Rob Halford could easily be the president of Alice Cooper’s fan club. Or at least one of its most enthusiastic members.
The Judas Priest frontman first met the Detroit-born shock rocker when they co-headlined the Operation Rock N’ Roll tour in 1991, accompanied by Motorhead, Dangerous Toys and Metal Church. “It was kind of a financial disaster on all fronts,” recalls Halford, 74, because there was a war kicking up somewhere in the Middle East, so there was a lot of nervousness — not only in America, but (in) the rest of the world — of people putting their money down for a ticket.
“And most of the bands, including Priest and Alice, had done tours quite recently. So it was risky.”
But the two — who play together again on Thursday, Oct. 2 at the Pine Knob Music Theatre, the venue’s final show of the season — did emerge from the trek with a firm friendship, which only became stronger after they became “practically neighbors” in the Phoenix area.
“He’s just a wonderful, wonderful human being,” says Halford, a native of Birmingham, England, where Priest formed back in 1969 (he joined during 1973 in time for the debut album, “Rocka Rolla”). “He’s so pure and he gives so much. I’ve done a lot of work for him for his Solid Rock Foundation, which is just so beautiful. We’ve done many, many things together in recent years, and I’m always there when I can be to do what I can for that organization, ’cause it’s such an important thing.”
And when it comes to Cooper, the performer…
“There is no other Alice Cooper,” Halford explains. “You can talk volumes about the man and never scratch the surface. He’s a little bit like Ozzy (Osbourne); I love the fact that he goes, ‘That’s not me on stage. That’s Alice. that’s the alter ego.’ Alice is this personality, and there’s the other stuff that goes on in his private life that we know only a little bit about.
“The idea of Alice and me, the Metal God, is pretty cool in terms of frontmen, is pretty cool because when I get dressed and ready to work, I change. I know Alice does the same. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you change and you become THAT guy. That’s this remarkable thing in rock ‘n’ roll.”
Halford and Judas Priest know about remarkable, too.
The quintet — inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022 — has become a prototype of heavy metal over the course of 19 albums and worldwide record sales of more than 50 million. Its biggest hits — “Livin’ After Midnight,” “Breaking the Law,” “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” — are rock radio staples. Its image, especially Halford’s array of studded leather outfits, are iconic.
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“The real musical adventure that Judas Priest has been on since ‘Rocka Rolla’ is that we’re a band that has taken you through man different dimensions of metal,” Halford, who left band between ??, explains. “We’re a very difficult band to pin down; we’ve always called ourselves a ‘classic’ metal band…but we do really search for those different opportunities within the genre of metal.
“We’ve meticulously hand-crafted every song and every album. We’re very fierce without songwriting; there’s never been a moment of, ‘That’s OK, let’s accept that.’ We want it to be…excellent.”
Priest is showcasing one of those adventures in its shows this year, celebrating the 35th anniversary of 1995’s Painkiller, which was Halford’s last before his departure and its first to feature drummer Scott Travis. It came in the wake of a highly publicized trial that year where the band was exonerated on charges of using subliminal messages that caused two fans in Nevada to commit suicide — the subject of the 1991 documentary “Dream Deceivers…”
“It’s one of the few albums that we had an agenda for,” Halford recalls. With the album going on concurrent to the lawsuit, he explains, “We said, ‘Look, we’ve got to do something here. We’ve got to send out a defining signal about who this band is, what we love about heavy metal, what we can do with heavy metal.
“It was this case of, ‘We’re just gonna go a million miles an hour, from the first track to the last track, with a little breather in the middle with ‘Touch of Evil.’ But that’s it. That’s the agenda.’ And so off we went, and that’s what you heard.”
This summer brought another blow, meanwhile, with the death of good friend Osbourne in July. Priest was not able to perform at his final Back to the Beginning concert on July 5 in Birmingham because it was already committed to playing Scorpions 60th anniversary show in Germany the same night, though Halford watched it afterwards. He is, nevertheless, “still grieving” the loss of his good friend and colleague, and Priest has just released a version of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” that features Osbourne on guest vocals, with proceeds going to charity.
“You grieve because grieving cleanses the soul and lets us move on and let go,” says Halford, who opted not to attend Osbourne’s funeral and stayed home in Arizona listening to his music and watching videos. “That was my way of showing respect to him as a friend, as the funeral was happening. You have to celebrate.
“And I still can’t believe it, quite frankly, because we were all still so high and full of adrenalin from watching that (Back to the Beginning) show. It’s God’s work he was able to get through that moment…just so profound and beautiful and sad and full of love and joy and them memories. It couldn’t have been better for him, really.”