Alice's 'hell house'

Cooper's macabre act now includes a call to repentance | Arsenio Orteza

Jay West/WireImage/Getty Images

From his emergence as the father of "shock rock" in the early 1970s to his disappearance into alcoholism and audience indifference a decade later, Alice Cooper was Public Enemy No. 1 among defenders of community standards. Both on record and on stage, he dramatized the Seven Deadly Sins (or at least the more lurid of them) so lustily that many observers mistook the act for reality.

These days, having long been superseded in shock value by everything from hip-hop to Columbine to 9/11, Cooper's act attracts neither censure nor censorship. Well, almost none. The owners of a venue in Finland, fearing that Cooper might "incite evil and the power of darkness," recently changed their minds about hosting his "Theater of Death Tour" in December. And someone with a sign accusing Cooper of Satanism protested the tour in York, Pa., last September.

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