First with the band that bore his name, then as a solo artist, Alice Cooper was for a decade the leading figure of shock rock, marking a major step forward in the evolution of popular music. His landmark albums influenced several generations of artists and still carry weight today
The fact that rock isn't just music, but also image, symbols and mythology, and that these elements aren't easily separable, is something only a handful of romantics clinging to a nineteenth-century idea of art still insist on denying. When it comes to Alice Cooper, these elements are so thoroughly intertwined that trying to isolate them would only produce a sterile view of the project.
Alice Cooper's music comes across as all the more excessive given that, over the years, audiences have grown used to watching him handle giant constrictor snakes as if they were scarves. The unease that radiates from his lyrics almost always goes hand in hand with the evolution of his arrangements, and it all fits perfectly with the settings of his videos and album covers. His career amounts to one long theatrical re-enactment of the whole universe surrounding rock music.
When, around the turn of the Nineties, the entire United States found itself blaming Marilyn Manson for every conceivable act of youth violence — unwittingly proving the artist and his unflinching exposure of the American dream's most uncomfortable undersides entirely right — what was really airing was just another episode of the age-old game of hunting for a symbol of moral decay within hard rock. That game had already been perfected by Alice Cooper, long before.
Not that the international music scene of the Sixties hadn't already seen its share of excessive characters. Mick Jagger's bad-boy image was distasteful to conservative parents, Jim Morrison sang about sex with brazen nerve and mimed intercourse on stage, Iron Butterfly spent a year in the US top 10 with a lysergic trip.
Yet when Alice Cooper burst onto the scene singing about mental disorders, phobias, necrophilia, homicidal urges and the like, it became clear the game had reached a level from which there would be no easy turning back. Excess became a representation of evil rather than a mere tool of protest. And while Black Sabbath, on the other side of the ocean, were moving in a similar direction, Cooper had something extra: the image. Dressed in leather and heavily made up, he drew explicit inspiration from two of the most controversial figures in Sixties cinema — Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" for the face, and Anita Pallenberg in "Barbarella" for the wardrobe. Two female figures, incidentally, now grotesquely combined on the silhouette of a skeletal little man with a wild-eyed stare.
Alice Cooper's shows, populated by reptiles, cascades of blood, guillotines, electric chairs and straitjackets, nonetheless risked growing tiresome not long after his commercial breakthrough. The shock lasted roughly a couple of years, but by the end of 1973 people no longer seemed particularly impressed by all those tricks, and for a moment the artist appeared destined to go the way of those horror films that, a few years after release, lose their power to unsettle, rendered harmless by even more violent successors (if not by reality itself).
Cooper, however, in a move worthy of a master strategist, chose a different path. Understanding that frightening people and probing the collective unconscious with such direct provocations would mean an endless game of one-upmanship, he carved out a niche of his own by playing the irony card, staking everything on the grotesque and the farcical. This wave of lightness defined his solo career, once the band bearing his name had broken up.
His persona thus became a macabre storyteller who exposes the abysses of the human soul while disguised as a clown, unafraid to swing from hard rock to the syrupiest orchestral pop. Having cast off the mantle of master of terror, he became its jester instead. No longer obliged to scare people, he could simply make them smile, without that stopping him from continuing to sprinkle his lyrics with less-than-flattering portraits of the human condition.
This flexibility in managing his own image kept him more or less commercially afloat until the early Nineties. From that point on, the repetitiveness of his output and the singer's advancing age gradually overshadowed his new releases, which grew ever blander. None of this, however, dented the legend of his classics, which remain as alive and influential as ever decades after their release.
Vincent Furnier was born in 1948 in Detroit into a family of followers of the Church of Christ, but that doesn't stop him from developing a passion for rock, and he has no trouble forming his first band while still a teenager. The lineup keeps changing its name: Spiders, Earwigs, Nazz, releasing a total of four singles between 1965 and 1967 on small local labels. The music, still harmless, is a near-perfect imitation of Merseybeat, particularly the Yardbirds, several of whose songs the quintet covers during live performances. Furnier in particular is a huge fan of the bizarre sounds coming out of Jeff Beck's guitar.
