Alice Cooper: The Godfather of Shock Rock

The Spiders, a fledging rock band, hailed from quiet Arizona community, and looked no different than their hippie, flower-child contemporaries in 1968. Their leader was the son of a Methodist minister. However,their musical message, was not one of peace, love, and strawberry incense. The Spiders founder was Vincent Furnier - known to rock fans around the world as Alice Cooper.

Along with bandmates Glenn Buxton and Mike Bruce (guitars),bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith,Furnier tried various incarnations - Earwigs, Nazz, and finally, courtesy of an Oujia board, Alice Cooper. Not surprisingly,after the band left Arizona for Hollywood, Frank Zappa discovered them and signed the band to Straight Records. Alice Cooper's first two releases Pretties For You and Easy Action didn't sell very well and the band moved again, this time to Alice's birthplace of Detroit. Soon,they were signed to Warner Brothers Records and began their long-time association with producer Bob Ezrin.

Ezrin, manager Shep Gordon and Cooper forged one of the most successful rock associations of the 1970s. Alice was a member of the "glam-rock" school of R & R, along with the Ziggy Stardust version of David Bowie, the New York Dolls and the Goat's Head Soup era Rolling Stones. (Yes, Mick even wore lipstick for a time back then. Check out the Stones on Don Kirshners' Rock Concert, 1973. ) Anyhow, while his contemporaries were trading on androgny, sex,and shiny wardrobes, Alice made his mark with violent and horror imagery. Alice Cooper had the songs to make 13 year olds swoon, but they didn't appeal to the teeny bopper aspect of your neighborhood seventh-grader. Instead, the crushing bugs against the window aspect of adolescene was piqued by songs like I Love The Dead and Billion Dollar Babies.

I'm Eighteen started the round of early 70s hits well Alice in his gold lame costume with the mascara and the snake and the poster of such adorned every teenage kids closet door In our school it was the Barry Manilow clique versus the Alice Cooper clique. (Guess which group I belonged to.)

Witness the subsequent success of Billion Dollar Babies the band's greatest album.Songs that are now classic rock standards filled the album,including No More Mr. Nice Guy,Schools Out. Accompanied by a litany of faux beheadings and boa constrictors onstage during their concerts,success and controversy followed. Billion Dollar Babies also spawned a book of the same name by journalist Bob Greene, who unwittingly chronicled the breakdown of the band. A great keepsake of the early years is Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits, which contains all the songs you've actually heard and enjoyed,no filler. By late 1974, the band's Muscle of Love, flopped. Alice and his bandmates parted company.

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