ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEPT. 2, 1983
By Steve Newton
Jim Stafford once did a song with the line “I don’t like spiders and snakes”–but you’ll never hear local rocker Guy Jones singing it. He loves them both, and the bigger the better. Tarantulas and boa constrictors are lovely creatures in Jones’s books, and when he mixes them with rock and roll–as in his tribute to Alice Cooper–they also help him earn a pretty penny in B.C. and Alberta nightclubs.
“I’ve got a couple of snakes,” Jones says proudly, sipping on a draught in the Fraser Arms pub. “This python I have at home is about three times the size of Leia, the boa that we use onstage. She’s the best for stage use because she’s the only one that can handle roadwork. There’s a fair amount of traveling, and she’s the only one that can take it.”
Spiders and snakes on the road? You betcha.
“The tarantulas don’t handle the road work quite as well, though,” says Jones. “I mean, they’re only an insect. I’ve gone through about four of them in two years.”
Jones started recruiting creepy-crawlies for his traveling menagerie about two years ago when he left a local club band named Tarcus and decided to get his own act together.
“I wanted to do something where I had total control over what was going on,” he recalls, “because most of the bands that I’d been with were all five guys with equal say–and it always went five different ways.
“There was no real direction, so I figured that I wanted to do it my way. In this band I more or less call the shots.”
The other members of the Guy Jones Band–bassist Arthur Scollon, guitarist Dave Anderson, drummer Rob Poole, and keyboardist Randy Megaw–don’t seem to mind Jones having the last word. His Alice Cooper set has helped make the band one of the highest paid in town. And they’re booked steady till next year.
To see Jones’s Cooper imitation is almost to see Alice himself because–with his straggly hair, black eye-makeup, and top-hatted costumes–he’s the spitting image of the Billion Dollar Baby. And he’s got the snarly, tough-guy vocals down pat as well.
The tribute to Alice Cooper set begins with an intro tape of “The Sound of Music”, but as soon as Julie Andrews starts singing “The hills are alive…” the group breaks into Cooper’s own concert opener, “Hello! Hooray!”. Clad in black leather and studs, and with the obligatory black around the eyes and down the corners of the mouth, Jones staggers about the stage, exhorting the audience that the fun is about to begin.
“We kinda start out mellow and, well… kinda sickly, right. You know, to get the mood at the very beginning of it.”
In true Cooper fashion, things get really sick with the next song, “Dead Babies”, and Jones knocking a little doll to pieces. “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” follows, with Jones putting on a straightjacket and acting really crazy, and then the classic rockers “School’s Out” and “Under My Wheels” begin to populate the dance floor.
After “Only Women Bleed”–a favourite for slow-dancing–comes one of Cooper’s newer songs, “(We’re All) Clones”, and then his big hit, “Eighteen”.
“Right after ‘Eighteen’ we do ‘Desperado’,” cites Jones, “and that’s when I bring out the snake. And it’s always a big bang–especially when I take it into the audience for ‘Is it My Body’.
“I’ve come out with it at times and had girls jump right out ot their seats, knock all the drinks, and hit the ceiling practically. They didn’t know I’d have a snake, so they just flipped.”
The sight of Leia draped casually over Jones’s shoulders often causes a ruckus. But he points out that there’s no danger of her suddenly taking off across the cabaret floor, causing young ladies to leap up here and there like jack-in-the-boxes.
“It’s not that fast,” he assures, “unless it’s hungry. And I don’t use it when it’s hungry.”
Thank god for that. But what does Leia eat when the tummy starts growling? Bassist Scollon, overhearing the question, reinforces the grisly Cooper mystique by slipping in that “small babies” are her favourite. But actually, live rats is closer to the truth.
Scollon, who’s been with the band for about a year, has played in two other local bands, Tarcus and Handley Page. Guitarist Anderson–who along with ex-Photo drummer Poole has been in the group for just six months–used to play for the Kidz. And Vernon native Randy Megaw, the only member not originally from the city, played in Stryder before hooking up with Jones two years ago.
