Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper is a rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans four decades. Cooper drew equally from heavy metal, garage rock, horror movies and burlesque to create a theatrical brand of rock music that would come to be known as shock rock. "Alice Cooper" was originally a band name with front man Vincent Furnier. Furnier legally changed his name in 1974 to Alice Cooper and launched a solo career. Since their first single release in 1966 the original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1972 hit "School's Out" and reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies. Cooper's solo career began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare.

Early life and career
Vincent Furnier was born in Detroit, Michigan to Ether Moroni Furnier and Ella Mae McCart. Vincent has some distant French Huguenot ancestry; the remainder of his ancestry was English and Scottish. After Washington Elementary School, Furnier attended Cortez High School. In 1965, Furnier was eager to take part in the local annual Letterman's talent show and gathered fellow cross-country teammates from the school to form a group for the show. Their stronger second album, Easy Action released in 1970, met with the same fate as its predecessor. Music label Warner Bros. Records then purchased Straight Records from Frank Zappa and the Alice Cooper group was set to receive a higher level of promotion with this major label. It was around this time that the band, relocated to Cooper's birthplace, Detroit, where their bizarre stage act was much better received.

1970s
In 1970 the band was teamed up with fledging producer Bob Ezrin for their third album, the final of three in their original Straight Records contract, to be entitled Love It to Death. This album would be the first of 8 Alice Cooper group and solo albums done with Ezrin who is credited with having helped create and develop the band's definitive sound. Their first hit single soon followed, 1971's "I'm Eighteen".

1980s
Cooper's albums from the beginning of the 1980s, Flush the Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and DaDa, were not as commercially successful as his past releases. Flush the Fashion, produced by Queen Producer Roy Thomas Baker, has a sparse, edgy musical sound that was so unexpected as to have been truly mysterious to long-time fans, but yielded the US Top 40 hit "Clones. The album Special Forces featured a more accessible form of New Wave style.

1990s
In 1991 Cooper's album Hey Stoopid was released to a mediocre response, as well as the home video documentary "Alice Cooper: Prime Cuts" which chronicled his career story up to that point. He also appeared on the Guns N' Roses album Use Your Illusion I, singing backup on the track "The Garden". He also made a brief appearance as the abusive stepfather of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Cooper toured USA, headlining the pre-OzzFest concept "Operation: Rock n' Roll" festival tour.

2000s
A pause between studio albums ended in 2000 with Brutal Planet. The accompanying world tour was a resounding success, introducing Alice Cooper to a new audience and produced the live home video "Brutally Live" in 2001.
Personal life
In 1976, Alice married Sheryl Goddard. They have three children.
Details:
Melody Maker magazine once published a satirical concert review of Cooper in the form of a mock obituary, causing confused readers to think he had died. Once he had been tracked down, Alice Cooper reassured them: "I'm alive, and drunk as usual". Alice Cooper performs "Welcome To My Nightmare", "You and Me", and "School's Out" in The Muppet Show in March 1978. He brings what many believed to be his own monster puppets and plays one of the devil's henchmen trying to dupe Kermit the Frog and Gonzo into selling their souls. Cooper donated $27,700 to help redo the third O of the Hollywood Sign along with eight other donors. Alice Cooper once made an appearance on That 70's Show as himself.