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DETAILS

Alice Cooper
Jubilee Auditorium
Saturday, September 27 - Saturday, September 27

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Alice Cooper
w/ Econoline Crush. Sept. 27 (8pm). Jubilee Auditorium. Tickets: $59.50, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca)

“To me, this is really one of [my] best-written albums, as far as melding together and making the story work,” says original shock rocker Alice Cooper regarding his latest effort, the cryptic, eerie Along Came a Spider. His 24th studio album tells the tale of Spider, a serial killer, and the strange modus operandi behind his gore-iffic art.

“It’s an interesting story about a serial killer that definitely has flaws,” Cooper says. “Even though he thinks he’s infallible, he’s totally fallible. When you think of Hannibal Lecter, he’s perfect. He’s a serial killer, a psychologist [and] meticulous planner. This guy thinks he’s that — but the more the album goes on, the more you find all these flaws in his personality. He has a romantic side that will get him in trouble. He eventually falls in love with one of his victims and can’t kill her... one of his downfalls. He also has a religious side. In the middle of the album, he has an epiphany: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ That’s a great, complex thing to have happen to a serial killer.”

Easily Cooper’s best work in almost two decades, Along Came a Spider pulls from the tragic conceptualism of 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare yet boasts enough balls to almost reach the metallic tinge of 1987’s Raise Your Fist and Yell.

Naturally though, when dealing with The Coop, nothing is as it seems.

While the 11-track opus lends itself to the belief that all is real, the album’s unnerving “Epilogue” forces listeners to rethink everything they’ve just heard. Did it happen? Is Spider simply crazy? Was it all just another of Stephen’s nightmares? Cooper wryly declines clarification.

“He’s got everybody on the run; he’s created this spider and wraps his victims in silk — very clever. He takes one leg and the police finally realize: ‘Eight legs and silk? This guy thinks he’s a spider or at least becoming that.’ But then you realize it’s written in a diary form.

“Just when you think you’ve got it all put away, he says, ‘Well, we’ve been in this cell for 28 years. We couldn’t have done that.’ All of those murders only happened in his mind and showed up in the diary… or there could be another killer.”

Still, Along Came a Spider took a lot of work to come together. Cooper discarded several approaches to telling the story before settling on the diary concept.

And while he was initially keen to create a radio serial, the idea was nixed when he realized both the limitations of the form, and the shortage of listeners in this day and age who know what the hell a radio soap opera even is.

“It would have been great as a radio drama,” Cooper says. “When I first thought about it, I thought it would be great to have Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Douglas — my friends — to play the parts of the psychiatrist, the cop, or the insane asylum orderly. I think everybody would’ve loved to do that, but I got to the point where I realized if I explain it too much or explain what’ll happen, if I don’t give the audience a chance to use their imagination, it won’t work.

“Great art forces the audience to use their imagination. When I see a Salvador Dalí painting, I know what I see but you’d say, ‘No, he’s not saying that. He’s saying this.’ We all have our own values we place on a crutch or a tongue or a melting watch. It’s the same with my show or with the album. When you [experience] it, there are so many images going on, you create your own story. [Alice Cooper] is a Rorschach test… it’s all up to you.”