The band does sound good together, and–after Jones has given half the women in the audience the scare of their lives–they all don satin tour jackets with ‘Jets’ written on the back for the street-gang number “Gutter Cat vs. the Jets”.
“No More Mister Nice Guy” comes next, with Jones slipping through the audience in a white tux, top hat, and cane. Then for the last tune of the Cooper set, “The Black Widow”, Boris the tarantula gets to stretch his hairy legs a bit, crawling up and down Jones’s arms, and across his chest.
But Jones doesn’t take anything that he does as Alice seriously. The costumes, scary creatures, and evil makeup are there for just one reason: to make his act a show.
“There’s a little comedy involved, a little bit of gore, and a lot of theatrics. There’s everything all in one, and I guess that’s why we’ve made so much money off it.”
According to Jones, his band is even more popular–and successful–in Calgary and Edmonton than they are in their home town.
“We’re monstrous over there,” he declares. “We get lumped in with the showband idea when we go there–and the bucks are incredible. It’s double the money that we make in Vancouver.”
Once, in Calgary, the band happened to get an unusual gig. It took place at Spyhill Prison.
“We were pretty weirded out about how the Alice thing would go over, because it has the tendency to go off the deep end with the psycho idea sometimes. We we did a concert for the real hard-core inmates in the afternoon, and these guys were yelling and screaming and saying all sorts of weird stuff.
“It was minimum security, but it was quite hard just to get in! There were all these doors and procedures like, ‘Leave your keys! No money in there!’ And there were cameras everywhere. I tell you, it was weird. I don’t want to do it again.”
“We had the snake stolen in Red Deer,” he adds, “and it was headlines in the paper there. Someone took it from the back room. The police were on it, and the radio stations. It was wild.
“And they got it back right away–the next day. It ended up at some party. You steal something like that and it’s not the kind of thing that you can hide. So we went to the police station to pick it up–and they had it behind bars [laughs].”
As well as the Alice Cooper set, the Guy Jones Band used to do a Who tribute as well, and a rather effective one at that. But the band dropped it, Jones says, because it couldn’t compete with the Alice set.
‘We tried to take it to the point that we took Alice because we figured Alice was gonna burn itself out. But it doesn’t seem to have, it seems to be a revival.”
Aside from the Cooper and Who sets–which the band still does “once in a while”–the Guy Jones Band have a good supply of both Top 40 and original material.
“We do a lot of Top 40,” admits Jones, “if that type of place calls for it. We could also do backup dates and play all original material. The Cooper thing enables us to go ahead and write instead of trying to keep up with what’s going on all the time.
“The original thing is what we’re really after right now. We’ve been able to financially secure ourselves by doing Alice, and it’s been a lot fun, but ultimately we’re never gonna be millionares doing this. And it would be nice to get up there and play for the big coin one of these days. So that’s what we’re working on.”
Jones may not be scoring the really “big coin” just yet, but he sure doesn’t seem to mind spending it. Just last week he invested $3,000 on stage clothes alone, which he bought from a local designer.
“Abbey’s Designs does all my stuff,” he says. “She made my cat costume and all my blue leather. She’s also making a black outfit right now with a skeleton on it which I’m going to use for an encore. I just go for a lot of clothes–it feels better on stage.”
And Jones–who’s seen Alice Cooper “every time he’s been in Vancouver”–wants to keep his stage appearance up to par. Because you never know when the person you’re imitating might turn up to take a peek.
“We’ve been talking to Bob Ezrin,” he says, “who’s just back producing Alice now. And he’s going to bring him out to see us, because he says he’d be just knocked out with what we’re doing.”
In the meantime, Jones is always thinking of new ways to make the Guy Jones Band a really big show.
“I’d like to go to the ultimate,” he declares, polishing off his beer and smacking the glass on the table in support of the idea. “I’d like to go right out there, maybe get into something where we’re all wearing chrome outfits. I got a deal on an argon laser right now that I’m picking up.”
To read over 100 of my interviews with local Vancouver musicians since 1983, go here.
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