The rain that poured down on last night’s Alice Cooper performance seemed only to be a constant reminder of how washed up the singer is.

The 57-year-old heavy metal singer who performed at the New York State Fair to an only half-filled audience of about 8,000 people failed to live up to his death-rocking reputation. While the show did have the dark and eerie feel that comes with Cooper’s presence, the music itself was often dull and repetitive. Songs seemed to blend together as Cooper himself can no longer scream out some of the tougher notes, therefore letting his band wail away on endless angry solos that couldn’t help but run together. Also, the exceptional pyrotechnics that are so well associated with Cooper’s performances were missing entirely, much to the disappointment of many.

It seemed that Cooper was relying too much on his creepy reputation to carry him through the night that the half-efforts he made to win over the audience never came to fruition. Cooper never once spoke a word to the crowd, but instead played with props to try to enhance his mystique. He threw out pearls to the audience while crooning ‘Dirty Diamonds’ and shook out a sword full of fake money onto people in the first row as he sang ‘Be My Lover.’ And during his tribute to dreams, ‘Welcome to My Nightmare,’ a giant yellow python was draped around him. But instead of actually doing anything with the snake, Cooper just let it hang like it was any other part of his wardrobe and lost the cool effect of a live animal onstage.

Even Cooper’s theatrics didn’t go off well with the crowd. Randomly throughout the night, Cooper would bring out women in different gothic costumes to try and add an air of mystery, but they ended up just being a distraction from the music. Also, at the beginning of the show, Cooper set up a headless corpse as a dramatic part of the background scenery. Then later, during one of his longer songs called ‘Steven,’ Cooper was beheaded by guillotine and a prop model resembling his skull was placed on top of the corpse. Yet this was exceptionally tame, and almost cheesy, compared to the gruesome scenes of today’s modern horror movies, leaving no one too impressed.

The show wasn’t all bad, though. Cooper’s band was exceptionally well-rehearsed and were synched together for the entire night, both musically and physically. There was an excellent acoustic version of ‘I Never Cry’ in the middle of the set that moved immediately and flawlessly into the rocking chauvinistic anthem of ‘Woman of Mass Distraction.’ Cooper also performed all of his big hits, including ‘Feed My Frankenstein,’ ‘Poison’ and ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy.’ And although he played it, there was something exceptionally wrong about Cooper going through ‘School’s Out’ during late August.

The real surprise of the night actually came from the warm-up band, ’70s party rock group Cheap Trick, which may have aged physically but not musically. Exceptionally moving through their hits such as ‘I Want You To Want Me,’ ‘If You Want My Love,’ ‘The Flame’ and ‘Surrender’ (where guitarist Rick Nielsen pulled out a five-necked guitar from the wings and rocked out on each portion), as well as ‘That ’70s Song,’ the theme song for the hit program ‘That 70’s Show,’ the band proved that it still has talent. Along with the muisc, Neilson and lead singer Robin Zander created exceptional banter between themselves as well as members of the crowd, poking fun of such musical acts as Toby Keith, Aerosmith and, of course, themseleves. It was clear that, because they didn’t take themselves seriously and were still able to rock as they once did, Cheap Trick still knows how to play to a crowd and make some really excellent music.

Published on August 30, 2005 at 12:00 pm