Alice Cooper’s favourite album by The Rolling Stones
It’s fair to say Alice Cooper isn’t one for the faint-hearted. But then, to be fair, you could say that for a lot of rock music, and he clearly knew he needed something to stand out from the rest. They don’t call him the ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’ for nothing. But behind the jarring makeup and the illusions of grandeur, Cooper was once just Vincent Furnier, a young boy not yet swept up in the lights of theatricality but already dreaming of making it big.
While not theatrical in quite the same sense as the persona Cooper would later go on to adopt, in 1964, a new effervescent presence caught the then 16-year-old Arizona-born boy’s eye all the way from across the pond. It was in the form of five London lads by the name of The Rolling Stones, the centrepiece of whom, Mick Jagger, was instantly the prototype for the kind of exuberant star Cooper would want to become.
The band’s debut album, at first self-titled but then renamed England’s Newest Hit Makers, burst the Stones onto a scene from which their splattering influence has never left, quite simply redefining the face of rock music forevermore. For Cooper, this album is among his favourites of all time, but it’s easy to see why – he’d soon be following in their footsteps.
This was because, right from the very start, The Rolling Stones were no ordinary run-of-the-mill rock band. It was at the height of the rhythm and blues boom, and though they were clearly reverent of it, Jagger and Co took the genre by the horns and made it their own. That presence is everywhere on tracks like ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and ‘Now I’ve Got A Witness (Like Uncle Phil and Uncle Gene)’, the latter referencing contributions from production powerhouses Phil Spector and Gene Pitney.
But not only in a revolutionary sense, the Rolling Stones lived up to their album’s title and more. Evidently, Cooper was far from alone in his discovery of the rockers as England’s Newest Hit Makers spent a whopping 12 weeks atop the album chart and solidified the band as a force to be reckoned with. Watching in rapture from afar, it was clear Cooper wanted a taste of that life.
It didn’t take him long to set about it because, by 1967, Cooper had formed a band and decamped to Los Angeles in search of glory. Amid his lofty ambition, the move was a harsh reminder of reality, as success was hard fought, and his first two albums were commercial failures. However, just five short years and another move to Michigan later, Cooper finally started to find his groove – he had developed his outlandish stage persona almost by an inventive happy accident, and by 1972, with the release of ‘School’s Out’, he never looked back.
Although they manifest it in entirely different ways, it’s clear to see that the nature of a commanding persona was a defining asset to both Jagger and Cooper in shaping their rock brands. They may both have lived the full throttle of the sex and drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, but maybe their secret behind the gregariousness is to fake it ’till you make it.
