The ridiculous moment Alice Cooper almost killed himself onstage
Alice Cooper has never been one to shy away from death-defying acts whenever he gets up onstage. The man had practically invented the idea of shock rock, and no matter how many times he “dies” for the pleasure of every fan, there’s always going to be a way for him to come back by the end of the night. That said, there have to be a lot of safety precautions, and once Cooper found himself on the wrong end of a noose, he almost met his maker in full view of his audience.
Then again, the concept of dying onstage would have been the equivalent of a Viking funeral for someone like Cooper. The entire premise of his career was about making grotesque moments for everyone’s pleasure, so it would have been shockingly morbid if he had actually taken it too far and the audience treated the whole thing like it was a joke.
But for someone who brought the circus atmosphere to the live stage, Cooper knew he needed to get the best people to work with him. There was no point if people were spewing blood that looked like ketchup, so some of the best magicians were brought in on Cooper’s tour to make sure that he met his demise in the best way possible.
That’s before getting into the massive amount of ways that he dies. For someone who gets killed onstage, Cooper has never run short on new and interesting ways to bite the dust, whether that’s being impaled in a box full of spikes, having a giant metal syringe plunged into his gut, or getting a guillotine to chop his head clean off. Compared to everything else in his arsenal, a scene where he’s hanging should have been almost quaint, right?
After all, the whole thing was meant to be an illusion when Cooper gets up on the gallows, with a wire catching him right before the rope catches him. For someone who lives on the road, though, the fact that no one bothered the check to see if the wire was in good condition meant that certain members of the crew could have had blood on their hands.
When performing in 1988 during a dress rehearsal, Cooper remembered almost having his neck snapped when the wire didn’t catch him, saying, “The wire snaps. I could hear the rope hit my chin, and in an instant, I flipped my head back. That must’ve been a fraction of a second because if it caught my chin it would have been a different result. It went over my neck and gave me a pretty good burn.”
But given the fact that Cooper was one of the biggest bad boys of rock, it’s a miracle that they didn’t encounter that kind of problem until the 1980s. He had been drinking throughout his entire run of classic albums in the 1970s, and if he barely made it out alive stone-cold sober, chances are he would have been pissed out of his head and hanging in the gallows if it had taken place in 1973.
Or maybe this was some kind of twisted revenge karma that backfired on Cooper. After all, he did begin his career in the limelight by murdering a chicken, so maybe this was his higher power reminding him of just how quickly things can go wrong if everyone isn’t paying attention.
