The band Alice Cooper wanted to apologise to: “We were embarrassed”
Being world-famous doesn’t stop you from still being a person. Especially for musicians, achieving success doesn’t revoke your status as a music fan. No one gets into the business of show business without first being a fan of someone else – it takes inspiration and excitement. So then, when Alice Cooper was ranked above the exact people that influenced him, he was ready to kick off on their behalf.
As the iconic Peep Show quote goes, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.” I’m reminded of that line every single time any kind of public-voted musical ranking comes out. The general public simply cannot be trusted in this matter because the riff raff will vote for someone like Ed Sheeran as the world’s best musician or rank the ultimate radio-hodder hit high in a list supposedly of the best songs.
Especially when it comes to ‘best of all time’ type lists attempting to gather a snapshot of true timeless classics or true heroes, it’s an impossible thing to ever do right. It’s too big to quantify with any level of occurrence, but obviously, there are some key names that will come up.
Obviously, The Beatles will be there as a kind of unanimously celebrated and acknowledged force. The Rolling Stones will likely be there as the greatest rock and roll band. But even after that, it gets hazy. Who else makes the top? Oasis? Joni Mitchell? Bob Dylan? Jimi Hendrix? How about more modern acts? Beyonce? Taylor Swift? How about Robbie Williams?
Music, like all art, is objective, so any of these lists needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But when Alice Cooper looked at one and saw himself at the top, he wanted to protest it.
“We were getting voted best band in the world over Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. We’d look at that and laugh,” Cooper said. At the height of his fame, and in the endurance of his power, he’d find himself topping the ranks, but no amount of ego could ever undo his stance as a music fan first, and how that reminded him of his place.
The idea is laughable that Cooper would ever come above The Beatles, or the Stones- and he knows it. It’s almost just as much of an insult to him as a fan and follower of all of those acts, and as a musician who only ever got started because of how looming legends like them inspired him. It made him feel genuinely guilty as he said, “I almost called up McCartney and said: ‘Listen, we didn’t vote on this’”, wanting to apologise for the insult.
However, that didn’t expand so much to all the bands they beat. While The Beatles were on an untouchable plane and they knew it, and while they had to respect the dominating power of Mick Jagger, Cooper didn’t care so much about beating others to the post. “Led Zeppelin we would give a run for,” he said, willing to enter that competition, but some things were off limits – like beating the Beatles to the position of the world’s best as he added, “when it came to The Beatles and the Stones we were embarrassed to be ahead of them in anything.”
