Two nights before Halloween, the 70-year-old shock-rocker brought his ever-entertaining, creepy rock to DeVos Performance Hall. Check out the review, photos and set list from Monday’s musical mayhem.
Halloween Shock-Rock: Alice Cooper brought his bag of tricks and treats to Grand Rapids on Monday. (Photo/Anthony Norkus)
It’s hard to envision a better collision of concert calendar and seasonal holiday vibes than Monday night’s All Hallows Eve-Eve visit from legendary Detroit rocker Alice Cooper, who brought his “A Paranormal Evening With Alice Cooper” tour to a near-capacity DeVos Performance Hall.
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Depending on how you feel about Valentine’s Day, perhaps.
Yet, were it not for the (presumably evil/haunted) jack-o-lanterns scattered across the stage that occasionally belched columns of smoke as Cooper’s backing band ripped through one of their many foot-on-monitor guitar solos, one might have mistaken it for any other night in the life of the now-70-year-old shock-rock pioneer.
No More Mr. Nice Guy: Alice Cooper and band on the DeVos stage. (Photo/Anthony Norkus)
Cooper — backed by a five-member band of three guitarists, a bassist and drummer, plus a stagehand who regularly popped out of a trunk to accouter the bandleader with the necessary top hats, leather coats, canes and so forth — presided over a 20-plus-song set of serious theatrical silliness on Monday that was rarely less than 100 percent entertaining.
To that end, the late-set highlight “Feed My Frankenstein” climaxed with the show’s best piece of stagecraft: Cooper, strapped to an operating table, disappeared in a shower of sparks and smoke as a giant Frankenstein’s monster cavorted across the stage.
Was it the same as watching Cooper in his hair-raising 1970s commercial heyday? Couldn’t say. My first encounter with Cooper was as a kid when I saw “Wayne’s World,” where, after a roaring performance of “Feed My Frankenstein” in Milwaukee, he schools Wayne and Garth with an erudite monologue about the city’s history and culture.
Special Effects Galore: Alice Cooper brought his usual theatrical flair. (Photo/Anthony Norkus)
Even now, Cooper seems just as well known for his placid life off stage (he golfs and teaches Sunday school) as whatever hell he might have raised when rock was still capable of shocking.
But Cooper was reveling in rock’s conceptual art/artifice gray space a few years before David Bowie and a few decades before everyone else, so you’ll excuse the man for sticking to what works. Agelessness was never really Cooper’s schtick, but his canonical hits — “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” “Poison,” “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen” — are sturdy in a manner the Halloween chill in this week’s air compels me to describe as un-dead.
And every music fan will someday be 18 and confused every day and need their own generation’s version of Cooper to put their angst into words. Why be ageless when you can be timeless?
PHOTO GALLERY: Alice Cooper at DeVos Performance Hall
Photos by Anthony Norkus
SETLIST: Alice Cooper at DeVos Performance Hall
Courtesy of setlist.fm
1. Brutal Planet
2. No More Mr. Nice Guy
3. Under My Wheels
4. Billion Dollar Babies
5. Grim Facts
6. Lost in America
7. Serious
8. Fallen in Love
9. Woman of Mass Distraction
10. Poison
11. Halo of Flies
12. Feed My Frankenstein
13. Cold Ethyl
14. Only Women Bleed
15. Paranoiac Personality
16. Ballad of Dwight Fry
17. Killer
18. I Love the Dead
19. I’m Eighteen
ENCORE
20. School’s Out
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