The classic rock band Alice Cooper called “the Salvador Dali of music”
In the early 1960s, most rock and rollers were known as some of the greatest musical heroes in the world. Whereas most parents would get upset that their children were listening to what they thought was disposable party music, some of the genre’s greatest artists were being put on a pedestal as heroes like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. There wasn’t much room for villains, that was until Alice Cooper came to the table.
First spawning out of Detroit, Alice Cooper and his cast of merry crypt-crawlers became one of the biggest sensations in the world for how taboo they could get, often creating a nuisance and enraging parents around the world. Despite Cooper’s taboo subjects and obnoxious attitude to the stage, he was still a child of everyone else’s influences.
Being immersed in music from an early age, Cooper mentioned being shell-shocked when he saw The Beatles for the first time, recalling to Louder, “I was painting the side of a house, and I had the radio on. All of a sudden, ‘She Loves You’ comes on. And I stopped and went: ‘What was that? What’s going on? Who are these guys?’ I had never heard anything like it before”.
Outside of the usual love songs coming out of the US, The Beatles arrived like a bolt of lightning, playing tunes that made boys want to be them and every girl who heard them fall in love. As the band went on, Cooper would marvel at how the quality control never shifted in their sound, always moving on from one style to the next while still keeping a standard unmatched by anyone else.
When creating one classic song after the next, Cooper was staggered by the band’s chemistry, recalling later, “You couldn’t believe a band could come up with that much great material. It was almost supernatural. The Beatles will always be the Salvador Dali of music, just unapproachable”. With his musical spark ignited, Cooper didn’t take long to make his music with his band, becoming a Beatle parody act known as the Earwigs.
As the band started to play different places around their area, Cooper hit on the idea of making something more macabre, often adopting different scary aspects to their stage set, like a guillotine onstage. When it was time for the band to hit the big time, Cooper had moulded himself into a completely different character, often performing the most unsettling things imaginable onstage, like maiming baby dolls and getting killed towards the end of the show.
For all of the blood that adorned the stage, Cooper still held onto The Beatles as his main inspiration, keeping that melodic part of his sound intact on his ballads like ‘Only Women Bleed’. Cooper would also get to know some of The Beatles as friends, becoming drinking buddies with John Lennon and Ringo Starr when Lennon was on his ‘lost weekend’, christening their drinking club ‘The Hollywood Vampires’.
Cooper’s influence would also extend far beyond his own genre, becoming the template for future shock rock acts like KISS and David Bowie to play with theatricality in their live shows. The Beatles may have been the more child-friendly introduction to rock and roll, but Alice Cooper knew the power of playing into the dark side of life.
