“We set up outside Frank Zappa’s bedroom door and played so loud the pictures on the wall ended up crooked. I thought he’d shoot us”: the forgotten psychedelic beginnings of Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper.

As the 1960s dawned, Phoenix was a bland, monochrome city in the middle of the Arizona desert. Tumbleweed blew through the streets and, while the sound of the Beach Boys dominated the syrupy airwaves, nobody was about to go surfing. 

Phoenix was home to Alice Cooper – born Vincent Damon Furnier, a preacher’s son who moved to the city from Detroit with his family, when he was 13. Young Vincent had been afflicted with asthma from birth, and the city’s arid conditions were expected to improve his general health. But within two months he’d developed peritonitis from a burst appendix.