How did Alice Cooper get his name?
At its core, the idea of rock and roll is meant to be shocking.
Dark and edgy tones are spouted through loud, jarring arrangements to stick a sonic middle finger up to the generations who came before and set out the rules which rock fans don’t want to follow.
It was an idea displayed best in Ozzy Osbourne’s satanic yell of “all aboard” on ‘Crazy Train’ or in the Sex Pistols’ divisive lyrics for ‘God Save The Queen’. Everything about it was designed to be unruly in the most unfiltered fashion possible, and if people didn’t like it, well, that only went to benefit the overall message.
Alice Cooper had that idea right down to a tee when he clad his entire body in leather and drenched his eyes in black make-up. With song titles like ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ and ‘I’ll Bite Your Face Off’ he had all the hallmarks of being rock’s next great dark lord, befit to conquer the world with his twisted vision of anti-establishment musings.
But it seemed like he couldn’t quite commit. He wanted to contrast the music he was creating with something innocuous and wholesome, to ultimately create a jarring juxtaposition of light and dark.
“There was a giant web behind us. We wore all black,” the musician, actually named Vincent Furnier, says. “We didn’t just show up and stand up on stage, we appeared on stage.”
He continued, “That was the point where I said, ‘Let’s not be obvious. Let’s not call ourselves the Tarantulas. Let’s go the other way. Let’s go for something that sounds like a little old lady,” Furnier says. “I said, ‘Alice Cooper,’ and that just kind of stuck.”
What initially seemed like a lack of commitment to his demonic aesthetic was actually a carefully crafted and clever artistic decision. It was all the more considered given that his aesthetic was actually inspired by the 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? starring Bette Davis: “In the movie, Bette wears disgusting caked makeup smeared on her face and underneath her eyes, with deep, dark, black eyeliner.”
Cooper took traditional tropes of innocence and twisted them into a more sinister design to entice the interest of an unsuspecting audience, and then teach them about the worlds of rock and roll once they were captured.
What were Alice Cooper’s most shocking on-stage moments?
Alice Cooper’s on-stage antics rivalled some of the industry’s most esoteric. Sure, Iggy Pop led the way with his truly bizarre and shocking behaviour, but Cooper ensured that this innocent new name was juxtaposed with outright darkness.
He once threw a chicken into a crowd of unruly rock fans who brutally tore it apart, impaled the heads of babies and regularly faked fatal circumstances like putting his head in a guillotine or noose. The latter was, in fact, almost a stunt that went horribly wrong, where during the rehearsals for a 1988 show, Cooper went the wrong way in the noose and found himself genuinely cut off from any oxygen.
