Intro (Edit)

Alice Cooper, born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4th, 1948, is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career has lasted for five decades. Cooper has helped to create a theatrical brand of rock music that would come to be known as shock rock. Vincent was in a band originally known as Alice Cooper, then he adopted that as his stage name and went solo.

Cooper was born in Detroit, Michigan, but after a series of childhood illnesses, Vincent Furnier and his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona.

In 1964, at the age of 16, Furnier was eager to take part in the local annual Letterman’s talent show and gathered friends from the school to form a group for the show. They named themselves The Earwigs, and since they didn’t know how to play any instruments at the time, they mimed their performance to Beatles songs. As a result of winning the talent show and loving the experience of being onstage, the group immediately proceeded to learn how to play instruments they acquired from a local pawn shop and soon renamed themselves The Spiders. Musically, the group was inspired by artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Kinks, and The Yardbirds.

For the next year the band performed regularly around the Phoenix area with a huge black spider’s web as their backdrop, the group’s first stage prop. In 1965 they also recorded their first single “Why Don’t You Love Me” (originally performed by The Blackwells), with Furnier learning the harmonica for the song.

In 1966, the members of The Spiders graduated from Cortez High School. After Michael Bruce replaced John Tatum on rhythm guitar, the band scored a local #1 radio hit with “Don’t Blow Your Mind”, an original composition from their second single release. By 1967, the band had begun to make regular roadtrips to Los Angeles, California to play gigs. They soon renamed themselves The Nazz and released the single “Wonder Who’s Lovin’ Her Now”, backed with future Alice Cooper track “Lay Down And Die, Goodbye”. It was around this time that drummer John Speer was replaced by Neal Smith, and by the end of the year the band had relocated to Los Angeles permanently.

In 1968, upon learning that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, the band was again in need of another name. Furnier recognized that the group needed a gimmick to succeed, and that other bands were not exploiting the showmanship potential of the stage. He subsequently chose Alice Cooper as the band’s name and adopted this stage name as his own.

The classic Alice Cooper group line-up consisted of singer Alice Cooper (Vincent Furnier), lead guitarist Glen Buxton, rhythm guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith.

After an unrehearsed stage routine involving Cooper and a live chicken garnered attention from the press, the band decided to capitalize on tabloid sensationalism, creating in the process a new subgenre, shock rock. Cooper claims that the infamous ‘Chicken Incident’, which took place at the Toronto Rock ‘n Roll Revival concert in September 1969, was in fact an accident. A chicken somehow made its way on stage during Alice Cooper’s performance. Not having any experience around farm animals, Cooper presumed that, since the chicken had wings, it would be able to fly. He picked it up and threw it out over the crowd, expecting it to fly away; the bird instead plummeted into the first few rows of the crowd occupied by disabled people in wheelchairs, who reportedly proceeded to tear the animal to pieces.

The next day, the incident made the front page of many national newspapers, and Zappa phoned him to ask if the story, which reported that Cooper had bit the head off the chicken and drunk its blood on stage, was true. Cooper denied the rumor, then Zappa told him, “Well, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you didn’t do it”, obviously recognising that such kind of publicity would be priceless for the band.

Despite the infamy the band received from the Chicken Incident, their stronger second album, Easy Action, released in 1970, met with the same fate as its predecessor. Music label Warner Brothers Records then purchased Straight Records from Frank Zappa, and the Alice Cooper group was set to receive a higher level of promotion from the more major label. It was around this time that the band, fed up with Californians’ indifference to their act, relocated to Cooper’s birthplace, Detroit, where their bizarre stage act was much better received. Detroit would remain their steady home base until 1972.

By mid-1970, after two failed albums, the Alice Cooper group was teamed up with producer Bob Ezrin for their third album, the last in their contract with Straight Records, and the band’s last chance to create a hit. That hit soon came with the single “I’m Eighteen”, released in November of 1970, which reached number 21 in the Billboard Hot 100. The album that followed was Love it to Death, released in February 1971, which proved to be their breakthrough record, reaching number 35 in the US Billboard 200 album charts. Love it to Death would be the first of eleven Alice Cooper group and solo albums produced by Ezrin, who is seen as being instrumental in helping to create and develop the band’s definitive sound.

Their follow-up album Killer, released in late 1971, continued the commercial success of Love It To Death and included further single success with “Under My Wheels” and “Be My Lover” in early 1972, and “Halo Of Flies”, which became a Top 10 hit in the Netherlands.

That summer saw the release of the appropriately-titled single “School’s Out”. It went Top 10 in the US, was a #1 single in the UK, and remains an important part on classic rock radio to this day. Their hit had finally arrived. School’s Out, the album, reached #2 on the US charts and sold over a million copies.

In February 1973 Billion Dollar Babies appeared, which was the band’s most commercially successful album. It reached #1 in both the US and UK, and is also viewed by many critics as representing the band’s creative peak. “Elected”, a 1972 Top 10 UK hit from the album, was followed by two more UK Top 10 singles, “Hello Hooray” and “No More Mr Nice Guy”, the latter of which was the last UK single from the album; it reached #25 in the US. The title track, featuring guest vocals by Donovan, was also a US hit single. Due to Glen Buxton’s health problems around this time, Mick Mashbir was added to the band, who also played, without credit, on Muscle of Love.

