From his origins as a teen rocker in Phoenix who released his first single in 1965, Vincent Furnier transformed himself into Alice Cooper — and changed rock and roll along the way.
He was born Vincent Damon Furnier on Feb. 4, 1948, in Detroit, the son of a pastor. Afflicted with asthma from birth, when he was 13 years old, the family relocated to Phoenix, where tumbleweeds are often seen blowing across roads during dust storms. The arid conditions were expected to improve his general health. But within two months he had developed peritonitis (a potentially life-threatening condition) from a burst appendix.
Much of his early adolescence was spent shuttered in fusty sickrooms.
“I was only 98 pounds and had spent a year-and-a-half hunched over in bed, which left a curvature of my spine and shoulders which could have put the Hunchback of Notre Dame to shame,” Furnier said.
He rallied and began to elbow his way back to health by consequence of a new found interest in long-distance running. He was so good that he reputedly broke the record time for the marathon in Phoenix.
It was at Cortez High School — while running on the track and cross country teams — where Furnier first made the acquaintance of Dennis Dunaway (who would later become the bassist for the Alice Cooper band).
At the age of 15, despite his enthusiasm for racing with the wind, Furnier knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
After witnessing Ed Sullivan announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles,” he was transfixed as John, Paul, George, and Ringo came onto the stage to perform “All My Loving” to the ear-piercing shrieks from teenage girls in the audience.
Furnier resolved to be a singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band.
Insects and 8-legged creatures
Originating in The Valley of the Sun in 1964, the Alice Cooper band went through a couple of incarnations and names — including the Earwigs and the Spiders — before settling on The Nazz.
While still attending high school, the Spiders performed regularly around the Phoenix area, with a huge black spider’s web as their backdrop. 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. Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” was on the B-side. The single was released by Mascot Records, a local record label owned by Jack Curtis, an impresario who also operated the VIP, a teen club where the Spiders were the house band.
After graduation — now with North High School footballer Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar — the band released their second single, “Don’t Blow Your Mind” (Santa Cruz Records, 1966), an original composition which rose to become a local radio hit.
At the time, there were hazards for long-haired guys living in the Southwest; who too often became easy targets for abuse and ridicule by cowboys in pick-up trucks.
By 1967, the band had begun to make regular road trips to Los Angeles to play shows.
After rebranding themselves as The Nazz, they released the single “Wonder Who’s Lovin’ Her Now.” Around this time, Neal Smith replaced John Speer behind the drum kit.
By the end of the year, the band had relocated to Los Angeles.
It’s all in the name
Following the release of “Summertime Blues,” an earsplitting cover of Eddie Cochran’s classic by San Francisco band Blue Cheer in 1968 — a song considered by many it to be a prototype for metal and punk — the sound that would become known as heavy metal began to take form.
For The Nazz, the move from Phoenix to the full-blown weirdness of Hollywood only served to nurture the scrappy band’s spirit of reinvention.
Later that year, the release of “Open My Eyes” — a hit single by a Philadelphia band fronted by Todd Rundgren also known as Nazz — prompted a change of direction.
Despite some amusing myths surrounding the name — one fiction contends that the name spelled itself out on a Ouija board when Furnier inquired who he was in a past life — the true origin of the name was more mundane.
“It just came out of my mouth. I just kind of said, ‘Alice Cooper.’ That was it,” he recalled in a recent interview the Tucson Sentinel. “There was something about it, though. It conjured up an image of a little girl with a lollipop in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Lizzie Borden. Alice Cooper. They had a similar ring.”
Cooper channeled Bette Davis’s deranged look in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” — a 1969 psychological horror film, based on a novel by Henry Farrell, in which Jane (played by Davis) descends into alcoholism and mental illness. And he drew inspiration from “Barbarella” — a sexy 1968 sci-fi comedy film directed by Roger Vadim, based on the French comic series by Jean-Claude Forest — and “The Avengers,” copying the futuristic leather and glam costuming worn by Anita Pallenberg (in the role of The Great Tyrant) and Diana Rigg (who played Emma Peel in the 1960s British espionage television series).
Cooper began to sloppily apply black kohl mascara to encircle his eyes.
“I had absolutely no qualms about it,” Cooper said in an interview with VH1’s Behind the Music. “I had to build a reputation somehow in this city.”
The newly christened Alice Cooper band — consisted of guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, drummer Neal Smith, and vocalist Vincent Furnier — walked the fine line between femininity and attention-grabbing theatricality that complemented the band’s brand of counterculture vaudeville.
Alice Cooper is often called the “Godfather of Shock Rock” for popularizing the genre in the 1970s. Arguably, a template that Screamin’ Jay Hawkins may have cut years prior. After the success of his 1956 hit “I Put a Spell on You,” Hawkins began setting off smoke bombs before rising from a coffin to sing into a skull-shaped microphone at live performances.
Alice Cooper was never intended to be the name of one person. It was initially conceived as the band’s name.
“It just stuck, and pretty soon I was Alice,” he said.
