Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Urban Bolta
Location: Športova hala Pasienky / Bratislava / Slovakia
Concert date: November 18, 2009
Attendance: 5,000
Ticket price: €25 / €29
Catching a show by the legendary Vincent Damon Furnier goes straight into the “must-see for every hard rocker” category. I’m talking, of course, about Alice Cooper, the stage name Vincent slapped on himself ages ago, sometime in the sixties of the last century. Starting out as the Alice Cooper group, in the early seventies he took the pioneering style of Arthur Brown and perfected it with his creepy getup straight out of the horror flicks of the day. Thanks to albums like “Love it to Death”, “School’s Out” and the releases that followed, he became the leading force of shock rock and, over the years, an icon of American rock music. Last year you could catch him in Munich, where he teamed up with Whitesnake and presented the freshly released album “Along Came a Spider”. The promo tour is over, and so that Alice Cooper wouldn’t get bored, he immediately hit the road again with a new one called Theatre of Death. After the summer-autumn leg in Australia and America, the “theatre of death” has now made it to Europe, and to Bratislava for the very first time. It’s a fairly distant destination, but still the closest “scene of the crime”. In a few days of wandering around town I spotted just two posters advertising Cooper’s gig, so there was no sign of any euphoria whatsoever. I don’t know Slovak concert habits, and with the promo being next to nonexistent, it was a big unknown (to me) how many people the event would even draw. In the end the number was pretty big: the nicely designed Pasienky sports hall on the outskirts of Bratislava was decently packed.
Before Bratislava got to experience a Cooper show for the first time ever, 30 minutes of glory went to Evarest, a Czech metal band that had already done the same job in eastern Slovakia, in Košice, where Alice Cooper played the day before the Bratislava show. Evarest are miles away from the headliner’s style. They play the female-fronted band formula, a breed that multiplied like mushrooms after rain once Nightwish made it big. A heavy metal foundation with two guitars, drenched in female vocals and melodic choruses, is what Evarest bet on, but they didn’t make too positive an impression on the crowd.
School bell for an intro, and now it’s on! The show, the story, had begun. Alice Cooper is that figure in rock history who took his music to the stage and created and directed breathtaking productions there that more than once shocked the audience. The Bratislava story started to unfold with the hit School’s Out, whose job is to warm up the crowd right from the start. With this move the band gets the contact with the audience going immediately, not gradually over the course of the show as so often happens. The stage setup was magnificent: Jimmy DeGrasso’s drum set perched high in the air with stairs leading up to it from both sides, and gigantic letters hanging at various distances like scenery, adding a third, depth dimension to the stage. What dynamics up there! Lead guitarist Keri Kelli (ex-Pretty Boy Floyd), mostly on the right, and the left side of the stage in the form of second guitarist Damon Johnson (Brother Cane) and bassist Chuck Garric (ex-Dio, ex-L.A. Guns..) kept swapping positions and changing the tempo. During instrumental parts they came together and created crushing “Iron Maiden” guitar power, and when needed they made room for the boss and played in apparent darkness while all eyes were on Alice Cooper. Maybe all that guitarist kinetics is why they were a bit weaker on their harmony vocal duties, standing far from the mics like inexperienced ducklings and coming through way too quietly. That happened on Devil’s Blood, for example. Tons of mileage on the road has seasoned Alice Cooper thoroughly, and the old man knows exactly how to please a crowd. On stage he morphs into an actor, assisted by a small supporting crew, and together they write a story that the viewer, pardon, the listener, gets sucked into. Only the house lights coming on at the end of the show wake them up and sober them up. The story is made up of punchy tracks with heavy guitar lines that turn into dramatic moments on stage, and bluesy rock ballad marches that ease the tempo and provide some “respite”, a breather in the story. There are also a few long instrumental parts where the musicians get their turn, stepping out of Cooper’s shadow while he’s off stage and getting a few moments of self-promotion. Guitarist Kelli is a real treat for the ears. Heavy rock fits him like a glove, and his charisma overshadows Cooper’s other hired musicians. Alice Cooper is no spring chicken at sixty-something, and it shows in his vocals, but the theatricality of the show gives him a mask he can use to bend the vocal lines however he likes and adapt them to whatever is happening on stage. He uses that cunning tactic skillfully, and at moments it even comes off very well!
The setlist wandered deep into the seventies. The backbone was made up of songs from Love It to Death (1971) to Alice Cooper Goes to Hell (1976), which was a real treat for all fans of the American rocker. The core was spiced up with the (like it or not, mandatory) out-of-series hit Poison and a few newer tracks: Wicked Young Man, Dirty Diamonds and Vengeance is Mine, the only one from last year’s Along Came a Spider. In fact, the set played was a “best of” the seventies.
What a showman Cooper can be! It’s really no surprise he once got up the noses of his conservative fellow citizens, when he puts on a breathtaking show on stage that makes every hair on your body stand up! The range of concert props is very varied, from the more fun balloons to the slightly less fun contraptions that would belong more in a Tallinn museum of torture devices. The peak of the show’s theatricality comes near the end, when, to the roaring celebration of the crowd, Lady Death leads the main character of the story to the gallows, where she takes him into her hands forever…
It’s all just part of the game, of course, Cooper’s well-studied opium for the masses. A decent bit of entertainment from an old tomcat that gave Bratislava an hour and a half of rock’n’roll treats. Only the sound played a bit of a trick on us. The Pasienky hall, too, is graced with the well-known Tivoli syndrome of poor acoustics. But what matters, of course, is that we concertgoers all went to bed happy on Thursday!
Photos: Urban Bolta
Setlist
1. School’s Out (intro part) 2. Department Of Youth 3. I’m Eighteen 4. Wicked Young Man 5. Ballad Of Dwight Fry 6. Go To Hell 7. Guilty 8. Welcome To My Nightmare 9. Cold Ethyl 10. Poison 11. The Awakening 12. From The Inside 13. Nurse Rozetta 14. Is It My Body 15. Be My Lover 16. Only Women Bleed 17. I Never Cry 18. The Black Widow (instrumental) 19. Vengeance Is Mine 20. Devil’s Food 21. Dirty Diamonds 22. Billion Dollar Babies 23. Killer 24. I Love The Dead 25. No More Mr. Nice Guy 26. Under My Wheels ——— 27. School’s Out
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