Alice Cooper invented everything cool in rock’n’roll, from wearing tight pants to shitting in a cup on stage. He might have started life as a preacher’s son from Detroit named Vincent Furnier, but a mythical meeting with an ancient witch and a ouija board somewhere in the late 1960s changed things irrevocably.
Alice Cooper became the band and the man, the two fused in an explosion of rock’n’roll outrage that has spanned four decades and lays claim to the accidental invention of glam and punk, and the intentional invention of shock rock – a free-form riot of excess that has, over the years, involved mind-scrambling acts of self-evisceration and infanticide (fake) and heart-stopping acts of chemical bravado and liquid insanity (real), all wrapped around razor-sharp slices of downtown glitter punk that spoke of cheerful subjects like sex with the dead and serial murder.
