Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vienna / Wiener Stadthalle / Austria
Concert date: November 27, 2017
Attendance: 7,500
When the concert year starts winding down, things always get hectic. Autumn is always well stocked with gigs. Abroad especially. Every year a solid concert alibi has to turn up for that old-school day-trip gig adventure to the Czech Republic. This year the alibi came as a triple bill: the Czech Republic, Slovakia and, for the grand finale, Austria, where on Monday, November 27, 2017, we caught the one-of-a-kind director of rock’n’roll chillers and horrors, the indestructible rock ‘n’ roll excellence that is Alice Cooper, in Vienna. His stop in the Austrian capital was all the more special because legendary Swedish hard rockers Europe opened the night.
The day before, we had watched Helloween in Slovakia’s Bratislava, and we showed up at the venue painfully late this time. The easygoing, laid-back vibe that’s so easy to soak up when you’re hanging around the Czech Republic and Slovakia kind of lulls you to sleep, which isn’t ideal when you roll into orderly, always punctual, by-the-book, “polished” Austria. Sometimes it simply turns out that in crisis moments like these, when the navigation in your head quits on the road, you’d better switch on a real one (or get one in the first place). When it comes down to the wire, it comes down to the wire, and they don’t say for nothing that luck favors the crazy and the brave. In the end, everything worked out fine.
The Wiener Stadthalle was already enviably packed. The upper tiers stayed closed, covered with a curtain. There must have been around 7,000 people in the building. Europe got a solid three quarters of an hour and fired off a set that’s a mix of old and new. The band is enjoying a new spring, and in their mature years they’ve leaned into the elements of old-school hard rock more than ever, expressing even more intensely the influence of pioneering rock acts, from Deep Purple and Rainbow to Thin Lizzy. The band makes exceptionally beautiful, high-quality studio records in the new era too, and their latest, “Walk the Earth,” with its pronounced atmospheric depth and gloom, is an excellent follow-up to its already superb predecessor “War of Kings” (2015). The lineup of John Norum (guitar), Joey Tempest (vocals, guitar), John Leven (bass), Ian Haugland (drums) and Mic Michaeli (keyboards) took a full run-up and opened the show, as expected, with the one-two punch of the new album, Walk the Earth and The SIege. Joey Tempest exploded onto the stage right away and took over with his typically commanding stage presence, filling the whole place in a heartbeat. The agile, unbelievably bouncy singer is also in excellent vocal shape, proving again and again what a great frontman he is, and really the band’s main and fundamental magnet. The front rows of ultra-fired-up fans were eating out of his hand. Joey did his job with loads of stage charisma, plus routine and a ridiculous bag of experience. The crowd backed him up fiercely in the verses all the way through. Europe remain exceptional in their delivery. No matter the rich experience, the mileage and the routine they’re armed with, you feel in their playing the whole time that there’s still plenty of heart and burning fire, which proves the guys are enjoying the joys of the stage enormously even in their mature years. Above all, as always, one of the finest guitarists of his generation stunned once again with the standard greatness of his contribution: guitar ace and grand wizard John Norum, who didn’t lack dynamite, refined softness or piercing, spicy conversation with the strings for a single moment this time either. The man remains a great gentleman and tutor of the six-string bible. Europe spiced up their performance, as expected, with a run of unforgettable hits. Already at “number three” they decided to bring the crowd to its knees with Rock the Night, then there was the ever-invasive Superstitious, Wing Of Tomorrow’s “gem” Wasted Time, then Cherokee, and the closing, much-anticipated evergreen giant The Final Countdown. With this kind of form, this kind of stage execution and fire, Europe can’t go wrong in the new era either. Let’s hope for another meeting with these priceless masters of old-school Swedish hard rock vision as soon as possible. On this tour the band also tested for the first time how the new song GTO works on stage. In Vienna they played it for the first time ever.
