The one artist Alice Cooper couldn’t compete with: “I can’t compete on his level”
By the end of the 1960s, any rockstar needed to do more than sing and play guitar to entertain an audience. The British invasion bands had already whipped their audiences into absolute hysteria by their sheer presence, but as soon as people started testing the limits of what could be done onstage, there was no limit to what the new school of artists were bound to try. And while Alice Cooper did have his fair share of surprises up his sleeve, he knew when someone outmatched him in terms of shock rock.
Granted, Cooper didn’t initially anticipate being the world’s most beloved shock rocker or anything. He had made some major strides as a songwriter on the same level as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, but once people started seeing the grotesque things he could do onstage, this was far from the Summer of Love. This was the bad acid trip The Doors had warned them about, and now they had to deal with someone who crawled out of the crypt.
Compared to every other rockstar during his time, Cooper rebelled against anything remotely associated with the status quo. Anything tasteless was fair game for him to do onstage, whether that was his infamous moment killing a chicken in front of an audience, graphically showing a mockup of him murdering baby dolls, or watching him meet his tragic end by guillotine at the end of every show.
But that was all pageantry in some respects. Anyone who was going to one of Cooper’s shows knew that it was part of his whacked-out sense of humour in many respects, but the whole process was for him to make the kind of show that some of his idols could never have competed with.
Because, let’s face it, Cooper wasn’t looking to be on the same level as the Jimi Hendrix’s of the world. He knew that there were limits to where he could go with the concept of the pop song, and when listening to what Paul McCartney was doing both in and out of The Beatles, he knew that he had to go in the opposite direction if he wanted to be taken seriously, or at least a certain definition of “seriously.”
“For instance, I love Paul McCartney, but I can’t compete with [him] on his level. So I thought, ‘Let me create a character that he can’t compete with.’ “
alice cooper
Even when looking back, Cooper thought that someone like Macca was the main reason why he needed to branch out a little bit more when it came to the stage show, saying, “I didn’t want to be anything like them. For instance, I love Paul McCartney, but I can’t compete with [him] on his level. So I thought, ‘Let me create a character that he can’t compete with.’ I love drama, and I loved horror, and I said, ‘Well, nobody’s doing that in rock and roll.”
For someone who painted themselves as the main antagonist of rock and roll, though, Cooper could always show his heart when he wanted to. And listening back to some of his greatest ballads, tunes like ‘Only Women Bleed’ have the same kind of melodic sensibilities that McCartney had during his prime, only this time it was the abuse of women and the dark side of relationships.
Despite not having as much to do with McCartney’s brand of songwriting, Cooper’s career trajectory is only further proof of how much any of The Beatles meant to rock and roll at large. Either people were following in their footsteps, or they were turning their back on them because they knew they would never equal what they did.
