Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper pioneered a grandly theatrical brand of hard rock that was designed to shock. Drawing equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock, the group created a stage show that featured electric chairs, guillotines, fake blood and boa constrictors.

Vincent Damon Furnier was born on February 4, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Ether Moroni Furnier (1924–1987) and his wife Ella Mae (née McCart; 1925–2022). He was named after his uncle, Vincent Collier Furnier, and the short-story writer Damon Runyon.

Cooper attended Kantner Elementary School, and recalled watching horror movies at the Eastown Theatre (where he would later perform), and local neighborhood trick-or-treating on Halloween, the “biggest night of the year”, which he took “very seriously”.

In 1964, 16-year-old Furnier was eager to participate in Cortez High School’s annual Letterman’s talent show, so he gathered four fellow cross country teammates to form a group. They named themselves the Earwigs. They dressed up in costumes and wigs to resemble the Beatles, and performed several parodies of Beatles songs. The group got an overwhelming response from the audience and won the talent show.

They later renamed themselves the Spiders and released two singles their second release, “Don’t Blow Your Mind”, became a local No.1 hit. By 1967, the band had begun to make regular road trips to Los Angeles to play shows and renamed themselves Nazz and released the single “Wonder Who’s Lovin’ Her Now”, backed with future Alice Cooper track “Lay Down and Die, Goodbye”. By the end of the year, the band relocated to Los Angeles.

In 1968, the band learned that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, which was signed to a major label, and found themselves in need of another stage name. Furnier also believed that the group needed a gimmick to succeed, and that other bands were not exploiting the showmanship potential of the stage. They chose the name “Alice Cooper” largely because it sounded innocuous and wholesome.

The classic Alice Cooper group lineup consisted of Furnier, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, rhythm guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. With the exception of Smith, who graduated from Camelback High School (which is referred to in the song “Alma Mater” on the band’s fifth studio album School’s Out), all of the band members were on the Cortez High School cross-country team.

One night after an unsuccessful gig at the Cheetah club in Venice, Los Angeles, they were approached by music manager Shep Gordon, who arranged an audition for the band with Frank Zappa, who was looking to sign bizarre acts to his new record label, Straight Records. For the audition Zappa told them to come to his house “at 7 o’clock.” The band mistakenly assumed he meant 7 o’clock in the morning. Being woken up by a band willing to play psychedelic rock at seven in the morning impressed Zappa enough for him to sign them to a three-album deal.

Alice Cooper’s “shock rock” reputation apparently developed almost by accident at first. An unrehearsed stage routine involving Cooper, a feather pillow, and a live chicken garnered attention from the press; the band decided to capitalise on the tabloid sensationalism, creating in the process a new subgenre, shock rock.

The band was highly influenced by Pink Floyd, especially their debut studio album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), the only Pink Floyd album made under the leadership of founding member Syd Barrett.

The summer of 1972 saw the release of the single “School’s Out”. It went Top 10 in the US and to number 1 in the UK, and remains a staple on classic rock radio to this day. The studio album School’s Out reached No. 2 on the US charts and sold over a million copies.

In the United Kingdom, Mary Whitehouse, a Christian morality campaigner, persuaded the BBC to ban the video for “School’s Out”. Cooper sent her a bunch of flowers in gratitude for the publicity.

In February 1973, Billion Dollar Babies was released worldwide and became the band’s most commercially successful studio album, reaching No.1 in both the US and UK. “Elected”, a late-1972 Top 10 UK hit from the album, which inspired one of the first MTV-style story-line promo videos ever made for a song (three years before Queen‘s promotional video for “Bohemian Rhapsody“), was followed by two more UK Top 10 singles, “Hello Hooray” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy”.

Their 1973 US tour broke box office records previously set by the Rolling Stones and raised rock theatrics to new heights; the multi-level stage show by then featured numerous special effects, including Billion Dollar Bills, decapitated baby dolls and mannequins, a dental psychosis scene complete with dancing teeth, and the ultimate execution prop and highlight of the show: the guillotine.

In 1975, Alice Cooper returned as a solo artist with the release of Welcome to My Nightmare. To avoid legal complications over ownership of the group name, “Alice Cooper” had by then become Furnier’s new legal name. The success of Welcome to My Nightmare marked the final breakup of the original members of the band, with Cooper collaborating with their producer Bob Ezrin, who recruited Lou Reed‘s backing band.

It became clear during his 1977 US tour that Cooper was in dire need of help with his alcoholism. At his alcoholic peak it was rumoured that he was consuming up to two cases of Budweiser beer and a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown whiskey a day.

In 1978, a sobered Cooper used his experience in the sanitarium as the inspiration for his semi-autobiographical studio album From the Inside, which he co-wrote with Bernie Taupin, known for his work with Elton John; it spawned yet another US Top 20 hit ballad, “How You Gonna See Me Now”.

During the early 1990s, Cooper guested on records by the most successful bands of the time, such as the Guns N’ Roses third studio album Use Your Illusion I, on which he shared vocal duties with Axl Rose on the track “The Garden”.

Cooper’s radio show Nights with Alice Cooper began airing on January 26, 2004, in several US cities. The program showcases classic rock, Cooper’s personal stories about his life as a rock icon and interviews with prominent rock artists. The show is broadcast on nearly 100 stations in the US and Canada, and has been broadcast internationally.

Six of his studio albums have achieved platinum in the United States and three more have achieved gold. He has sold over 50 million records world wide.

Cooper’s most memorable movie appearance was as himself in Wayne’s World in 1991. He also played (fittingly) Freddy Krueger’s wicked step-father in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, and appeared on Gene Wilder’s TV series Something Wilder.