Alice Cooper: The artist Rob Zombie called “The Beatles” of shock rock
Every genre of rock and roll normally has landmark artists who appear to be untouchable. No artist can make perfect music forever, but the influence that their golden years have on generations that follow goes a long way in preserving their legacy as the trailblazers for whatever style they happen to play. While Rob Zombie already holds a standard for pioneering the theatrical side of metal music, he believed that Alice Cooper was really the shock rocker who could go toe-to-toe with the Fab Four.
When Alice Cooper started, it was a band before it was just one guy. After picking a name based on playing with an Ouija board, depending on whose story you believe, frontman Vincent Furnier quickly moulded himself into the character of Alice Cooper, eventually donning the horrific makeup that made him look like a demon.
There had been some notorious figures in rock well before, like Keith Richards, but compared to everyone else, Cooper seemed to be pulled right from the crypt. Parents would have been hesitant if their daughters brought home someone like Richards, but if they brought home Cooper, they would most likely try to ward off any evil spirits that he brought in with him.
This wasn’t just a happy accident, either…this was by design. Cooper was sick of hearing that everyone wanted to put flowers in their hair and talk about everything being perfect, so why not try to make the show that no one else would dare let their children go to?
While it seems a lot tamer today now that bands like Slipknot are walking the Earth, Cooper’s stage show was insane for the early 1970s, featuring him decapitating baby dolls and eventually leading to a massive climax of the show where he would get “killed” in whatever way struck him that night, from being thrown into a bed of nails to being hung from a gallows to being decapitated.
Arthur Brown and Screaming Jaw Hawkins had come before, but Cooper was the first to bring it to America’s attention, which wasn’t that hard to do. I mean, if you take a naked picture of yourself and plaster it on a double-decker bus the minute you arrive in England, you’re not exactly going to be keeping a low profile.
For Zombie, this kind of music was wildly exciting, eventually telling Metal Evolution, “I think Alice took everything to a new level. He’s kind of like the first and best at everything. He’s kinda like The Beatles of this style of music. You can’t really think before [him]”. Cooper may have been the more macabre take on The Beatles’ flavour of heavy rock, but just like the Fab Four, he knew how to innovate as well.
When Zombie was putting together White Zombie and having his first major hits like ‘More Human Than Human’, Cooper still shocked audiences with more underrated gems in his back catalogue like Brutal Planet and Dragontown. Whereas most shock rock bands are looking to scare the audience and focus on the music later, Cooper was the one who kicked down the door for how music could terrify people and still sell in droves.