In a recent interview with Guitar Player magazine, guitarist Kane Roberts shared a hair-raising story from his days performing with rock legend Alice Cooper in the late 1980s, involving a custom-made guitar that quite literally packed heat.
The tale begins when Cooper's manager Shep Gordon received an unusual call from a young guitar builder. "Some kid called up Shep and said, 'Hey, I have a guitar that might be good for the Alice Cooper tour,'" Roberts recounted. The builder, who grew up as an Army brat around military bases, had crafted something extraordinary - a fully functional electric guitar shaped like a machine gun that could shoot 10-foot flames.
Initially skeptical, Roberts was won over by the instrument's playability. "That guitar played amazing," he said. "That's one of the things that shocked me. He just put together this incredible instrument."
The guitar became Roberts' signature piece during Cooper's successful "The Nightmare Returns" tour of 1986-87, perfectly matching his Rambo-esque stage presence. However, wielding a flame-throwing instrument came with obvious risks, as Roberts discovered during one memorable performance.
"At the end of my solo, I had to flick a switch to make it shoot flames," Roberts explained. During one show, after the guitar had malfunctioned the previous night, Roberts made what he calls "the dumbest" mistake. While checking with the drummer, he inadvertently pointed the guitar toward the crowd. "When I turned around, the flames were shooting into and out over the audience!"
When Roberts rejoined Cooper's band in 2022, he brought a new machine-gun guitar - this time without the pyrotechnics. Looking back on the original flame-throwing guitar, Roberts admitted the dangerous potential was "always in my head."
The incident serves as a reminder of rock music's more dangerous days, when stage shows pushed the boundaries of both spectacle and safety.