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 Alice
Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, February 4,
1948), is a rock singer and musician. Alice
Cooper was originally just the name of Furnier's
band. Furnier officially changed his own name to
Alice Cooper for a successful solo career.
Furnier
was born in Detroit, but moved to Phoenix,
Arizona in his youth. His grandfather, Thurman
Furnier, was an ordained Apostle of the Church
of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite). Cooper's father,
Ether Furnier, was an ordained Elder. Cooper had
some distant French Huguenot ancestry; the
remainder of his ancestry was English.
Cooper,
influenced by British Bands such as The Beatles,
The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks and in
particular The Yardbirds, formed a number of
rock bands in the 1960s, including the Earwigs,
The Spiders, and The Nazz. Furnier, upon
learning that Todd Rundgren also had a band
called the Nazz, changed the band's name to
Alice Cooper (the name Alice Cooper is said to
have been agreed upon after one of Furnier's
Ouija sessions, and learning that he was a
reincarnation of a 17th century
"witch" of the same name, according to
band legend, although Cooper in interviews has
said the name actually came out of thin air
conjuring an image of "a cute little girl
with an axe behind her back"). The classic
Alice Cooper group line up consisted of
guitarists Michael Bruce and Glen Buxton,
bassist Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith.
After moving to California in 1968, the band
enlisted Shep Gordon and Joe Greenberg as their
managers, and the band was soon signed to Frank
Zappa's label, Straight Records - releasing two
competent but outlandish albums, Pretties For
You and Easy Action, to a frosty public and
critical reception.
Although
the band incorporated theatrics in their stage
act from the outset, a chance case of press
misreporting an unfortunate, unrehearsed stage
routine involving Alice and a live chicken led
to the band changing tack - capitalizing on
tabloid sensationalism and creating a new
sub-genre, shock rock. Alice claims that the
chicken incident was an accident. He says he
thought, "Chickens have wings, so they must
be able to fly" so when it was on the
stage, he threw it out over the crowd, with the
intention of having the chicken fly away. But
chickens can't fly, so it was instead ripped to
shreds by the rowdy audience. Read
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