Yet another name change comes in 1968, to avoid confusion with Todd Rundgren's Nazz. The choice falls on Alice Cooper, a random girl's name that, according to Vincent, would contrast strikingly with their frenzied music. To this day the legend persists that it was the spirit of the witch of the same name — burned alive in 17th-century Salem — who made contact with the band. The name soon sticks to Vincent as well, never to come off again.
During a live show in Los Angeles the five are spotted by Frank Zappa, who appreciates their spirit and signs them to Straight Records. Besides the newly christened Cooper on vocals, the group includes Glen Buxton (lead guitar), Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar and keyboards), Dennis Dunaway (bass) and Neal Smith (drums).
Under Zappa's wing — though he isn't actually present in the studio with the band — two albums are released, Pretties For You (1969) and Easy Action (1970). They're interesting records, but very messy, and they feel somewhat immature next to the rock classics of the same era. Running through their grooves are primordial hard rock, acid riffs, psychedelic jams, spoken skits, musique-concrète collage and assorted cacophony. The more coherently arranged moments work, but the rest fares less well, diluting the band's creativity into a jumble of sounds that only the most devoted disciple of Zappa's aesthetic could find compelling... bearing in mind, of course, that Zappa himself handled his own moments of chaos far more skillfully than a still-immature band lacking the guidance of an adequate producer.
In October 1970, young Bob Ezrin, at the time an assistant to producer Jack Richardson, catches a live Alice Cooper show and is struck by their stage presence. Sensing their potential, he rushes them into the studio, and a month later a new single, "I'm Eighteen," hits the market.
The song charts, climbing to number 21 nationally: an exhilarating result for a band that until then had been little more than a modest traveling circus. Warner Bros. signs them, and hands Ezrin the production reins for the album. The result is Love It To Death, now regarded as a kind of second debut for Alice Cooper, since few remember what came before. This is where the legend of the band and its frontman is born, the formula is refined, the songs become sharper, and the scattering of ideas is reined in through extensive cut-and-paste work in the studio. It's ground zero for shock rock, at least on vinyl. It's also the first album produced by Bob Ezrin. Dubbed by Cooper himself "our George Martin," Ezrin went on to become one of the decade's most important producers. Some of rock's classic albums were born with him at the helm: Lou Reed's "Berlin," Kiss's "Destroyer," Pink Floyd's "The Wall." In all of them his hand is unmistakable, his personality deeply permeating the sonic fabric.
The word genius gets thrown around too often, but when a twenty-one-year-old manages single-handedly to bring maturity to a band made up entirely of older musicians, to refine their arrangements, shape their sound and bring order to chaos, producing a flawless album in the process, you have to acknowledge an intuitive talent well out of the ordinary.
The first thing Ezrin zeroes in on is the melodies: he doesn't stop the band from indulging in the acid jams that seem to come naturally to the quintet, but once the sessions wrap up he purges every digression that threatens the song's accessibility, so that any surviving instrumental interludes are built around hypnotic riffs and hooks. This way, the band's songs also start to make sense in pop terms.
The second move is to steer the sound in a precise direction, that of the hard rock that was conquering markets pretty much everywhere. No more genres thrown together haphazardly, but a granite-solid sound with clearly defined traits. The result still ends up a touch less violent than average, so as to foreground Cooper's voice, instantly recognizable yet prone to fraying at the slightest effort. This diluted aggression, combined with the band's flashy image, is what leads journalists a year later, amid the band's worldwide breakthrough, to lump them in with the glorious glam rock bandwagon.
Aside from "Sun Arise", a cover of Australia's Rolf Harris, the tracklist consists of eight band originals. Contrary to what many believe, though, the frontman only writes four of the songs, meaning half the album was conceived by the other musicians without his input. This isn't meant to diminish Cooper's role: the music is built around his persona, and his gifts as a performer are out of the ordinary, but for once it doesn't hurt to give credit to the others too, too often dismissed as mere sidemen.
