The singer Alice Cooper said “one of the best voices I’ve ever heard in my life”
There’s plenty to say on shock rock legend Alice Cooper, but a fantastic voice is not one of them.
That’s not to say he has a bad voice. Across his nearly 60-year career conjuring his gruesome hard rock theatre, a certain kind of scowling, goblin vocal has been perfected by the ‘President of the Wild Party’, befitting his cartoon-heavy attack.
It’s the whole package that works when thrown together. A jack of all trades, master of none, perhaps? But who cares when you’ve got songs as immortal as ‘Under My Wheels’ and ‘I’m Eighteen’ under your studded belt. During his classic glam era, he was a master orchestrator who knew how to direct an experience, orchestrating nightly executions with his guillotine prop, able to coax ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ razor riff, and dream up ‘School’s Out’s dizzyingly witty lyrics, “Well, we got no class / And we got no principals!”
People forget how long Cooper had been slogging it out for by the time he cracked glam gold. It took two albums of floundering psychedelia, a desperate knock at Frank Zappa’s door for label signing, and a relocation to the infinitely more rough and ready Michigan away from sunny Los Angeles before finally seeing the glittered light and cementing the Cooper formula with 1971’s Love It to Death.
Throughout this time, he and the band were boozing, partying, and rubbing shoulders with some of the counterculture’s biggest – and doomed – icons, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Keith Moon, all characters in Cooper’s wild ride through rock.
But even late in life, long after the hedonism of the 1960s and ‘70s, Cooper could still be stunned by talent in the rock world decades after his golden age. Reflecting on the old musical comrades and buddies that had their lives claimed by the era’s excesses, one recent key figure of the grunge wave shocked Cooper with his sad and surprising exit from the world.
“I was more shocked recently by Chris Cornell,” Cooper confessed to GQ. “Because I knew Chris very well, I wrote songs with him, we recorded together. I’d never met someone that had every single element in total control; he had a great family, on stage he was one of the best voices I’ve ever heard in my life, he wrote great songs… he was like the ultra-hip guy out there.”
Cornell had one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, voices in 1990s alternative rock. Similarly floating in the Seattle music underground for years before finding fame, the Soundgarden frontman suitably reflected the band’s eclectic brew of hard rock, psychedelia, and subtle progressive washes, able to dextrously wield his lungs with cooing intimacy or thunderous bellow with ease, often in the same song.
There was plenty of competition around him, Kurt Cobain’s screaming howl unleashed the deepest inner demons, and Layne Staley’s pained croon pricked with electric drama, but Cornell possessed the most dimensions, a voice that seemed to jump around in multiple emotional layers at once. Despite a career uptick, Cornell sadly took his own life in 2017. “There’s something I don’t get about that,” Cooper concluded. “His passing was the only one that makes me go, ‘What? That doesn’t make sense?’”
