As he pulls up a chair in the art studio of his ever-expanding Rock Teen Center on a sunny afternoon, Alice Cooper removes his dark sunglasses.

"Only Bob Dylan should be able to wear sunglasses during an interview," he says with a laugh.

Cooper has come to the center to talk about Saturday's Rock & Roll Fundraising Bash at Las Sendas Golf Club. That event and Cooper's annual Christmas Pudding concert are the two main charity events that made this center a reality and fund its daily operations.

He'll be joined at Saturday's event by Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, Kiss guitarist Tommy Thayer, Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, Robby Krieger of the Doors, Chicago drummer Danny Seraphine, Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain, and original Alice Cooper drummer Neal Smith, with comedy provided by Alonzo Bodden and actor Patrick Warburton.

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The event is followed Sunday by his 22nd annual Rock & Roll Golf Classic, also at Las Sendas.

"The cool thing about a golf tournament like this," Cooper says, "is that I can go through a Rolodex and call people." After naming several of the people taking part, he says, "You never really know what’s gonna happen until you get there.Then, you see all the players and you go, 'Well, what do you want to do?'”

It doesn't take much work to get the show together once you've rounded up the right musicians.

As Cooper explains, "If you’ve been in a band for 40 years, it’s very simple. Everybody knows Chuck Berry. Everybody knows two or three Cheap Tricks songs. All you have to do is say the name of the song, run it through one time, and it’s ready to go."

He likes the sense of spontaneity that comes with that arrangement — "inventing the bands as you go" — and feels that makes the night more special for the audience as well.

"The people who are there will never see a show with those people in that order again," he says. "So it’s a very unique experience for the audience. And we raise a lot of money."

Those funds go directly to the center, which opened in 2012 on the southeastern corner of Thunderbird Road and 32nd Street, built in partnership with Genesis Church and Cooper's Solid Rock Foundation after more than a decade of fundraising efforts.

Additional funding for the center comes from grants and donations made by people and organizations who appreciate what Cooper, his wife, Sheryl, and their Solid Rock Foundation have done for teens in the community.

The LeRoy Neiman Art Studio, where teens are painting as the legend talks about the center at a nearby table, was a gift from the Good Tidings Foundation.

"I think it’s about a $250,000 studio," Cooper says. "They came in, they looked around, and they kind of went, ‘Well you don’t have an art studio.’ We said, “No.’ And they said 'Well, we’ll put one in then."

A woman named Spanky from Texas built the center a recording studio.

As Cooper recalls, "She saw what we were doing, heard the bands playing, and said, ‘You don’t have a recording studio.' And we went, 'Well, it’s pretty expensive, you know.' So she wrote us a check for $400,000, just to put a studio in. And it’s a state-of-the-art studio. She came in to make sure everything that we bought was top of the line."

He's amazed, Cooper says, at how quickly these kids have been able to master the technology.

"A 16-year-old kid running ProTools is like 'What?!,'” Cooper says. "You take a guy like that and put him in a studio in LA; he’s worth his weight in gold. That’s a career right there. You’ll be working every day for the rest of your life."

It's important, he says, for the center to provide a range of opportunities for teens who come in after school each day to explore beyond the musical pursuits you might expect.

"A lot of the kids are not into music," Cooper says. "Or they’re into music but not into playing. But they’re into art. So, good. Come and show your talent in here. Find your talent. That’s the whole idea here. You may not know you’re a dancer. You may not know that you’re a photographer. You may not know that you’re a bass player until you pick it up and try it. And I think kids gravitate toward what they’re good at."

That includes what Cooper calls "the best amateur dance program in the city," run by his wife and director of dance Hodgie Jo with the Coopers' daughter, Sonora, helping out.

"If you were gonna go pay," Cooper says, "you’d be paying a lot of money to get those three people teaching you dance. I mean, they’re top of the line. It’s all free here, though."

What's important, he says, is that these kids have somewhere they can go and find a healthy outlet for their creativity.

When he hears kids say they're not very good at writing songs, he says, he points out that the song they wrote, however good or bad they think it is, did not exist before they wrote it.

"It does now exist on this planet," Cooper says. "Because you wrote it. So it’s yours. It’s your baby. Now you can change it, you can move it around, you can improve on it or you can write another song.

"I say, 'But just keep writing and you’ll see how much better your writing gets. Keep painting and you’ll notice how good your painting gets.' Nobody just walks in and they’re good at something. They have to work at it. At their art. Our whole motto is 'Come in and find your talent.' And then when you find it, have fun. It’s free."

He'd like to keep expanding into other areas where kids could that talent. His daughter Calico, an actress and improv comedian who fronts a band called Beasto Blanco, wants to put in a black box theatre for improv where kids could also write and stage short plays. And Cooper thinks it's time they had a choir.

"I don’t know how many of these kids can sing," he says. "But we have a friend that runs the Chicago Children’s Choir and I’m gonna try to get her involved in this."

The ultimate goal, Cooper says, is to open more teen centers across the Valley, from Mesa to Glendale.

"There are 5 million people in Phoenix," he says. "It’s the fifth biggest city in the United States. So this can’t be the only one. This is the mothership."

Cooper often drops by the teen center when he's not on tour.

"I go to each room and just kind of see what’s going on," he says. "I’ve come in, and watched a kid play his first three chords on guitar and come in a year later and seen the kid playing guitar. Because he comes in three or four times a week, and our guys stay on him."

The latest on Hollywood Vampires

Cooper's next appearance in the Valley after the Rock & Roll Fundraising Bash is a concert with Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup he formed four years ago with actor Johnny Deep and Aerosmith's Joe Perry.

Their second album, "Rise," is set to hit the streets June 21, and they recently shared the lead single, a heavy industrial rocker called "Who's Laughing Now."

Cooper says the new album is "really different," calling it a "good hard-rock album that goes all over the place."

The last record, he says, "was a tip of the hat to all our dead drunk friends and we wrote two or three songs on it." The new album is mostly original songs with a handful of covers – David Bowie's "Heroes," Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory," and Jim Carroll's "People Who Died."

A lot of the album is "very satirical," he says. And a lot of it is "just straight-out rock and roll."

New Alice Cooper music in the works

He's also started work on his next solo album.

"The next Alice Cooper album is being written right now, as we speak," Cooper says. "There’s about four or five songs already written. I worked with Bob Ezrin in Nashville the last couple of weeks on a couple things. We worked in Detroit on a few things. And I think that’s going to be a very interesting album. It’s gonna be very different, something I’ve never done before. I can’t really let the cat out of the bag. But it’s gonna be really good."

Asked if the difference is musical or conceptual, Cooper says, "Conceptually, it’s something that we’ve never done. A lot of story lines are fantasy-driven – 'Welcome to my Nightmare,' 'Brutal Planet,' fantasy-driven, sci-fi horror novels. 'Along Came a Spider' was a mystery novel. This is totally different than that. But it’s all hard rock. Pure hard-rock. It’s just got a different flavor to it."

As to when that album may be ready to release, he says, "Much closer to the end of the year, because we’re gonna be out on tour until December. So I don’t know. We wouldn’t really record it until during breaks in the tour, which are only four or five days at a time. But we’re not worried about that album coming out. We’ve got a Vampires album coming out. We have a live album, “Paranormal in Paris,” that’s out now. That’s a live Alice album. So we’re taking our time on the studio album."

Alice Cooper's Rock & Roll Fundraising Bash

When: 4:30 p.m. Saturday, April 27.

Where: Las Sendas Golf Club, 7555 E. Eagle Crest Drive, Mesa.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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