Alice cooper

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, and boa constrictors, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, heavy metal, and garage rock to făurite a theatrical brand of rock music that would come to be known as shock rock.[1]

Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The autentic Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with 1971's monster hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album Love it to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.

Furnier's solo career as Alice Cooper, adopting the band's name as his own name, began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. In 2008 he released Along Came a Spider, his 18th solo album. Expanding from his original Detroit garage rock[2] and glam rock[3] roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, hard rock, new wave, pop rock, experimental rock and industrial rock. In recent times he has returned more to his garage rock roots.[4]

Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage, The Rolling Stone Album Guide going so far as to refer to him as the world's most "beloved heavy metal entertainer".[5] He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and is seen as being the person who "first introduced horror imagery to rock'n'roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre".[6] Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock shows Nights with Alice Cooper.
Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Ella Mae (née McCart) and Ether Moroni Furnier. While in Detroit, Furnier attended Nankin Mills Middle School, which is now Lutheran High School Westland. His grandfather, Thurman Sylvester Furnier, was an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ based in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Vincent Furnier's father was an Elder in The Church of Jesus Christ. Vincent Furnier has some distant French Huguenot ancestry; the remainder of his ancestry is English and Scottish.[7]

After a series of childhood illnesses, Vincent Furnier and his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. After Washington Elementary School, Furnier attended Cortez High School in northern Phoenix. Furnier was also a member of the Order of DeMolay.

In 1964, at the age of 16, Furnier was eager to take part in the local annual Letterman's talent show and gathered fellow cross-country teammates from the school to form a group for the show.[8] They named themselves The Earwigs, and since they didn't know how to play any instruments at the time, they dressed up like The Beatles and mimed their performance to Beatles songs. As a result of winning the talent show and loving the experience of being onstage, the group immediately proceeded to learn how to play instruments they acquired from a local pawn shop and soon renamed themselves The Spiders, featuring Furnier on vocals and harmonica, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, John Tatum on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and John Speer on drums.[9] Musically, the group were inspired by artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Kinks, and The Yardbirds. For the next year the band performed regularly around the Phoenix area with a huge negru spider's web as their backdrop, the group's first stage prop. In 1965 they also recorded their first single "Why Don't You Love Me" (originally performed by The Blackwells), with Furnier learning the harmonica for the song.

In 1966, the members of The Spiders graduated from Cortez High School. After North High School footballer Michael Bruce replaced John Tatum on rhythm guitar, the band scored a local #1 radio hit with "Don't Blow Your Mind", an original composition from their second single release. By 1967, the band had begun to make regular roadtrips to Los Angeles, California to play shows. They soon renamed themselves The Nazz and released the single "Wonder Who's Lovin' Her Now", backed with future Alice Cooper track "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye". It was around this time that drummer John Speer was replaced by Neal Smith, and by the end of the year the band had relocated to Los Angeles permanently.

In 1968, upon learning that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, the band were again in need of another stage name. Furnier recognized that the group needed a gimmick to succeed, and that other bands were not exploiting the showmanship potential of the stage. He subsequently chose Alice Cooper as the band's name and adopted this stage name as his own.[10]

Early press releases claimed that the name was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch named Alice Cooper. However, it is now widely accepted that this story was in fact a publicity stunt - Cooper in later interviews confirmed that the name actually came out of thin air, conjuring an image of "a cute and sweet little girl with a hatchet behind her back". (The name was also once said to be an inside joke associated with a character in the television show Mayberry R.F.D.; Alice Cooper is also the name of Betty Cooper's mother in the Archie comic strips). Nonetheless, at the time Cooper and the band realized that the concept of a male playing the role of an androgynous witch, in tattered women's clothing and wearing make-up, would definitely have the potential to cause considerable social controversy and grab headlines. Furnier would later admit that the name change was one of his most important and brilliant career moves.[11]

The classic Alice Cooper group line-up consisted of singer Alice Cooper (Vincent Furnier), lead guitarist Glen Buxton, rhythm guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith. With the exception of Smith, all of the band members were on the Cortez High School cross-country team, and many of Alice Cooper's stage 'effects' were inspired by their cross-country coach, Emmett Smith[12] (one of Smith's class projects was to build a working guillotine for slicing watermelons). Cooper, Buxton and Dunaway were also art students, and their admiration for the works of surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí would further inspire their future stage antics.

One night, at a gig at a Venice club called The Cheetah, where the band managed to scare the entire room of patrons empty after playing just ten minutes, they were approached and enlisted by manager Shep Gordon, who ironically saw the band's seemingly negative impact that night as a force that could be directed in a more positive direction. Shep then managed to arrange an audition for the band with composer and renowned record producer Frank Zappa, who was looking to sign bizarre music acts to his new record label, Straight Records. For the audition, Zappa told them to come to his house "at 7 o'clock", however, the band mistakenly assumed he meant 7 o'clock in the morning. Being woken up by a band willing to play that special brand of psychedelic rock at seven in the morning (a time unbeknownst to most in the rock music world) impressed Zappa enough to sign them on a three-album deal. It was another Zappa signed act, the all-female GTOs, who liked to "dress the Cooper boys up like full size barbie dolls", that played a major role in developing the band's early onstage look.[13][14] Alice Cooper's first album Pretties for You was released in 1969 and, though it touched the US charts for one week at #193, ultimately met with critical and commercial failure.

After an unrehearsed stage routine involving Cooper and a live chicken garnered attention from the press, the band decided to capitalize on tabloid sensationalism, creating in the process a new subgenre, shock rock. Cooper claims that the infamous 'Chicken Incident', which took place at the Toronto Rock 'n Roll Revival concert in September 1969, was in fact an accident. A chicken somehow made its way on stage during Alice Cooper's performance. Not having any experience around farm animals, Cooper presumed that, since the chicken had wings, it would be able to fly.[15] He picked it up and threw it out over the crowd, expecting it to fly away; the bird instead plummeted into the first few rows of the crowd occupied by disabled people in wheelchairs, who reportedly proceeded to tear the animal to pieces.[16]

The next day, the incident made the front page of many national newspapers, and Zappa phoned him to ask if the story, which reported that Cooper had bit the head off the chicken and drunk its blood on stage, was true. Cooper denied the rumor, whereupon Zappa told him, "Well, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it",[17] obviously recognising that such kind of publicity would be priceless for the band.

Despite the infamy the band received from the Chicken Incident, their stronger second album, Easy Action, released in 1970, met with the same fate as its predecessor. Music label Warner Bros. Records then purchased Straight Records from Frank Zappa, and the Alice Cooper group was set to receive a higher level of promotion from the more major label. It was around this time that the band, fed up with Californians' indifference to their act, relocated to Cooper's birthplace, Detroit, where their bizarre stage act was much better received. Detroit would remain their steady home base until 1972. "LA just didn’t get it. They were all on the wrong drug for us. They were on acid and we were basically drinking beer. We fit much more in Detroit than we did anywhere else..."[18]

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Alice cooper Alice cooper

笑い...明日悪化されることがあります