Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors, and baby dolls, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of rock designed to shock.
Originating in Detroit in the late 1960s, Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album Love It to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.
Furnier's solo career as Alice Cooper, adopting the band's name as his own name, began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare; in 2011 he released Welcome 2 My Nightmare, his 19th album as a solo artist, and his 26th album in total. Expanding from his Detroit rock roots, in his career Cooper has experimented with a number of musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, hard rock, New Wave, pop rock, experimental rock and industrial rock.
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage; The Rolling Stone Album Guide has called him the world's most "beloved heavy metal entertainer". Cooper is credited with helping to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and he is regarded as being the artist who "first introduced horror imagery to rock'n'roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre". Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock show Nights with Alice Cooper.
In 2011 the original Alice Cooper band was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Cooper was born as Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit, Michigan, USA, the son of Ella Mae (née McCart) and Ether Moroni Furnier. His father was a lay preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ (also known as the Bickertonite Church) which, historically, is an offshoot of the Latter Day Saint movement. He has French Huguenot, Sioux Native American, English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry, and was named after one of his uncles (Vincent Collier Furnier) and the writer Damon Runyon.[8] His paternal grandfather, Thurman Sylvester Furnier, was an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite). Vincent Furnier was active in his church at the ages of 11 and 12.[9][10]
While growing up in Detroit, Furnier attended Washington Elementary School, then Nankin Mills Jr. High, now Lutheran High School Westland. Following a series of childhood illnesses, Furnier moved with his family to Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended Cortez High School in north Phoenix. Vincent had gained admission into the University of Arizona, University of Colorado and University of California-Davis – he declined all these offers
In 1964 sixteen year-old Furnier (later rumours suggested he was nineteen) was eager to take part in the local annual letterman's talent show, so he gathered fellow cross-country teammates to form a group for the show. They named themselves The Earwigs. Because they did not know how to play any instruments at the time, they dressed up like The Beatles and 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. They soon renamed themselves The Spiders, featuring Furnier on vocals, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, John Tatum on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar and John Speer on drums.[citation needed] Musically, the group was inspired by artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Doors 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 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 Spiders graduated from high school, and after North High School footballer Michael Bruce replaced John Tatum on rhythm guitar, the band scored a local No. 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 road trips to Los Angeles to play shows. 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." At around this time drummer John Speer was replaced by Neal Smith. By the end of the year the band had relocated to Los Angeles.
In 1968 the band learned that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, 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. The name "Alice Cooper" came from a session with a ouija board, largely chosen because it sounded innocuous and wholesome, in humorous contrast to the band's image and music, and eventually adopted this stage name as his own. Cooper later stated that the name change was one of his most important and successful career moves.
Nonetheless, at the time Cooper and the band realized that the concept of a male playing the role of a villain, a woman killer, in tattered women's clothing and wearing make-up, would have the potential to cause considerable social controversy and grab headlines. In 2007 in his book Alice Cooper, Golf Monster Cooper stated that his look was inspired in part by film. One of the band's all-time favorite movies was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane starring Bette Davis. "In the movie, Bette wears disgusting caked makeup smeared on her face and underneath her eyes, with deep, dark, black eyeliner." Another movie the band watched over and over was Barbarella. "When I saw Anita Pallenberg playing the Great Tyrant in that movie in 1968, wearing long black leather gloves with switchblades coming out of them, I thought, 'That's what Alice should look like.' That, and a little bit of Emma Peel from The Avengers."
The classic Alice Cooper group line-up 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 album School's Out), all of the band members were on the Cortez High School cross-country team, and many of Cooper's stage effects were inspired by their cross-country coach, Emmett Smith (one of Smith's class projects was to build a working guillotine for slicing watermelons). Cooper, Buxton and Dunaway were also art students, and their admiration for the works of surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí would further inspire their future stage antics.
