I’m not a concert guy. Not even close. I like keeping my music between my ears and the speakers, intimate, private, meditative, unwitnessed. Even when I’m digging though the ditches and burning through the witches. The few concerts I’ve gone to in my life have been cozy affairs—Gordon Lightfoot, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, that guy from Once—so diving into the screaming spooky spectacle that is Zombie and Cooper back-to-back with 20,000 other people was never somewhere I would have ended up at on my own.
Don’t get me wrong. I dig Zombie and Cooper. I’ll never forget my first experience with either: seeing Cooper on The Muppet Show, dancing with foam and felt fiendies while welcoming us to his nightmare. I was entranced. That time in college in Florida when a hurricane was bearing down on us, so we evacuated and I ended up at a cabin in the middle of the state with half a dozen other people. I walked inside, and on the TV, there he was. Smashing in the back of his Dragula. I was mesmerized.
The motivation for the concert was my oldest daughter, whom I introduced to Zombie after we watched his Munsters movie, as I felt like I needed to level-set the guy’s work afterward for her. She got hooked, and eventually talked me into going to see him live. So we ended up at the Massachusetts stop of this year’s Freaks on Parade tour.
And I’m super glad we did.
It was at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, which sounds awful. I was expecting a giant box of a place thick-filled with beer and body. But it was a great venue, an outdoor pavilion-type arrangement (previously known as Great Woods before selling its name to corporate interests—I mean, this is where my internet bill goes?). I felt like I was at a fair. All the vendors were on winding paths outside the pavilion, the weather was perfect fall temps, and the people in the stands were all ages and types, only having in common band t-shirts and a high tolerance for loud guitars.
The first two acts were Filter and Ministry, the former impressive, the latter less so.
Then came Alice Cooper. I mean, we were technically there for Zombie, but Cooper was obviously the bigger deal, even though we hadn’t quite wrapped our heads around that fact yet. And I’ll tell you. I wasn’t ready for Alice Cooper. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen with my own eye jellies.
He did his whole shtick. The live python. The guillotine and severed Alice head. The straighttjacket. He sang the hits. School’s Out. Poison. He sang He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask) with giant hockey masks on the screen behind him. Jason even came out and sliced the neck of someone onstage during the song. Feed my Frankenstein conjured the giant Alice Cooper Frankenstein puppet on stage. He played Black Widow, projecting the Vincent Price clips from the video on the screens. It could only have been more Halloween had he performed Keepin’ Halloween Alive. Hell, at the end of the set, he said, “Halloween is coming, and you know who owns Halloween, right? I do! May your nightmares be horrid.”
Did I mention this dude is 76?
Then cam Mr. Zombie. A few people had summarized his concert experience for me in advance as, “He can’t sing, but he can damn sure put on a show.” They were right. The guy couldn’t sing and could barely finish a line before going out of breath, but I’ve never seen a person work harder on a stage to get people pumped. All while a massive inflatable robot loomed above, giant puppets wandered the stage, pyrotechnics went off, and a dozen screens flashed and strobed chaos at us to the point I sometimes forgot it was a live show. His concert was basically a multimedia presentation. With fire and monsters. The song selection included Everybody’s Fucking in a UFO, the Satanic Rites of Blacula, Lords of Salem, and his two big White Zombie hits More Human Than Human and Thunder Kiss ’65. And he finished with Dragula.
Now, all that said, I’m not going to become a regular concert goer. But at least I know what I’m missing out on now.
And I learned that rock n’ roll should always be spooky.
