Alice Cooper didn’t mean to make another concept album.

He and producer Bob Ezrin, who did his share to shape the classic Alice Cooper sound and vision in the early ’70s, were coming off a “Welcome to My Nightmare” sequel aptly titled “Welcome 2 My Nightmare.”

As Cooper recalls, “I went into this record with Bob Ezrin going, ‘Let’s not do a concept album. We always do concepts. And we’re good at that. That’s what we do. But let’s just do 13 great rock songs, alright?' ”

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So they wrote 20 songs and proceeded to whittle that down to a workable number. That’s when Cooper noticed something funny.

“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I wrote a concept album,’ ” he says with a laugh. “I accidentally wrote a concept album. I write all the lyrics, right? And I said, ‘All these people have some kind of paranormal problem. They’re not spinning in a normal direction.’ Then I started thinking, ‘Well, what’s normal?’ I don’t know one normal person. I don’t care how much they might come off as being normal. There’s always one or two things about them that makes you go ‘What?’ But that’s what makes them interesting, those quirks.”

That revelation is how Cooper came to call his latest album "Paranormal." It's due Friday, July 28.

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“Everybody puts the word ‘paranormal’ with ghost chasing and stuff like that,” Cooper says, “whereas the word actually means alongside of normal. And I go, ‘My whole career has been that.’ ”

And then he laughs, as he does often in the course of conversation.

He’s a funny guy, a quality some parents had a hard time seeing through the shock when Cooper and the bandmates he met here in Phoenix grabbed pop culture by the feather boa in the ‘70s. This despite such smile-inducing evidence as “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “School’s Out,” which famously rhymes “Well, we got no class / And we got no principles” with “And we got no innocence / We can't even think of a word that rhymes.”

Cooper is calling from home, which he’s quick to note “is not the Valley of the Sun — it’s more like the surface of the sun right now.”

He’s on the phone to talk about the new release, which features two reunion tracks recorded with the three surviving members of the lineup that launched his career — guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith.

He also talks about the other member of that classic lineup, recalling guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997, as “our Syd Barrett.”

Question: What do you think draws you to the sort of characters you write about on “Paranormal?

Answer: I think I always end up writing about people.

But on this record, I looked around and I said, “Everybody in the world knows somebody who thinks everything is a conspiracy. We didn’t really land on the moon. And this didn’t happen. Or that didn’t happen. And there’s a shadow government and all this going on.” And I said, OK, “Paranoiac Personality,” that’s gonna be this guy.

And then I wanted to write a real summer song about a guy and his friends and they’re in the car having a great time and they get run off the road by a carload of pretty girls and the devil’s driving. It’s almost like a rockabilly kind of song, you know? So every song has a different personality.

Q: This album also features Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 on drums.

A: I said, “Bob, why don’t we do something that’s inherently different for us?” And he said, “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we change the whole bottom? Let’s put in a drummer that we would never, ever think about using.” And he mentioned Larry Mullen Jr. I went, “That is such a great idea.”

Larry comes to me and he goes, “Lemme see the lyrics.” He interprets the lyrics through the drums. I said, “That’s gonna give this whole album an entirely different texture.” He’s a great rock drummer, too. So that was totally, purposefully done to change the sound of this album. It was a very creative process this time.

I was really pleased that Bob said, “I want to do a great rock record but I want to make it unique to anything else we’ve done.” It was really very refreshing to me to color outside the lines.

Q: So Larry plays on every song except the two you did with the original group?

A: Except the ones with the original group. And Neal actually plays on a couple of songs that aren’t the original group.

The thing about the original band on the album, it was one of those moments where you go, “You know, Dennis, Neal and Mike still play great together. We’ve used Dennis before. We’ve used Neal before. But let’s put the whole unit in and write a couple songs with them and I think it will sound like 1972 Alice Cooper.” And it really did.

Q: It definitely did.

A: I mean, “Genuine American Girl” is a pure Alice Cooper song. And so is “You and All Your Friends.” The weird thing is, when I play with those guys, I sing totally different. I change my voice somehow. Without thinking about it. And that gave it another great texture on the album.

