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Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier ; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four 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 heavy metal that was designed to shock.
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 2008 he released Along Came a Spider , his 18th solo album. Expanding from his original Detroit rock roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, Glam Metal, hard rock, new wave, pop rock, soft rock, experimental rock and industrial rock. In recent times he has returned more to his garage rock roots.
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage, The Rolling Stone Album Guide going so far as to refer to him as the world's most "beloved heavy metal entertainer". He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and is seen as being the person 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 .
On VH1's "100 Greatest artists of Hard Rock", Cooper was ranked #20..
Childhood and early life
Alice Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Ella Mae (McCart) and Ether Moroni Furnier. He was named after one of his uncles and the writer Damon Runyon. While in Detroit, Furnier attended a Middle School, which is now Lutheran High School Westland. His grandfather, Thurman Sylvester Furnier, was an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ based in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Vincent Furnier's father was an Elder in The Church of Jesus Christ. Furnier has some distant French Huguenot ancestry; the remainder of his ancestry is English and Scottish. The young Vincent was very active in the Church of Jesus Christ at the ages of 11 and 12.
After a series of childhood illnesses, Furnier and his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. After Washington Elementary School, Furnier attended Cortez High School in northern Phoenix. He was also a member of the Order of DeMolay.
Recording career
1960s
In 1964, at the age of 16, Furnier was eager to take part in the local annual Letterman's talent show and gathered fellow cross-country teammates from the school to form a group for the show. They named themselves The Earwigs, and since 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 and soon renamed themselves The Spiders, featuring Furnier on vocals and harmonica, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, John Tatum on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and John Speer on drums. Musically, the group were inspired by artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, 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 a High School. After North High School footballer 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 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". 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 were again in need of another stage 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.
Early press releases claimed that the name was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch named Alice Cooper . However, it is now widely accepted that this story was in fact a publicity stunt—Cooper in later interviews confirmed that the name actually came out of thin air, conjuring an image of "a cute and sweet little girl with a hatchet behind her back". (The name was also once said to be an inside joke associated with a character in the television show Mayberry R.F.D.; Alice Cooper is also the name of Betty Cooper's mother in the Archie comic strips).
In later interviews, Cooper admitted that "Alice Cooper" was only intended to be the name of the band, as Cooper himself used his birth name (Vincent Furnier) during the band's early days. However, as the band played more shows, numerous fans were coming up to Cooper and saying, "Hey, Alice!" Cooper was unaware that the fans were addressing him, and was taken aback by the notion that the fans were mistaking the band's name for his own.
Nonetheless, at the time Cooper and the band realized that the concept of a male playing the role of an androgynous witch, in tattered women's clothing and wearing make-up, would definitely have the potential to cause considerable social controversy and grab headlines. Furnier would later admit that the name change was one of his most important and brilliant career moves.
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. With the exception of Smith, who graduated from Camelback High School (which is referred to in the song "Alma Mater" on the School's Out album), all of the band members were on the Cortez High School cross-country team, and many of Alice 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 a club in Venice, California called The Cheetah, 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 seemingly negative impact that night as a force that could be directed in a more positive direction. Shep then managed to arrange 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", however, 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 (a time unbeknownst to most in the rock music world) impressed Zappa enough to sign them on a three-album deal. It was another Zappa signed act, the all-female GTOs, who liked to "dress the Cooper boys up like full size barbie dolls", that played a major role in developing the band's early onstage look. Alice Cooper's first album Pretties for You was released in 1969 and, though it touched the US charts for one week at #193, ultimately met with critical and commercial failure.
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 and 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,
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