GROWING UP WITH ALICE COOPER

Some local hard rock fans will probably check out Mötley Crüe at Sunday’s concert promoting their “The Final Tour” (yeah, right), but the real deal starts the show — the venerable Alice Cooper. The now-66-year-old is surely best known for his de facto rock classics like 1971’s “I’m Eighteen” and the following year’s “School’s Out,” but the dark prince of ’70s shock rock boasts a full career that rivals, if not wallops, many of his contemporaries.

Admittedly, my genuflection toward Cooper is highly biased. As a child of the ’70s and the following decade’s Ronnie Raygun era, I grew up in a time of increasing repression, suppression, depression and nuclear war-fueled-doom that now seems almost quaint. My antidote to this pervasive nonsense was a devotional love of loud-ass rock.

I had the benefit of having that classic bad influence — an older sibling — turn me on to Cooper and band’s early releases when I was but a mere child.

Yet my moment of being completely infected by Cooper’s twisted vision occurred while, almost appropriately, being physically sick. In the spring of 1983, when I was 11 years old, I had a brutal case of gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that was possibly a result of my creepy childhood eating habits, i.e., mustard-and-onion sandwiches, mustard-and-banana-pepper-ring sandwiches, anything on bread slathered with mustard, etc. Two things occurred during my gradual convalescence that ultimately affected my development: my mom (reluctantly) let me stay home alone, as she had to go to work for a few hours, and my pediatrician prescribed paregoric. The “medicine” is an opiate-based liquid used to quell, ahem, malevolent diarrhea. My mom would give me the bitter, smoked-banana-flavored stuff as prescribed (over the years a Calvinist habit that I eventually broke) and, miraculously, the roiling storm in my innards settled. Yet let’s not bullshit ourselves — it also got me completely high.

While in this languid state, I grew bored with the daytime TV offerings, so I sleepwalked toward the turntable. I pulled out my brother’s Cooper albums, which included 1971’s Love It to Death, and Killers, as well as Billion Dollar Babies (1973). I had heard some of these tracks before, but in my drug-modified condition I was completely leveled by the music that seemed to slither out of the speakers. Tunes like “Second Coming/The Ballad of Dwight Frye,” “Halo of Flies,” and “Generation Landslide” were completely unlike the drivel of the then-current pop music (for further study, listen to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria”).