Rockers dressed to thrill
20 essential costumed rockers, from Bowie to KISS
From David Bowie to Kiss to Alice Cooper, many classic music performers, past to present, put Halloween on tour as a year-round proposition.
The Halloween season is upon us. But these essential costumed rockers didn’t need a calendar to tell them it was time to get their look together. They made Halloween a year-round proposition. And if you still haven’t settled on a costume, you could do a lot worse than to borrow one of these looks.
A lot of the more ghoulish entertainers here are just a logical extensions of the shock-rock theater of the macabre that Alice Cooper mastered in the early ‘70s. But you could trace that type of presentation through the Crazy World of Arthur Brown to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in the ‘50s.
The man would emerge from a coffin and sing into a skull.
Of course, the Village People also made our list, and they don’t owe a thing to Cooper, Brown or Screamin’ Jay.
Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper was the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” of costume rock, a watershed event that changed the game forever. And at first, it wasn’t much — a dab of makeup here, some tattered women’s clothing there.
But by the time he got to “Billion Dollar Babies,” it was on — electric chairs, hangings, a guillotine, boa constrictors, Cooper hacking baby dolls to pieces with an axe, the stage awash in fake blood every show. It was ludicrous, really, but brilliantly so.
They called it shock rock at the time and it probably was but it was funny too.
Decades later, Cooper’s look is probably as recognizable as any shock-rock makeup job this side of Kiss — a gob of dark mascara smeared around each eye with little black lines dripping from the corners of his mouth like blood.
He’s reinforced the image through the years with everything from biker jackets to glitter to a blood-red athletic protector worn outside his pants, but it’s that makeup people struggle to perfect each year on Halloween.
He also came up with a good backstory for the name (which started off referring to both Cooper and the original band): A Ouija board informed him that he was the reincarnation of a 17th Century witch named Alice Cooper.
The Mummies
These garage-punk icons dress like mummies, rocking tattered bandages while touring in an ambulance. I’m not sure they could even be more Halloween. And their records have held up amazingly well. Of course, I keep mine stored in a sarcophagus, but still ...
David Bowie
Among the more theatrical performers in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, he apprenticed in Lindsay Kemp’s avantgarde theater and mime troupe in the ‘60s and experimented with a lot of different costuming and makeup through the years, whether wearing a dress on the cover of the U.K. pressing of 1971’s “The Man Who Sold the World” or being transformed for the album art of “Diamond Dogs” into a half-man/half-dog creature.
But his best-known image overhaul remains the messianic rock star from an another planet, Ziggy Stardust, with his futuristic, androgynous costumes, bright orange hair and copious amounts of makeup.
Peter Gabriel
The costumes he wore while fronting Genesis are now the stuff of legend.
The man wore batwings on his head, appearing on stage as an oversized flower, a fox in a dress (as portrayed on the cover of “Foxtrot”), a deformed monstrosity called Slipperman and the Moonlight Knight.
As the story goes, the PA they were using at the time was so ill-suited to the task at hand that nothing Gabriel was singing could be heard, so wearing costumes was his way of overcompensating for those buried lyrics while getting the audience to look at him.
Kiss
The whole premise of Kiss was if people are going this crazy for one Alice Cooper, imagine what four Alice Coopers could do.
Good premise, and they followed through with four distinct personas, each one sporting black and white kabuki makeup — a demon (Gene Simmons), a starchild (Paul Stanley), a spaceman (Ace Frehley) and, strangest of all, a catman (Peter Criss).
By “Kiss Alive,” their costuming was
more elaborate than Cooper’s while their stage show featured a smoking guitar and Simmons breathing fire and spitting blood.
Like fools, they took the makeup off in 1983, by which point Criss and Frehley had been fired. But that only helped make Kiss’ big reunion in full makeup tour the high-grossing concert tour of 1996 and 1997.
The Monks
They met as American servicemen stationed in Germany in the early ‘60s. Their sound was an unlikely blend of avant-garde experimentation and primal garage-rock. And their look? You don’t just call yourselves the Monks and then not follow through and dress as monks. They even wore those little bald spots in their scalps. That’s dedication to a shtick (although in the case an actual monk, it would be dedication to one’s Lord and savior).
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Long before Cooper had met his untimely demise in a guillotine, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was making the world safe for spooky rock ‘n’ roll theatrics in the ‘50s. Carried on stage in a flaming coffin, Hawkins would rise from the coffin, wearing a black satin vampire cape, and serenade a skull named Henry, which Hawkins would carry around on a stick.
Paul Revere & the Raiders
Known for their crowd-pleasing stage shows, the Raiders performed in matching Revolutionary War-style costumes not unlike the sort the Beatles later donned for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The Raiders were among the most commercially successful artists tied to the ‘60s garage-rock sound, scoring their first Top 40 hit in 1965 with “Just Like Me” and going on to top the Hot 100 in 1971 with their version of John D. Loudermilk’s “Indian Reservation (The Lament of Cherokee Reservation Indian).”
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
Man wore a flaming metal helmet in his ‘60s prime while singing “Fire,” sometimes accidentally setting fire to his hair. Now that’s a spectacle. He also had a metal suit he’d set on fire, and after Crazy World, he led a band called Kingdom Come while wearing makeup and staging his own crucifixions.
