Alice Cooper on the “last great guitar gunslinger”
He might be a shock rock hero, opening the gates for everyone from Slipknot to Ghost, but Alice Cooper‘s scope stretches far beyond his dramatic, vaudevillian twist on guitar music. Breaking out in the early 1970s as a pioneer of this new, dark, and theatrical form of rock, the Detroiter carved out a space for himself and did his bit to push the genre forward amid a changing world and evolving listener tastes. As all the greats do, he has continued to pluck from emergent sounds to keep himself relevant.
Despite his sonic scope, one thing Cooper has done better than most is hard rock, and it was by fusing this sound with his propensity for drama that he rose so meteorically and became one of his era’s best-selling artists. From Iron Maiden to the Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon and even Salvador Dalí, he’s accrued a long list of prominent fans with such an effective style. Because of his artistic character, he continues to be deemed one of rock’s ultimate titans, with his understanding of the intertwined relationship between aesthetic and sound revolutionary.
While Cooper has amassed a swollen following in his time, one of his most lauded fans is Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. A master of the six-string in the vein of the classic rock titans that inspired him, such as Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Mick Taylor, despite often being tied to the glam metal scene, Slash was always spiritually indebted to the players of the 1960s and 1970s, not the spandex-clad virtuosos of the decade in which he emerged.
Not only is he sonically related to the men who made Les Pauls and Marshall stacks the norm, but he and the rest of this band always weaponised their image. Guns N’ Roses’ aesthetics and notorious tales of hellraising supplemented their music, which explored the seedy underbelly of their hometown, Los Angeles.
Like Cooper, Slash has an enormous mythology attached to him, with him another classic figure whose music and life are inextricable from the rockstar archetype. Even if people aren’t fans of his work, most are familiar with his silhouette, the Les Paul, shades, aviators and flowing locks. Providing another connection to those who came before him, he is one of the last prominent rockers to blur the line between fact and fiction, with his life the stuff of legend, brimming with controversy.
In light of their parallels, Slash would end up working with Alice Cooper on the star-studded 1991 single ‘Hey Stoopid’, from that year’s album of the same name, which also featured the likes of Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and even Ozzy Osbourne on backing vocals. With Slash, who was at his peak during this period, seamlessly fitting in with the genre veterans who starred on the record, it gave Cooper first-hand experience of his brilliance and confirmed him as the “last great guitar gunslinger”.
Speaking to Classic Rock, ahead of 2010’s debut solo album, Slash, Cooper waxed lyrical about the man who brought ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ to life and his connection to the guitar greats of the past, including the two others that featured on ‘Hey Stoopid’.
“I think Slash is one of the last real guitar gunslingers,” he said, “in the same tradition as Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck. There are very few in this generation. There’s Steve Vai, Satriani, Slash and Joe Perry. And Slash is one of those guys that never lets his image down. He rocks it every time he gets up and plays. He plays it like he means it.”
Cooper is right. While many guitar heroes have emerged since Slash first burst onto the scene with 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, none have carried the torch of the 1970s pioneers as well as he has. He’s the last of a dying breed.
