Alice Cooper’s favourite album by The Doors: “The guy was a genius”
Jim Morrison was a true musical anomaly, someone who was a genius in their own right, but whose light also burned bright and fast.
When Alice Cooper originally started making music, he did so with a huge variety of influences playing their part. For a lot of his early career, he wasn’t making anything cohesive, and instead was just playing around with different sounds and seeing what stuck. It wasn’t until he landed on the character of Alice Cooper that things fell into place.
“I was creating a fantasy,” he explained. “I looked all around me and saw all these Peter Pans with no Captain Hook. I saw the Black Queen in Barbarella and said, ‘That’s Alice, right there.’ I immediately related and knew a piece of Alice had to look like that; the black gloves with the switchblades coming out of the end, the black make-up with the patch over her eye.”
From that moment on, it became easy for Cooper to inject different influences into both his music and his style because he had essentially landed on a character from another world. The sound and style could be as haphazard as he wished, given that what he was essentially building was a character that seemed otherworldly.
“Then I would see something else in a comic book and go ‘Oh, that’s definitely Alice’. So I started stitching all these characters together, and pretty soon, there he was,” said the king of shock rock. “All I had to do was put his skin on and feel comfortable in there.”
When you know this, it’s interesting reading about some of Cooper’s favourite albums of all time, as, despite being vastly different from one another, there isn’t a single record which feels out of place. Everything from The Beach Boys and The Beatles, to Butterfield Blues Band and Laura Nyro, you can hear their sound bleed into what Cooper went on to make. And of course, another pioneer group of musicians who this otherworldly character gives a nod to is Jim Morrison and Co, The Doors.
Alice Cooper selected their self-titled record as not only his favourite by the band, but one of his favourites of all time, and he isn’t alone in this praise either, as the work of The Doors continues to be revered by music lovers around the world, as Cooper adores what the band made, but he also listens with a hint of sadness, as he mourns the loss of Morrison.
“There are certain people you meet, and you just know they won’t be around forever, and Jim was one of those people,” he said in an interview with Classic Rock. “The guy was a genius, and I don’t throw that word around very often, but he did not treat himself very well.”
Cooper concluded, “He would eat pills like you might eat Skittles, and he was a big drinker. He could have died 100 times. He was a risk-taker, fearless. You’d be at a party and see him standing on the edge of a 300-foot-high building, balancing himself with a whisky bottle in each hand: that was a normal day for him.”
