A GENTLEMAN’S GAME

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Dust&Cover

Alice Cooper brings the same show he brings to Wembley Arena to the Chumash Casino Resort on Thursday, November 21.

by Jeremy Harbin

Learning to write by tracing the artist bios on the backs of album covers, Jeremy Harbin spent his formative years in the Southern state of Georgia, but please don’t hold that against him – since becoming a resident of Santa Barbara, he’s gotten used to the local customs (rolling through stop signs and complaining about fog). He immediately regretted his rock-writing self-education when he realized all that record sleeve scrawling decreased the eBay appeal of his collection. Have your record reviewed or local music news covered by emailing dustandcover@gmail.com.

[citation needed]:

Alice Cooper Sets the Record Straight

A

quick admission: Wikipedia is an easy place to start when conducting pre-interview research, especially when you’re on short notice that you’ll be speaking to a cultural icon like Alice Cooper. It’s a website, an online encyclopedia, that doesn’t have the best reputation. Since anyone can contribute, a lot of erroneous and grammatically atrocious information can appear on any entry at any time. But don’t worry. An army of Wikipedians (their word) patrol the site to ensure that when you need a refresher on a shock

rocker known for an elaborate stage show and a handful of hit songs like School’s Out and No More Mr. Nice Guy, you’re getting only the most pertinent, accurate information possible. On every Wikipedia page, there’s a tab on the top left corner labeled “talk.” This is where the Wiki-guardians go to avoid the pain of being alive by dissecting the semantics, ambiguities and minutiae of a subject’s page. The most common tool this ilk wields to refute a claim is the “citation needed” tag. It can be found on almost any page across the site,

foregrounding the thought resting at the back of every casual user’s mind: this might not be true. It’s all enough to make you wish you could just flat-out ask Alice Cooper himself about the contested factoids on his Wikipedia page. Sure, he popularized the marriage of rock ‘n’ roll to outsized imagery before other bands caught on to the same trick, but what colleges did he apply to after senior year? Well, here comes a second admission. Sometimes an artist’s road manager calls you from Florida and tells you that Alice Cooper is stuck in Disney World traffic. Then he calls you back a few minutes later

and puts Alice Cooper on the line. And then you can explain all of this to him and just ask whatever you want. Sentinel: So this first one is from the “early life” section of your page. It says you gained admission to the University of Arizona, University of Colorado and University of California Davis, but you declined all three offers. Is that true? Alice Cooper: No. I went to Glendale Community College and I was in a band. We were just basically trying to make our parents feel good that we went to

GUITARS. AMPLIFIERS. ACCESSORIES. LESSONS. REPAIRS. AWESOME.

137 ANACAPA STREET SUITE A • 805/770-7242 • SBGUITARBAR.COM

...continued p.24

Guitar: Suhr, Modern Carve Top in Trans Purple Burst Leonard Schwartz, General Manager/Executive Chef, Lucky's, 1279 Coast Village Road, Montecito

“Alice Cooper has been making music since 1964. “KISS, UFO, Priest and Maiden” started AFTER Alice Cooper. Please, get your facts straight before making a fool of yourself.” – Zanders5k


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