‘She Loves You’: The song that changed Alice Cooper’s brain
Most artists tend to have one song that really seals the deal for them to become a musician. Even if they liked the music when they were teenagers, there are always those songs that come and go over three minutes and change someone’s genetic makeup by the time the tune ends. While Alice Cooper has been no stranger to making off-the-wall music during his many lifetimes, he admitted that there were certain pop marvels that turned him sideways the minute that he heard it.
For someone of Cooper’s stature in the music industry, though, it was always easy for him to cater to hard rock. After all, his voice was already known for having that signature growl, so it was safe to assume that he was going to earn his keep by playing in Crosby, Stills, and Nash cover bands. He was always interested in something heavier, and that meant going to the dark side of the British invasion.
Despite every act from England coming over in suits singing pretty pop songs, there was a bluesier side that Cooper fell head over heels for. If you listen to many of the songs on his debut album, Pretties For You, it’s clear that he worshipped at the alter of The Yardbirds, especially with how he plays the harmonica on a handful of tunes and his manner of playing off of guitarist Glen Buxton.
But anyone who was looking to make any kind of music that reached the charts owed it to take a few cues from The Beatles. Outside of Little Richard and Chuck Berry, the Fab Four wrote the rulebook on how to make hit songs, and when they first debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show, America suddenly couldn’t get enough of these four kids with overly long hair singing their simple love songs.
And out of all their initial singles, none of them come more perfect than ‘She Loves You’. From the minute that Ringo Starr kicks off the song with that signature drum fill to the sixth chord that each of them sings in the harmonies, every single piece of the tune is a hook throughout those two minutes.
Cooper may have outgrown the sounds of Beatles songs by the time he made darker material, but he still admitted that something changed in him listening to ‘She Loves You’, saying, “What really did change my life was ‘She Loves You’. That was the first Beatles song I ever heard, and it literally changed something in my brain. It took me someplace new, and it probably inspired what Alice Cooper became.”
It’s not hard to pick up on some of those Beatlesque tendencies in Cooper’s material, either. While someone who dresses in horrific makeup isn’t looking to share screentime with The Carpenters by any stretch, hearing lush ballads like ‘Only Women Bleed’ wouldn’t have existed if not for the Fab Four playing around with stringed instruments on some of their classics like ‘Yesterday’.
But by the time John Lennon confessed that he wanted a divorce from The Beatles, his debut performance with The Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Peace Festival was also the site of Cooper’s infamous chicken show, which launched him to stardom once everyone saw how macabre he could be. ‘She Loves You’ may have started a revolution, but Cooper was willing to push the envelope to see how far someone could go in the mainstream.
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