Concert Review: Alice Cooper, Judas Priest and Corrosion of Conformity at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY

Review by John Moore

Photos by Mark Kurtzner

On September 27, 2025, a mighty triple-bill rolled into the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY: Alice Cooper, Judas Priest and Corrosion of Conformity.  

Truly, a bulletproof lineup – not only the sinister Uncle Alice, a man who not only invented shock-rock but boasts a discography so varied and full of gems that he could be deemed a genre all by himself, but the mighty Judas Priest, the first band to unapologetically declare itself to be a heavy metal band in the 1970s.  Priest may not have invented metal (Sabbath did), but before JP, no band not only admitted, but chest-beatingly boasted that they were, in fact heavy metal.  To top it off, the excellent COC opening – originally an 80s hardcore band that morphed into something more metal, groove-laden and Sabbathy in the 1990s.  Kudos to Alice and Priest for bringing COC along on this trek, truly a perfect opener for this bill.

All of these bands have played the 518 many times over the years. Priest and Alice have done gigs many times at the Palace Theater, Glens Falls Civic Center, RPI Fieldhouse and other big halls, Priest even playing legendary Albany club JB Scott’s in the late 70s.  COC have done local shows at Saratoga Winners and Northern Lights/Upstate Concert Hall quite a few times too, and played once way back in 1986 at the VFW Hall in Albany, the same year that Priest headlined RPI Fieldhouse and Alice’s ‘Nightmare Return’ tour played the Palace.  But none have an extensive history at SPAC.  COC have never played SPAC.  Alice played there in 2014, warming up Motley Crue – and maybe once in the early 1970s with the original band?  Not sure about that.  JP played SPAC only once – a killer show on the ‘Ram It Down’ tour in Summer 1988, a legendary evening of headbanging glory, despite soft-pedal metal-lite band Cinderella opening the show.  So it was cool to see them all here.

Alice and Priest do have history touring together, notably the 1991 ‘Operation Rock’n’Roll’ Festival tour with Motörhead and others, which did not play the 518 but did come as close as Middletown, NY downstate in August ‘91 – a well-attended show, although ‘Operation R’n’R’ was notable that summer for poor ticket sales in some markets, overshadowed by Lollapalooza as the hot summer festival tour, which foretold the ascendency of alternative rock over metal as the new popular loud guitar music of the 90s.  

Frankly, ticket sales were a point of concern for THIS tour as well.  SPAC holds a lot of people: ~5200 people inside (over a thousand remained unsold inside at 3 pm, day of show), and can fit many thousands more on the lawn outside.  And let’s be frank: Alice is a solid theater-headlining act in 2025.  Judas Priest packed arenas in the 1980s up to and including the 90-91 ‘Painkiller’ tour, and while recent tours have played arenas, they draw theater-level numbers these days too.  As recent 2022 and 2024 local gigs at MVP Arena showed, JP are not selling out 10,000+ seat venues these days.  And COC are a solid club-level act.  So pre-show, there were plenty of seats available inside, not helped by Live Nation’s infuriating ‘flexible pricing’, and the fact that inside seats were close to (or over) $200 on the floor near the stage, with most of the floor seats over $100, and balcony seats ranging between $60 – 90.  Sure, these are fairly typical big-venue concert prices in 2025 (low, even), obviously those of us who are grousing about the fact that we paid $12 to see Judas Priest and Iron Maiden play at Glens Falls or the Palace in 1981 – 82 are stuck in ancient times.  Everything’s a lot more expensive these days, especially concert tickets.  But you had to wonder how many people would show up on the night.  

Well, that wasn’t an issue – there was a big walk-up on the night and people showed up in droves.  SPAC was full.  The weather was perfect – a pleasant early fall night, ideal for an outdoor show.  The indoor theater looked fairly full from my perspective.  The lawn was jammed.   The crowd was a mix of veteran metalheads, old-school rock fans, but a fair amount of younger folks (and lots of kids with parents).  SPAC is a great place to see a gig on a nice early fall night, but on the downside the prices of everything – not just tickets but parking, beer, soda, food – was hard to swallow.  A can of beer shouldn’t cost $20+.  Concessions in upstate NY should not make Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park look like a bargain. It was hard not to feel like the place is designed to drain your wallet, but for all the grousing about gouging it was hard to pass up this triple-bill.