When the band broke up, we never broke up with any bad blood. Everybody had their own point of view, but nobody was angry. Dennis and I were never at odds with each other. Neither were Neal and I. Neither was Mike. And then Glen passed away, you know. Glen was our Syd Barrett so it was really hard to replace him.

But if Dennis wanted me to sing on a Blue Coupe song, I was there. If Neal wanted me to do lyrics for this or that, you know, we never, ever had a falling out. The door was always open for whatever could happen.

So after putting them on the record, I said, “Why don’t we see how it sounds if Alice gets his head cut off, the curtain comes down, it’s the end of the show and when the curtain comes back up for the encore, it’s the original band and we do five songs with the original band?”

We did it in Nashville and we’re doing it all through Britain. When we did it in Nashville, it sounded great, because the original band treats “Eighteen” and “Nice Guy” and those songs heavier than my band does.

Q: But you’re not doing that in Phoenix?

A: No. Wait, well, now that you mention it… (laughs)

Q: How much do I have to pay you to make that happen?

A: It might be a great place to do it.

Q: How could you not do it here?

A: That’s not a bad idea. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that, to do it in Phoenix as a special deal.

Q: You said Glen was "our Syd Barrett." What did you mean by that?

A: Well, Glen would have a hard time sitting down and jamming with, say, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which was just pure, straight-up 12-bar blues.

But he would sit with Syd Barrett and they would each have an Echoplex (a tape delay effect) and they would play stuff back and forth. Back when Syd was with Pink Floyd, they stayed with us for a while at our house in California. And Glen and Syd Barrett would go in the other room and just play crazy s--t back and forth to each other (laughs).

So that’s the kind of lead player Glen was. He wasn’t your straight-up blues-based guitar player. He was much more of a psychedelic kind of a guitar player. How many people could jam with Syd Barrett? Not many. Glen could. Because he had that sensibility to him.

The only thing Glen ever wrote was the riff on “School’s Out.” The most famous riff we ever did is the only thing he ever wrote. And like “Smoke on the Water,” it ended up being one of those riffs that every kid plays.

Q: This is the second album in a row that you’ve worked on with Bob Ezrin. Why do you think that partnership works?

A: You know, when Bob came in to work with Alice Cooper, he was our George Martin. He was the guy that took this psychedelic band from Arizona and listened to the first two albums.

And you have to realize that the first two albums, “Pretties for You” and “Easy Action,” were all songs written by the Spiders and the Nazz. They weren’t written by Alice Cooper.

So when we finally got “Love It to Death” going with Bob Ezrin, he was the one that really gave Alice Cooper a signature sound.

He would say to us, “Why is it when you hear a Doors song you know it’s the Doors? Why is it when you hear the Rolling Stones, you know it’s the Rolling Stones? Because they have their own signature. You don’t have that. What we need to do is to establish that.”

And that’s when he really worked our butts off to establish that sound. When you hear “Love It to Death,” you go, “Oh, that could only be Alice Cooper.” That’s what Bob brought to us.

Bob and I were the two that designed the character of Alice Cooper in the studio. We designed what he would sound like, what his sense of humor was, what his sense of irony was, because when I write a song, I do not write the song for me. I write the song for Alice, the character.

I’ll write a song and I’ll hand it to Bob and Bob says, “Oh, that’s great. Except Alice would never say this.” And I go, “Oh yeah, you’re right. Alice wouldn’t say that. I’d say that but Alice wouldn’t.” So, we’re very good about treating Alice in the third person.

Even when I’m not working with Bob, if I’m working with Roy Thomas Baker or David Foster or any of those guys, I would write my songs and then send them to Bob. And he would filter through them and say, “This B section here is weak. This chorus doesn’t pay off. Give me a better verse on this.”

He’d send it back to me and I would rewrite it, send it back to him and he’d go, “OK, I think you’ve got it.” And then I would take it in. Because we’re sort of like a songwriting team. Bob is essential to me.

