The musician Paul Stanley called the “personification of rock and roll danger”
In the 1970s, New York was a gritty cesspit of urban decay and street anarchy. It was here, just one short year into the decade, that Paul Stanley would join Gene Simmons to make a record. Originally, the pair would form a band called Wicked Lester, but two years, one shelved album, one well-placed advertisement by drummer Peter Criss in Rolling Stone and one lead guitarist called Ace Frehley later, the legendary glam rock band Kiss would be formed.
The boots were big, the makeup was unique, and the outfits were absolutely outrageous. Kiss embodied the anti-establishment sentiment that covered New York like smog. On the other side of the US, another band was already cementing their place in glam rock history. Arizona had given birth to Alice Cooper five years before, and by 1973, it seemed that there was nothing that could stop the behemoth toddler from stomping their way across the country. They had just released Billion Dollar Babies and were about to embark on one of the most ambitious tours that rock music had ever seen, beating The Rolling Stones to reclaim America.
Cooper himself was only 25 years old, but the frontman was creating shockwaves with his theatrical on-stage persona. It all began by accident, or so the legend goes. In 1969 Cooper had developed a stage gag involving the tearing apart of a feather pillow, somehow a live chicken had ended up amongst the feathers and Cooper, apparently unfamiliar with how to handle wildlife, threw the chicken, expecting it to fly away. Of course, chickens cannot fly. The chicken fell into the first few rows of the audience, coincidentally where wheelchair users had been seated. Unfortunately, in the thrall of the stage violence, the chicken did not make it out alive. The “Chicken Incident” entered the rock and roll history books, creating a new subgenre of shock rock.
The hippy movement might have been in full swing, but Cooper was hell-bent on the exploration of sex, death and money, “we drove a stake through the heart of the Love Generation,” Cooper told Maxim Furek in his book The Death Proclamation of Generation X: A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Goth, Grunge and Heroin. Ushering in the age of darkness that would turn into the 1970s, Cooper was taking over the hearts and minds of America’s youth, far from the preacher’s son he’d grown up as.
It was Cooper’s mantle that would inspire Kiss. “Alice, I think, when he first came out, was if not ground-breaking, certainly the child of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and was all of the fear that rock and roll should elicit,” Paul Stanley told Forbes earlier this year. “The band that I saw on the Billion Dollar Babies tour was fantastic,” he enthused. By 1973, Cooper and the band were at the peak of their success. Their previous tour had culminated in a mock execution of Cooper, with torture models in BDSM gear strapping the frontman into an electric chair as Cooper would mock convulsions. Shock rock was the right phrase, indeed.
Kiss, however, were newcomers making a name for themselves with their own accidental stage shocks. Fire breathing became a Gene Simmons staple, leading him to set his product-heavy hair on fire several times. Even as Kiss’ record sales fluctuated, their stage shows became the talk of every town. Stanley took to smashing guitars à la Peter Townshend, spitting blood became a normal work activity and fire, well fire was everything to Kiss.
Stanley admits that the inspiration was Cooper’s brazen on-stage behaviour: “Alice was the personification of rock and roll danger. And the songs – like Elected and No More Mr. Nice Guy– were not only great songs but solidified Alice’s personality. So it wasn’t just the singing, but exemplifying the character”. The shock value of Cooper’s work wasn’t enough to keep the band from splitting, though, in 1975, their split became public, and it was Kiss’ turn to take the shocking spotlight.
In September 1975, Kiss had a stream of sold-out shows. Much to Stanley’s surprise, “I saw a pattern emerging with us on the road. Every night, I’d ask somebody before the show, ‘How are we doing?’, which meant, ‘What’s the attendance?’ One night, they said, ‘It’s sold out,’ and then the next night I’d hear the same thing. All of a sudden, it was becoming the norm.” Stanley wrote in Kiss’ 2019 End of the Road World Tour Program.
Where Cooper led, Stanley followed. But as the new kings of shock rock, Kiss found a way through. It would take them all the way to the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Alice Cooper’s band, in their first incarnation, may have only lasted for six years, but their legacy touched rock and roll forever.
