Alice’s wild adventures in rockland
Detroit Stories is both a love letter to his hometown and his best record this century
In 1970, a 22-year-old Alice Cooper decided to leave Los Angeles. Frustrated with his band’s lack of success after two years of gigging, the theatrical rocker had to admit he had caught the ear of almost no one. (Frank Zappa was an idiosyncratic exception, telling Cooper: “I don’t get what you’re doing . . . and I think that’s great.”)
So, with “20,000 groups from around the world heading to LA”, the singer relocated to Detroit. In the Motor City, he found his crowd.
“The people in Detroit wanted their bands to sound like the machinery that they were working with in the Ford factories, or at Chrysler,” Cooper says. “It was a very masculine kind of society. It was tough. If you were in a band you also had to know how to fight. Nobody ever went out alone.”
These days are recalled on Detroit Stories, the singer’s 21st album, released last week. Produced by longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin and cowritten by Wayne Kramer, guitarist in Detroit punk-rock band MC5, the 15-song collection is both a love letter to the city in which Alice Cooper (real name, Vincent Furnier) was born, and in which he lived until he was 10, and his best record this century.
As recounted in tracks such as Rock & Roll and Social Debris, in Detroit the Alice Cooper band were free to “play it loud and fast”. California could keep its dreamin’ because here they were in the thick of a meatier musical epicentre. As well as being the home of Motown, Detroit harnessed wild men such as Iggy Pop and the heartland rockers Bob Seger and Suzi Quatro. Out west the quest was spiritual. In Michigan, bands like MC5 allied themselves with violent civil rights groups and used images of guns and bombs.
It was quite the time to be alive. Detroit Stories describes a city in which people were “trying to burn the place down”. The riots of 1967 between mainly black residents and the police left 43 people dead and 2000 buildings in ruins. More civil unrest followed. Detroit became a byword for urban decay and a warning to others on just how far the United States would allow a great metropolis to fall. Pockmarked and freezing, the Motor City, renamed “Murder City”, laboured under a racial divide that permeated all areas of life save for one.
“If you were a musician who had long hair, during a riot you could walk into any black bar and you were not the enemy,” Cooper says. “You were a musician so you were a brother. Other times we’d be on stage and I’d look down into this audience of black leather jackets and long hair and I’d see Smokey Robinson, and there’d be two of The Supremes, or there’d be one of the guys from the Temptations. There was no colour barrier in Detroit in music.”
Flush with the success of albums such as Love It To Death and Killer, and with a macabre stage show that featured gallows, boa constrictors and gallons of fake blood, Alice Cooper shipped out after just three years. Returning to a music scene in Los Angeles that was whiter than the cast of The Waltons, the singer forged a shock-rock reputation and a loyal fan base that endures to this day.
“In Beverly Hills, if you were a rock star you could do anything you wanted,” the singer says. “Unlike Detroit, LA was all about the glitz and the glamour. Up in the Hollywood Hills there were probably 500 parties a night. It was a whole different scene.”
Cooper filled his boots. He knocked out an album a year, sometimes two. At heart a blue-collar grafter, so tireless was his work ethic that he lacked a house in which to lay his head. “There was a point there when I didn’t live anywhere,” he says. “I was basically a road rat . . .”
On the road or in a bar. Unusually for the 70s, Alice Cooper claims to have eschewed illegal substances. Bending the elbow, instead, he gamely tried to drink himself to death. Alcohol was “safe”, he reasoned, while pills and powders were “dangerous”.
Following the release of a slew of albums that he can’t actually remember recording, Alice Cooper gave up drinking in 1983. Now 73, Cooper, when asked to nominate the words he’d like to see engraved on his headstone, gives his answer without hesitation: “Here lies Alice, since from when he was teething, never stopped rocking till he stopped breathing.”