In actual fact, Cooper is no more the proprietor of this bar than B.B. King is the owner of the Beale Street blues club that bears his name in Memphis. Not only is Cooper's financial investment in the business minimal (reportedly a mere $5,000), but his involvement in its day-to-day operations borders on the nonexistent.
That wouldn't be a big deal, except that it's Cooper's name and image that ultimately sell this place. It's the Cooper myth that compels scores of hard-rock bands from California to call the bar every week, hoping to get booked there. And it's Cooper's justified image as a good guy that motivates many local bands to play there, despite the obvious pitfalls.
Without the Cooper connection, it would be easier to see Alice Cooper'stown for what it truly is: the latest in a line of downtown restaurant/bars catering to the glut of sports fans packing BOB and America West Arena on a regular basis. Without the Cooper connection, it would be easier to argue that any group that chooses to play here gets what it deserves.
After all, particularly on sports-event nights, this bar is really made for bands that never tire of playing "China Grove" to chili-dog scarfers whose only brush with '90s music comes during time-outs at Suns games, when the PA blasts out "Whoomp! (There It Is)."
As a sports bar, Cooper'stown is an unqualified success, consistently drawing overflow pregame crowds. But it aspires to be more than a sports bar; it wants to be that late-'90s schizophrenic beast: the sports-rock venue. That's where the problems come in. The unfortunate result is that at this very moment, with Cooper riding high from the release of Rhino's outstanding career-spanning boxed set (to be celebrated at Cooper'stown on Thursday, April 29) and the May 2 premiere of a VH1 Behind the Music documentary devoted to him, several local musicians are cursing the bar that bears his name.
The real source of problems, as these musicians see it, is the other factor that separates Cooper'stown from the average downtown sports bar: the involvement of Evening Star, the Valley's dominant concert-promotion company. Danny Zelisko, the head of Evening Star, is a partner in Cooper'stown, and he entrusted the bar's live music to Tom Lapenna, his right-hand man.
Lapenna, perhaps unwittingly, immediately created a rift between local bands by booking one set of acts for a guaranteed fee, while simultaneously calling other bands and inviting them to "showcase" for free at the bar. When he found bands willing to play for free, he bumped the already-booked bands from their gigs. One of the artists bumped by this unusual booking practice was veteran blues man Hans Olson, one of the most respected musicians on the local scene.
"It seems like it's kind of a mess," Olson says of Cooper'stown. "I don't think he [Lapenna] is too used to booking local acts. He thinks people are just doing it for fun."
In fact, Lapenna does tend to take the attitude that local bands should be happy for the exposure that Cooper'stown provides, and should be eager to play for free.
"I think every band in Phoenix is overexposed," he says. "None of them draw people, unless there's a built-in situation. Forget about being paid. This was an opportunity for bands to play in front of a built-in audience. This was only on event nights.
"Danny and I didn't even discuss money for the first two months of booking the place, it wasn't about paying bands. And these are bands that can't draw people on their own anyway.
"If you want to call it an audition, so be it, but the way I read it, this was a showcase opportunity, because on any event night there's 250 people in the courtyard. So why wouldn't any band want to play there for free?"
Lapenna says the auditions helped familiarize him with local bands and see what works at the bar. However, one of the bands he contacted, Honey Child, should have been very familiar to him, because it had played the Evening Star-promoted HORDE festival last year, and had been offered several opening slots for national shows handled by the company.
Honey Child played a free audition, and was subsequently offered $100, plus a free dinner, for subsequent shows. "For a four-hour gig, with six band members, that's well below minimum wage," says Jason Montero of Honey Child.
The band turned down the offer, but Montero was dismayed to find that members of Olson's band were angry with Honey Child because the word had gotten around that Honey Child had played several free gigs, which had bumped Olson. For Montero, who deeply admires Olson, the misunderstanding was painful.
Singer-songwriter David Grossman went through a similarly painful experience when Lapenna booked him for five straight Thursdays after Grossman had played a well-received gig at Cooper'stown on March 19. Grossman enthusiastically promoted the gigs for weeks, only to get late word that all the shows were canceled. In fact, the first of those scheduled gigs has metamorphosed into Cooper's boxed-set release party. Lapenna blames the cancellations on the fact that Thursdays have turned into slow nights, but Grossman simply sees it as $1,000 that he lost because he trusted Evening Star, and, more important, the power of Alice Cooper's name.
"I thought, 'Alice Cooper's a really cool guy, he can't possibly be screwing people,'" Grossman says. "I don't think he knows what's going on, but it's starting to make him look pretty bad in the music community."
Here's to the Winners: The ballot results are in from the fourth annual New Times Music Awards Showcase, and the winners are as follows: Blues, Sistah Blue; Country/Americana, The Revenants; Funked-Up, Fred Green; Hip-Hop, Cousins of the Wize; Industrial/Goth, Radio Free America; Jazz, Dave Cook; Latin, Barrio Latino; Hard Rock/Metal, Windigo; Modern Rock, Haggis; Punk, Hillbilly Devilspeak; Reggae/Ska, Walt Richardson Band; Club DJ, Radar; Swing, Heavenly 7; Most Likely to Make It Big, Sistah Blue.
This year's vote featured some of the closest races ever, including two--Hard Rock/Metal and Industrial/Goth--in which the runners-up were within three votes of the victors. Awards were scheduled to be presented at Arizona Roadhouse in Tempe on Tuesday, April 27.
Miller's Crossing: KZON DJ Leah Miller celebrates the release of the station's new 17-song compilation CD, Leah's Local Zone, with a release party on Friday, April 30, at Bash on Ash in Tempe. The release show features three bands included on the disc: Peacemakers, Pharoahs 2000 and The Pistoleros. The CD--which features live, on-the-air performances by many of the Valley's best bands--will be available only the night of the show.
Rocky Mountain Low: Reluctant as I am to add to the media overkill directed at the murder spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, it's hard not to be aggravated by the way certain self-appointed social critics are exploiting the situation to target pop music for supposedly stimulating violent behavior in America.
What always annoys me about these arguments--also raised years ago when both Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest were blamed for provoking teen suicides--is that they work on the assumption that all pop music is mindless swill (granted, much of it is) and, more insulting, that pop-music listeners are so stupid and impressionable that they can't even hear the word "death" in a song without losing control of their mental faculties.
Nearly two decades ago, in a span of four months, both John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were shot by men who had been avidly reading J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (in fact, Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, was reading a copy of the book when police arrived at the murder scene). Yet no one suggested--as many have in the last week with Marilyn Manson and KMFDM--that Salinger's book was responsible for fueling murder in this country. Similarly, has anyone seriously argued that Wagner's music was evil because Hitler used it as inspiration for the Third Reich's policies of aggression and Jewish persecution?
Of course not, because Wagner, like Salinger, was respected as a creator of art, while pop musicians are widely looked upon as purveyors of cultural junk food. But is the music creating alienation, or is it merely speaking to it? Shouldn't the pipe bomb your son is making in the basement be a bigger cause for concern than the industrial album he's got in his CD player? It's time that people who demand easy solutions to our most complex problems stop mistaking the symptom for the cause.
--Gilbert Garcia
Contact Gilbert Garcia at his online address: [email protected]
