The songs Alice Cooper should’ve written, according to Alice Cooper
The 1960s were drawing to a close. The children of the revolution’s children were looking forward to something fresh—something to revitalise the ideals of Woodstock, which were increasingly looking like a futile pipe dream. On September 13th, 1969, their own chapter would begin, and the world would never be the same again, evolving into a beastly bonanza of wild hedonism and all the good fun that goes along with it. Alice Cooper would be at the forefront.
On that fateful day, the fittingly named Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival was taking place at the Varsity City Stadium. One of the acts that took place that afternoon was Alice Cooper. Only a few months earlier, a gig at Los Angeles’ Venice Club saw them empty the room in ten minutes flat—the hippy crowd were too freaked out by their Salvador Dalí meets the rock ‘n’ roll circus style, with many of them leaving disgruntled, muttering about some search for ‘the real thing’. It was one of the best gigs Alice Cooper had ever played. They gained a single fan—a fan who then led them to Frank Zappa and, subsequently, a record contract.
Their strange narrative of failing to succeed imbued the band with a natural bent to be divisive. They knew that shocking people worked. Frontman Vincent Furnier had grown up loving The Beatles. His childhood was staunchly religious and blighted by illness. Suddenly, the Fab Four seemed like glowing liberation. It was this hopeful legacy that Alice Cooper looked to project when he became the title character behind his new band in the late 1960s. Shock and liberate was the name of their game.
In the following years, two tracks stood out as manifestations of the same musical stance. “[Aerosmith’s] ‘Dude (Looks Like A Lady)’ I should have written,“ Furnier told NME. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ I should have written. Those were songs that were right up Alice Cooper’s alley. There are some songs that are just so good, you sit there and you go, ‘I could never write that,’ but those two were two that I really should have written.”
As the singer alludes, both songs are simple in terms of musical composition, but like Alice Cooper and The Beatles before them, they did something radical with that simplicity. As Cooper opined of the pioneers in this realm, “[‘She Loves You’] was the first song by The Beatles I ever heard, and it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became.”
While ‘She Loves You’ is technically five diatonic chords and two altered chords, you can rattle it off in three without the fancy flourishes. But its power extends to untold heights. Those are the types of songs that Alice Cooper looked to rattle off—songs that could change lives without barely knowing it themselves. Had the band written ‘Dude (Looks Like A Lady)’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, they may well have sounded like the familiar shock rock viscera the band are known for, altering the musicality, but there is no doubt the sentiment would’ve remained the same.
In the cyclic world of songs, Alice Cooper even had a hand in inspiring Nirvana. ”I’ve done a bunch of things with the Foo Fighters, and a lot of their influence was Alice Cooper. The guys in the band – they said they learned how to play listening to our early albums,” Furnier recalls, proving that as soon as you’ve had a seminal hit of your own, you’ve had a hand in writing others to come.
