Alice Cooper [ tickets ] has sandwiched a late-summer run on the US country-fair circuit between jaunts through Europe and Australia.

The Godfather of Shock Rock will launch his US roadwork Aug. 1 at the Ohio State Fair, and a total of nine stops are planned through the middle of that month, culminating in an Aug. 13 performance at the Sioux Empire Fair in Sioux Falls, SD. Details are shown below.

Before tackling the North American dates, Cooper will mount a European run in May and June, and he'll follow the US trek with an Australian outing that fills the latter half of August and spills into early September. Specific information for those international trips are posted at Cooper's website.

Cooper continues to back his 25th studio album, last year's "Along Came a Spider." Released last July, the set is a concept album that centers on the story of a serial killer named Spider.

"I kept thinking, 'He wants eight victims because he wants eight legs to be a spider, and he wraps them in silk because that's what a spider would do,'" Cooper said during an interview with LiveDaily last fall. "Then I started finding out he was romantic; he couldn't kill his eighth victim because he was in love with her. He couldn't take the leg."

Born Vincent Damon Furnier in 1948, Cooper broke into the music business in the late '60s. He scored his first hit with the cut "I'm Eighteen," featured on 1971's "Love It to Death."