sweetcharmedlife wrote on Apr 21
st, 2017 at 9:26pm:
.......and here's something else that makes us great.
Betcha don't read all the way to the end.
Editorial: The Alice Cooper you don't know
One of the nation’s best-known Republicans appears tonight in Salem. The 68-year-old millionaire businessman from Arizona has golfed with Donald Trump, but also has questioned the president’s morals.
The son of a minister, this particular conservative professes to be a born-again Christian who says that throughout his career, he has been warning against the temptations of Satan. His primary charity is a Christian-based teen center. He believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible; he questions evolution, and supports a strong national defense.
He also has a thing for snakes, guillotines and wearing mascara, at least during his public appearances.
We refer, of course, to Vincent Damon Furnier, better known by his stage name of Alice Cooper.
Yes, that Alice Cooper. The one who plays tonight at the Salem Civic Center.
Conservative rock stars are about as hard to find as, umm, well, liberal country music stars. The list of conservative rock stars starts with Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, who were recent guests at the White House. And then there’s Alice Cooper, who probably won’t be. To be fair, Cooper is not exactly a Republican activist, and over the years, he’s often said that rock stars should stay away from politics. He told one interviewer last year that rock stars talking about politics is “the worst idea ever.”
“First of all, why do people think rock stars know more than they do? That is the biggest fallacy in the world — if anything, we’re dumber. We’re not smarter than anybody else. I mean, why do you think we’re rock stars?
“Trust me, we don’t read magazines you don’t read,” Cooper told the interview show “Metal Hammer” on Spotify. “Nobody calls us up and gives us as inside information on politics. We know less than you do. If I watch TV, it’s ‘Family Guy’.
“Rock ‘n’ roll was built to go as far away from politics as you could get. When my mom and dad talked about who to vote for, I’d go in the other room and put on The Beatles or Rolling Stones — and I’m still like that.”
On the other hand, from time to time, Cooper has offered his opinions — usually when someone has asked, and he hasn’t been shy about answering. “I’ll be honest, I go from Democrat to Republican,” he told a Canadian interviewer in 2008. “I vote for the person, not the party.” That doesn’t sound particularly Republican, but Cooper did go on to praise Sarah Palin that year as “totally a breath of fresh air.” When it comes to national security, Cooper said that “in a shooting war, I want a pit bull, not a poodle. I’m gonna go for the hawk.” Pollsters would probably categorize Cooper as “leans Republican.”
As early as fall 2015 —when even many political pundits were still discounting Trump — Cooper suggested that the idea of a Trump presidency wasn’t all that crazy. “I know Donald and I know he’s doer; he’s not a sayer; he’s a doer,” Cooper told a Canadian radio program. “I think that’s what the American public are looking at. The American public always votes with their wallets. They’re looking at a guy and going, ‘Why don’t we put a billionaire in there that knows how to run a business?’ ”
That’s not to say that Cooper thought Trump was the best choice. Cooper — an avid golfer who often hits the links at 6 a.m. to avoid the Arizona heat — was asked in 2012 who was the “worst celebrity golf cheat” he’d ever met. “I played with Donald Trump one time,” Cooper replied. “That’s all I’m going to say.” For his part, Trump has denied ever playing golf with Cooper. You can decide for yourself who’s more likely telling the truth — Cooper in 2012 when Trump was still just a businessman in New York, or Trump in the midst of a political campaign when the Washington Post was putting together a story on all the celebrities who have accused him of playing fast and loose with the rules.
Google “Alice Cooper” and “golf” and you won’t find any pictures of him golfing with Trump but you will find one of Cooper golfing with former Vice President Dan Quayle.
Perhaps most interestingly, given the often grotesque nature of Cooper’s elaborate shows, is his religiosity. Cooper’s father was a minister in an offshoot of the Mormon church; Cooper has said that as a child he spent seven days a week in church and was regarded as “a religious whiz kid” because of his ability to memorize scripture.
Cooper shot to fame in the 1970s with shows that weren’t exactly Biblical in nature, unless you count song titles like “Prince of Darkness,” “Devil’s Food” and “Alice Cooper Goes To Hell.” He also became addicted to alcohol and other rock’n’roll-related vices. Cooper has credited two things with helping him break those habits: Golf, and God – and not necessarily in that order.
Today, Cooper occasionally teaches Sunday School at his home church. Cooper once told a British newspaper: “You should see the look on people’s faces. ‘Alice Cooper teaching Bible class? But he’s the spawn of the devil!’ Surely people get it by now ... Alice is just a character. Alice hates going to church, but I go every Sunday.”
He’s also been known to attend church or Bible studies when he’s on the road. Baptist News Global has an entertaining story of the time Cooper stunned parishioners when he showed up unannounced at First Baptist Pensacola in Florida and “joined his voice with others in singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”
In 2006, Cooper opened the Solid Rock Teen Center, a $3 million facility in Phoenix billed as “a creative sanctuary for troubled teens” that encourages kids to “embrace artistic excellence and avoid drugs, guns and gangs.” The logo blends the letter “R” into the Christian cross.
How does Cooper square all this with his songs and stage persona? In an interview on The Harvest Show, an evangelical Christian program, Cooper once insisted that many of his songs actually carry religious themes. “Almost everything I wrote was ‘good and evil, don’t pick evil,’ ” Cooper said. He says his early songs, in particular, “have totally got all kinds of Christian bywords going all the way through it, because it comes out of you what’s in you. So songs like ‘Second Coming’ and things like that were all pretty much always warning about Satan.”
He just had, shall we say, an interesting way of saying it. Decades later, he still does.
http://www.roanoke.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-the-alice-cooper-you-don-t-k...