Dee Snider recently discussed how he thought Alice Cooper’s stage shows would be much more filled with action and why he didn’t imitate him while speaking with Rock Pages.
When the host asked his opinion of Alice Cooper and how the rocker still ‘kicked a**’ on stage, the Twisted Sister frontman replied to the question, saying:
“Is he really kicking ass? Now, people, this isn’t a criticism about Alice. Please! Every time I do one of these interviews the next day, I get Google alerts… There’s a radio personality named Eddie Trunk, a heavy metal radio personality in America, and I have spoken about this at length, and his observation [about me] was this: ‘In fairness to you, Dee, you really did paint yourself in a corner.’”
He further continued by sharing what Eddie mentioned and appreciated about his stage shows:
“He [Trunk] said, ‘Alice Cooper’s stage persona was always the creepy kind of guy. He sort of slinks and walks around the stage… It works as well now, in his seventies, as it worked in his twenties and thirties. You, Dee Snider, you were always shot out of a cannon. You, Dee Snider, set a bar up here of thrashing and rocking.’”
How Snider ‘Failed’ To Imitate Cooper
The rocker then decided to discuss how Alice had inspired him greatly, but that time showed him that there was nothing similar between their stage shows. Still, Dee also stated he’d tried to imitate Cooper:
“So, Alice is still amazing, but his persona was never like mine. But here’s a funny thing. Alice Cooper is one of my biggest inspirations. There were no videos back then. You only saw them live. I never got to see Alice Cooper live, so all I had was photographs, and I would see these pictures of Alice, and I was like, ‘That’s going to be me.’”
Snider then shared how he’d felt upon seeing pictures of Cooper, as he imagined the rocker to ‘jump up seven stories’ on stage:
“And then I figure, okay, what is he doing here? So, he must [he pretends he is running]… I didn’t figure out how he got to that point. He was on the microphone now, sitting on the stage, making a face. He’s got a shirt in his mouth; okay, how do I get there to get there? So, I said, he must have been running around jumping up seven stories up from the ground…’
The ‘Other Side’ Of Cooper’s Shows
However, when the frontman finally got to see Cooper in the ’00s, it seemed that his imagination had failed him as Cooper’s shows weren’t what he thought they would be. Snider pointed out:
“I finally saw Alice Cooper in the 2000s, I watched him and said: ‘He’s nothing like I thought he would be!’ I thought I was imitating Alice Cooper… I’m nothing like Alice Cooper, which is probably a good thing…”
Check out the link here to read the full conversation.
