Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors, and baby dolls, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal designed to shock.
Originating in Detroit in the late 1960s, Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album Love It to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.
Furnier's solo career as Alice Cooper, adopting the band's name as his own name, began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare; in 2011 he released Welcome 2 My Nightmare, his 19th album as a solo artist, and his 26th album in total. Expanding from his Detroit rock roots, in his career Cooper has experimented with a number of musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, hard rock, New Wave, pop rock, experimental rock and industrial rock.
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage; The Rolling Stone Album Guide has called him the world's most "beloved heavy metal entertainer". Cooper is credited with helping to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and he is regarded as being the artist who "first introduced horror imagery to rock'n'roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre". Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock show Nights with Alice Cooper.
In 2011 the original Alice Cooper band was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Read more about Alice Cooper: Early Life, Style and Influences, Personal Life, Discography, Awards and Nominations, Filmography, List of Alice Cooper Band Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words alice and/or cooper:
“Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don’t realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a nice air-conditioned office.”
—Beatrice Alice Hicks (1919–1979)
“Humanity from the first has had its vultures and sharks, and representatives of the fraternity who prey upon mankind may be expected no less in America than elsewhere. That this virulence breaks out most readily and commonly against colored persons in this country, is due of course to the fact that they are, generally speaking, weak and can be imposed upon with impunity. Bullies are always cowards at heart ...”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)