One night after an unsuccessful gig at the Cheetah club in Venice, California, where the band emptied the entire room of patrons after playing just ten minutes, they were approached and enlisted by music manager Shep Gordon, who ironically saw the band's negative impact that night as a force that could be turned in a more productive direction. Shep then arranged an audition for the band with composer and renowned record producer, Frank Zappa, who was looking to sign bizarre music 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 that particular brand of psychedelic rock at seven in the morning impressed Zappa enough to sign them to a three-album deal. Another Zappa-signed act, the all-female GTOs, who liked to "dress the Cooper boys up like full size Barbie dolls," played a major role in developing the band's early onstage look.
Cooper's first album Pretties for You (released in 1969) had a slight psychedelic feel. Although it touched the US charts for one week at No. 193, it was ultimately a critical and commercial failure.
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 capitalize on the tabloid sensationalism, creating in the process a new subgenre, shock rock. Cooper claims that the infamous "Chicken Incident" at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert in September 1969 was an accident. A chicken somehow made its way onto the stage into the feathers of a feather pillow they would open during Cooper's performance, and not having any experience around farm animals, Cooper presumed that, because 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 chicken instead plummeted into the first few rows occupied by disabled people in wheelchairs, who reportedly proceeded to tear the bird to pieces.
Alice was announced his love for fried chicken and Jack Daniels in numerous interviews. The next day the incident made the front page of national newspapers, and Zappa phoned Cooper and asked if the story, which reported that he had bitten off the chicken's head and drunk its blood on stage, was true. Cooper denied the rumor, whereupon Zappa told him, "Well, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it," obviously recognizing that such publicity would be priceless for the band.
The band have later claimed that this period was highly influenced by Pink Floyd, and especially the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Glen Buxton said he could listen to Syd Barrett's guitar for hours at a time
Despite the publicity from the Chicken Incident, the band's second album, Easy Action, released in June 1970, met with the same fate as its predecessor. At around this time 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 by the crowds of the Midwest states who were accustomed to the similar hard rock styles of local bands such as The Stooges and The MC5. Despite this, Cooper still managed to receive a cream pie in the face when performing at the Cincinnati Pop Festival. Detroit would remain their steady home base until 1972. "L.A. just didn’t get it," Cooper stated. "They were all on the wrong drug for us. They were on acid and we were basically drinking beer. We fit much more in Detroit than we did anywhere else."
Alice Cooper appeared at the Woodstock-esque, Strawberry Fields Festival near Toronto, Ontario in August 1970. The band's mix of glam and increasingly violent stage theatrics stood out in stark contrast to the bearded, denim-clad hippie bands of the time. As Cooper himself stated: "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".
In autumn 1970 the Alice Cooper group teamed with producer Bob Ezrin for the recording of their third album Love It to Death. This was the final album in their Straight Records contract and the band's last chance to create a hit. That first success came with the single "I'm Eighteen", released in November 1970, which reached number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1971. Not long after the album's release in January 1971 Warner Bros. Records purchased Alice Cooper's contract from Straight and re-issued the album, giving the group a higher level of promotion.
Love It to Death proved to be their breakthrough album, reaching number 35 on the U.S. Billboard 200 album charts. It would be the first of eleven Alice Cooper group and solo albums produced by Ezrin, who is widely seen as being instrumental in helping to create and develop the band's definitive sound.
The group's 1971 tour featured a stage show involving mock fights and gothic torture modes being imposed on Cooper climaxing with a staged execution by electric chair, with the band sporting tight, sequined, and color-contrasting glam rock-style costumes made by prominent rock fashion designer Cindy Dunaway (sister of band member Neal Smith, and wife of band member Dennis Dunaway). Cooper's androgynous stage role had developed to present a villainous side, portraying a potential threat to modern society. The success of the band's single and album, and their tour of 1971, which included their first tour of Europe (audience members reportedly included Elton John and a pre-Ziggy David Bowie), provided enough encouragement for Warner Bros. to offer the band a new multi-album contract.