Hollyweird
“Our first walk down Sunset Boulevard was an eye-opener,” Dennis Dunaway (original Alice Cooper bassist) said in a 2013 interview with Louder. “I’d never even heard the word ‘silicone’ before. And there it was in all of its see-through-blouse glory.”
For the young Phoenicians, Hollywood provided an all-you-can-eat feast for the eyes, as well as the ears.
The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Byrds, and Love (one of the first racially diverse rock bands) performed regularly in the dream factory; their names emblazoned on the marquees of the Whisky A Go Go, Gazzari’s, The London Fog and other rock chic hangouts of the day.
The five members of Alice Cooper quickly realized that their band were merely nanoscopic particles buzzing around a dynamic nucleus in a city that has no heart.
It is said that after playing just 10 minutes, one fateful night at the Cheetah Club — then a popular hippie hotspot located on the Santa Monica Pier — the band emptied the entire room of patrons. Except for one: music manager Shep Gordon. An alumnus of The New School University in New York, Gordon — who after relocating to L.A. took a job as probation officer — was undaunted by the band’s adverse impact on the crowd, but rather, saw it as a force that could be harnessed and redirected in a new direction.
Misfits all the same, others in the L.A. music scene were also intrigued.
Soon, The Mothers Of Invention, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors (and their girlfriends), Rodney Bingenheimer (legendary disc jockey and impresario), Kim Fowley (infamous record producer), and Lawerence “Wild Man” Fischer (a noted street performer) would befriend the lads.
One association, in particular, would prove auspicious.
Christine Frka was a famous groupie and member of pioneering all-girl band, The GTOs. The members of which were connected by their association with Frank Zappa, who encouraged their artistic endeavors. In 1968, Frka was the live-in nanny for Zappa’s eldest child Moon Unit before bandmate Pamela Des Barres (née Miller) took over the following year. The GTOs released one album,”Permanent Damage” (Straight Records, 1969), produced by Frank Zappa.
It was Frka (known in The GTOs as Miss Christine) who arranged an audition for Alice Cooper with Frank Zappa, after sustained coaxing.
As the story goes, the band were given a 7 p.m. appointment time. But due to a miscommunication, the sweaty-palmed band showed up at 7 a.m. to set up in an area adjacent to Zappa’s bedroom.
“We played so loud that the pictures on the wall ended up crooked.”
Needless to say, Zappa was jolted out of bed.
But instead of launching into an expletive-laden tirade, before pointing towards the door, he made Alice Cooper a deal that they couldn’t refuse.
The audition resulted in a three-album deal with Straight Records; a label formed in 1969 by Zappa and his business partner/manager Herb Cohen to distribute productions and musical discoveries.
Alice Cooper released “Pretties for You” (Straight, 1969), their psychedelic-tinged debut album later that year.
The band took to the road in its support.
While in Toronto, it was reported that Cooper had bitten the head off a chicken.
“The great thing is that it never happened,” Cooper said in an interview with The Times of London. “Like a benign uncle recounting tall tales of derring-do in the war.”
Cooper recalled being on stage and suddenly looking down to see a chicken. “I have no idea where it came from. Being from Detroit, I had never been on a farm in my life. So, I picked it up and threw it into the audience.”
He assumed that someone would take it home.
“Instead the audience — actually, the people in the front row, who were all in wheelchairs — tore it to pieces before throwing it back on the stage,” he said.
The next day, Cooper received a call from Zappa. “Frank said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t deny it.’ That’s when I knew, rock needed a villain.”
Following the incident, Alice Cooper’s notoriety grew exponentially.
Upon returning to L.A., they performed shows at the Whisky A Go Go with Led Zeppelin and a string of engagements at the Cheetah Club.
Despite being signed to a label bearing Zappa’s endorsement and the illusion of having conquered the boulevard of broken dreams, the band left town, broke.
“We were too weird for Hollywood.”
For a time, they holed up in a tumbledown motel outside of Detroit. Alice Cooper continued to gig — each performance more fierce than the last in defiance of their frustration — and were soon adopted into the cutthroat local scene spearheaded by The Stooges and MC5.
They indulged in the everydaynesses of being in a rock band, until September 1970 when they played a show at Max’s Kansas City; a legendary New York City-based club haunted by poets, punks, artists, and provocateurs. That night Bob Ezrin, a talented young Canadian producer — who would go onto work with Lou Reed, Aerosmith, Kiss, and Pink Floyd — was in the audience. According to legend, in spite of Cooper being arrested for uttering vulgarities from the stage, Ezrin was impressed.
Not long after Ezrin’s first collaboration with the band, Alice Cooper released a single, “I’m Eighteen” in November 1970.
Under Ezrin’s direction, the band pulled away from psychedelic rock — as the lyrical content continued to explore decadence, perversion, and psychosis — to a tighter, guitar-driven, aggressive hard-rocking sound.
“I’m Eighteen” peaked at number 21 on the U.S. singles chart.
With Ezrin behind the mixing console — capitalizing on “I’m Eighteen’s” breakthrough success at infiltrating the Top 40 — Alice Cooper released “Love It To Death” (Warner Bros., 1971), the shock rocker’s first full-length album on a major label.
