In the summer of 1971, rock stars performed at New York’s Concert for Bangladesh, but a gritty band from the American Midwest burst onto the scene with an album that dismantled the era’s fashionable optimism. Titled Love It to Death, the record featured a cover showing the group under a searchlight: menacing, androgynous figures who had seemingly turned Halloween into a 24-hour phenomenon.
The band’s music combined buzz-saw guitars and a snarling lead singer named Alice Cooper—a stage name also used by the group, rumored to honor a 17th-century witch executed for heresy. In their opening track, “Caught in a Dream,” they detailed their aspirations after years of commercial rejection: “I need a houseboat and I need a plane/I need a butler and a trip to Spain/ I need everything the world owes me/I tell that to myself and I agree.”
These ambitions soon became reality. By 1973, the band released Billion Dollar Babies, a concept album reflecting their journey from obscurity to rock stardom. The record-breaking tour featured an array of stage props, including semitrailer trucks with 22,000 sparklers, 300 baby dolls, 58 mannequins, and a guillotine.
The band’s drive originated in their difficult early years in Los Angeles, where they rejected the communal hippie ethos of the late 1960s for a consumerist vision: “Our attitude was, ‘Be as one and all smell of patchouli?’ Nah, we want Ferraris and a house in the Hollywood Hills!” wrote Cooper.
Born Vince Furnier, Cooper grew up surrounded by horror films and The Twilight Zone. At Cortez High School in Phoenix, he excelled in track and art class, where he bonded with Dennis Dunaway over Salvador Dali’s surreal paintings. After forming The Spiders, they relocated to Los Angeles and changed names multiple times before becoming Alice Cooper.
Frank Zappa signed the band to his Straight Records label after witnessing their explosive live shows. Manager Shep Gordon encouraged the group’s theatricality, while producer Bob Ezrin honed their sound into concise, hook-laden songs with unexpected twists—a style Cooper attributed to lessons from O. Henry stories and Alfred Hitchcock thrillers.
The band achieved early 1970s hits like “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out.” In 1975, Cooper created his iconic stage persona, Alice, to fill a void of villainous characters in rock music: “At that time there were no villains in rock and roll,” he wrote. “There were all these Peter Pans but no Captain Hook.”
The persona evolved into increasingly elaborate performances, including mock executions and electric-chair scenes. After decades of fame, Cooper overcame addiction by 1983 and now describes himself as a daily golfer, churchgoer, and proprietor of the Solid Rock Teen Center in Phoenix.
Cooper’s memoir also clarifies his past, including his retraction of his 1976 book Me, Alice, which he later called drunken storytelling. At 78, Cooper continues to tour, singing “I’m Eighteen” for nearly half a century and stating: “I’m not hanging up my spurs at least until after Mick Jagger does.”