He legally changed his name to Alice Cooper, but when he takes the stage, his character is as much artifice as it is him. It's a long trip for the former Vincent Furnier, born in Detroit in 1948. "I think Alice Cooper has been woven into Americana now," he says. He might have shocked the tour, but what's more shocking is that Cooper and his shtick have come to seem mainstream. "I kept thinking, 'I've got to do it all in black with makeup,' " he says. He actually had a chance to go pro on the senior tour. "It would be like if Marilyn Manson suddenly became, like, the world's greatest badminton player."Ĭooper isn't exaggerating his skills. I ended up playing it every single day," a development he chronicled in his recent book, Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. "Golf seemed to be a real challenge, and then I ended up being good at it. The next thing you know, I have to find somewhere to spend my time, and being half-jock anyway, what can I do for five hours a day? He'd been "the most controversial rocker of all time - and then alcohol totally sideswiped me. How did that happen? By the '80s, his love affair with booze was dragging him down at the same time that his showbiz star was dimming, he says. But there is an exception - his late drinking buddy: "Everything you read about Keith Moon is true," he says, laughing.Ĭooper, 59, is a born-again Christian these days as well as an author and avid golfer. "Same thing about Michael Jackson." In fact, such stories are interchangeably applied to other rockers of his era, he points out, such as Ozzy Osbourne. "Maybe 30 percent of what's written about me is true," he says. His career highlights are interspersed with urban legends, like those that say he bit chickens' heads off onstage or that he's Captain Kangaroo's lost son. Nowadays, Cooper seems to be setting his scarier persona aside more often, but that still leaves him big laurels to rest upon. When reality becomes more shocking than Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper's fantasy shows. "Now I can come home, turn on CNN, and those guys are showing people's heads getting cut off by terrorists. "When I used to cut my head off and be resurrected the same night in stitches, that used to freak parents out more than anything," he says of his old stage show, which saw him punished by a guillotine. "Audiences are shocked full at this point, because of CNN."Ĭooper should know he's the most infamous shock-rocker of all time, a pioneer of the genre. One thing that Marilyn Manson and I both agree on: You can't shock an audience today," Alice Cooper says.
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