Oh man, what a blast from the past! Not that I ever got to see Alice Cooper live when I was a teenager - but his album Welcome to my Nightmare was such a strong soundtrack during my 15th year - it's as if I was seeing him again, rather than for the first time.
That was my second year at boarding school. We were the kind of boarders who went home in the weekends - lived too far away from school to travel in every day, but not so far that we couldn't jump on a bus and come home for Saturdays and Sundays. My next-door-room-mate Clare Munro and I had hit it off from day one, so when she invited me home to her place one weekend, to the South Taranaki seaside township of Opunake, I was keen as mustard to visit.
It was a great weekend, full of rugby clubs, smoking on the beach (how we ever thought her parents couldn't smell the reek of smoke on us, I have no idea) and my first french (that sounds way more exotic and romantic than the local garage's butane fumed tongue actually was) kiss. All through my memory of that weekend and most of that year, was Alice Coopers creepy, theatrical rock.
So there he was, in black leather and bathed in blood red light, telling me that school was out for summer, that Ethyl was frigid, that only women bleed - stories I know so well, and I just loved every minute of it. Creepy, Master of the Ring, Alice Cooper twirled his baton, buckled his straitjacket and dragged 1978 screaming into my life one last time.
Alice Cooper interview in case you don't know who he is and maybe, want to.