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", "Be My Lover" in early 1972, and "Halo of Flies" which became a Top 10 hit in the Netherlands in 1972. Thematically, Killer expanded on the villainous side of Cooper's androgynous stage role, with its music becoming the soundtrack to the group's morality-based stage show, which by then featured a boa constrictor hugging Cooper on-stage, the murderous axe chopping of bloodied baby dolls, and execution by hanging at the gallows. Back then, the real criticism was aimed at questioning the artists' sexual ambiguity, rather than the stage gore. In January 1972, Cooper was again asked about his peculiar name, and told talk show hostess Dinah Shore that he took the name from a "Mayberry RFD" character.
The summer of 1972 saw the release of the single "School's Out". It went Top 10 in the US, was a No. 1 single in the UK, and remains a staple on classic rock radio to this day. The album School's Out reached No. 2 on the US charts and sold over a million copies. The band now relocated to their new mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. With Cooper's on-stage androgynous persona completely replaced with brattiness and machismo, the band solidified their success with subsequent tours in the US and Europe, and won over devoted fans in droves while at the same time horrifying parents and outraging the social establishment. In the United Kingdom, Mary Whitehouse, a christian morality campaigner, persuaded the BBC to ban the video for "School's Out" and Member of Parliament Leo Abse petitioned Home Secretary Reginald Maudling to have the group banned altogether from performing in the country.
In February 1973 Billion Dollar Babies was released worldwide and became the band's most commercially successful 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", the latter of which was the last UK single from the album; it reached No. 25 in the US. The title track, featuring guest vocals by Donovan, was also a US hit single. Around this time Glen Buxton left Alice Cooper briefly due to his waning health.
The group in 1973.
With a string of successful concept albums and several hit singles, the band continued their gruelling schedule and toured the US once again. Continued attempts by politicians and pressure groups to ban their shocking act only served to fuel the myth of Alice Cooper further and generate even greater public interest. 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. The guillotine and other stage effects were designed for the band by magician James Randi, who appeared on stage during some of the shows as executioner. The Alice Cooper group had now reached its peak and it was among the most visible and successful acts in the industry. Beneath the surface, however, the repetitive schedule of recording and touring had begun to take its toll on the band, and Cooper, who was under the constant pressure of getting into character for that night's show, was consistently sighted nursing a can of beer.
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". An unsolicited theme song was recorded for the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, but a different song of the same name by Lulu was chosen instead. 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. For various reasons the band decided to take a hiatus.
During this time Cooper relocated back to Los Angeles and started appearing regularly on TV shows such as Hollywood Squares, and Warner Bros. released the Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits compilation album. It featured classic style artwork and reached the US Top 10, performing better than Muscle of Love. However, the band's 1974 feature film Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper (consisting mainly of 1973 concert footage with 'comedic' sketches woven throughout to a faint storyline), released on a minor theatrical run mostly to drive-in theaters, saw little box office success. On March 5, 1974 Cooper appeared on episode 3 of The Snoop Sisters playing a satanic cult singer.
In 1975 Alice released his first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare. To avoid legal complications over ownership of the group name, Alice Cooper had by then become the singer's new legal name. The success of the solo album marked the final break with the original members of the band with Cooper collaborating with their producer Bob Ezrin, who recruited Lou Reed's backing band, including guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, to play on the album. Spearheaded by the US Top 20 hit ballad, "Only Women Bleed", the album was released by Atlantic Records in March of that year and became a Top 10 hit for Cooper. It was a concept album that was based on the nightmare of a child named Steven, featuring narration by classic horror movie film star Vincent Price (who several years after Welcome to My Nightmare 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 8-foot-tall (2.4 m) furry Cyclops which Cooper decapitates and kills).
Cooper (second from right) laughs at Mae West's words after the opening of her last movie in 1978.
By this time, however, alcohol was clearly affecting Cooper's performances. During the Welcome to My Nightmare tour in Vancouver, and only a few songs into the routine, Cooper tripped over a foot-light, staggered a few paces, lost his bearings, and plunged head-first off the stage and onto the concrete floor of the Pacific Coliseum. Some fans, thinking it was all part of the act, reached through the barriers to pull at his blood-matted hair before bouncers could pull him away for help. He was taken to a local hospital, where medical staff stitched his head wound and provided him with a skullcap. Cooper returned to the venue a couple of hours later and tried to perform two more songs, but within minutes he had to call it a night.
