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Nov 28, 2023

Alice Cooper: The shock rock life and times of 1970s

Alice Cooper once said, “Mistakes are part of the game. It’s how well you

Alice Cooper once said, "Mistakes are part of the game. It's how well you recover from them, that's the mark of a great player." It says a lot about the duality of his character that the former asylum patient was actually referring to golf when he made this assertion. He is a rock ‘n’ roll oddity: a shock rocker whose personal life is somewhat wholesome, a hellraising make-up clad atavist who hobnobbed with the eternally suited Frank Sinatra, and a guillotine survivor who has a cracking nine-hole golf handicap. Alice Cooper may well be the most sui generis rebel that pop culture has ever seen.

Born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit Michigan, the future shock rocker was an angelic altar boy at his local church. Life was normal in his religious family, and Cooper praised the lord for his good fortune. Then illness sadly began to blight his upbringing. With this in mind, his family moved him to Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended Cortez High School, and saw his interest begin to shift. In fact, it says a lot for Phoenix that in a few short years his yearbook ambition was suddenly stated as wanting to sell a million records.

Happily, he has easily achieved that lofty ambition, but he certainly didn't achieve it the easy way. Things got off swimmingly when his parody band, The Earwigs, won the high school talent show by a landslide after performing mock Beatles tracks. The adulation they received convinced them that rock ‘n’ roll was where their future lay. Duly, they dropped the parody element of their act, changed their name to The Spiders and then subsequently Nazz, and turned serious. Or at least serious to a degree, after all, it was acerbic fun that spawned them, and that sense of silly escapism would remain a central tenet.

Essentially, it was fun and thrills a world away from harsh reality that they craved anyway. That notion would form the backbone of Cooper's worldview forevermore. As he recently proclaimed: "I call it treason against rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics. … When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I’d run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So, when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick. …. If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."

But an insatiable appetite for fun can be troublesome. Initially, Cooper's outlook was a masterstroke. In 1968, even before David Bowie had fully tapped into the character rock realm, Furnier – as he was still known then – realised that bands were failing to tap into the showmanship potential of the spotlight. While the likes of Jim Morrison might have illuminated the potential of creating a sort of myth and putting in larger than life performances, their alter-egos were still bound by name. Furnier decided to push it to the limit and create the ultimate rock circus master. With that, Alice Cooper was born.

They paired this with the surrealist art of Salvador Dali to push music towards a full performance. It proved too much for many hippies still craving ‘the real thing’. One of their early gigs saw them empty Los Angeles’ Venice Club in ten minutes flat. It was one of the best gigs they ever played. The lone clapping straggler happened to be Shep Gordon, a music manager who saw the future potential of this singular act. He sent them Frank Zappa's way, after all, his label was the highest purveyor of weirdness around, and he signed them.

It is important to note that what Zappa signed at this juncture was essentially a psychedelic band with an eccentric frontman. It took a chicken to bring the shock rock element to the fore. You see, while the band were playing at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert at the Varsity Stadium, a feather pillow prop had been placed to the side of the stage. Somehow a chicken crossed the road and made its way towards it. As Cooper crossed the stage mid-performance to retrieve the pillow prop, he witnessed the chicken pecking away it. Thinking in his feet, he quickly swept down towards it like a line-back, plucked it up in one fell-swoop and held it aloft. Then came the error that christened him the shock rocker of his age: he presumed chickens could fly.

Thus, he hurled the winged beast into the crowd expecting it to soar to safety, only to see it tumble headfirst towards a group of wheelchair users stationed in a designated area by the front. They were incensed by this farmyard intruder, and in – what can only be diagnosed as a rock-induced hysteria – they literally tore the poor bastard apart. Cooper looked on appalled, gobsmacked by both the shocking reality that chickens can't fly and the primordial behaviour of his differently abled fans.

The next day, a headline claimed that Cooper, a firm friend of the avians, had, in fact, bitten the chickens head clean off himself. Zappa gave him one piece of advice on the matter: "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it." Now, once again in the inadvertent life of poor old altar boy Vincent Furnier, he found himself thrust towards musical fate. He was now the proverbial shock rocker. The band relished the press publicity that came with this clucking carnage and set themselves as the crazy crew in town. Audiences flocked to their shows as a result.

They were the new kick. As Cooper explains: "We were into fun, sex, death and money when everybody was into peace and love. We wanted to see what was next. It turned out we were next, and we drove a stake through the heart of the Love Generation." This 1970 revelation, ties in almost perfectly with Joni Mitchell's view of the zeitgeist: "You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression. Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic."

Greed and porn are what Cooper and the band wanted. The problem was that it can easily go too far. Success blossomed on both fronts in the 1970s for Alice Cooper, but the frontman struggling with alcohol addiction. His ailing health and wayward ways resulted in him checking into an asylum for treatment. His experience at the facility was an interesting one. The so-called ‘asylum’ was a sanatorium whereby mentally ill patients mixed with the recovering alcoholics.

This proved humbling for Cooper. He left the facility clean and refreshed. He hired Bernie Taupin to help out with his next album and the record that followed was rather misogynistically deemed ‘a housewife's dream’ by fans. Regardless of the language used, it was clear that the consensus was that Cooper's music had been sanitised now he was moving away from shocks. Cooper didn't seem to care. He still loved music, but he wanted to use his position to promote positive activism now.

It was during this time that he would also rub shoulders with the famous rock hater, Frank Sinatra. As Cooper writes in his memoir: "I remember attending a Friars roast for Muhammad Ali when Don Rickles grabbed me and walked me up to Sinatra. ‘Hey, Frank,’ he said to the Chairman of the Board, ‘tonight I’m sitting with this guy. You know why? Because he fills up baseball stadiums! You play bars.’ Frank laughed and waved him off, with me standing there silently."

As Cooper recalls: "Soon I felt totally at home with those guys. I sometimes think they saw the bigger picture of my music, more than a lot of my rock fans." Thus, Sinatra softened to rockers when he saw the human side. And that is what led him to cover Cooper one night. "There was a celebrity baseball game," Cooper recalled. "This little kid was trying to get in the game and they wouldn't let him. I went over and I took him, brought him in and sat him on our bench. I said ‘You’re our team mascot’. That night I’m in the casino and this guy comes over and says ‘Hey, the boss wants to see you’. I’m thinking like ‘Is this the Costello family?’ And I walked over timidly and there's Frank Sinatra."

Sinatra called him ‘Coop’ and purred, "You did me a solid today. That little kid you got in the game was my best friend's son." So, the crooned decided to pay Coop back. He invited him to the Hollywood Bowl, and "we go backstage and that's when the picture was taken and he says ‘I’m gonna do one of your songs tonight’. That was the biggest compliment I ever got in my life. He said ‘You keep writing them kiddo, I’ll keep singing them’." When Cooper went home and told his mam Sinatra had covered ‘You and Me’, that is "when she finally said ‘Ok, you’re a star’."

And he was a star—Cooper had gone from the height of shock rock to a household name, and he had done it all with the single aim of having fun. He's never stopped making music ever since, collaborating with everyone he wanted to, starring in every film he desired, and generally living life on his own terms provided that they remain harmless. He has far surpassed shock rock, in fact, he almost inadvertently become an icon who defined the 1970s.