Alice Cooper stormed the stage with the backing crew he presented at the Ljubljana show a good year ago. So, the stage opened in a crackle of sparks, just like in Ljubljana, with the band members, minus Cooper, already in position: Chuck Garric (bass) and Ryan Roxie (guitar) stuck together to the left of the riser in front of Glen Sobel’s drums, while Nita Strauss (guitar) and Tommy Henkriksen (guitar) took the right. Alice only walked out a minute or so later, solemnly, draped in a dark cloak, not forgetting to aim a sinister, coldly grim stare into the vast hall, which was already boiling like a hornets’ nest. Alice soon “unfolded,” grabbed a cane in his right hand and started “conducting like a witch” with it. A deliciously scary theater is in the cards. Flawless. The crew is frighteningly tight. It’s incredible what three guitarists on stage can build if you know how to use them right. With a cannon-fire rhythm section, where Garric’s Thunderbird rattled and tore off its shackles and Sobel’s rolls came crashing down like cannon blasts, the Alice Cooper Band built an exceptional sound in the Stadthalle, and? The resulting connection with the crowd, where chemical sparks kept violently leaping across. Wherever you stood, you got outstanding sound, and the execution hit right at the core of its essence, giving you goosebumps as you watched. Incredible togetherness, with all three guitarists constantly trading solo spots, and the devilish Nita Strauss taking the initiative, practically bubbling over with unbelievable energy, ease and joy of life. And here’s the king of shock theater, Alice Cooper, girded with all the wickedness and obsessions of extremely obscene deeds, which of course come across as deliberately bizarre in the theater. Brilliant.
The set list had a pleasant surprise in the classic The World Needs Guts, which the band hadn’t played live in years, and otherwise the repertoire was fairly similar to Ljubljana a year ago, except this time the band didn’t play covers of some rock’n’roll classics. From the songs off the latest studio effort “Paranormal,” only Paranoiac Personality rang out, in the second half of the show. Of course, the highlights of every Alice Coooper spectacle are the numbers outfitted with extra stage show theater, like the eternal Feed My Frankenstein, then the hangout of Cooper locked in a straitjacket with a sadomasochistic nurse, with Cooper finally getting his head chopped off on the guillotine during Killer. He later hurled it theatrically among Sobel’s drums. A plastic replica, of course.
A show that doesn’t let you breathe and literally chains you to it. With all its intensity and inventiveness, when conducting his stage “orchestra,” Alice Cooper often follows the moves of his great teacher Frank Zappa. Every second is calculated down to exactly what will happen in it, which means the crew of technicians has to stay intensely focused at all times so that Alice Cooper and his gang can pull off a concert packed with spectacular stunts, at a high level, and bring it home safely. There was no shortage of pyrotechnics, smoke curtains and sparkling, crackling inserts, and in the finale Alice Cooper of course tackles School’s Out, as giant balloons full of confetti roll off the stage, which Cooper theatrically popped with his dagger every time one of them came near it.
Vincent Damon Furnier, as Alice Cooper is really named, who will turn a round seventy next February, thus remains the guarantee of everything a good rock’n’roll spectacle demands. It’s loaded with a colorful garnish of stage sets, acts of “sobering up” the audience with shock therapy of excesses on the edge of reality, and a witty bag of humoresques. Absolute fun, no brakes. Unfortunately, spectacles like this tend to end awfully fast, since they’re extremely intense in delivering all the information. Whoever watches an Alice Cooper concert is busy to the bone soaking up all the theater spinning before their eyes. At the same time, above all that stage theater there’s still the brilliant execution of the most prominent moments of Cooper’s rich career, led by his irreplaceable, signature vocal and the presence of a giant, towering charisma and spellbinding charm, which guarantees him a unique position on the wide rock map as a cult rock icon and persona!
Setlist
EUROPE:
1. Walk the Earth
2. The Siege
3. Rock the Night
4. Last Look at Eden
5. GTO
6. Superstitious
7. Wasted Time
8. Cherokee
9. War of Kings
10. Hole in My Pocket
11. Days of Rock ‘n’ Roll
12. The Final Countdown
ALICE COOPER:
1. Spend the Night (taped intro)
2. Brutal Planet
3. No More Mr. Nice Guy
4. Department of Youth
5. Pain
6. Billion Dollar Babies
7. The World Needs Guts
8. Woman of Mass Distraction (Nita Strauss guitar solo)
9. Poison
10. Halo of Flies (Glen Sobel drum solo)
11. Feed My Frankenstein
12. Cold Ethyl
13. Only Women Bleed
14. Paranoiac Personality
15. Ballad of Dwight Fry
16. Killer
17. I Love the Dead
18. I’m Eighteen
—encore—
19. School’s Out
Photo Gallery