Accompanying the album and stage show was the TV special The Nightmare, starring Cooper and Vincent Price, which aired on US prime-time TV in April 1975. The Nightmare (which was later released on home video in 1983 and gained a Grammy Awards nomination for Best Long Form Music Video) was regarded as another groundbreaking moment in rock history. Adding to all that, a concert film, also called Welcome to My Nightmare produced, directed and choreographed by the West Side Story cast member David Winters and filmed live at London's Wembley Arena in September 1975, was released to theaters in 1976.[30][31] Though it failed at the box office, it later became a midnight movie favorite and a cult classic.
Such was the immense success of Cooper's solo project that he decided to continue alone as a solo artist, and the original band became officially defunct. Bruce, Dunnaway and Smith would go on to form the short-lived band Billion Dollar Babies, producing one album - Battle Axe - in 1977. While occasionally performing with one another and Glen Buxton, they would not reunite with Alice until October 23, 1999, at the second Glen Buxton Memorial Weekend for a show at CoopersTown in Phoenix. Since that time they have also performed together (televised) on March 14, 2011, at the induction of the original Alice Coopoer group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as on May 11, 2011 at London's Battersea Power Station at the Jagermiester Ice Cold 4D event (webcast). The trio also appeared on several tracks on Alice's 2011 album Welcome 2 My Nightmare.
It was also during this time that Cooper co-founded the legendary drinking club The Hollywood Vampires.
Cooper in 1978.
Following the 1976 US No. 12 ballad hit "I Never Cry"; two albums, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell and Lace and Whiskey; and the 1977 US No. 9 ballad hit "You and Me", it became clear from many performances during his 1977 US tour that Cooper was in dire need of help with his alcoholism (at his alcoholic peak it was rumored that Cooper was consuming up to two cases of Budweiser and a bottle of whiskey a day). Following the tour, Cooper had himself hospitalized in a New York sanitarium for treatment, during which time the live album The Alice Cooper Show was released.
In 1978 a sobered Cooper used his experience in the sanitarium as the inspiration for the semi-autobiographical album From the Inside, which he co-wrote with Bernie Taupin. The release spawned another US Top 20 hit "How You Gonna See Me Now", yet another ballad. The subsequent tour's stage show was based inside an asylum, and was filmed for Cooper's first home video release, The Strange Case of Alice Cooper, in 1979. Around this time, Cooper performed "Welcome to My Nightmare", "You and Me" and "School's Out" on The Muppet Show (episode # 307) on March 28, 1978 (he played one of the devil's henchmen trying to dupe Kermit the Frog and Gonzo into selling their souls). He also appeared in an against-typecasting role as a piano-playing disco bellboy in Mae West's final film, Sextette, and as a villain in the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cooper also led celebrities in raising money to remodel the famous Hollywood Sign in California. Cooper himself contributed over $27,000 to the project, buying an O in the sign in memory of friend and comedian Groucho Marx.
1980s
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. 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 "(We're All) Clones". 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 Bros. contract.
In 1983 after the recording of DaDa, Cooper was re-hospitalized for alcoholism. In a deathly state of health he moved back to Phoenix to save his marriage from collapse, and so that he could receive the support of family and friends. Cooper was finally clean and sober by the time DaDa and The Nightmare home video (of his 1975 TV Special) were released in the fall of that year; however, both releases performed below expectations. Even with The Nightmare scoring a nomination for 1984's Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video (he lost to Duran Duran), it was not enough for Warner Bros. to keep Cooper on their books, so in 1984 Cooper became a "free agent" for the first time in his career.
