“Alice Cooper has been many things in his time: a rock god, a chicken-chucker, a guillotine-operator, a welcomer of nightmares—and now, it seems, a dewy-eyed advocate for the teaching of classical music in schools,” writes Tom Service in Wednesday’s (11/4) Guardian (London). “He’s providing the narration for a new recording of a Prokofiev classic, although his version is called Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood…. The Prokofiev project has inspired him to make wider connections between his music and classical.… ‘I don’t think it’s possible to write an original melody that hasn’t been written somewhere before in classical.’ … Says Cooper, ‘I was lucky because my producer on [my Welcome to My Nightmare] album, Bob Ezrin, was classically trained…. We would get to a certain point and he would say, “Let’s go back to that theme here, let’s weave it in, to remind them.” That’s a classical device.’ … Fifty years from now, they are going to be playing Sgt. Pepper and the Who and hopefully a couple of mine, too.’ And of course Prokofiev. ‘These classical writers were insane…. They were just eaten by this music.… They were the rock stars of their time.’ ”
Posted November 6, 2015
