Villainous Alice Cooper, rock’s prodigal son
By Mark Ellis, Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net)
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS - April 22, 2016)
-- He has been called the godfather of shock-rock, mixing elements of
horror movies into acts that have included an unpalatable array of
guillotines, fake blood, baby dolls and boa constrictors. Yet many would
be surprised to learn of his Christian roots and his homecoming to the
faith after sowing his oats as the ultimate prodigal.
“My
father was a pastor and my grandfather was an evangelist, actually both
were evangelists,” Cooper told the Harvest Show. “I grew up in the
church and all my friends were church kids. I had so much fun. I was in
church Sunday, Wednesday night, Friday night. All my social life was
based around kids in the church.”
When
the Beatles invaded the American music scene in the ’60s, Cooper (born
Vincent Furnier) was captivated and formed a band called The Spiders
among his classmates, mimicking the Beatles’ style. After a couple years
of recording songs, he realized something was missing from the rock
scene.
“I
looked around and thought, ‘There’s no villains in rock and roll, why
not create rock’s ultimate villain?’ Furnier created a character known
as Alice Cooper, who appeared on stage as a debased female killer
wearing tattered women’s clothing, with smeared deep, dark black
eyeliner on his face.
At
first, he didn’t think “playing” the role of an antihero on stage would
affect his Christianity. “I didn’t think about how that might affect my
faith at all. The Bible is full of villains. I thought, ‘I’ll be this
villain.’”
“I
gave Alice his perimeters, those areas he wouldn’t go past,” he told
the Harvest Show. Eventually, the band adopted the same name as its
infamous lead.
Their first big success came with the single “I’m Eighteen,” which reached number 21 on Billboard’s top 100 in early 1971.
Cooper’s
1971-72 tours featured a stage show with mock fights and gothic torture
scenes, Cooper hugging a boa constrictor, chopping bloodied baby dolls,
and a staged execution.
In
1972 their single “School’s Out” went into the Top 10 in the U.S. and
to number one in the UK. The band horrified parents and outraged
politicians in the U.K. A British Labor MP petitioned the home secretary
to have the group banned from performing in the country and one of
their songs was banned by the BBC.
Furnier
aka Cooper was drawn into a self-destructive lifestyle and left his
Christian roots behind. “The things you heard about us were pretty
insane,” he told Mulatschag TV in Austria. “We were probably a threat to
the pubic at the time. We were the ones who lived. Most of our friends
died trying to be rock stars.”
Cooper
counted among his friends Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and
Keith Moon. “I drank with these guys every night and I watched every
one of them go down. The reason is that they tried to be their character
off stage,” he recalls.
His
heavy drinking began to exact a toll on his body. “I drank for a long
time. I was throwing up blood every morning. I was really a bad
alcoholic. I wasn’t cruel or mean, but I was definitely
self-destructive,” he says. At its worst, reports said he was consuming
two cases of Budweiser and a bottle of whisky every day.
Following
his 1977 US tour, Cooper checked himself into a sanitarium for
treatment of his alcoholism. Six years later, he was hospitalized for
alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver.
Photo
captions:1) Rock legend, Alice Cooper and Christopher his not-so-scary
boa constrictor (Photo credit: Splash/Ouzounova). 2) One of Cooper’s
scary record covers. 3) With his wife. 4) Dan Wooding welcomes Mark
Ellis to the set of their "Windows on the World" TV show.
About the writer: Mark Ellis is senior correspondent for the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net), and also founder of www.GodReports.com, a
website that shares stories, testimonies and videos from the church
around the world. He is also co-host for "Widows on the World" with ANS
Founder, Dan Wooding, which is airred on the Holy Spirit Broadcasting
Network (http://hsbn.tv).
** You may republish this or any of our ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net).
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