Detroit, MI · shock rock

Alice Cooper

1 upcoming festival

The original shock-rock showman — guillotines, snakes, straitjackets, and 'School's Out' forever, still running rock's greatest vaudeville horror show six decades in.

Alice Cooper is the stage name of Vincent Furnier, who took the name from the band he fronted in Detroit and Phoenix in the late 1960s before continuing as a solo artist from the mid-1970s. The group's run of albums with producer Bob Ezrin — including 'Love It to Death', 'Killer', 'School's Out' and 'Billion Dollar Babies' — established a hard rock sound built on riffs and theatre, and yielded standards such as 'School's Out', 'I'm Eighteen' and 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'.

The stage show is the other half of the story: a horror-vaudeville production involving a boa constrictor, a guillotine, a straitjacket and staged executions, which set a template later followed by generations of theatrical rock and metal acts. Cooper has continued recording and touring more or less continuously since, with the live show still built around the same character.

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