“We are the group that drove a stake through the heart of the love generation.”
image: source
It’s the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Flower children dance barefoot in grassy green meadows as tablets of LSD dissolve on their tongues. It’s the era of peace, love, and something much more sinister. In their efforts to reject authority and embrace nonconformity, the hippies had become keenly aware of the wicked teachings of men like Aleister Crowley. An occult revival was in the works and a decade of darkness loomed beneath the sunny exterior of the summer of love. Witches, Satanism, and all things mystical were simultaneously revered and reviled. For some, it was nothing more than a mere gimmick, but to others, it was supremely real. Amid all of this lay a performer born under the name Vincent Furnier.
Furnier was born on February 4, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan. Brought up in trailer parks in the American Southwest, Furnier found solace within the music of British invasion groups like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who. As a teenager, he made his own foray into musicianship, performing satirical parodies with his band The Earwigs. Vincent, all dark hair and thick eyebrows, was accompanied by several of his track teammates. Dressed in signature Beatles suits and wigs, they sang through a modified version of “Please Please Me.” What was once “Last night I said these words to my girl,” became “Last night I ran four laps for my coach.”
A talent show served as The Earwigs’ gateway drug to performance. With a cheerful rendition of their usual parodies, they won first place and roaring applause. It was too late for Vincent to turn back now, for he'd been sucked into the magical tornado that is the world of entertainment.
Once Furnier and the rest of The Earwigs (now The Spiders) graduated high school in 1966, they relocated to Los Angeles, where they rebranded once again. Furnier came to the conclusion that in order to succeed, they would need to find a gimmick, something to make them stand out in the sea of aspiring musicians. They would now be called Alice Cooper - the kind of unassuming name a sweet girl-next-door would have. The band injected their performances with a dose of ghoulish theatricality, with Furnier clad in women’s clothes and caked on makeup. He drew style inspiration from Anita Pallenberg in Barbarella and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, brewing a costume concoction that would transform him into the character of Alice Cooper.
Their performances were bizarre, low-budget, and ghastly; precisely the type of act Frank Zappa was in search of for his new record label, Straight Records. Zappa had caught wind of the band after music manager Shep Gordon noticed their peculiar talent to end shows with smaller audiences than they had begun with. The Alice Cooper Band was invited to audition for Zappa; “Be there at 7 o’clock,” he’d said, and they obeyed. The band arrived precisely at 7:00 am wielding their instruments and blasting their psychedelic rock, shaking the walls with the sheer volume. Zappa, still in bed, woke with a start as the sound of what could only be the musical lovechild of Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, and The Hollies ripped through the atmosphere. It seemed their signals had gotten mixed - Zappa had meant 7:00 pm. He was, nonetheless, fascinated by their determination and courage and had them signed to a three-record deal.
The Alice Cooper Band would soon encounter another of Zappa’s musical projects, the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously). They were an all-female gaggle of groupies dressed in vintage gowns and feather boas, black eyeliner weighing on their soft eyelids. They danced wildly and sang off-key tunes, the magical sirens of the Sunset Strip. The GTOs took to the band like moths to a flame, dressing them up like Barbie Dolls. It was one Christine Frka who took Vincent under her eclectic wing, showing him how to do his makeup in the style of a sort of gothic clown. She pulled her soft, black eyeliner pencil across his face, encasing his eyes in dark circles and pulling the corners of his mouth downward.
Unbeknownst to the band, Frka had purportedly been instrumental in their being signed.
The GTOs and Alice Cooper. Christine Frka third from left, Alice second from right
As 60s psychedelia melted away, the Alice Cooper group would lean into much harder sounds to match their heavy makeup and fiendish appearance. Furnier would soon take on the role of Alice Cooper completely, adopting the name legally in 1975. It is Cooper who is credited with birthing “shock rock,” the exact moment of which can practically be pinpointed to a fateful performance involving a chicken.
As Cooper strutted across the stage, his gravelly voice ricocheting throughout the venue, he noticed a chicken standing beside him. Naturally, he assumed that, with chickens having wings, they could fly. He scooped up the bird and tossed it playfully into the audience, anticipating it would flap its wings and fly off. Instead, the chicken plummeted feet from the stage, hitting the ground with a thud within the first few rows of the audience. Frenzied concertgoers instantly descended upon the bird, pulling at its feathers and ravaging it until it was nothing more than blood and bones.
By the next day, the chicken incident was plastered across newspapers internationally. They reported that with his own two hands, Cooper had ripped the bird’s head from its body and consumed its blood on stage, forcing everyone to watch.
Despite the publicity, Cooper and the rest of the band struggled to connect with audiences, who were largely impervious to the act. They would soon uproot, abandoning their LA audience in favor of Michigan, where they were more accustomed to proto-punk acts like The Stooges or The MC5. Cooper’s live performances fused punk and glam elements under an umbrella of electric rock, dripping with ruby red sequins and blood. He danced with writhing boa constrictors and decapitated baby dolls as he sang hits like “Dead Babies," “Go To Hell,” and other songs with sinister lyrics about murder, death, and destruction, all of which cloaked cleverly worded innuendoes. Performances would climax with the death of Alice himself, either by electric chair, hanging, or guillotine - the blade of which would fall on Cooper's neck before members of the band brandished a head with messy dark hair and caked on makeup before the audience.
Parents and religious officials were incensed, calling for the group to be banned, particularly in England. They naturally linked Cooper to the occult revival happening within youth subcultures. Cooper created such a believable character that casual observers assumed he was truly a ghoulish freak sent from hell, a mouthpiece for Belial. Insiders, however, recognized that Cooper was nothing of the sort. He wasn’t a Crowleyite or an occultist who spent his evenings sitting cloaked by candlelight - his name was Vincent, he played in celebrity golf tournaments, and he was now among the most successful musicians on the planet. Cooper and his band set records with not only their ticket sales but their multi-level stage shows and usage of special effects, the likes of which had never been seen before.
“He was aware that much of America took his sick, blood-soaked image very seriously indeed, which made him all the more willing to laugh at himself. Alice was proud of his intelligence and his sense of irony, and in the studio he did all he could to show that the job of playing the Alice Cooper role was just that, a job...[H]e was always eager to demonstrate once again that he was not mistaking himself for the dangerous wretch named Alice Cooper that was being sold to the public.”*
The rumors surrounding Cooper never seemed to bother him. He boasts of having been a member of the band that “drove a stake through the heart of the love generation.” He was the mascot of all things ugly and weird, a symbol of rock and roll, and will forever be regarded as the founding father of shock rock.
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