Alice Cooper began as high school runners miming Beatles songs at a talent show
In 1964 a 16-year-old in Phoenix roped four teammates from his cross-country squad into a school talent show. Dressed as the Beatles, they rewrote the lyrics about running laps for their coach, and only one of them could actually play. They won anyway, bought pawn-shop instruments, and became the band Alice Cooper.
Vincent Damon Furnier was born in Detroit in 1948, named partly after the writer Damon Runyon. His father was an evangelist in a small church his grandfather later led, and young Vincent was active in it around age eleven, while also treating Halloween as the biggest night of the year and soaking up horror films at a local cinema where he would one day perform. Childhood illnesses sent the family to the dry air of Phoenix.
The talent-show group called itself the Earwigs, then the Spiders, scoring a local number one with Don't Blow Your Mind in 1966, then Nazz. Discovering that Todd Rundgren already had a signed band called Nazz forced another change. They picked Alice Cooper because it sounded sweet and harmless, a joke against their menacing act. The look borrowed from Bette Davis's smeared makeup in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and from the switchblade gloves in Barbarella.
Their big break was a scheduling mix-up. After a Los Angeles gig where they emptied the room in ten minutes, manager Shep Gordon got them an audition with Frank Zappa, who said to come by at seven. They turned up at seven in the morning and woke him with psychedelic rock, which impressed him enough to sign them for three albums. The first two flopped, and Los Angeles shrugged. The band moved to Michigan, where crowds raised on the Stooges and MC5 got the joke. Cooper later summed it up: the Californians were on acid while the band mostly drank beer.
The breakthrough came with producer Bob Ezrin, who would eventually produce 11 of their records. In the first months of 1971 the single I'm Eighteen climbed to 21 on the Hot 100, Warner Bros. bought out their contract, and hits like School's Out followed. After the group split in 1975, Furnier legally took the name Alice Cooper and went solo, eventually selling over 50 million records.
Source: Alice Cooper
