Alice Cooper recently made a pitstop at The Sound in Clearwater during the Florida arm of his “Too Close for Comfort” tour, and the show was as incredible and terrifying as his music.

Cooper, the “Godfather of Shock Rock,” has been performing and recording music since the 1970s, when he released his debut solo album “Welcome to My Nightmare” in 1975. The legendary rock ‘n roll icon, now 77, has been rampaging through the eastern and midwestern United States playing a collection of his classic hits and his more recent releases, and his roughly 1-hour and 30-minute show on Feb. 8 in no way failed to amaze.

He immediately opened with the 1987 hit “Lock Me Up,” from the album Raise Your Fist and Yell, after tearing through a massive printout of a mock news article about Alice Cooper being banned by Florida conservatives. “Lock Me Up” led smoothly into the fittingly-placed “Welcome to the Show,” off his latest album, Road, released in 2023. 

He played several more songs in a variety of situations, dressed in gothic suits and punk-rock jackets, using props ranging from knives and machine guns to crutches and balloons. For “Snakebite,” he, rather aptly, appeared with a live Burmese python draped around his shoulders, in a fitting homage to his previous history with snake imagery. 

Snakes have been seen throughout Cooper’s career, first on the cover of the 1971 album Killer, produced when he was still part of a band; all the way through to the concert poster for the “Comfort” tour itself. It’s only fitting, then, that the merchandise sold at the concert included a life-sized snake plush adorned with Cooper’s iconic makeup and white top-hat. 

Cooper’s theatrical stable was out in full force with the performance accompanying “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask),” a not-so-subtle homage to the Friday the 13th franchise, released in 1986. An innocent young “fan” had her throat slit by a looming Jason after getting a little too close to Cooper’s backup vocals. Cooper’s wife, Sheryl Cooper, even made a cameo in a startling scene in which she, dressed as Marie Antoinette, had Cooper executed via guillotine during the performance of the 1973 hit “I Love the Dead.”

He finished the show with a stunning performance accompanying the 1991 hit “Feed My Frankenstein,” in which a massive Cooper-themed Frankenstein paraded around the stage while the band performed the song. 

My favorite had to be, I think, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry,” where Cooper appeared in (and later escaped from) a straitjacket, playing the part of Dwight Fry. Somewhat ironically, it fit parts of his character extremely well; in that performance he really had the chance to let the unhinged, not-quite-stable madman side of his stage persona show. 

Altogether, the show was amazing. When I first saw Cooper back in 2021, I was shell-shocked; this show was just as good, if not better.