Meet Maurice Escargot, Alice Cooper’s film noir alter-ego from 1977
It seems unbelievable now, but Alice Cooper indeed decided to change tack and play the role of a comedic private investigator during the late 1970s.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise? After all, Cooper’s no less a character than his ivory-tinkling disco waiter in Sextette or the cartoonish Father Sun in 1978’s atrocious Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band musical. And have you ever seen him in his golf clobber? The fact is, the once-named Vincent Damon Furnier has never hidden the fact that, while no doubt a lover of the Detroit garage that burnished him, the ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’ is a costume that’s left in the wardrobe at his Paradise Valley mansion.
Once he’d shaken off the hippy straggler schtick at the end of the 1960s, a raid of glam’s dressing-box would ensure Cooper’s rock immortality. Live snakes, one-stage executions, fake blood, and the band’s ghoulish uniform would help propel the run of proto-punk LPs like Love It to Death, Killers, and School’s Out to extra notoriety, and naturally, infinitely more sales.
Then the band wound down, and Cooper went solo for 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare. Now, there’ll be little dispute as to where the shock rocker’s golden age lies. Cooper certainly won a lot of fans in the late 1980s with the success of Poison’s pop-friendly hair metal, while most will opt for the early run of glam offerings with his old band. You may even find a few that are partial to his dabble with the new wave. Next to none will opt for the ‘Maurice Escargot’ era as a career highlight, however.
For 1977’s Lace and Whiskey, Cooper unveiled to the new world his newest creation. It was a bold move, but the shock rocker thought a jump into easy listening balladry and a nostalgic love of 1940s Hollywood, dreaming up the hard-drinking PI that was a little bit Humphrey Bogart and just a touch of Inspector Clouseau for the conceptual venture.
While the album’s still rooted in rock, the lead single ‘You and Me’ dwells in orchestral gloss for its blue-collar pop romance, and ‘King of the Silver Screen’ throws itself into an unabashed bluster of vaudeville ‘that’s all folks’ light entertainment.
Any good actor plays a version of themselves. Escargot’s whiskey-swigging booze hound wasn’t all that unfamiliar; Cooper plunged into a gnawing alcoholism issue and reportedly polished off two boxes of Budweiser and a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown a day. He even appears half-cut in much of the videos and live footage of the era. You’d have to be to commit to King of the Silver Screen’s touring set design, Escargot crooning away in front of a giant TV screen flanked by massive feathery chickens looking oblivious to the absurdity of it all amid his inebriated fug, without a guillotine in sight.
It would take another six years for Cooper to sober up for good, appearing on The Muppet Show along the way and never quite finding that same bite responsible for ‘Under My Wheels’ or ‘Billion Dollar Babies’. But Cooper makes no secret of PI Escargot. To this day, he’s still known to perform ‘You and Me’ fairly regularly, and even back during his Lace and Whiskey era, the shock rocker let slip an admission to what inspires his picking up Escargot’s fedora or apply Alice’s smeared mascara.
“That’s what you’re in the business for,” Cooper confessed to Circus at the time. “It’s show business, and that’s the whole idea behind it – to entertain.”
