By Martin Popoff
Call it Hell. Call it Dragontown. Call it Ozzfest in the early afternoon. Whatever your metaphor for eternal damnation, Alice Cooper has gathered a few lost souls from the hot side to tell you what it's like, why these colourful characters are there, why they are quite surprised they are indeed, frying on Satan's spit.
Alice, from a stop on the rock 'n' roll revival tour that poses questions you might find a little more than uneasy, tells us where to get those questions on CD. "This one's got a little bit more colour, a little bit more texture," explains Sir Furnier, the thoughtful man legend behind the stage legend. "And it's character-driven. I think I have more characters actually on this album. The first one, Brutal Planet (ed.: the first part of the two-fisted concept) was sort of explaining what Brutal Planet was and why it was there and that you weren't going to get off (laughs). And this one is a lot of the characters that are there. Basically, they're asking all the same questions. They're all asking how did I get here? How am I going to get out? And some of the questions are also, hey, I'm a nice guy, I shouldn't be here. And this is saying, a lot of nice guys are in Hell."
"My general purpose on this thing is to just establish that there is a Hell," affirms (let's say for logistic ease) Cooper. "Let's say you're not religious at all; let's say you don't believe in anything, let's just say that you die, and you're worm food. This is like saying OK, let's pretend that there is a Hell, let's pretend that there's a Dragontown, OK? Let's pretend that, well, after all is said and done, you do have to pay for your transgressions. Let's say you do have to answer for your bad moral choices. Well, then that's where we are here, but we're just pretending. What it does is it throws a scare. I don't care who you are; you're lying in bed at night and you may be an atheist, you may be anything, and there's that possibility. And for other people, maybe for Jewish or Muslims, they have their own idea of what it is. For Christians, and for me, it's salvation through Christ. That's my belief. But what I'm proposing here is that for all of those who don't believe that there is any afterlife or any payment, this is to propose that, this is what's happening here. This is where you find out 'oh oh, I was wrong, there is a price to pay.' And you have all these people saying I was a nice guy and I did more good things than bad things and I'm going to Hell?"
ALICE COOPER - Dragon You Through Hell! Page 2