That said, the best tracks are still the ones he had a hand in, starting with the single. Heard today, "I'm Eighteen" sounds almost like an unwitting preview of grunge, with the distorted riff that opens it dissolving into an atmospheric verse carried by the bass and liquid guitar effects, before the chorus snaps back to its initial harshness. The lyrics are one of rock's great manifestos of teenage malaise: "I have the brain of a child in the heart of an old man, it's taken eighteen years to get to this point, I don't always know what I'm talking about, I feel like I'm living in the midst of doubt". The insecurity and fear of the future it depicts are universal enough that the song went on to become a touchstone for generations of rock musicians (from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols to Anthrax), and decades later it still sounded perfectly credible coming from an aging Cooper. Memorable too is the twist the Eaters, a short-lived British punk outfit, put on it in 1977, renaming it "Fifteen".
Another standout is "Ballad Of Dwight Fry", inspired by the near-homonymous American actor Dwight Frye, who played the madman Renfield in Tod Browning's "Dracula", killed by Bela Lugosi in one of the most famous scenes of 1930s cinema (we'll spare the digression here on that film's enormous influence on rock music, given that Alice Cooper and Bauhaus alone would cover most of the darkest corners of rock). The ballad is a brilliant piece of theatrical performance, with Cooper singing the anguish of a killer locked away in an asylum, his sense of powerlessness and the pain of being separated from his daughter: "I think I lost weight there, and I'm sure I need rest, it's not easy sleeping in a white straitjacket [...] She's only four years old, I'd give her back all her toys, even... even the ones I stole".
It's not just the sensitivity of the lyrics that creates the momentary illusion the singer has actually lived through that situation, but also the insecurity with which he repeats certain words and stumbles over them, as well as the chilling moment when he screams "I gotta get out of here" over and over, as if seized by convulsions. The shifts in tone are matched by an elaborate arrangement featuring piano flourishes, electric outbursts, sinister organ passages, echo effects and a driving rhythm underpinned by acoustic guitar.
The martial "Second Coming", driven by a gorgeous piano melody, shows Cooper's conflicted relationship with religion ("Il tempo si avvicina, l'ho letto su un manifesto, predicatori fanatici agli angoli delle strade hanno profetizzato"), while Bruce pens the two most conventionally rock moments, the FM-radio anthem "Caught In A Dream" and the proto-punk assault "Long Way To Go". It's Dunaway who contributes the longest track on the record, "Black Juju", a nine-minute gothic delirium that live was used as the backdrop for Cooper's mock electrocution.
The album comes out on March 8, 1971 and climbs to number 35 on the US chart, staying there long enough to sell a million copies. The cover was censored at the time — incredible but true — because of Cooper's thumb positioned at groin height. Awkward resemblances.
Two radio-friendly singles written by Bruce open the fourth album in a somewhat misleading way. "Under My Wheels" is a hard rock number with horn flourishes in which the protagonist is driven so crazy by his girlfriend that he wants to run her over with the car, while "Be My Lover" — one of countless variations on the riff from the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" — tells of the guitarist's romantic encounter. Both are flawlessly crafted FM-rock classics, but they seem placed there specifically to give commercial appeal to a record that otherwise has very little of it. Killer is in fact the band's most elaborate album, capable of blending hard rock, glam and progressive rock into a single theatrical tableau — cinematic, even, as shown by the third track, "Halo Of Flies", an eight-minute shapeshifting ride overflowing with references, from lyrics that reconstruct a James Bond-style spy story, to the quote of the "My Favourite Things" melody — from "The Sound Of Music" — that pops up at 2'10". Openly built to do something in the style of King Crimson, "Halo Of Flies" exceeds every expectation in terms of sonic and structural richness, a puzzle of interlocking parts in which every musician shines: Dunaway with cavernous, hypnotic bass lines, Smith with his battle-ready drums, Ezrin with the futuristic pulses of the Minimoog and the orchestral entrance at 5'10", Buxton and Bruce trading metallic riffs, solos and Eastern-tinged scales.
