Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American singer, songwriter, musician and occasional actor whose career spans five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers alike to be “The Godfather of Shock Rock”; he has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre, theatrical brand of rock designed to shock people. Cooper is also known for his distinctive raspy voice. (More from Wikipedia)
Likewise, Alice Cooper was the under-stated name of the lead singer from the beginning, but Alice Cooper started out mainly as the name of the band. The bulky, dirty-yellow Schwann Catalogue – which showed all the records in print in the United States, and which used to sit in one corner of larger record stores back in my youth – identified them as “the Alice Cooper”, and they were listed with the A’s. Once the lead singer of this theatrical band became larger than life, it was more Alice the man than Alice the band. In later years, Alice Cooper frequently appeared on talk shows and game shows as just a regular guy – and that was as startling in its own way as the gaudy make-up that he used in his live performances.
(August 2013)
* * *
Patti Smith is renowned for reworking well-known rock standards to fit her vision and also of adding shock value to her music that surely made Alice Cooper smile; and that was true of the band’s first single from 1974, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory”. Patti Smith included a monologue about Patty Hearst (who had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army earlier that year) in the middle of her rendition of the 1960’s standard; while the latter song relates the salvation she received from the helplessness of her job on an assembly line after discovering a book by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Jim Morrison of the Doors was similarly enthralled with Rimbaud).
(February 2014)
