How about spending Halloween night with Alice Cooper? The performer has just announced that, the night after his sold out show at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, he’ll be making a special appearance at the intimate Bootleg Theater.
For this special event, instead of playing a concert of his 1970s rock hits (and showing off the famous on-stage antics), he’ll be sitting down for a conversation with Shep Gordon, the longtime behind-the-scenes Svengali who shaped Alice Cooper’s career, as well as the careers of many others.
Gordon is currently promoting his new memoir, They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock 'n' Roll. It chronicles his decades of bouncing around L.A. and New York, intervening at critical moments for a crazy list of people, from Groucho Marx, Jimi Hendrix and Raquel Welch to Emeril Lagasse, according to a recent profile in GQ.
The story of Gordon’s connection to Alice Cooper goes that, in 1968, when an 18-year-old Vincent Damon Furnier had just adopted the stage name of Alice Cooper and the women’s clothing and psycho-killer persona to go along with it, the band played a gig in Venice that went pretty terribly. Like, everyone walked out terrible. Everyone, that is, except for one guy, a self-styled music manager who thought there was something in their theatrics that he could mold. That Shep Gordon had by his own account become a band manager largely as a cover for his primary career as a drug dealer was another matter altogether, of course.
Obviously, the on-stage conversation is sure to be full of colorful tales of hard-partying rock legends from the days when the Sunset Strip was the center of the musical universe.
Alice Cooper and Shep Gordon appear in conversation at the Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd, on October 31 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $43 to $95.
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