Live Review: Alice Cooper/The Sins, Cornwall Civic Complex, Cornwall, ON, Tuesday October 17, 2006

Not be deterred by the driving rain here in Eastern Ontario, my pal Goggles Pizzano and I headed an hour and a bit out of town Tuesday night to check out American rock legend Alice Cooper, one of the last remaining artists on my "need to see live before I die" list (only AC/DC is left).

Alice was inexplicably playing this town of 45,000 souls in between gigs this fall opening up for the Stones in Halifax and Phoenix, and generally speaking, the less than capacity crowd (maybe 2,000 people, and that's being on the generous side) didn't really know how to react, but for the Coop, it could have been the Joe in Detroit on the Nightmare '75 tour as he didn't let up and proved exactly why more than 30 years after his heyday, he is still a household name, playing gigs where the average age of the ticketholder is less than that if last night is any indication.

The sword stacked with dollar bills, the crutch, the straitjacket, the top hat, and of course, the guillotine all made appearances as did classics like "Is It My Body", "Billion Dollar Babies", "Be My Lover", "Only Women Bleed", "I Never Cry", "Eighteen", "Under My Wheels", "No More Mr. Nice Guy", and of course, "School's Out". A personal favourite from 1976 titled "Go To Hell" also received an airing, a song which contains some of the funniest lyrics I've ever heard:

You're something that never should have happened
You even make your Grandma sick
You'd poison a blind man's dog and steal his cane
You'd gift wrap a leper
And mail him to your Aunt Jane
You'd even force-feed a diabetic a candy cane
You can go to Hell.

Now that's poetry, folks.

Although his voice, never his best asset, is sounding a little rough, newer material like "Woman Of Mass Distraction", "Lost In America", "Dirty Diamonds" and "Feed My Frankenstein" fit in really well alongside the classics and the band was also more than adequate with members of Brother Cane on guitars and KISS' Eric Singer on the skins. Even Alice's daughter (didn't catch her name) played the role of the nurse during the asylum scene prior to Alice's beheading as a medley of tunes from "Welcome To My Nightmare" provided the soundtrack.

My only complaints were that his tongue-in-cheek ode to necrophilia, "Cold Ethyl", was omitted from the set list, and no boa constrictors came out to play. It would have also been better if a more credible band like Nashville Pussy would have opened rather than The Sins, who looked and sounded like they just won second place during the battle of the bands competition at a local high school.

I give Cooper a hell of a lot of credit for bringing a little escapism and good ol' riffage to places across North America that don't often get to hear it.

Oh yeah, and "Poison" was part of the encore.

How can you resist that?

Overall rating: 9/10