Alice Cooper has been freaking people out for five decades now, and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He’s made 24 studio albums and is planning another release in 2007.

He’s also released three concert DVDs this year alone. His radio show, Nights With Alice Cooper, airs five nights a week in almost 100 U.S. cities, as well as Canada, Australia and the U.K. His Solid Rock Foundation is raising funds to build a US$3-million teen activity centre on a Christian college campus in West Phoenix.

He plays golf like crazy, at home in Arizona and pretty much everywhere he tours—which includes Niagara Falls, Cornwall, Kingston and Montréal this month, on the heels of supporting the Rolling Stones in Halifax in September.

But ask the godfather of shock rock where he likes to soak up his surroundings instead of being the centre of attention and he’ll point you to his early stomping grounds—a place where chickens are wary upon his arrival and, apparently, where future sci-fi action stars are raised on metal.

“Toronto and I always got along really well. It’s always been one of my favourite places in the world. I kind of look at Toronto the same way I look at hometown Detroit: that audience is a demanding audience; they don’t let you get away with walking through a show. You have to really work. I always pump it up an extra notch for Toronto and Detroit.

“Bob Ezra, my producer, is from there. I did a couple of albums there… just a lot of great memories about Toronto.

“The House of Lords—everybody would get their hair done at House of Lords. And then there’s another place that did these great boots. Now I went in there three months ago… some of the boots are still there from 1974, ’75. Now they’re more expensive ’cause they’re retro.

“A place called Nimbus Nine—that was our studio in Yorkville. Right there across the street is where I used to live in an old Victorian house for about three months at a time. And I used to babysit this kid named Keanu… Reeves. When he was about five or six years old. It just so happened that his grandma lived across the street and he lived there. And rather than stay in a hotel, I liked staying up in the top bedroom in this old Victorian house, but along with it came the Hawaiian grandmother and this black-haired kid named ‘Kee.’

“I used to take him to the studio every day. We’d go over there and they had a dog and a cat and he’d love to go and play, and I’d get him some ice cream. We’d go and record and that was just sort of his playground. I didn’t realize it was Keanu Reeves until years later. He turned out fine.

“Yorkville was this tough area [then]; it wasn’t this sorta yuppie area that it is now. If you were gonna go outside at night, certain streets were tough streets, certain bars had all bikes outside and they were all Angels or whatever the local gang was gonna be. But we knew ’em all, you’d tip your hat and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ We made sure that they got tickets to shows and records so that they wouldn’t bother us.
 
“The first time I ever missed a show was in Toronto, when I had an asthma attack and there was a big riot at the CNE. That was about ’78 [or] ’79. I have bronchial asthma [and] it just so happened that that day, it was the biggest pollen count that Toronto had ever had. I just could not get my breath, and I couldn’t do the show. And they tore that place to pieces. It was the front page of the paper the next day; they just destroyed all the chairs. And then they had buttons that said ‘Alice: You’re A Riot.’ ”