Gwar
These guys have taken Alice Cooper’s shock-rock template to grotesque extremes in the course of advancing a visual concept based on portraying interplanetary warriors, their costumes made of latex, Styrofoam and hardened rubber. Their stage shows are the stuff of legend, outrageously violent and far more sexual in nature than a Cooper show, including simulated mutilations of “celebrity” guests, from O.J. Simpson to Adolf Hitler, Pope Francis and Snooki. They’re also known for dousing the fans down front with copious amounts of fake blood.
Adam and the Ants
There’s a great line in “Stand and Deliver” in which Adam Ant sums up his whole aesthetic with a wink: “I spend my cash / On looking flash / And grabbing your attention.” Cash well spent.
These New Wave icons dressed as campy New Romantic pirates, a look that transformed rather easily into the dandy highwayman their focal point proclaimed himself to be in the lyrics of “Stand and Deliver.”
But their look was always changing. For the cover of “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” a post-punk masterpiece that’s held up as one of the ‘80s’ most enduring triumphs, Ant rocked an ultra-stylish military jacket of the sort Jimi Hendrix wore in 1967, a white stripe of Native American warpaint and feathers completing quite a look.
The Village People
It’s hard to imagine an image more in touch with disco’s sensibilities — a leather biker, a construction worker, a Native American, a cowboy, a cop and a soldier.
Then when “In The Navy” hit, the cop and soldier took one for the team and dressed as sailors. If you’ve never found this group remotely entertaining? You might be a redneck.
Marilyn Manson’s look is something out of Alice Cooper’s dark night of the soul. It began as a raunchier take on Cooper’s makeup and androgyny, with crazy colored contact lenses giving him an even creepier demeanor.
Through the years, he’s prowled the stage on stilts and metal arm extensions like a really creepy bug, gone futuristic glam as an extraterrestrial, his naked body covered head to toe in latex paint with artificial breasts, and given fans a tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in a top hat and cane for the video to “Dope Hat.”
Slipknot
We’re not saying Slipknot would be slinging burgers back in Iowa if someone hadn’t said, “Dude, we should so wear masks and maybe, I don’t know, some matching jumpsuits with our album’s UPC code on the back.”
But chances are most fans would be at least a little disappointed if they strolled on stage in street clothes. As bassist Paul Gray sums it up, “Nine dudes in masks? You’re gonna remember them over four dudes with long hair.”
He’s right. I’ve seen four dudes with long hair more than once and I can’t tell you who they were or what they sounded like. But Slipknot? That, I do remember.
It was OzzFest, 1999, and I had no idea who they were until that afternoon, but I was blown away by everything about them, starting with those ghoulish rubber masks and ending with the way they brutalized themselves, the stage, their instruments and everything in sight with an intensity I’d rarely seen.
Daft Punk
No one rocks a robot costume quite like this dynamic duo, whose look includes metallic gloves and helmets with elaborate LED displays. As Thomas Bangal
ter explained the robot look in Remix Magazine Online, “We did not choose to become robots. There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots.” In 2006, the French duo blew minds at Coachella when they hit the stage inside a giant glowing pyramid, rocking their LED headgear and dark leather jumpsuits.
The Aquabats
Led by the MC Bat Commander, the Aquabats wear matching superhero costumes with helmets and masks.
In an early review, the Los Angeles Times attempted to sum up the goofy appeal on the Aquabats experience with, “If ska is the bouncy balloon of ‘90s pop, the Aquabats fill it with helium and let go of the string.”
Their music has evolved beyond the helium-filled ska balloon since then, incorporating elements of punk and New Wave, but the spirit of silliness remains (as do the costumes). Their stage shows have been known to feature fight scenes with costumed villains and monsters.
Los Straitjackets
It’s been 25 years since the men in the Mexican wrestling masks took the surf-loving fringes by storm with “The Utterly Fantastic and Totally Unbelievable Sound of Los Straitjackets.” And they’re still going strong.
Blowfly
When Clarence Reid launched his alter ego in the early ‘70s with an album of sexually explicit spoofs of soul and R&B hits, “The Weird World of Blow Fly,” he appeared on the cover as a costumed supervillain with wings and a fly mask, holding a rubber chicken.
He cycled through a few more images and started spelling Blowfly as a single word before arriving at the sequined superhero look, complete with cape and cowl, as seen in the 2010 documentary on his life, also titled “The Weird World of Blowfly,” which Spin magazine reviewed under the headline, “Blowfly: Hip-Hop’s Dirty, Weird Uncle.”
The Residents
This avant-garde art collective is known for wearing giant eyeball helmets, top hats and tails, a signature look they premiered in the album art of a 1979 release called “Eskimo.” The original plan was just to wear those costumes on the cover and be done with it, but they soon realized the marketing genius of having such an odd, recognizable image.
They’ve worn many other costumes, though, throughout the years, from high school cheerleader outfits to costumes made of newspapers and a giant skull mask known as Mr Skull.
Misfits
Rolling Stone declared these Jersey punks known for incorporating B-movie horror and sci-fi themes into their album art, lyrics and look “the archetypal horror-punk band of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.”
In the early days, Glenn Danzig would paint skeletal patterns on his stage wear while Jerry Only complemented his dark eye makeup by styling his hair into a long point called a “devilock,” a hairstyle Danzig and Only’s brother Doyle soon adopted.
The Misfits skull is among the most iconic logos in the history of rock.