COC hit the stage at 6:45 sharp, and the crowd was sparse as the Carolina heavies started, but the theater filled in nicely before the band finished.  The band kicked off their set with the stomping instrumental “Bottom Feeder (El que come abajo)” off the great 1996 ‘Wiseblood’ set, although was an intro-type truncated version, not the 10-minute epic from the studio record.  This led straight into that same record’s hammering “King of the Rotten” – and in contrast to the big stage sets and rock star attire of the headline bands, COC kept it spartan and bling-free – jeans, battered Gibson SGs, loud, pummeling riffs.  Corrosion in 2025 features only original guitarist Woody Weatherman and singer/guitarist Pepper Keenan from the 1990s lineup that recorded all of the songs played tonight, as bassist Mike Dean left the band last year, and drummer Reed Mullin passed away a few years back.  The band added “Seven Days” from ‘Deliverance’ to the opening set for the first time in Saratoga, and a highlight was the ripping “Vote With A Bullet”, from 1991’s ‘Blind’, a song originally written to rail against the now long-dead far-right Senator of COC’s native North Carolina, Jesse Helms, although the lyrics continue to unfortunately resonate in the current fractured political clime.  The rest of the short set mined their mid-90s years: “Wiseblood”, followed by the (minor) hits “Clean My Wounds” and “Albatross”.  The set clocked in at 35 minutes and was a perfect warmup set, the band got a great reaction, and I hope to see this band stay active and headline again locally in the near future.

This is a co-headlining tour, so it wasn’t exactly clear whether Priest or Alice would be closing the show (a different band closes each night), but the advertising suggested that Alice was the ‘headliner’ of this one, and so it was.  Priest hit the stage next a little before 8 pm, as darkness fell, with the intro tape of Sabbath’s “War Pigs” evoking a big singalong from the crowd, followed by Rob Halford barking out the intro to “All Guns Blazing”, and the band blasted out of the traps, followed by “Hell Patrol”, both from the 1990 album ‘Painkiller’.  To their credit, Judas Priest in recent tours have dedicated an increasing amount of the set to “deep tracks” across their substantial catalog, and this tour has been advertised as a show which commemorates the 35^th anniversary of ‘Painkiller’.  Of course, your enjoyment of this night’s setlist was inevitably related to your affinity for ‘Painkiller’ – if you love that album, which marked Priest’s return to the HEAVY after the sins (after sins) of the lightweight ‘Turbo’ and the better-but-formulaic ‘Ram It Down’, this was an amazing setlist.  If not, eyes were bound to glaze over.

Priest did play some of the hits, though, and song #3 was their biggest American single “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”, which led to huge cheers from the more casual fans. It was great seeing them put the thrashing 1984 gem “Freewheel Burning” back in the set, before heading back into hit single territory with the singalong, never-out-of-the-set standard “Breaking the Law”.  To this writer, it’s still odd to see Judas Priest without Glenn Tipton and KK Downing manning the twin guitars, but KK’s longtime replacement Richie Faulkner has long settled into his role as JP’s main guitar protagonist, and he does so well, with rock star swagger aplenty, ably assisted by JP producer and ex-Sabbat guitarist Andy Sneap.  Of course, the rhythm section remains intact with Scott Travis (who joined the band just before ‘Painkiller’) and longtime bassist and original member Ian Hill, who sways reliably at the rear of the stage, the zero-flash bedrock of the band, as it has ever been.  And, of course, Rob Halford led the charge, looking more in 2025 like heavy metal Santa Claus than the ringleading drill sergeant of old.  Rob’s vocal prowess and range has maybe faded somewhat since days of yore, but he was on form this night, not only vocally but in terms of activity, ranging the stage, the cane he’d been utilizing in tours past nowhere to be seen.  He remains the Metal God.  And the stage set was great – blazing screens in the back, lots of song-specific graphics and/or video of the band for those in the cheap seats, Halford and Faulkner prowling the stage while Hill and Sneap stayed fairly static, heads down, blasting out the heavy, Travis hammering away up in the back.

A couple of the more mid-tempo ‘Painkiller’ offerings were next (“A Touch of Evil” and “Night Crawler”), before JP ripped into the only real non-Painkiller deep track of the night: “Solar Angels”, from ‘Point of Entry’. This was a glorious addition to the set – the first song this writer ever saw them play live, the opening song when I first saw them as a kid at the Palace in 1981 with Maiden.  Amazing choice, and great to see it back in the set.