The western imagery of "Desperado" paints the tormented, melancholy portrait of a skilled killer-gunslinger ("Sono la foto di brutte storie, sono un killer e un pagliaccio"), set to an arrangement of effects-laden guitars, acoustic embroidery and orchestral swells. In the Nineties Cooper put about the story that the song was written as a tribute to Jim Morrison, a version that's hard to believe though, since up to that point neither he nor the rest of the band had ever mentioned such a thing, instead describing the character as a cowboy.
"Dead Babies" sounds like it was made with a time machine. Both the jagged bassline that opens it and the echoing guitar refractions that follow sound like an anticipation of Eighties post-punk. It later settles back into hard rock territory, though, right up to the unsettling, childlike vocal harmonies that mark the chorus. The lyrics tell of a little girl named Betty who dies after swallowing a pack of aspirin, mistaking them for candy. Her father — uninterested in his family — works away from home, while her mother is, as every evening, out getting drunk at the bar and unable to help her. These are raw, nihilistic verses that stirred up more than one controversy at the time, but they actually amount to a heartrending indictment of child neglect and the pain caused by bringing children into the world without being ready to be their parents.
Closing things out is the title track, which tells of the execution of some poor soul dragged into a shady deal who, unable to handle the situation, ends up killing someone ("Davvero non volevo essere immischiato in questa cosa, qualcuno mi ha passato una pistola e io... io ce l'ho messa tutta"). The ending is perhaps the peak of shock rock, a slow march for organ and choir complete with a prayer in Latin, at the end of which you can hear a trapdoor click open and twenty seconds of accelerating electronic hum symbolizing the approach of death. In 1971, it must have left no one indifferent.
Audiences respond warmly, and the record does even better than its predecessor, climbing to number 21 and staying on the chart for more than a year.
Although it’s the album of the band’s definitive commercial breakthrough, it’s not among their most accomplished, due to a somewhat musical-theatre atmosphere that here and there creates a sense of ruckus that's hard to ignore. It’s certainly fun to catch the “West Side Story” references in “Gutter Cat vs. the Jets”, as well as the cartoonish feel of “Luney Tune”, but over the long haul the formula wears thin, and Cooper himself must have realized it: over the years, despite this being the record that turned him into a global star, he would play almost nothing from it live except the title track.
It’s impossible, however, not to dwell on that particular track, because it’s one of those songs that are worth an entire career. Built on a devastating riff by Buxton, “School’s Out” is one of the emblems of Seventies rock and of rebellion against authority. The children’s choir backing Cooper in his joyous anthem to the end of school is, in effect, a preview of the trick Ezrin himself would later use on Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”.
It’s a song with everything it takes to become a smash hit, and indeed it did. The single reached number 7 in the US and number 1 in the UK, while the album hit number 2 in the US and number 4 in the UK. Worth tracking down is the performance on Top Of The Pops, one of the show’s landmark moments.
It doesn’t contain songs as famous as “School’s Out”, but overall it’s a flawless work that brings the band back to the level of their two 1971 albums. It’s the record where Cooper establishes himself as the main songwriter, even though it opens with a cover, “Hello Hooray”, written by the little-known Canadian songwriter Rolf Kempf and first sung by Judy Collins in 1968. It is, however, so different from the original that even listening to them back to back, it’s hard to recognize it as the same song — both because of some evident changes to the vocal melody, and because of the arrangement (folk-pop in one case, glam cabaret in the other), as well as the lyrics, which were altered, turning it into a thank-you note to the audience (“Let the lights grow dim, I'm ready, ready as this audience that's wanting me to be”). In several spots the sound of the Mellotron, set to strings, makes an appearance.
The lead single was “Elected”, an enjoyable glam rock anthem that nonetheless can’t really be counted among the band’s most original moments. The same can’t be said of “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, which seems to anticipate the mood of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, with those clean, dreamy sounds just a step away from West Coast polish, yet still unwilling to give up hard rock’s energy. Another winning number is the title track, a crooked, syncopated piece, with the drums seemingly trying to break free from the guitars and Cooper’s raspy voice overlapping with the falsetto of guest of honor Donovan, in a bizarre duet centered on a sex doll.
