There are two sides to every story, and Alice Cooper just happens to be on both of them. Born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948, his creation of Alice Cooper – the larger-than-life villain inspired by 50s horror movies – helped to inject a bit of theatricality into rock’n’roll that has helped inspire everyone from Kiss to Mercyful Fate.
Cooper has shared parts of his story before – notably in 1976’s Me, Alice and 2007’s Golf Monster – but his latest book, Devil On My Shoulder, is a novel reappraisal of his life through the lens of both Furnier the man and Alice Cooper the character. Hammer caught up with the shock rock legend to talk about his new book and how he feels about his place in the pantheon of rock and metal greats.
What inspired you to do a book basically cross-examining yourself?
“I have to deal with both me and Alice! Who are two entirely different people, by the way. So I got to thinking, ‘Hey, that’d be a great idea for a book – the conflict between the two.’ They coexist, and get along quite well even though they’re opposites. I am just the dad, grandad, church-going guy who’s as normal as can be. Alice is just the opposite – he’s the villain of rock! I have to jump between those skins a lot.”
Rock’n’roll has always had an element of reinvention, but it seems there was always an element of Alice in you even when you were in school?
“Well, I was certainly the class clown. I went to a lot of different schools and I figured the only real way to get along was to be the funny kid you didn’t want to beat up. I learned how to exist like that and I was always the kid who wanted to go see horror movies, always more on the side of the villain than the good guy. But I could see the humour in those movies too, where the guy would come out of a cave and you could see the zipper on the back of his scary costume. I was way ahead of other kids my age when it came to understanding the absurdity of things. I created Alice to be my favourite rock star – he still is.”
We’re at a point where theatricality is coming back into rock and metal in a big way. Does it feel like we’ve come full circle?
“I grew up in Detroit with Motown and stuff. But I really loved Chuck Berry, because he would lead a song off with his guitar. He could tell a story in three minutes and make it syncopated, funny, tragic or whatever. To me, that was so clever. He was the architect for the Rolling Stones and The Beatles – he put the rock into rock’n’roll. So that was my biggest influence at the time, until I was about 15 and then it was the British invasion."
There’s a point in the book where you point out all the bands who’ve cited Alice as an influence. Has there ever been anyone who made you go “I’m not sure I see us in that.”
“Almost all of them. They’d say, ‘We really digested this album’, but it’d always end up being an album where I’d be like, ‘Really?’ The punks kind of liked albums like Zipper Catches Skin, or Special Forces – those really blackout albums I had. Whereas Metallica said they listened to Welcome To My Nightmare. The Sex Pistols said Killer was their favourite album… everybody had a different take.
I think what it was, is that we went so far against what you were supposed to do and still made hit records that could be played on the radio. Everybody could see that, from KISS to [David] Bowie. It was like, ‘Wow, you can be a character and still get hit records?’ That was what we brought to the table. Without Bob Ezrin we would’ve dissolved, I think. He was our George Martin – he took what was good about us and made it better.”
You mention being fascinated by horror movies from a young age – when metal came up and was quite explicitly influenced by that stuff, did it feel like a scene that immediately appealed to you?
“I looked at heavy metal as just being very hard rock – it was still guitar driven rock’n’roll. All it was, was now the frills had been taken out. I found a lot of your metal bands were actually prog bands. Listen to Iron Maiden – they’re metal, but they’re also prog. There’s a 10-minute song that goes through 28 changes, but they keep the attitude. The thing about metal is that it’s all about attitude. How do you want that band to come off? You want the anger and frustration to show, to spit at society. Spit at authority. It kind of got funny to me watching it for a while, because half of these people wanna be Vikings.
It got humorous, because I’m looking at some of these bands – death metal is still hard rock. It’s still guitar driven hard rock, with a different attitude. Then it got more theatrical. It was really just bands… not necessarily living that lifestyle, but doing what I was doing – playing characters up there. I think that’s healthy, I think that’s great. Being a Christian, people would say, ‘What about these death metal bands who are anti this or that?’ I’d go, ‘Hey, they’re yelling at God. I think he can take it.’”
What’s your favourite rumour you’ve heard about yourself?
“Oh my God, I’d hear a new one every day! There was no internet when we started, it was all word of mouth, so stuff like the chicken incident [in 1969 Alice threw a live chicken into an audience thinking it would fly away – the crowd instead tore it apart] started it all. We weren’t the band your parents wanted you to see. The funny thing was, there was nothing in the show that was bannable. It was just so different that nobody knew how to put it in a box.
We’d get to towns and the ASPCA would turn up like, ‘You cannot see a German Shepherd on fire in this show.’ I’d go, ‘What?! Are you kidding me? Who even thought of that?’ The absurdity of it got so humourous we just had to not deny anything and the notoriety would get bigger and bigger."
How mad did it get?
"The best thing that ever happened to us was when they tried to ban us in Britain – our next record [1989’s Trash] went right up the charts and we sold out Wembley. I’d send David Blunkett gifts – he couldn’t figure out why we were so happy!”
Devil On My Shoulder is out now via Ebury Spotlight. Alice Cooper is currently on tour in the UK, and tours North America later this month.
