Alice Cooper wanted to make The Rolling Stones look like “choirboys”
Vincent Furnier, better known by his stage name Alice Cooper, created one of the wildest and most outrageous live shows in the history of rock music. It features fake blood, electric chairs, fireworks, reptiles, and even swordplay. Essentially, Cooper’s show is one of true theatre and has led to his nickname, ‘The Godfather of Shock Rock’.
Cooper got his name Alice after his teenage band called themselves ‘Alice Cooper’. They had originally been named Nazz but discovered Todd Rundgren had already taken the name for his band. Believing they needed a gimmick to stand out from the crowd, they took the Alice Cooper name, knowing that its innocence would contrast with their hard-hitting music and spooky image.
Reflecting on the early musicians that provided a welcome antidote to the sterile live performances that had come up in the 1950s and 1960s, Cooper told Metal Hammer, “I was seven when I first saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, and we were so used to doo-wop music when I was a kid, all of a sudden we didn’t know if Elvis was the hero or the villain, but I knew my parents liked him.”
He added, “The second time was when we saw the Beatles – we all went, ‘Wow, look at that hair, look at the boots, look at the suits! These songs are the best songs I’ve ever heard!’” Cooper is known to be a massive fan of the Fab Four, and their aesthetic clearly played an influence on the young Vincent Furnier.
However, Cooper’s parents were less than impressed by The Rolling Stones. “Then the Rolling Stones came, and I got the reaction from my parents that these guys were scruffy, they could be drug addicts – that appealed to me,” he said. “I looked at them and thought, ‘If I ever get a band together, I’m gonna make these guys look like choirboys!’”
When Cooper’s shocking live shows brought attention to his band, he developed a level of infamy amongst his fans’ parents. “We gave the audience everything their parents hated,” Cooper told The Independent. “The way we saw it, if you’re driving by and you see Disneyland on the left side and a plane wreck on the right, you’re going to look at the plane wreck. We were that plane wreck.”
“You could cut off your arm and eat it on stage, and it wouldn’t matter,” he added. “The audience is shockproof.” So Cooper took that approach to vivacious live performances by Elvis, added a touch of aesthetic glamour as made famous by the Beatles and dropped in a touch of the shock from the scruffiness of The Rolling Stones and combined it all together to create one of the most legendary and terrifying live performances of a rock musician of all time.
