Alice Cooper has revealed to Noise11 that Mae West once asked him to “come up and see her sometime” but he rejected her offer. However, Keith Moon went through with it.
Alice Cooper and Keith Moon starred with the Vaudeville legend in the 1977 movie ‘Sextet’.
“Mae West and I did this movie called ‘Sextet’,” Alice Cooper tells Noise11.com. “She did this play in 1925 and was put in jail for it. It was too racy. When she got to jail it was all painted pink, they had a double bed in there. I think she spent one night in jail. So now she wants to redo it and the cast is Ringo (Starr), Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, (Timothy) Dalton the guy who played James Bond, and I played an Italian waiter who does a song with her. We are all having lunch one day and I said ‘guys, this is weird. I got done with the song and she whispered in my ear “why don’t you come on back to my trailer”. And I’m going ‘well, because you’re 86 and I’m not sure if you’re a woman’. She said ‘oh I’m all woman’. Everybody said ‘she came onto me too’. We all went around the table and it got to Keith Moon and we all looked at him and went ‘no’. And he says ‘well, how many chances do you get to be with Mae West’.
When Alice started performing his shock horror show in the 70s, some of Vaudeville’s biggest stars would come and see him. “That’s how Groucho Marx saw the show. Groucho Marx would bring Fred Astaire, Mae West, Jack Benny, all these great Vaudeville artists would come to see our show,” Alice says. ‘They would go ‘oh yeah, I get it’. They were not thrown off by the shock value of it because when they saw the guillotine, the snake, those were all Vaudeville bits. Except we put them in Rock and Roll and it was a new form of Vaudeville. Now when Salvador Dali saw the show he saw it as surrealism. He’d say ‘Oh Alice Cooper, he is like a Dali painting. It is absurd and it comes to life’. It depended on who you were and how you saw the show. Some people saw it as a horror show, some people saw it as comedy, some people saw it as hard rock. I wanted that show to be fairly indefinable. You really couldn’t put it in a box’.
Alice Cooper’s new album Detroit Stories is out 26 February 2021.
Tracklist
1. Rock & Roll
2. Go Man Go (Album Version)
3. Our Love Will Change The World
4. Social Debris
5. $1000 High Heel Shoes
6. Hail Mary
7. Detroit City 2021 (Album Version)
8. Drunk And In Love
9. Independence Dave
10. I Hate You
11. Wonderful World
12. Sister Anne (Album Version)
13. Hanging On By A Thread (Don’t Give Up)
14. Shut Up And Rock
15. East Side Story (Album Version)
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