Alice Cooper

Biography

Vincent Damon Furnier (born February 4, 1948 in Detroit, MI) better known as Alice Cooper is an American rock singer, songwriter, and musician whose career spans five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors, and baby dolls, he is considered by fans and peers alike to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock"; Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and macabre brand of rock designe...

Vincent Damon Furnier (born February 4, 1948 in Detroit, MI) better known as Alice Cooper is an American rock singer, songwriter, and musician whose career spans five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors, and baby dolls, he is considered by fans and peers alike to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock"; Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and macabre brand of rock designed to shock.

Alice Cooper is both the name of an American rock band formed in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1964 and subsequently the name of the band's lead singer who legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and had a solo career under that name after the band became inactive in 1975.

Alice Cooper, the band consisted of lead singer Vince Furnier (stage name Alice Cooper), Glen Buxton (lead guitar), Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar, keyboards), Dennis Dunaway (bass guitar), and Neal Smith (drums). After several years of little success, the band rose to fame in 1971 with the hit single "I'm Eighteen" and the album Love It to Death. Success continued with the popular single "School's Out" and the album of the same name in 1972. The band peaked in popularity in 1973. After the breakup in 1975, Vincent Furnier took "Alice Cooper" as his own name. Bruce, Dunaway and Smith went on to form the short-lived band Billion Dollar Babies.

Originating in Phoenix in the late 1960s after Furnier moved from Detroit, Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album Love It to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972 which reached No 1 in the UK. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.

Furnier adopted the band's name as his own name in the 1970s and began a solo career with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. In 2011 he released Welcome 2 My Nightmare, his 22th album as a solo artist. Expanding from his Detroit rock roots, in his career Cooper has experimented with a number of musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, hard rock, heavy metal, new wave, pop rock, experimental rock and industrial rock.

He released the album "Paranormal" in 2017. It contains 2 new tracks with the original members of the Alice Cooper Band from the early '70s. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.