Q: You mentioned sense of humor. Did you find it surprising when you were the scourge of the PTA that parents just completely missed that humor?

A: I knew it was gonna take some time. We realized there was gonna be a point where the shock value was over. And Shep (Gordon, Cooper’s longtime manager) and I both said, “We’ve got to let everyone in on the fact that you play Alice Cooper, that you’re not Alice Cooper.”

The shock value of Alice did what it was supposed to do. And then when people were over the shock and you couldn’t shock an audience anymore, the next shock was that Alice could go on Johnny Carson and be funny, Alice could do these different things and not be the same Alice you’re seeing on stage.

I always treated the Alice character as when I get on stage, I’m going to be this arrogant villain. But that character is never gonna leave the stage. He stays up there.

And when I come off stage, then I can be myself. I can do interviews. I can play golf. I can go to the movies. I can do television. And people are not expecting me to be this scary, evil, weird Alice.

That character, you get when you come to see Alice. And that to me was co-existing with Alice. I didn’t want to get up in the morning and have to put a snake around my neck and put makeup on to go to the grocery store. That might have been fun when I was 20. But I said, “I can’t live like that.”

I didn’t want to bring that character off stage. In some ways, I think that’s what killed Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and those guys, because they tried to be that character all the time. And they had to fuel that with something.

You know, Jim Morrison used to take pills the way you and I would eat Skittles in order to fuel being Jim Morrison. I didn’t want to have to fuel this Alice Cooper character all the time.

Q: Was there ever a point at which you felt like you were on the verge of becoming the character?

A: Well, you know, there was a real gray area when I was drinking and taking drugs where I didn’t know where I stopped and Alice Cooper started. I was sort of immersed in the character all of the time. There was no time off. It was always either in the studio or on stage or doing some function.

So I was Alice a lot. When I got sober is when I really divorced the character and just said, “Look, I’m gonna play him on stage and I’m gonna play him to the hilt, on stage, but he doesn’t get to leave that stage.” And that way, I could co-exist with him.

Q: I always though one of the more interesting albums you made after the original run was “From the Inside,” where you dealt with some of that stuff. What do you think of that album at this point? How does it hold up?

A: That musically might be the best album we ever did. That was David Foster producing. Basically, the band was the Porcaro brothers and Steve Lukathar. It was almost the Toto band. They were the guys who worked a lot with David Foster.

Davey Johnstone was on that album. It was the only time Maurice White from Earth, Wind & Fire ever did a duet with anybody, on “The Quiet Room.” Flo & Eddie did all the background singing. There was somebody different on each song.

And it was Bernie Taupin and me doing the lyrics. He was my best friend. And when I told him stories from the inside, I said, “These are all characters that I met in there. We have to give 'em different names, but let me tell you some of the stories.” It was a writer’s paradise, Millie and Billie and Jackknife Johnny and all those characters.”

Q: Are you saying the nurse’s name was not Rozetta?

A: No. But there was a nurse in there that was, you know, Nurse Ratched. We just gave her a better name. I took each character and just blew them all out of proportion.

The most fun part of that was Bernie and me kind of ping-ponging lyrics. I would write a line, then he would write the next line. Then, that meant I would have to find a way to finish that line. And in some cases, we tried to leave each other with really hard rhymes (laughs).

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Q: You’re coming through town for a concert with Deep Purple. Are there any new twists in the stage show since the last time?

A: There’s a couple of things I don’t think anybody’s seen yet here. The toy box is back and all the things Alice plays with come out of the toy box now. “Only Women Bleed” has a rag doll that does a ballet — AKA (Cooper’s wife) Sheryl Cooper. She’s also the nurse.

In this new show, we’re doing a lot of metal festivals, so I’m looking at this one song, “Roses on White Lace,” because my guitar player is a shredder. Nita Strauss is just a pure shredder, so I’ve got to give her a few things to shred on. And that will have another character in it too that’s being prepared right now.

Alice Cooper with Deep Purple

When: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 15.

Where: Ak-Chin Pavilion, 2121 N. 83rd Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $33-$97.50.

Details: 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.

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