Although the tour is titled ‘Shield of Pain’, there wasn’t much from the newest ‘Invincible Shield’ record – “Gates of Hell” from that record was next, maybe not my favorite song off that record (would’ve preferred the title track or the jittery “Panic Attack”, but I get they played those last tour and are mixing it up).  But you can’t complain about what followed: the unmistakable intro music of “The Hellion” played over the PA to huge cheers, and JP destroyed all with a smoking rendition of “Electric Eye”, re-added to the set a few shows before in place of “Between the Hammer & the Anvil”, and certainly a more crowd-pleasing choice than that relatively obscure ‘Painkiller’ cut.  The band then did a tribute to fallen metal heroes with another ‘Invincible Shield’ track, “Giants in the Sky”, which featured video backdrops of the faces departed rockers ranging from Janis Joplin to Maiden’s Paul Di’Anno, but the biggest roar came when, of course, Ozzy’s face showed up last on the video montage.  JP wrapped up the regular set in fast, heavy, headbanging fashion with (of course) “Painkiller” itself, before an encore which mirrored that of the past few tours: the motorcycle, “Hell Bent for Leather” (sadly, the only 1970s JP song in the whole set – how do they not even do “Victim of Changes”?) and the anthemic finale of “Living After Midnight”, with huge applause.

Great Priest show.  They always are.  The best setlist?  Nah.  Do I need to hear five Painkiller songs and no “Victim” or “Sinner” or “Ripper” or “Metal Gods” or other vintage classics?  Nope.  But that’s a product of when I discovered JP, and to people who came in on ‘Painkiller’, this was surely awesome.

But if we want to talk about face-destroyingly fantastic setlists, then look no further than what came next.  This was a great Alice Cooper gig.  Had to be, after Priest, and Alice brought the A-game.  Interestingly, Alice had been playing (up until the end of August) the same setlist he’s been playing for a few years (which featured a lot of focus on the mid-late 80s material along with the old classics), and the same one we saw at Albany’s Palace Theater in July of 2024. Yat weeks later the Coop has shuffled the set almost completely with a great new song selection which mixes a few reliable standards in with a fantastic array of deep tracks.

Alice hit the stage (after an instrumental “Hello Hooray”) with a surprise opener – a portion of the 1981 deep cut “Who Do You Think We Are?” (from the underrated ‘Special Forces’), which led into “Spark in the Dark” from the 1989 ‘Trash’ record.  There was a lot from the 1989 and 1991 ‘Trash’ and ‘Hey Stoopid’ records, three from each album.  But it’s still the stuff up to and including 1975 which gets the big reactions, and “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “I’m Eighteen” from the original band got bigger reaction.  The vintage stuff wasn’t just the hits, though, as he unveiled “Muscle of Love”, title track of the final album from the original band, and a stupendous version of the rarely-played ‘Caught in a Dream” from ‘Love it to Death’, mixed in with late 80s and 90s tracks like “Feed My Frankenstein” (featuring the giant monster), “Hey Stoopid”, “Dangerous Tonight”, the more recent “Dirty Diamonds”.  Sadly, ‘Flush the Fashion’ gem “Clones”, which was in the set at the start of this tour, wasn’t in the set this night. A heavy “Brutal Planet” weaved in an extended solo from Nita Strauss (g), and jamming from Ryan Roxie (g), Tommy Henrikson (g), Chuck Garric (b) and Glen Sobel (d), all of whom have been with Alice (or in and out of the band) for quite a few years. They are a crack unit, rock stars all, a killer band.

The solo and instrumental spots, as ever, set the stage for Alice’s return to the stage and the theatrics: Alice was the focus for the mental breakdown of “Ballad of Dwight Fry”, into a heavy “Cold Ethyl”, and Alice’s ageless wife/dancer Sheryl Cooper took center stage for “Only Woman Bleed”. Of course, Alice must die before the end of the show, and Sheryl took the lead, manning the guillotine and beheading her husband – and it was cool to hear “Second Coming”, absent from the set since 1971 (!) weaved into the show during the execution, along with the (band-led) ‘Go To Hell’ gem “Going Home”, which had never been played live before this month.

Of course, the night could end with only one song – “School’s Out” – one of those evergreens you could be happy to never hear on the radio again you’ve heard it so much, but somehow live it is just purely celebratory, and you don’t mind hearing it for the trillionth time.  They added in a jam on “Another Brick in the Wall” with band intros, and then those giant balloons floating around the crowd as Alice manages to pop every single one with his sword.  A great finish, as ever.

A top-notch night of the heavy – all hail Alice, the Priest and COC.