Alice Cooper Biography

Written by The Rock Radio staff, July 2005 © The Rock Radio

Easy Action
Long before the glory days of onstage hangings, blood, and beheadings, the original Alice Cooper band were merely five young rockers making singles in their home state of Arizona. Led by singer Vincent Furnier, the group was known at various times as The Earwigs, The Spiders, and The Nazz, and featured Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce on guitars, Dennis Dunaway on bass, and Neal Smith on drums. By the late Sixties, L.A.-based singer/songwriter Todd Rundgren had appropriated the name The Nazz, Furnier and the boys had turned to psychedelia, and a date with a ouija board was about to change rock history forever.

Pretties For You
According to legend, frustrated in his attempts to coin an appropriately shocking band name, Furnier turned to a ouija board. He later claimed the board told him he was the reincarnation of a 17th-Century witch named Alice Cooper. Whether there was any truth to this or not, once he took on the name and persona of this character, Alice and the band's luck changed for the better. Indeed, once the band moved to Los Angeles, they seemed to walk right into one big break after another. They met scene vet Shep Gordon, who introduced them to Frank Zappa, who in turn signed them to his label, Bizarre.

Their first two albums, Pretties For You and Easy Action, immediately set them apart from the hippie vibe so prevalent in late '60's California. Like a less arty West Coast Velvet Underground, Cooper and his band reveled in the dark side of Sixties counterculture, wrote songs about death, social deviancy, and depression, and laid them atop a bed of cacophonic proto-metal. And while those early albums didn't shoot to the top of the charts, they established the band's reputation as innovators and set the stage for their '70's heyday.

No More Mister Nice Guy
At the dawn of the sensitive, singer/songwriter '70's, Alice wisely packed up and moved to Detroit, Michigan. Home to such incendiary, ground-breaking bands as The MC5 and The Stooges, the wasted city streets of Motown were a perfect playground for the fledgling Cooper outfit. After Warner Brothers bought out their contract, their fortunes once again improved.

Alongside producer Bob Ezrin, the group channeled their occult fascinations through a whiskey-fueled, teen-angst driven vibe to create instant rock classics, and taking Cooper's own childhood fixation with horror movies, created a shocking stage show. Their first WB effort, Love It To Death, produced several hit singles, including the growling youth anthem, "Eighteen."

By this point, Cooper was wearing makeup and living out his darkest fantasies onstage. Mock hangings, guillotines, movie monsters, and gallons of fake blood were the norm, inspiring such later shock-rockers as Kiss, White Zombie, and Gwar. But Cooper's music was only getting better. 1971's Killer went gold, spawning several more hits, including "Under My Wheels," and "Be My Lover."

1972's School's Out was part West Side Story, part metal meltdown, and part pop wizardry. The title track struck a chord with the disaffected youth of the day, and became a Top Ten hit in America. The album went to number two and sold over a million units. 1973's Billion Dollar Babies cemented Cooper's rep as a top-notch hard rocker, with the title cut hitting number one in both the U.S. and the U.K. and the single "No More Mister Nice Guy" reaching number 25 Stateside. The band seemed poised for world domination.

Unfortunately, the frantic pace of it all hit the members hard just as they were preparing for a massive tour in support of Billion Dollar Babies. Glen Buxton's drinking habits actually caused his spleen to explode. He eventually recuperated, but the damage had been done. Cooper released Muscle Of Love, his final album with the original line-up, and disbanded the group. It would be twenty years before Alice and the original band would play together again, and their record-making days were over for good.

From The Inside

Cooper's solo career got off to a decent start, after he borrowed Lou Reed's backing band and wrote one of his most ghoulish albums to date, Welcome To My Nightmare. And although the record kept Cooper on the charts and in the public eye, the release and subsequent success of the ballad "Only Women Bleed" would eventually spell the end of his golden run. Alice Cooper Goes To Hell, released in 1976, hit the charts with the similarly mawkish "I Never Cry," and the man himself began to succumb to the effects of alcohol and road life. By 1978, he'd checked into a psychiatric ward, and though he hit again that year with the autobiographical ballad, "How You Gonna See Me Now," the first glorious, groundbreaking phase of his career was over.

The '80's saw him veer into over-produced, uninspired material- most of it written by others- and experience nearly a decade of declining record sales. Cooper made something of a come-back in 1989, when he released Trash, with the hit single "Poison" becoming his first Top Ten success since the mid-'70's and the album itself reaching platinum status.

He's Back
Since the early '90's, Alice has starred in several movies, an episode of The Simpsons, print and television ads, hosted a radio show, become something of a celebrity golfer, and continued to tour and record. Although he's no longer considered the most controversial rock star on the planet, he is revered by a plethora of younger acts and remains the unchallenged King Of Shock Rock.

Cooper has made another comeback in 2005 with Dirty Diamonds. The album is a welcome return to form for Alice; a gritty, street-wise rocker recorded with garage ethics by a man who's simply got nothing to prove.

"Just because I cut the heads off dolls, they say I must hate babies. But it's not true. I just hate dolls."
Alice Cooper