After over a year on hiatus, during which time he spent being a full-time father, perfecting his golf swing every day on the golf course, and finding time to star in the Spanish B-grade horror movie production Monster Dog, Cooper sought to pick up the pieces of his musical career. In 1985 he met and began writing songs with guitarist Kane Roberts. Cooper was subsequently signed to MCA Records, and appeared as guest vocalist on Twisted Sister's song "Be Chrool To Your Scuel". A video was made for the song, featuring Cooper donning his black snake-eyes make-up for the first time since 1979. But any publicity it may have generated toward Cooper's return to the music scene was cut short as the video was promptly banned because of its graphically gory make-up (by Tom Savini), and because of the innumerable zombies in the video and their insatiable appetite for gorging on human flesh.
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)" (the theme song for the movie Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives; in the video of the song Cooper was given a cameo role as a deranged psychiatrist) 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 entitled The Nightmare Returns. The Detroit leg of this tour, which took place at the end of October 1986during Halloween, was captured on film as The Nightmare Returns, and is viewed by some as being the definitive Alice Cooper concert film. The concert, which received rave reviews in the rock music press, was also described by Rolling Stone magazine as bringing "Cooper's violent, twisted onstage fantasies to a new generation". The Constrictor album was followed by Raise Your Fist and Yell in 1987, which had an even rougher sound than its predecessor, as well as the Cooper classic "Freedom". The subsequent tour of Raise Your Fist and Yell, which was heavily inspired by the slasher horror movies of the time such as the Friday the 13th series and Nightmare on Elm Street, served up a shocking spectacle similar to its predecessor, and courted the kind of controversy, especially in Europe, that recalled the public outrage caused by Cooper's public performances in America in the early 1970s.
In Britain Labour M.P. David Blunkett called for the show to be banned, saying "I'm horrified by his behaviour – it goes beyond the bounds of entertainment" (even though Blunkett has been blind from birth). The controversy spilled over into the German segment of the tour, with the German government actually succeeding in having some of the gorier segments of the performance removed. It was also during the London leg of the tour that Cooper met with a near fatal accident during the hanging execution sequence at the end of the show.
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).
In 1987 Cooper made a brief appearance as a vagrant in the horror movie Prince of Darkness, directed by John Carpenter. His role had no lines and consisted of generally menacing the protagonists before eventually impaling one of them with a bicycle frame. Cooper also appeared at WrestleMania III, escorting wrestler Jake 'The Snake' Roberts to the ring. After the match was over, Cooper got involved and threw Jake's snake Damien at The Honky Tonk Man's manager Jimmy Hart. Jake considered the involvement of Cooper to be an honor, as he had idolized Cooper in his youth and was still a huge fan.
Cooper recorded a new song, I Got A Line On You, for the soundtrack to Iron Eagle II. A music video was shot for the song and got minor airplay on MTV. The song was originally recorded and released in 1969 by the band Spirit. "I Got A Line On You" was released as a B-side for the Poison single and on The Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper CD.
In 1988, Cooper's contract with MCA Records expired and he signed with Epic Records. Then in 1989 his career finally experienced a legitimate revival with the Desmond Child produced and Grammy-nominated album Trash, which spawned a hit single "Poison", which reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 7 in the US, and a worldwide arena tour.
1990s
1991 saw the release of Cooper's 19th studio album, Hey Stoopid, again featuring several of rock music’s glitterati guesting on the record. Released as glam metal's popularity was on the wane, and just before the explosion of grunge, it failed to have the same commercial impact as its predecessor. 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 that Prime Cuts demonstrates how Cooper had used (in contrast to similar artists who succeeded him) themes of satire and moralisation to such good effect throughout his career. It was in the Prime Cuts video that Bob Ezrin delivered his own summation of the Alice Cooper persona: "He is the psycho killer in all of us. He's the axe murderer, he's the spoiled child, he's the abuser, he's the abused; he's the perpetrator, he's the victim, he's the gun slinger, and he's the guy lying dead in the middle of the street".
By the early 1990s Cooper had become a genuine cultural icon, guesting on records by the most successful bands of the time, such as the Guns N' Roses album Use Your Illusion I, on which he shared vocal duties with Axl Rose on the track "The Garden"; making a brief appearance as the abusive stepfather of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).
