The strange deaths of Alice Cooper’s pet snakes: “Bit on by your Wheaties”
Through a strange quirk of fate, one animal’s loss was nearly always Vincent Damon Furnier’s gain. Sure, he was never going to win ‘Pet Owner of the Year’, but it wasn’t due to a lack of care that the animals in his circle came to harm. Any creature that crawled, clucked or slithered his way was simply met with the misfortune of ill-fate. Their ends were so odious and strange that fate is surely the only thing you can ascribe it to. After all, if it hadn’t been for a wayward winged beast, Furnier might never have evolved into Alice Cooper at all.
The rockstar, raised in a religious household, was desperately trying to follow in the footsteps of his heroes, the Fab Four, and stoke up a revolution as the 1960s drew to a dower end. Quite by chance, on September 13th, 1969, he would do just that, unleashing a beastly bonanza of wild hedonism largely by accident. On that fateful day, the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival was taking place at the Varsity City Stadium, and it saw Alice Cooper give birth to shock rock.
Somehow, in a manner that is still not known, an errant chicken had wandered onto the stage arena. Determined to make its road crossing purposeful, it began pecking at one of Furnier’s props. In a mid-performance panic, the frontman assumed he could scoop it up, hold it aloft and then unleash it with a waft like a pure white dove.
His tragic miscalculation was that, much like their fellow feathered fowls, penguins and chickens can’t fly, so it simply careened into the audience. A melee of madness then seemed to consume bird and man alike. The chicken was tragically torn to bits. But the postscript tells you a whole lot more than the maddening incident might on the surface: the little-known Alice Cooper was suddenly met with gaudy junglefowl desecrating headlines and swept up in a wave of public interest.
Furnier decided to give the public more of the madness that they desired, and a snake soon slithered its way into the band’s shocking act. The purpose of this oversized reptile was largely decorative, more so than musical. He just figured that a frontman with a 12-foot boa constrictor draped around his neck might add a little bit of an edge. He was correct.
What happened to the slew of snakes?
But keeping these constrictors alive was easier said than done. The first dastardly departure occurred when a pet snake named Chichita made a bid to escape the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle by seeking out a new lease of life in the New York sewage system. Chichita’s tail was seen disappearing down a toilet while on tour, and that was the last that was ever seen of her.
Similar circumstances saw Yvonne, another 12-foot boa, depart the band. After a show in Tennessee, Furnier and his scaly co-performer wearily returned to their hotel room. “I put her in the bathtub overnight as she loved to swim, but in the morning she had gone down the toilet,” the singer recalled. “She eventually emerged two weeks later in a different bathroom, having survived on sewer rats in the plumbing.”
Furthering the sentiment that fate and happenstance always seemed to have a hand in Furnier’s animal husbandry, the room in which a stinking Yvonne subsequently resurfaced was being rented by Charley Pride, whose career had been launched by the hit single ‘The Snakes Crawl at Midnight’. Whether or not his second big single, ‘Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’, came to fruition the following dawn remains a mystery.
However, of all the strangest pet deaths attached to Cooper, there can be none that compete with the unusual end of Julius. This enormous boa underestimated his breakfast and paid a fatal price. Julius was cast a docile rat, but somehow, the rat ended up killing the snake! “It was a bit like being bit on by your Wheaties,” Furnier would comically reflect. One swift but perfectly delivered bite seemed to be Julius’ undoing.
Like Caesar of old, ego had brought about a disastrous smug complacency in Julius the snake, and he was brutally betrayed by his brunch. This left Alice Cooper in the lurch ahead of a pivotal run of their tour. Julius’ performances had wowed audiences, and he needed to be replaced on short notice. A televised show awaited them, and by this stage, reptile interplay had become a key tenet of the band.
A casting call was swiftly answered, and a snake by the name of Angel (completely unrelated to the muse behind Pride’s country hit) was brought in to perform. Unlike many of the animals brought into the band’s stable, Angel was seemingly returned to her owner unscathed, though it is said that she showed signs of wistfully missing the stage.
However, snakes would nearly get their own on the frontman in Brazil. Unable to import his own trained boa, when Cooper put out a request to Brazilian fixers to fetch him a reptile, they simply seemed to scoop a giant from the Amazon rainforest. Cooper’s previous boas were all well-fed and thus had no reason to squeeze him to death, but this South American amateur was untrained and hungry, and mid-performance, the slithering turned into a full-on chokehold.
The crew quickly realised that his discomfort was genuine and managed to intervene, but the audience thought it was yet another stunt and cheered when a terrified Furnier rose to his feet. He might have been shaken, but given the uproarious reception, he had little choice but to soldier on and finish the show, chalking it up to an occupational hazard of shock rock.