Muscle of Love, released at the end of 1973, was to be the last studio album from the classic line-up, and marked Alice Cooper’s last UK Top 20 single of the 1970s with “Teenage Lament ‘74″. By 1974, the Muscle of Love album had not matched the top-charting success of its predecessor, and the band began to have constant disagreements. Cooper wanted to retain the theatrics in the show that had brought them so much attention, while the rest of the group thought they should be toned down so that they could concentrate more on the music which had given them credibility. Largely as a result of this difference of opinion, the band decided to take a much-needed hiatus.

In 1975 Cooper released his first solo album, which marked the final break with the original members of the Alice Cooper band. Again collaborating with producer Bob Ezrin, and recruiting Lou Reed guitarist Dick Wagner, as well as Reed’s backing band, the project eventually resulted in Welcome To My Nightmare. Spearheaded by the US Top 20 hit “Only Women Bleed”, a ballad, the solo album was released by Atlantic Records in March 1975 and became a Top 10 hit for Cooper. It was a concept album, based on the nightmare of a child named Steven, featuring narration by classic horror movie film star Vincent Price, several years before he guested on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, and serving as the soundtrack to Cooper’s new stage show, which now included more theatrics than ever, including an eight foot tall furry Cyclops which Cooper decapitates and kills.

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History (Edit)

Cooper’s albums from the beginning of the 1980s, Flush the Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and DaDa, were not as commercially successful as his past releases, and Cooper has claimed that, suffering from acute alcoholic amnesia, he has no recollection of recording the last two of these albums. Flush the Fashion, produced by Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, had a thick, edgy New Wave musical sound that baffled even long-time fans, though it still yielded the US Top 40 hit “Clones (We’re All)”. The album Special Forces featured a more aggressive but consistent form of New Wave style, and included a new version of “Generation Landslide”. The following album, Zipper Catches Skin was a more power pop-oriented recording, with lots of quirky high-energy guitar-driven songs. While those three albums engaged the experimental New Wave sound with energetic results, 1983 marked the return collaboration of producer Bob Ezrin and guitarist Dick Wagner with the haunting epic DaDa, the final album in his Warner Brothers contract.

In 1986, Alice Cooper officially returned to the music industry with the album Constrictor. The album spawned the hits “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)” and the fan favorite “Teenage Frankenstein”. The Constrictor album was a catalyst for Cooper to make, for the first time since the 1982 Special Forces tour, a triumphant return to the road, on a tour appropriately called The Nightmare Returns. The Detroit leg of this tour, which took place at the end of October 1986 during Halloween, was captured on film as The Nightmare Returns, and is viewed by some as being the definitive Alice Cooper concert film.

Constrictor and Raise Your Fist and Yell were recorded with lead guitarist Kane Roberts and bassist Kip Winger, both of whom would leave the band by the end of 1988, although Kane Roberts played guitar on “Bed Of Nails” on 1989’s album Trash. Roberts would continue as a solo artist while Kip Winger would go on to form the band Winger.

In 1988 Cooper’s contract with MCA Records expired and he signed with Epic Records. Then, in 1989, his career finally experienced a real revival with the Desmond Child produced album Trash, which spawned a hit single “Poison”, which reached #2 in the UK and #7 in the US, and a worldwide arena tour.

1991 saw the release of Cooper’s 19th studio album Hey Stoopid, however, amidst the grunge rock explosion, it failed to have the same commercial impact as its predecessor, Trash. The same year also saw the release of the video Alice Cooper: Prime Cuts which chronicled his entire career using in depth interviews with Cooper himself, Bob Ezrin, and Shep Gordon. One critic has noted how Prime Cuts demonstrates how Cooper had used themes of satire and moralization to such good effect throughout his career.

In 1994 Cooper released The Last Temptation, his first concept album since DaDa, which dealt with issues of faith, temptation, alienation, and the frustrations of modern life, and which has been described as “a young man’s struggle to see the truth through the distractions of the ‘Sideshow’ of the modern world”. This was to be Cooper’s last album with Epic Records, and his last studio release for six years, though during this period the live album A Fistful of Alice.

The lengthy break between studio albums ended in 2000 with Brutal Planet, which was a return to horror-lined heavy metal, with a vicious injection of industrial rock, and with subject matter thematically inspired by the brutality of the modern world.

Cooper again adopted a leaner, cleaner sound for his critically acclaimed 2003 release, The Eyes Of Alice Cooper. Recognizing that many contemporary bands were having great success with his former sounds and styles, Cooper worked with a somewhat younger group of road and studio musicians who were very familiar with his of old sound. However, instead of rehashing the old sounds, they updated them, often with surprisingly effective results.

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 appears on nearly 100 stations in the USA and Canada, and has also been sold all over the world. In 2006 it began to appear as the Breakfast Show on the UK’s only Planet Rock, and in June 2006 it also started airing on Irish radio.

A continuation of the songwriting approach adopted on The Eyes of Alice Cooper was again adopted by Cooper for his 24th studio album, Dirty Diamonds, released in 2005. Dirty Diamonds became Cooper’s highest charting album since 1994’s The Last Temptation. Cooper and his band, including Kiss drummer Eric Singer, were filmed for a DVD released as Alice Cooper: Live at Montreux 2005.

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Update (Edit)

In July 2008, after lengthy delays, Cooper released Along Came a Spider, his 25th studio album. It was Cooper’s highest charting album since 1991’s Hey Stoopid, reaching #53 in the US and #31 in the UK. The album, visiting similar territory as 1987’s Raise Your Fist and Yell, deals with the antics of a deranged serial killer named Steven and is symbolized by the “Spider.” The album generally received extremely positive reviews from music critics, though Rolling Stone magazine opined that the music on the record sorely missed Bob Ezrin’s production values.

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