‘None of us thought about getting past 30’
Alice Cooper is rock’s great survivor and, at 73, has written an album which reflects on his wild days in Detroit. By
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 tells me. “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 long-time collaborator Bob Ezrin and co-written by Wayne Kramer, the 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 2,000 buildings in ruins. More civil unrest followed. Detroit became a byword for urban decay and a warning to others as to 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. Knocking out an album a year, sometimes two, the singer and his band played in such grand arenas as the “Fabulous” Forum, in Inglewood. 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… I was always on the road.”
Either that, or in the pub. Unusually for the Seventies, Alice Cooper claims to have eschewed illegal substances. Turning his attention to bending the elbow, instead, he gamely attempted to drink himself to death. Alcohol was “safe”, he reasoned, while pills and powders were “dangerous”.
Running riot in a rampantly licentious Los Angeles, the singer says that “if anyone was doing drugs, I certainly didn’t know about it”. It’s a dubious claim. Thinking aloud, I wonder if this determination to draw a line between drink and drugs indicates a mindset that is rather old-fashioned.
“I think you’re right,” he says. “But you have to remember that I had a career to protect. I worked really hard to get to that point. I had big records out and I was selling out all these big venues. At that point you definitely have something to protect. I was very aware of that, so I stayed very clean to anything like [drugs].”
Instead he spent his time at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, on the Sunset Strip, becoming a key member of the legendary Hollywood Vampires drinking club. On any given night, “a car would pull up and John Lennon would get out with Harry Nilsson. Along with myself, the club’s mainstays were Keith Moon, Bernie Taupin and Micky Dolenz.”
Hiring outfits from Western Costumes, Moon would arrive dressed as Hitler, or Zorro. To ensure privacy, club owner Elmer Valentine cleared a space for the group up in the roost. None of them ever saw daylight, hence the name. “At that point, nobody thought about getting past 30,” the singer says. “It was the party that never ended.”
Until it did. Following the release of a slew of albums that he can’t actually remember recording, Alice Cooper gave up drinking in 1983. Thirty-two years later the Hollywood Vampires were repurposed as the name of the supergroup in which the singer appears alongside guitarists Joe Perry, from Aerosmith, and long-time fan Johnny Depp.
What did Cooper make of Depp’s widely publicised libel trial last year, in which a judge concluded that Depp was, “on the balance of probabilities”, guilty of a string of assaults against his ex-wife Amber Heard?
“I know Johnny well enough to know
that he’s one of the gentlest, most harmless people I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “I only know him from being in the band, but I’ve been to his house, I record there, and I’ve never met anybody as nice as Johnny when it comes to people. Johnny is one of the classiest guys I’ve ever met.”
Maybe, but it’s Alice Cooper who is the pro. Punctual and engaging, not for the first time I’m left with the impression that there isn’t a question on earth that will give him pause. Still, it’s worth a shot. As our time together draws to a close, I ask the 73-year-old singer to nominate the words he’d like to see engraved on his headstone. He gives his answer without hesitation: “Here lies Alice, since from when he was teething, never stopped rocking ‘til he stopped breathing.”
STEUART BEDFORD, who has died aged 81, was a conductor and pianist known for his work with the composer Benjamin Britten; he made his operatic debut with Albert Herring, conducted the world premiere of Death in Venice and was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival for 24 years.
Bedford was working at Glyndebourne when, at the end of the 1966 festival, he was asked to play for a group of singers who were auditioning for Britten’s English Opera Group (EOG). “Although I was accompanying some excellent people, it was I who was asked to join the company,” he recalled with astonishment.
Soon afterwards Britten asked him to be assistant conductor for a recording of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an experience that proved to be marvellous preparation for working on live performances with the composer. He recalled how even during a busy festival Britten took the time to go through the music in the Red House library, a barn converted into a beautiful studio.
His conducting debut with the EOG came in Britten’s realisation of The Beggar’s Opera at Sadler’s Wells in 1967, which he also took to Expo ’67 in Montreal.
Over the next decade Bedford continued to work with the EOG, conducting not only Britten’s operas but also John Gardner’s The Visitors (1972) and Mozart’s Idomeneo (1973). Having been Britten’s assistant during the television recording of Owen Wingrave (1970), he conducted the first stage performance, in 1973, closely followed by the premiere of Death in Venice when Britten was no longer well enough to do so himself.
In 1976 Bedford made a studio recording of Paul Bunyan, a work that had been poorly received at its 1941 premiere in America, before the first British stage performance at Aldeburgh that summer. At that year’s festival, the last before the composer’s death, he also conducted the premiere of Britten’s cantata Phaedra given by its dedicatee, Janet Baker, and the English Chamber Orchestra.
The musical collaboration with Britten stretched beyond opera. In 1973 the pair played a Schubert piano duet for the Queen Mother, who was patron of the Aldeburgh Festival. “We got off to a frightful start,” Bedford recalled in the journal Opera Quarterly, adding: “It was difficult to say which of us was the more nervous.” They
soon settled down and he added that Britten, who was playing the top part, “was really in wonderful form”.
Steuart John Rudolf Bedford was born in Hendon, north London, on July 31 1939, the son of Leslie Bedford and his wife Lesley (née Duff) who sang in the original production of Britten’s opera Albert Herring. His grandparents included Herbert Bedford, a composer, painter and author, and Liza Lehmann, who wrote Edwardian parlour ballads, notably There are Fairies at the Bottom of my Garden. His brothers Peter and David became a singer and a composer respectively; both predeceased him.
The family had a summer cottage at Snape and were often in and out of Britten’s home. Bedford told of copying out music by Bach in the study and finding Peter Pears, Britten’s partner, a somewhat daunting figure. “I recall jaunts in their old Rolls, and picnics with them and my brothers,” he said.
Unlike some adolescent boys Bedford was never subject to Britten’s amorous affections, telling Humphrey Carpenter for his biography that the composer remained simply a family friend. He did, however, recall Britten’s juvenile behaviour around children, such as creating loud twangs with a knife on the edge of a restaurant table. On one occasion Pears helped the Bedford boys to make a potassium chlorate bomb at their house, which he then hit with a hammer, causing an explosion.
Steuart was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and was awarded a piano scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. Intent on being a cathedral organist, he was organ scholar at Worcester College, Oxford, but soon “got bitten by the operatic bug”. He conducted Albert Herring for the Oxford University Opera Club in 1964, receiving a congratulatory telegram from Britten on the opening night. One critic noted that he “succeeded in drawing some playing of real delicacy from his orchestra in the magical nocturne”.
After Britten’s death in 1976 Bedford remained artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, helped at various times by joint artistic directors, including the composer Oliver Knussen. While Bedford’s subsequent performances and recordings were dominated by the music of Britten, he went on to conduct operas by other contemporary composers, including Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which received its world premiere at the Monte Carlo Opera in 1996. He was also artistic director of the English Sinfonia during the 1980s.
In 2013, the Britten centenary year, he returned to Aldeburgh for a remarkable production of Peter Grimes that was staged on the beach, with Bedford expertly marshalling his forces from a dug-out. Two years later he had a notable triumph at Garsington Opera with Death in Venice, 43 years after the premiere. “Today his interpretation is perfectly measured, catching all the score’s febrile anxiety as well as its brief arcs of glowing lyricism and its brilliantly characterised vignettes of the Venetian scene,” observed Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph.
Steuart Bedford, who enjoyed golf and gardening, was appointed OBE in 2016. In 1969 he married Norma Burrowes, the Irish soprano. That marriage was dissolved, and in 1980 he married Celia Harding; they had two daughters.
Steuart Bedford, born July 31 1939, died February 15 2021