DALLAS — One of the most unlikely and unique nights in recent Dallas music history, and especially in the life of Good Records co-owner Chris Penn, didn’t exactly start with all engines running. In fact, it was an engine that stopped running 24 hours prior that nearly ruined the night Penn had dreamed of.
After months of planning and hoping and waiting, Penn had helped reunite the original Alice Cooper Group, his favorite band, and on top of that, the band was going to perform its first show together in decades on the tiny stage inside of Good Records on Lower Greenville Avenue on Oct. 6, 2015.
But in order to play a gig, the band has to make it to the gig.
The night before the show, which would feature a surprise appearance by the group’s legendary lead singer, Alice Cooper himself, Penn drove his wife’s minivan to the band’s Dallas hotel to pick them up and take them to the store so the musicians could check it out. A couple of blocks away from the store on Hope Street, however, the gas warning light that had lit up the minivan dashboard earlier had delivered on its promise as the van sputtered to a stop. Penn was embarrassed, but Dennis Dunaway, the band’s bass player, along with his wife, Cindy, and guitar player Michael Bruce and his wife, Lynn, were all pretty amused.
“We were all laughing,” Dunaway says over the phone with a laugh. “But Chris (Penn) was freaking out. He thought he had blown it in front of his heroes because we all had to get out and push the van to the store. It was a humbling experience, but it was hilarious, too.”
That funny and potentially hazardous experience is relived in colorful, animated detail in Live From the Astroturf, Alice Cooper, a documentary newly released on DVD and Blu-Ray.
There’s a good chance that more than a few people, had they been in Penn’s shoes, would’ve wanted to simply cut their losses and call the whole thing off. But not Penn. As a teenager, he had painted his face white with black streaks around his eyes, just like Cooper has famously done for so many years.
He knew that fans of the band, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, were coming in from all over the country for the event, which was being billed as only a book signing and Q-and-A session for Dunaway’s 2015 memoir Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group, in which fellow bandmates Bruce and Neal Smith would also be present. Penn knew that those in attendance were Cooper super fans, just like him, and he had a responsibility to make this thing happen.
After all, Penn had literally broken through a wall to make this surprise reunion a reality. Without the consent of the building’s landlord, Penn busted a massive hole in the wall at the back of the stage so that Cooper would be able to easily slip out onto the stage for the grandest of surprising entrances.
And indeed, all of Penn’s pushing and DIY renovation paid off when it came to showtime. With fans packing the aisles of the store’s main downstairs floor and the upstairs loft, the instantly recognizable rock icon walked through the newly created stage entrance with a smile as the group kicked into its 1971 hit “Be My Lover.”
“The look on people’s faces in the audience when Alice walked out,” Dunaway says, “were like the way the audience looked in The Producers when ‘Springtime for Hitler’ started. Everyone was in shock, had their mouths gaping open, and I even saw a couple of grown men crying.”
‘I just emailed him’
Penn making this happen by pushing vans and breaking down walls isn’t a surprise. He’s been a leading light in the Dallas music scene for many years as not only co-owner of Good Records, along with Polyphonic Spree lead singer Tim DeLaughter and Julie Doyle, but also as DJ CeePee. Well before that, Penn honed his skills as a talent booker in his college days, putting on concerts by notable bands including Dinosaur Jr. and Fugazi while attending Texas A&M in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Creativity and problem-solving are everyday parts of his life. But sometimes, Penn understood, making a dream come true starts with something all too simple.
“I just emailed him,” Penn said over the phone as he rang up a customer at Good Records one recent afternoon. “We’ve done a lot of signings over the years that didn’t involve an in-store performance with people like Johnny Rotten from PiL and the Sex Pistols, and John Densmore from the Doors. I’m a big Alice Cooper Group fan, and I had read that Dennis (Dunaway) had a book coming out, so I contacted him before it came out, and we stayed in touch. After a few months, he told me to pick a date so we could make it happen.”
As discussions about the in-store event continued, the plans grew more ambitious. Bruce and Smith agreed to join in on the fun. Naturally, this development spurred Penn into further dreaming. How often does someone get to organize a reunion of his favorite band’s living members, after all? (Glen Buxton, Alice Cooper Group’s founding guitarist, died in 1997).
Penn didn’t just throw a dart against a calendar to choose a night for the book signing. He says that “being semi-intelligent, I decided to look at Alice Cooper’s touring schedule.” What he found was an upcoming day off between gigs in Hidalgo and Dallas on Oct. 7, 2015. Penn hoped that Cooper, a golf fanatic, would welcome the many great local courses over the ones near the Texas-Mexico border, and also be up for reuniting with his old mates for a few songs.
Penn “planted seeds,” he says, by emailing Cooper’s manager and even driving to a Cooper concert in San Antonio to meet up with the manager face-to-face. Dunaway also vouched for Penn and his record store to his old high school friend Cooper. Unlike many famous bands that splinter, Cooper, Dunaway, Smith and Bruce have remained friendly since the band’s breakup in 1975. The seed-planting worked, and Cooper agreed to play his part.
Documenting the show
In 2019, the hourlong documentary made its way to film festivals in the United States and the United Kingdom, grabbing a number of awards. Over the past few years, Penn has overseen the release of the show’s audio in a couple of different vinyl LP formats as well. That there was any officially recorded evidence of the historic reunion ever happening came pretty close to not happening.
“I had planned for how I wanted the show to look,” Penn says. “I ordered pink carpet and white microphones for the stage, and had electric chairs made, and we had a backdrop made, but maybe a couple of days before the show I realized I hadn’t thought at all about recording of any kind. I had my buddy David Wilson running sound, and he said he could handle recording the audio, and then I talked to Patrick Cone and Steven Gaddis about cobbling together a camera crew to see what happens. At first, I just wanted to document the show for myself, because I knew I would be busy running around, making sure no one was shoplifting and stuff like that.”
Penn also had the proceedings going out online via Periscope, the now discontinued live streaming app. In rather quick fashion, media outlets from as far away as England and Japan, as well as American media including Rolling Stone, were reporting on the first proper reunion of the living members of the Alice Cooper Group in over 40 years.
“My daughter texted me that night,” Dunaway says. “She said, ‘Dad, I don’t know what you’re up to, but the internet is buzzing about you guys.’”
The band, which featured Cooper’s touring guitar player Ryan Roxie, burned through eight tunes, including enduring classic rock hits “Under My Wheels,” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” The fan in Penn was also impressed with what happened on his tiny stage.
“The guys played so well together,” he says. “Alice really belted out the songs, and the band really stepped up in a big way.”
As well as his elaborate in-store concert had gone, Penn is perhaps more excited about the aftereffects of that night. At American Airlines Center the night following the Good Records show, Dunaway, Smith and Bruce joined Cooper to play “School’s Out.” In the following months, more performances with the original Alice Cooper Group would happen, including a short run in the U.K. that Penn managed to see in person.
Penn and Dunaway have stayed in touch and become friends. Dunaway has told Penn that the reunion was a catalyst for his old band of buddies to work together again. For a music fan such as Penn, it’s the stuff of teenage daydreams come to life.
“This has all been mind-blowing,” he says. “I did all this just to do it; I didn’t have it all planned out, but it worked.”
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