Detroit, MI · shock rock

Alice Cooper

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

The name Alice Cooper began as a band, formed in Phoenix, Arizona in 1964 by Vincent Furnier with guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith, later relocating between Phoenix and Detroit. The group released seven studio albums between 1969 and 1973 before disbanding in 1975, after which Furnier legally took the name as his own and began a solo career with the concept album Welcome to My Nightmare.

Working with producer Bob Ezrin, the band built a hard rock sound out of riffs and theatre across Love It to Death, Killer, School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies, yielding standards such as School's Out, I'm Eighteen and No More Mr. Nice Guy. As a solo artist Cooper later added Only Women Bleed, You and Me and Poison to that catalogue, released across thirty studio albums that have sold more than fifty million copies worldwide.

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, drawing on horror films and vaudeville as much as rock and roll. It set a template later followed by generations of theatrical rock and metal acts, and helped earn Cooper the tag Godfather of Shock Rock.

The original band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Cooper kept recording and touring through the decades since, the live show still built around the same character, and now runs the Solid Rock Foundation, which offers free music, art and vocational programs to young people in Phoenix.

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