“I Love The Dead”, with piano and a melodic development in the style of Kurt Weill, is necrophilia thrown in your face with no metaphors (“While friends and lovers mourn you, in your silly grave, I'm planning the moves to make you flesh for my love in a scene even I don't believe”). The orchestral grandeur of the finale is obviously yet another one of Ezrin’s touches, just like the menacing arrangement of “Sick Things”, dense with filtered sounds, distorted voices and distortion.
Between March and April of ’73 the album reaches number 1 in both the US and the UK. The tour that follows is a triumph, selling out every corner of the United States, even though the band’s earnings fall short of expectations due to the show’s enormous production costs.
In November 1973 Muscle Of Love was released, the band’s final album. Surprisingly, Bob Ezrin is not among the producers (it would be revealed many years later that he had walked out of the sessions following an argument with Bruce over the arrangement of a song). The absence of the studio wizard is keenly felt, and without his touches the album ends up as something of a misstep. The songs sound like average radio rock — not bad, but hardly memorable either. Despite decent airplay for “Teenage Lament ‘74” as a single, the album stalled at number 10 in the US and failed to crack the UK top 30. Such a sharp drop within just a few months discouraged the band members, who in mid-1974 decided on an amicable split. In August, however, a Greatest Hits was released, featuring remixed versions of their various classics, which reached number 8 in the US.
This is Cooper’s first solo album; to avoid legal trouble from his former bandmates, he even had his name legally changed. Ezrin returns to the producer’s chair, while the entire band that Lou Reed used for “Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal” is enlisted for the instrumentation, with the guitar duo of Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter.
The last classic of his discography, it’s one of the most grandiose rock operas of the Seventies. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but the more fastidious listeners will be missing out on a handful of great songs, obsessively orchestrated and shot through with a sick, grotesque atmosphere. And not only that: it also contains one of the most moving songs of the artist's career up to that point, “Only Women Bleed”, which describes the lives of women forced to endure domestic violence. Carried by delicate guitar arpeggios and majestic orchestral swells, the ballad brought Cooper back to success in the US, where the album climbed to number 5.
The story told is that of the serial killer Steven: the first songs run through some of his obsessions, while the finale brings the action, complete with murder, hallucinatory delirium, incarceration and a reckoning with the harm he's caused. Cooper paints homicidal madness with compassion; there are no accusations in his lyrics — the focus instead is on the torment of those afflicted by it and on the difficulties that led to the personality disorder. Indeed, the most shocking moments of his career have almost always been those in which what was being described was not the protagonists’ illness, but the remedies of the surrounding society, depicted almost always harshly, from detention in conditions with little respect for human rights, to the death penalty. At the end of the day, Cooper’s works displayed more charitable moral principles than those of respectable America, which felt offended by them, yet was unwilling to give up capital punishment.
The music ranges from the gospel hues of “Department Of You” to the test-tube metal of “Black Widow”, taking in the funk/blues blend of the title track along the way. “Steven” stands out, an imposing march crossed by Bach-like piano and guitar runs, unsettling choirs and distortion. It's also one of Cooper's finest interpretive achievements: in the opening verse his voice whispers, cracks and contorts itself until it breaks into squeals. The protagonist's pain is thus laid bare, the exorcism is complete.
To support the album, that same year an excellent TV special titled “Alice Cooper: The Nightmare” was recorded, in which Alice/Steven wanders through his nightmares, assisted in the non-musical parts by Vincent Price as a diabolical Virgil. The pairing of the two is perfect, perhaps because Cooper knew the legendary actor inside out, having been a fan of his since he was a kid and having already partly reproduced his poses on stage. Watching them move through those cardboard sets and artificial fog, complete with giant rubber spiders and ghosts in tights, is a moment of priceless grotesque theatre. It's precisely with that show, with such silly and contrived elements, that Cooper crystallizes the farcical as a fundamental component of his art. Three years later he would appear on an episode of “The Muppet Show”, bringing things full circle.
