Janda (0:00)

97.1 FM the drive presents the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda no More with the Night Sky.

Alice Cooper (0:15)

Without a doubt, he's one of the most fascinating artists on the rock timeline. In fact, Alice Cooper has done such an incredible job of making sure that rock has an enduring smile, spectacle, element to it, of being kind of the embodiment of the freaky side of rock, that it's hard to imagine that there wasn't ever an Alice Cooper on stage somewhere. Snakes, guillotines, electric chairs and all. But of course there was. And it took a while for Alice Cooper's brand of entertainment to catch hold. When the Billion Dollar Babies album was released in 1973, Alice Cooper topped the charts, the world finally catching up with the idea that glamrock could be the vehicle for for a brutal caricature, a theatrical madman, an entertainer who's also come to be known as one of the nicest guys in rock. So it's funny that one of the hits on that album, one of the reasons it went to number one, is about not playing nice anymore in favor of letting one's freak flag fly. Let's dig into the story of no more Mr. Nice Guy in this episode of the behind the Song podcast and if you like it, give it a thumbs up and hit subscribe. Let us know in the comments.

Meundies (1:26)

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Alice Cooper (1:54)

From the Outside in Alice Cooper didn't start off as the Godfather of Shock rock, of course. He was born Vincent Furnier, son of a preacher in Detroit, and the family business of religion included his grandfather who was president of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Furnier family moved from Detroit to Phoenix, Arizona when he was a teen and it was there while attending Cortez High School that he started his first rock band with a few of his fellow cross country teammates. By the late 60s they'd gone through a few name changes. The Earwigs, the Spiders, and Naz and Started making the road trip through the desert for Los Angeles to play gigs. Other than drummer Neil Smith, all four of the other members of the classic lineup of Alice Cooper, Fournier himself, bassist Dennis Dunaway, and guitarists Glenn Buxton and Michael Bruce met at Cortez High. It was Furnier's idea to name the band Alice Cooper as a concept of everything that conjured up things that were nice opposite the band's aesthetic and kind of a subversive Lizzie Borden character, in his words. A little girl with a lollipop in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. It also happens to be the housekeeper character's name that Alice Ghostly played around 1969 in the show Mayberry RFD, the spin off of the old Andy Griffith show. Pretty wholesome. The name was perfect. The pleasant inverse of what they did on stage. Something that bands like Marilyn Manson would leapfrog off of. Years later in Los Angeles, they got the attention of super manager Shep Gordon, who introduced them to Frank Zappa, who fully understood what they were doing and signed them to his record label, Straight Records. And it was during this three album deal period that one of the most infamous incidents in all of rock and roll happened. While Alice Cooper were playing the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in September of 1969. It became known as the Chicken Incident. A very unlucky chicken was thrown on stage during their show. And Furnier, as he was still known at the time, assumed that because they had wings, chickens could fly. So he picked it up and let it go, thinking it would just fly away. It landed in the front row where it was rolled under the wheels of the wheelchair attendees in the front row and unfortunately was torn to pieces. The incident was blown up to report that Fernier had bitten the head off and drank the blood. But really it was just a case of a guy who didn't know anything at all about farm animals yet. And still the story only helped push them onto the tabloids and revile them to parents everywhere. Much to the delight of the teens who were attending the concerts and buying the records. Frank Zappa advised Fournier to never tell anyone that you didn't really do it. The myth grew bigger and bigger, and this was at a time when popular music was very much about the summer of love, peace loving hippies out of San Francisco leading the cultural pack. But that wasn't Alice Cooper. Their first few albums and singles didn't do all that well in terms of sales and they headed back to Detroit in 1970, where they felt the Midwesterners who came to their shows had a better appreciation for the hard rock cabaret that the band were all about. 1970 was a pivotal year for the band because of the move and because by that time they were at the end of their three year deal with Zappa, which with one more album to produce to show that they could create hits. This was the year that Alice Cooper first teamed up with producer Bob Ezrin, who would later go on to produce Pink Floyd's the Wall, among many other albums. This was the person that Fernier, who would shortly change his own name legally to Alice Cooper, called their George Martin. It was a perfect match. Ezrin produced their third album for Straight Records, Love it to Death, which finally got them a hit single with I'm 18. Warner Brothers Records bought out their contract from Zappa and they were finally on their way to doing what Furnier offered as his ambition in a quote in his high school yearbook to be a million record seller. Love it to Death was the first of 11 albums that Bob Ezrin would produce for Alice Cooper the band and for Alice Cooper the solo artist. And it went to number 35 in the US to give some context of how groundbreaking a time period this was for Alice Cooper. That success afforded the band their first European tour in 1971, where David Bowie was in the audience, a couple of years away from unleashing his own over the top rock character on the world in the form of Ziggy Stardust. Two more albums quickly followed, Killer in November of 1971 and then Schools out in 1972. The title track going into the top 10 in the US and the album going to number two. During this time, Alice Cooper stage antics got more and more theatrical. Boa constrictors became his co stars. Baby dolls were chopped up with axes. Alice Cooper, the character became fully formed as a black eyed heel with caked freakish makeup that he said was inspired by screen legend Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? On stage he was the blowhard nightmare that you love to hate. Pure genius. From a theatrical standpoint, Billion Dollar Babies was intended to be a more commercial product. The album artwork is a spectacular statement on this desire. A fold out snakeskin green wallet with gold and diamonds and a huge billion dollar bill foldout with