The band Alice Cooper thought didn’t deserve a Grammy: “A chorus of boos”
Most rock stars don’t really need to hype themselves up about a Grammy too much.
While that prestigious honour is bestowed upon some of the greatest musicians of all time in the past, there’s a certain code among rock and rollers that make them feel a little too cool for school whenever they are up onstage accepting an award. But even when Alice Cooper became a part of the Grammys ceremony, he wasn’t exactly in agreement with everything that they put through the door, either.
But sometime around the 1980s, Cooper had already begun to shed his controversial skin just a little bit. It’s not like any of the theatrics fell away, but when looking at the version of Cooper that live to cause a stir every time he performed, he seemed to lean more into the Halloween-esque aesthetic when he started appearing in movies like Wayne’s World or giving a handful of his tunes to horror movies.
Because at that point, the hard rock scene looked a lot different than when Cooper started. There are plenty of artists to this day who would claim that Cooper started it all for shock rock, but when looking at the kind of heaviness coming out of later Black Sabbath or even Judas Priest, it was easy to look back on songs like ‘Only Women Bleed’ and see that there was an obvious disconnect.
Cooper was still one of the reigning kings of hard rock and metal, but he was always in search of a great song whenever he wrote a record. It didn’t matter if it was a lush ballad or one of the heaviest riffs imaginable for him, but when he started to get paraded as a glam-rock elder statesman in the 1980s, he already saw things changing when thrash metal started to come into play.
So, naturally, now that the Grammys had given more recognition to metal, it seemed completely logical that Metallica would be one of the genre’s first recipients. They had already been slowly working their way up to the top of the musical food chain, and while The Black Album hadn’t come out yet, there was no denying that a song like ‘One’ had all the power of a metal masterpiece. With all that going for them, though, how the hell did Jethro Tull end up walking away with it?
Now don’t get it twisted. It’s not like Tull is a bad band. Far from it. Their music is a refreshing take on rock and roll with a lot of prog elements thrown in for good measure, but when they won for their album Crest of a Knave, even Cooper had to admit that he was mortified having to read out the name at the Grammys.
Suffice to say, Cooper felt that this was a major snub to real metal fans, saying, “It was Metallica and all these great heavy metal bands, and Jethro Tull, who’s so far away from metal. And I opened up the thing and I went, ‘And the winner is Jethro Tull.’ In that day and age, at that time, the people that were voting, the judges, Metallica was a brand new thing, metal was a brand new thing, and the only band they recognized was Jethro Tull. So even Jethro Trull went, ‘What?’”
To their credit, Tull frontman Ian Anderson did manage to have a bit of self-depricating humour about the whole thing and even felt bad for Cooper, saying, “The following day I became aware it had created something of a fury. Poor Alice Cooper, who collected the GRAMMY on our behalf. He walked onstage to a chorus of boos because Metallica didn’t win and a lot of their fans were there.”
While the award is still looked at as one of the biggest injustices in Grammy history, even Lars Ulrich managed to have a little bit of grace during the whole thing. He knew that the choice was absolute bullshit, but when they came back a few years later and nabbed a Grammy for their black masterpiece, one of the first people he thanked was Jethro Tull for not releasing an album to compete with.
There’s still bound to be more than a few Grammy cough-ups every single year, but it’s safe to say that some metalheads burned bridges with the Recording Academy solely on this choice alone. Because while the flute is an instrument that is made of metal, giving it to Anderson and co. instead of one of the foundational faces of heavy metal is borderline heresy in most metal circles.