The second half of the Seventies goes by amid poorly-received albums and a series of ballads that instead find favour with the public on the singles market (“I Never Cry”, “You And Me”, “How You Gonna See Me Now”, all of which made the US top 20). The last albums made with Ezrin at his side are Alice Cooper Goes To Hell (1976) and Whiskey And Lace (1977), which attempt to incorporate the most disparate influences, from disco music to folk, from early rock'n'roll to chart-friendly pop. However, the arrangements no longer seem to yield any noteworthy combinations, and even the melodies struggle to emerge, except on the slow numbers, which suffer instead from an excess of syrup.
Things go better with From The Inside (1978), a concept album recounting Cooper's stay in a rehab facility, a decision made once he realized that alcohol abuse was ruining him. In at least a couple of moments the old freshness seems to resurface, particularly thanks to arrangements that dive into the arena-rock trends of the day (or AOR, whichever term you prefer). On the suggestion of new producer David Foster, the boogie rock of “Serious” is co-written with Steve Lukather of Toto, while the electric piano driving the title track sounds borrowed from Supertramp. These are among his most sprightly and dynamic tracks, and they deserve rediscovery.
With Flush The Fashion (1980), produced by Roy Thomas Baker, he tries his hand at new wave, but the public doesn't seem interested, and this time not even the single makes much of an impact. A shame, because “Clones” – credited to one David Carron, who would never be heard from again – is truly one of his finest songs, a synthetic anthem about dehumanization worthy of Gary Numan. Also worth noting is the video, in which the singer, his face more skeletal than ever, wears a beret and black uniform. Unfortunately the album doesn't hold up by comparison, and overall Cooper gives the impression of being forced to chase new trends rather than help create them as he once did.
The period that follows is the most difficult of his career: Special Forces (1981) and Zipper Catches Skin (1982) pass by without leaving any trace, and sales are negligible. Not even Ezrin's return on DaDa (1983) manages to right the ship. The album isn't supported by any tour due to the singer's drug problems, by now weak and unmanageable. Warner Bros. drops him shortly after.
After a period spent between further detox (this time from cocaine) and side projects (B-movies, TV appearances, etc.), Cooper signs with MCA. The first two albums of this new chapter are Constrictor (1986) and Raise Your Fist And Yell (1987), which abandon any experimental temptation and dive headlong into the glossiest hard rock. Even when synths take the place of guitars, the result still feels closer to the muscular rock of Aerosmith than to new wave — witness “He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)”, a fine theme written for the sixth instalment of “Friday the 13th”. The two albums sell decently enough, and Cooper decides to attempt a large-scale comeback.
Which is exactly what happens when, in 1989, pushed by Epic, he releases Trash (number 2 in the UK and 20 in the US), produced by Desmond Child, who at that very moment was writing colossal hits for Bon Jovi and Aerosmith. The single that brings Cooper back to the top is “Poison” (number 2 in the UK and 7 in the US), a punchy hard rocker in the choral-excess vein of hair metal, but elevated by a performer of a far higher calibre than the genre's unremarkable average. “House Of Fire” and “Bed Of Nails” are also released as singles and will often be revived in concerts in the years to come.
Hey Stoopid (1991) represents the last moment in which Cooper was part of the mainstream (it reaches number 4 in the UK, while in the US it stalls at 47 but holds on long enough to go gold). The title track, rowdier than ever, is his last classic. From then on there isn't much to say: the ten albums that follow between 1994 and 2023 are repetitive and irredeemably derivative. On Welcome 2 My Nightmare (2011) he even has to stoop to duetting with Ke$ha (“What Baby Wants”) to achieve a result that's even remotely surprising. In 2015 he founds the Hollywood Vampires project together with Joe Perry of Aerosmith and actor Johnny Depp, with whom he releases the albums Hollywood Vampires (2015) and Rise (2019): the material is harmless, but the three of them at least give the impression of having a great deal of fun.
Without holding out any vain hope for a creative rebirth, one might as well enjoy him as the distinguished live performer he's become, with a vast repertoire of classic songs at his disposal and always ready to entertain anyone willing to pay the price of a ticket. He's already proved what he had to prove; asking for more would be ungenerous.
