Sony G90 manual Pop With a Twist, B G E N D R O N, Performance we see on DVD begins with a film

Pop With a Twist

. . . . . . . . .

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

Jane, Dracula, 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

B O B G E N D R O N