Hero Worship: Alice Cooper

My first real encounter with Alice Cooper was listening to the album Killer. Back in the day, I was in an early band in Seattle that preceded Green River and Mother Love Bone called 10 Minute Warning, we were one of the first bands at that time to really slow shit down. So it’s about 1982; Black Flag had done My War, some bands were starting to get heavier, and people were beginning to break away from hardcore. 

I was previously drumming for The Fartz, which was a hardcore band; when our singer quit I switched to rhythm guitar and we brought Greg Gilmore, who would go on to play with Mother Love Bone, in on drums. That's when 10 Minute Warning came about. Our bass player came in with Killer one day and said ‘this is the record, man!’ We listened to that album incessantly – I think, in a way it defined that band, helped us slow things down, and might have played a larger part in the whole Seattle sound than most people realise. 

Later on, in 1987, Guns opened for Alice Cooper and Megadeth when we were trying to work our way up. It was our first experience of that kind of tour, and it’s with Alice fucking Cooper, right – he’s the guy! By that time he’d been sober for a little while – we were all staying at the same hotel and he would get up at 5:30am to go play golf on gig days. Often that’s when we were just getting back to the hotel.

We saw this guy with get up and go and we were all just trying to hide how fucked up we were, because it was Alice Cooper and it was kind of embarrassing for us. He was a real gentleman to us then; he’s always been a gentleman to me. As an outside observer who visits the UK so much, I see how he’s built up this Halloween tour he does over there. To be able to be a part of that is pretty cool for me. Sometimes he gets the cred for bringing that greater sense of theatrics to rock’n’roll, but whatever happens he just continues to be Alice Cooper, and he doesn’t give a shit!