Alice Cooper’s time had finally come.
The rest is rock ‘n’ roll history.
Jesus was a rebel, too
“My wife and I are both Christian. My father was a pastor, my grandfather was an evangelist. I grew up in the church, then went as far away as I could from it — almost died — and then came back to the church,” Cooper said in a 2018 interview with New York Daily News.
Cooper has been married since March 1973 to Sheryl Goddard; a dancer, choreographer, and instructor. The couple have three children together.
During his zenith in the 1970s, Cooper spiraled out of control, becoming deeply dependent on alcohol; as well as another peccadillo the master of illusion tried to keep under wraps. Feature articles in tabloid zines of the day (like Creem, Circus, and NME) would often detail the amount of beer and spirits consumed on tour and run photos of Cooper with ubiquitous beer in hand as a badge of honor.
The rock ‘n’ roll bacchanal continued until it became a problem.
“The whiskey and cokes had nearly destroyed me.”
In October 1977, one of the world’s most famous rock stars was admitted as an inpatient at the Cornell Medical Center, a sanitarium located in Westchester County, N.Y., to undergo treatment for alcoholism.
In addition to booze, Cooper also developed a proclivity for cocaine so severe that he has no memory of recording or touring during that period.
Having endured all that she could abide, Goddard initiated divorce proceedings in November 1983.
Cooper detailed his moment of clarity.
“Sheryl had gone. She went to Chicago and said, ‘I can’t watch this.'”
“But the cocaine was speaking a lot louder than she was.”
“Finally, I looked in the mirror. It looked like my makeup. But it was blood coming down from my eyes [instead of mascara]. I might have been hallucinating. I don’t know,” Cooper said of the moment when he accepted Jesus into his life.
“I flushed the rock down the toilet. I woke up. I called Sheryl and said, ‘It’s done.'”
“‘Right. Now, you have to prove it,’ she said.'”
“People talk about Alice being a rebel. There was never more of a rebel than Jesus Christ.”
The game of kings and queens
“After I quit, I had to find something to do when I got up in the morning that would get me through to our shows in the evening. Time is an alcoholic’s worst nightmare.”
He took up golf right after he quit drinking, succumbing to a new addiction — one that Cooper credits with saving his life.
“Golf is the crack of sports. If you hit five good shots, you know you can hit six good shots. The next time you hit six good shots, you know you can hit seven,” he said.
Today, Cooper has been in recovery and sober for 40 years.
Over the course of years, Cooper has teed off with golf legends and rockstars alike: Arnold Palmer, Eddie Van Halen, Johnny Miller, Rob Zombie, Phil Mickelson, Meatloaf, and members of Metallica.
Tale of the tape
Alice Cooper (the band) would go onto release seven studio albums including “Billion Dollar Babies” (Warner Bros., 1973), the band’s biggest-selling recording, that topped the charts in America and the U.K. It as supported by a tour that broke box-office records previously held by the Rolling Stones.
Seemingly in top gear, under a plethora of internal problems, the band disbanded in 1973.
That year, Furnier legally adopted his stage name Alice Cooper to avoid legal entanglements. Soon thereafter, Cooper released “Welcome to My Nightmare” (Atlantic Records, 1975), his debut solo album.
Vincent Furnier, by adopting the persona of Alice Cooper, succeeded in creating some of rock’s most indelible iconography.
‘Road’
It’s been over five decades since the Alice Cooper band played their first gig at the Earl Warren Fairgrounds in Santa Barbara, Calif.
After thousands of gigs and millions of miles traveled, the ringmaster of rock ‘n roll’s original twisted circus released “Road” (Earmusic, 2023), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s 22nd solo album.
The shock rock pioneer continues to rattle the cages of those who guard the status quo — surprising fans and exuding danger at every turn, like a Tobe Hooper horror film classic — even in an era where watching the nightly newscast is rife with heinous imagery.
‘Too Close for Comfort’
Alice Cooper launched his “Too Close for Comfort” North American tour in Niagara Falls on July 30.
With giant video screens blending real-time live action with pre-recorded vignettes — offering a panoramic glimpse into a macabre world — Cooper brings his distinctive brand of rock ‘n’ roll psycho-drama to fans both young and old.
Expect spectacle — snakes, guillotines, monsters, and more — and a setlist drawn from one the greatest catalogs in rock history.
Cooper is accompanied by his long-running band: guitarists Nita Strauss, Ryan Roxie, and Tommy Henriksen, bassist Chuck Garric, and drummer Glen Sobel.
“Rock ’n’ roll should be made by outlaws,” Cooper concluded. “Gene Simmons of Kiss is always saying rock is dead. Maybe it isn’t what it used to be, but rock is now where it should be. No longer invited to the party, it is looking through the window.”
“Now we’re the outsiders.”
“A little bit of anger, a little bit of ‘I don’t care what you think’ attitude. That’s what made Alice Cooper. And that’s what will make the next great rock ‘n’ roll band,” he said.