,” he says now. “And I didn’t know if I was going to be able to work like that. I was in all my Alice drag and everything, just pacing up and down, wondering if Alice was going to be there. I must have walked ten miles in my dressing room.”
Several hours later, Alice Cooper – the man – is back in the dressing room. His live comeback went off better than he could have ever imagined. Alice Cooper – the character – did turn up for the show. And then some.
“When I got