all the band members pictured on its face inside. And the band got into a little trouble with the government over that because there's a law that requires FBI approval on the reproduction of photos of any US currency. With Bob Ezrin behind the curtain again, it was recorded in three Locations, The Record Plant in New York, Morgan Studios in London, and in an old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut that the band moved into so they could make noise at all hours of the day and night away from the city. 40 rooms, 15,000 square feet at $2,500 a month, surrounded by old money blue bloods in Greenwich, who Alice Cooper said, treated them like the Munsters when they went into town. The kicker, Bette Davis, the inspiration for Alice Cooper's makeup, lived right next door to the Cooper Mansion, as it came to be known, and would drive by in her Jaguar, telling the band to turn up the volume while they were rehearsing. Apparently she liked shocking the stuffy neighbors too. During one of their recording sessions in London, an infamous supergroup jam session happened that included Keith Moon on drums and Mark Bolan on guitar and Donovan and Harry Nilsson on vocals. These luminaries were all part of a notorious drinking club started by Alice Cooper at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip, and went on to become an actual supergroup decades later with different band members including Alice, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry. Anyway, Bob Ezrin was excited about the jam session that night and recorded it, but he was very disappointed in the result because everyone was so drunk at the time that it basically boiled down to a bunch of old covers and versions of Nilsson's Coconut with Keith Moon yelling dirty lines about dogs. Not really chart topping stuff, but legendary nonetheless. When Billion Dollar Babies was released in 1973, Alice Cooper found their zenith point. Four singles became hits on the Billboard chart, an amazing feat for songs with subject matter that ranged from dental anxiety to post mortem love affairs. This album and its surprising success is the reason Alice Cooper is rightly called the architect of shock rock. The songs and the live show carefully crafted to emit the same kind of shock and awe that you get when you watch a horror movie, a twisted cabaret on stage that you couldn't look away from and you could sing along to fans. Couldn't get enough. In fact, when the band toured behind this album, they broke box office records in the US that had been held by the Rolling Stones. It was also in 1973 that Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper as a way of protecting protecting it against future legal issues because some cracks had started to appear within the classic group. With that meteoric success fueled by the drinking that was becoming the pink elephant in the room, so to speak. By 1977, Alice Cooper would enter a sanitarium to briefly dry himself out, relapse, and then commit to Sobriety for good in the 80s. The entire 70s decade was wild for Alice Cooper, to say the least. And it's pretty telling that the reaction from the press to the band in the early 70s was the spark that ignited no More Mr. Nice Guy, Co written by Alice Cooper and Michael Bruce. Bruce has said that it was actually started during the sessions for the Killer album a couple years before in 1971. Started out as a song about a relationship. But as the press continued to go after Alice Cooper to the point of singling out his parents and hassling them, the lyrics evolved as an answer to that and the Alice Cooper character slapped back, threatening. More where that came from in a song that basically says, okay, the gloves are off now. The lyrics go like this. I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing Till they got a hold of me I opened doors for little old ladies I helped the blind to see I got no friends because they read the papers they can't be seen with me and I'm getting real shot down and I'm feeling mean no more Mr. Nice Guy no more Mr. Clean no more Mr. Nice Guy they say he's sick, he's obscene Alice Cooper's parents were religious, and his upbringing reflected that. But he's also said that they had no problem with rock and roll itself, with the music. Their only concern was the drinking and the drugs that were often part of the lifestyle. So it was really offensive to him that the press and even the church that his family belonged to would dog his family when he actually had their support. Alice has said that his father had to defend him a lot in the early days, fully in on the joke, assuring his fellow churchgoers that it was all an act. The song goes on to the second verse. My dog bit me on the leg today My cat clawed my eye My mom's been thrown out of the society circle My dad's had to hide I went to church incognito when everybody rose, the Reverend Smith, he recognized me and punched me in the nose. Alice Cooper, the godfather of shock rock, is now a longtime devout Christian himself. His issues with alcohol and drugs nearly killed him, and at the urging of his wife Cheryl, they started attending church. Back in the 80s of this fact, he told the Guardian in an interview, there's nothing in Christianity that says I can't be a rock star. It's probably one of the most rebellious things that a shock rocker like Alice Cooper could do. Be a nice Christian guy with a wholesome home life. He and Cheryl married in 1976, and they are still together. They've raised three kids and are now grandparents. He volunteers to support other musicians who struggle with substance abuse problems, and he supports music education in his home city of Phoenix and beyond. His longtime radio show, Alice's Attic, is heard on the Drive in Chicago, my home station, and all over the country. He sold over 50 million albums and was inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of fame in 2011, along with the rest of the classic lineup of the band. In other words, Alice Cooper has had the last laugh when it came to all those naysayers who gave him, his band and his family such a hard time back in the 70s when he was putting together one of the most entertaining hard rock acts of all time. Back when rock music didn't have a villain yet, like Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes. Where would we be without Alice Cooper disrupting the status quo on the rock and roll timeline? Something to think about. Until next time, I'm Janda and this has been behind the song. If you like this episode, give it a like and subscribe to the channel and check it out on TikTok too. Special thanks as always to Christian Lane for the music you hear on these podcast episodes. You can find me on the air at 97.1fm the drive in Chicago and at wdrv.com on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.