Cooper made a famous cameo appearance in the 1992 hit comedy film Wayne's World. Cooper and his band first appear onstage performing "Feed My Frankenstein" from Hey Stoopid. Afterwards at a backstage party, the movie's main characters Wayne and Garth discover that when offstage Cooper is a calm, articulate intellectual when he and his band discuss the history of Milwaukee in surprising depth. In a now famous scene, Wayne and Garth respond to an invitation to hang out with Cooper by kneeling and bowing reverently before him while chanting "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"
In 1994 Cooper released The Last Temptation, his first concept album since DaDa. The album deals with issues of faith, temptation, alienation and the frustrations of modern life, and has been described as "a young man's struggle to see the truth through the distractions of the 'Sideshow' of the modern world". Concurrent with the release of The Last Temptation was a three-part comic book series written by Neil Gaiman, fleshing out the album's story. 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 was released, and in 1997 he lent his voice to the first track of Insane Clown Posse's The Great Milenko.
In 1999, the four-disc box set The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper appeared, which contained an authorized biography of Cooper, Alcohol and Razor Blades, Poison and Needles: The Glorious Wretched Excess of Alice Cooper, All-American, written by Creem magazine editor Jeffrey Morgan.
During his absence from the recording studio, Cooper toured extensively every year throughout the latter part of the 1990s, including, in 1996, South America, which he had not visited since 1974. Also in 1996, Cooper sang the role of Herod on the London cast recording of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
He also made an appearance on an episode of That 70s Show, at the end of which he and two other (minor) guest characters parody Dungeons & Dragons.
2000s
Cooper in 2004 on a film set in L.A.
The first decade of the 21st century saw a sustained period of activity from Alice Cooper. In the decade that he turned sixty, he toured extensively and released (after a significant break) a steady stream of studio albums to favorable critical acclaim. During this period Cooper was also recognized and awarded in various ways: he received a Rock Immortal award at the 2007 Scream Awards; was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003; he received (in May 2004) an honorary doctoral degree from Grand Canyon University; was given (in May 2006) the key to the city of Alice, North Dakota; he won the living legend award at the 2006 Classic Rock Roll of Honour event; and he won the 2007 Mojo music magazine Hero Award.
The lengthy break between studio albums ended in 2000 with Brutal Planet, which was a return to horror-lined heavy metal, with industrial rock, and with subject matter thematically inspired by the brutality of the modern world, set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, and also inspired by a number of news stories that had recently appeared on the CNN news channel. The album was produced by Bob Marlett, with longtime Cooper production collaborator Bob Ezrin returning as executive producer. The accompanying world tour, which included Cooper's first concert in Russia, was a resounding success, introducing Alice Cooper to a new audience and producing the live home video, Brutally Live, in 2001. During one memorable episode in Brutally Live, Britney Spears (being played by Alice Cooper's real life daughter, Calico), and representing "everything that my audience hates – the softening of rock and roll...the sweetness of it" is executed by Cooper.
Brutal Planet was succeeded by the sonically similar and widely acclaimed sequel Dragontown, which saw Bob Ezrin back at the helm as producer. The album has been described as leading the listener down "a nightmarish path into the mind of rock's original conceptual storyteller" and by Cooper himself as being "the worst town on Brutal Planet". Like The Last Temptation, both Brutal Planet and Dragontown are albums which explore Cooper's personal faith perspective (born again Christianity). It is often cited in the music media that Dragontown forms the third chapter in a trilogy begun with The Last Temptation; however, Cooper has indicated that this in fact is not the case.
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 oeuvre of old. However, instead of rehashing the old sounds, they updated them, often with surprisingly effective results. The resulting Bare Bones tour adopted a less-orchestrated performance style that had fewer theatrical flourishes and a greater emphasis on musicality. The success of this tour helped support the growing recognition that the classic Cooper songs were exceptionally clever, tuneful and unique.
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 also been broadcast all over the world.
