March 2, 1990, St. Petersburg Times
Proto-typical shock rocker Alice Cooper performed in “Festival Hall” (Morsani) on, ironically, a Sunday.
The March 4 show here marked a stop on Cooper’s 1990 comeback tour, the same year a young man the world would know as Marilyn Manson was taking classes at Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale. When the pop music world reeled over Manson’s taking-it-to-the-next-level brand of shock rocker-ism, Cooper famously pointed out Manson wasn’t the first person to ever take a woman’s name and rock out with make up on.
This article, written by pop music critic Eric Snider, appeared in St. Petersburg Times as a feature of the “On The Town” section and profiled Cooper’s dual identity: as husband/father of two Vince Furnier, and as the gothic, be-serpented rock ’n’ roll character called Alice Cooper. “I’m very separate from him [Alice],” Furnier says in the article, “Off-stage, I’m not him. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde situation.” Snider’s feature, an examination of the creation of Alice that also included Furnier’s bouts with excessive drinking and Alice’s almost-murder by “the disco plague” (says Furnier in the interview), includes Cooper’s backstory of building the cult following in Detroit, recording under the tutelage of Frank Zappa and the band’s desire to “drive a stake through the heart of the [60s] love generation.”
At the time of his show here, Alice Cooper was a mere 42 years old—just a baby in the grand scheme of things, but ancient by pop music standards. At the time of this blog, Marilyn Manson is 45 … perhaps ready for a comeback tour of his own? Carol Morsani Hall? Anyone?
Alice Cooper show time was 7:30 p.m., tickets cost $19.75.
Twenty-one years after his stop here for this show, in 2011, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inducted the original Alice Cooper band into its elite pantheon.