Alice Cooper, Vaudevillian

Today is the birthday of Alice Cooper (Vincent Furnier, b. 1948). Being several decades too young for vaudeville, any actual nostalgia I ever feel is for performers from my own childhood, which includes the likes of Alice Cooper. That’s pretty twisted given what he once represented to the older generation of my day!

Cooper professes to be influenced by vaudeville, which nonplussed me for while. After all, his music would seem to be somewhat far from Tin Pan Alley, and for the most part, he and his contemporaries don’t go around in derbies and straw boaters, although there’s this:

But then the obvious hit me. The showmanship of artists like him is indeed very much in the tradition of a certain vaudeville sub-category: magicians, particularly Grand Guignol inspired ones who used Halloween hokum to gussy up their act. There were vaudeville magicians who used guillotines in their acts, just as Alice Cooper would use in his. And then there’s the fact that he loved appearing on TV variety shows from Dinah! to The Muppet Showto Pink Lady and Jeff. And he was actually good friends with several real vaudevillians including his old Detroit pal Soupy Sales,Mae West, and Groucho Marx, to whom he dedicated his donation to save the Hollywood sign in 1978. He was also chums with Salvador Dali. 

Cooper’s nostalgia for old school Hollywood is just as much a part of his act as his teenage love of The Beatles,The Rolling Stones, The Who,Pink Floyd, and The Yardbirds. (He has also mentioned The Crazy World of Arthur Brown as an influence — that’s the easiest one to see). “Alice Cooper” was initially the name of his entire band. When they broke up in 1975 Furnier took it legally for himself. He claimed the name came from an episode of Mayberry RFD; I tend to mix it up with that of the old silent star Gladys Cooper. He said his messy mascara look was taken from Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and he was also a big fan of Barbarella (1968).

So camp — humor and melodrama — was really where Alice Cooper was coming from, from the very beginning, though frightened grown-ups thought he was some kind of a menace. Satanism has never been part of his act or his ethos, although snakes, gallows, guillotines, electric chairs, Medieval torture devices, fake blood, dismemberment, and one accidentally murdered chicken have been. Many of his stage effects were designed by the late Amazing Randi, who sometimes played an Executioner onstage! Cooper’s father and grandfather were both preachers; Cooper himself has occasionally played Herod in productions of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

His first hit single “I’m Eighteen (1971) was loved by Johnny Rotten so much that he used it as his audition piece to get into The Sex Pistols. “School’s Out” (1972) went all the way to number seven and became a perennial teenage anthem that I heard periodically throughout the remainder of my childhood. “No More Mr. Nice Guy” (1973) was also a hit, and was included, along with “School’s Out” in Richard Linklater’sDazed and Confused (1993). Good Lord! Those tunes were only 20 years old back then! The 1975 LP and television special Welcome to My Nightmare (featuring Vincent Price!) was a huge deal, My favorite tune off that one is the ballad “Only Women Bleed” (#12).  I love the sentiment of the song, I love the tune, and I really love the production. The lyrics, while I like where their heart is, are a bit too embarrassing to sing along with however. (“Pleasin’ up her man”, for example, makes me want to take a shower, and I mean that in a bad way). Still it’s one of the best feminist songs ever, and probably did a lot more to make men think about how they treat women than did John Lennon’s atrocious “Woman is the N–r of the World”, which would have set the cause of feminism back several decades if anyone ever listened to it). 

It’s funny that many of us as a certain age think of Alice Cooper as one of the principal architects of metal, though I’m sure many hardcore fans of that genre would scoff. Indeed, his singles were often straight up pop, especially during the next stretch, it’s stuff like “I Never Cry” (#12, 1976), “You and Me” (#9, 1977), and “How You Gonna See Me Now?” (#12, 1978), all pretty goopy, lovey-dovey emotional stuff. For a brief while in the early ’80s, he dabbled in New Wave, seemingly an odd fit musically, but the themes of what he put out were of a piece with what he did before. They didn’t chart as high, but some of them like “Clones” (1980) and his 1982 cover of Love’s “Seven and Seven Is”, are amazing. Constrictor (1987), with its lead single “Teenage Frankenstein” was deemed his comeback album. It also contained “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask”) which was used as the theme song for the movie In 1989 he hit the top ten again with his single “Poison.”

Obviously there has been a ton of cross-fertilization between the horror community and Cooper. (Interesting side note, has also collaborated with Rob Zombie, who straddles both worlds, but is also a major Marx Brothers fan and at one point was considering making a film of Raised Eyebrows). In addition to all of his concert films and videos Alice Cooper is in Mae West’s Sextette (1978),Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Wayne’s World(1992), Tim Burton’sDark Shadows (2012). On The Snoop Sisters he even got to work with Helen Hayes!

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg, but who wants to smash into an iceberg? Alice Cooper, if he ever puts on a water show!

To find out more about vaudeville past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.