Alice Cooper
Vincent Damon Furnier (born February 4, 1948 in Detroit, Michigan)
His grandfather, Thurman Furnier was an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ and his father, Ether Furnier, was an ordained Elder.
Furnier formed a number of '60s bands, including The Earwigs, The Spiders and The Nazz - after moving to California in 1968, and realizing the latter name conflicted with Todd Rundgren's band, Furnier called the band Alice Cooper to capture the 'hard rock' image of "a cute little girl with an axe behind her back", as Furnier later recounted in an interview. Furnier changed his name to Alice Cooper in 1972 and it is now his legal name.
The band recorded their first album Pretties For You on FZ's Bizarre Records label (1969). The second album Easy Action was recorded on FZ's Straight label (1970).
From the beginning, the band incorporated theatrics in their stage act. FZ's 'groupie band', the GTO's, liked to "dress the Cooper boys up like full size barbie dolls", which played a major role in developing the band's early onstage look. A chance incident of an unrehearsed stage routine, involving Cooper and a live chicken, also led to the band receiving a lot of sensationalist press attention. Cooper 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 cannot fly particularly well, and the bird was instead ripped to shreds by the rowdy audience. Zappa phoned him shortly afterward to ask if the rumor that he had 'ripped the head off a live chicken and drunk its blood onstage' was true. Cooper denied the rumor, whereupon Zappa told him, "Well, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it."
After the release of Easy Action in 1970 Straight moved under the Warner Bros umbrella, and the band relocated to their hometown of Detroit. Their popularity and longevity in the rock music genre was sealed with the release of the single "School's Out" in 1972.
- The band is name-checked on What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are?
- more at Wikipedia: Alice Cooper