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. The Dirty Diamonds tour launched in America in August 2005 after several European concerts, including a performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland on July 12. Cooper and his band, including Kiss drummer Eric Singer, were filmed for a DVD released as Alice Cooper: Live at Montreux 2005. One critic, in a review of the Montreux release, commented that Cooper was to be applauded for "still mining pretty much the same territory of teenage angst and rebellion" as he had done more than thirty years previously.
In December 2006 the original Alice Cooper band reunited to perform six classic Alice Cooper songs at Cooper's annual charity event in Phoenix, entitled "Christmas Pudding".
On July 1, 2007 Cooper performed a duet with Marilyn Manson at the B'Estival event in Bucharest, Romania.[58] The performance represented a reconciliation between the two artists; Cooper had previously taken issue with Manson over his overtly anti-Christian on-stage antics and had sarcastically made reference to the originality of Manson's choosing a female name and dressing in women's clothing.[49] Cooper and Manson have been the subject of an academic paper on the significance of adolescent antiheroes.
In January 2008 he was one of the guest singers on the new Avantasia album The Scarecrow, singing the 7th track, "The Toy Master". 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 No. 53 in the US and No. 31 in the UK. The album, visiting similar territory explored in 1987's Raise Your Fist and Yell, deals with the nefarious antics of a deranged serial killer named "Spider" who is on a quest to use the limbs of his victims to create a human spider. The album generally received positive reviews from music critics, though Rolling Stone magazine opined that the music on the record sorely missed Bob Ezrin's production values. The resulting Theatre of Death tour of the album (during which Cooper is executed on four separate occasions) was described in a long November 2009 article about Cooper in The Times as "epic" and featuring "enough fake blood to remake Saving Private Ryan".
2010s
In January 2010, it was announced that Alice would be touring with Rob Zombie on the "Gruesome Twosome" tour. In May 2010, Cooper made an appearance during the beginning of the season finale of the reality-show American Idol, in which he sang "School's Out".
Alice Cooper performing live at Wembley Arena in 2012
With his daughter and former band member Dick Wagner, Cooper scored the music for the indie horror flick Silas Gore.
During 2010, Cooper began working on a new album, dubbed Welcome 2 My Nightmare, a sequel to the original Welcome to My Nightmare.[64] In a Radio Metal interview, he said that "We'll put some of the original people on it and add some new people [...] I'm very happy with working with Bob (Ezrin) again."
On December 15, 2010, it was announced Cooper and his former band would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The official Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony took place March 14, 2011 where Cooper was inducted by fellow horror-rocker Rob Zombie. Original members Bruce, Cooper, Dunaway, and Smith all made brief acceptance speeches and performed "I'm Eighteen" and "School's Out" live together, with Steve Hunter filling in for the late Glen Buxton. Alice showed up for the event wearing a (presumably fake) blood-splattered shirt and had a live giant albino boa snake wrapped around his neck. Cooper told Rolling Stone magazine that he was "elated" by the news and that the nomination had been made for the original band, as "We all did go to the same high school together, and we were all on the track team, and it was pretty cool that guys that knew each other before the band ended up going that far".
On March 10, 2011, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Alice Cooper, Jennifer Warnes and others performed at a benefit concert in Tucson, Arizona benefiting The Fund for Civility, Respect and Understanding, a foundation that raises awareness about and provides medical prevention and treatment services to people with mental disorders. In June 2011 Cooper took his place in the Reasonably Priced Car at the BBC auto show Top Gear.
Cooper supported Iron Maiden on their Maiden England World Tour from June to July 21, 2012, and then headlined Bloodstock Open Air on Sunday August 12. On September 16, 2012, Cooper appeared at the Sunflower Jam charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, performing alongside guitarist Brian May of Queen, bassist John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, drummer Ian Paice of Deep Purple, and Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson.
Cooper also starred as himself in the 2012 Tim Burton adaptation of Dark Shadows that also starred Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter as well as the series original actors Jonathan Frid, Kathryn Leigh Scott, and Lara Parker in cameo roles.
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