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Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare.
Rhino 74469. $19.99 (DVD).
alvador Dali saw his
paintings come alive in it.
Groucho Marx said it was
great vaudeville and the last
chance that burlesque had of
surviving. Disney designed its
costumes. It combined ele-
ments of A Clockwork Orange,
What Ever Happened to Baby
J a n e, D r a c u l a, James Bond,
and Zorro. When it closed, the
likes of Elton John, Michael
Jackson, Kiss, and David
Bowie borrowed its concepts.
No, it is not Cats. It is 1975’s
Welcome to My Nightmare, rock’s very first full-scale theatri-
cal tour, complete with dancing, illusions, movies, melodra-
ma, and monsters.
Conceived by Alice Cooper and record producer Bob
Ezrin, Nightmare was a huge gamble, costing over $600,000 to
design and hundreds of thousands more to compensate the
tour’s cast and crew. Such amounts may seem small in com-
parison to the mammoth pop productions we’ve witnessed
since then (U2’s four-story high TV screen on their 1997-98
Popmart Tour springs to mind), but conditions were consid-
erably different in 1975. Remind yourself that no rock artist
had ever staged a theatrical tour before. Cooper and Ezrin
paid for the entire venture with money from their own pock-
ets. Nightmare was so bizarre that it had two strikes against
it from the start. There was an enormous risk of failure; if the
tour bombed, Cooper’s career might have been over. Some of
the same uncertainties still exist now, but today Nightmare
would at least be underwritten by corporate sponsors and
Cooper’s record label. And don’t forget that the biggest gam-
ble of all is removed – theatrical rock tours have existed now
for 24 years, a parade that began with Cooper’s original vision.
The performance we see on DVD begins with a film
(another rock concert first) that depicts Cooper waking up
and rising from his bed in a cemetery. Dressed in pajamas, he
plays the role of a little boy who realizes he is interactively
immersed in an unshakable nightmare. From the moment the
concert begins, we experience the dream’s dementia and its
humor via Cooper’s lyrics and encounters, all of which are
scored to music, combining Cooper songs specifically written
for the staged presentation, and older, classic Cooper hits.
To fully appreciate how intense the
film is, consider that all its characters
and creatures – a legion of them – are played by an extremely
talented ensemble of only six people. With no pauses or inter-
missions, the cast is forced to change costumes quickly, cos-
tumes that range from a one-eyed Cyclops ensemble to silver
lamé space suits. The 18-year old woman who dances as a Day-
Glo skeleton, crawls as a Black Widow spider, and awakens as
the necrotic lover “Cold Ethyl,” to name but a few of her roles,
met Cooper during the Nightmare tryouts, dated him during
the tour, and is Cooper’s wife to this day.
Does Nightmare still work now? If we ask whether or not
it is fun to watch, the answer is resoundingly yes. Some of the
props and effects are outdated, but that adds to the charm.
What is most striking, though, is that two of Cooper’s stage
innovations seem as fresh today as they did in 1975: a movie
screen that erupts from the floor, and a giant spider web,
which also rises from the floor and spans the width of the set.
The way Cooper uses the movie screen has never been dupli-
cated. A performance of the song “Escape” begins, and we see
what is presumably a celluloid Cooper
in a cemetery on the screen. Four alien
Pop With a Twist
. . . . . . . . .
B O B G E N D R O N