Alice Cooper’s ‘Glass Three Quarters Full’ Coronavirus Approach
Alice Cooper said he was taking a “glass-three-quarters-full” approach to the coronavirus pandemic, and said he was more concerned for his crew and fans than he was for himself.
Like most artists, Cooper's touring schedule was torn up as the global emergency intensified. He headed home to Arizona, inviting his pregnant daughter and her husband to move in too.
"I said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here and we’ll keep it all in house?’” Cooper told AZCentral in a new interview. “That makes it kinda nice, actually. In some ways, you kind of think it’s God’s way of telling everybody, ‘Slow down. Everybody get back with your families.’ ... I am the glass-three-quarters-full guy. I look at things like this and go, Yeah, it’s a horrible thing. But there’s also another side to it of everybody kind of pulling together and at the same time, families sort of being forced to live with each and get reacquainted.”
Cooper said being at home made him feel “less vulnerable” than moving among hotels on tour. “You don’t know who’s been there, what they’ve touched,” he explained. “When I was in Europe, I spent all day doing Purell, washing my hands. Every time you would touch something, you’d realize, 'Well, how do you know that wasn’t infected?'"
The veteran performer noted he was “not scared of this thing,” but, he added, “you’ve got to consider everybody. You never know what the guy next door's health problems are. … The people that we work with, we have to make sure that they’re taken care of. There’s a certain responsibility, especially to employees that you’ve had for a really long time that you realize are working from paycheck to paycheck.”
Cooper also pointed out that "some of these audiences buy their tickets a year in advance and they plan their vacations around it and all kinds of things like that. I don’t know how you can help that. You just have to reschedule and say, ‘Do your best to get there.’"