DETROIT LEANING
Detroit, Michigan’s Motown, shaped both Vincent Furnier and Alice Cooper. Evangelist’s son Vince was born and raised in the city. Asthmatic from birth, he suffered with ill-health. Yet, while active in his father’s Christian Restorationist church, his soul was awakened to significantly more earthly delights.
“I discovered rock’n’roll when I was about six,” he recalls. “My uncle played me a Chuck Berry song and I was like: ‘Wow, what was that?’ It was the first song I ever heard that was driven by guitar rather than piano or horns. It was different, and it just stuck with me. Real, straight-ahead hard rock’s in the Detroit DNA somehow. It’s where they make the cars, it’s where all the heavy machinery is, and people end up wanting their music like that.”
As the sixties dawned, Detroit offered everything that young Vince desired from life: “It was always a good sports city and it was always a good music city.” But his parents, concerned for their son’s health, had other ideas.
Following a move to California, the Furniers ultimately settled in Phoenix, where Arizona’s arid conditions helped Vince blossom steadily from sickly child to stalwart member of Cortez High School’s track, field and cross-country teams.
In 1964, having fallen under the spell of The Beatles, Vince formed The Earwigs with fellow Cortez track team members John Speer, Phil Wheeler, (art class surrealist) Dennis Dunaway and (the band’s only musician) Glen Buxton on guitar. Impressed by the kind of female attention that standing on a stage brought them, The Earwigs persisted (entering talent shows and local Battle Of The Bands competitions), became The Spiders (enjoying a local hit single with Don’t Blow Your Mind) and then The Nazz, before relocating to Santa Monica in ’67. Finally settling on a line-up of Buxton (lead guitar), Dunaway (bass), Neal Smith (drums) and Michael Bruce (rhythm guitar), Vince renamed the band and – crucially – himself, Alice Cooper.
“Real, straight-ahead hard rock’s in the Detroit DNA somehow.”
Alice Cooper
Setting out to simultaneously freak out and out-freak Los Angeles, the quintet dressed up, messed up and generally outraged all that they surveyed. They signed to Frank Zappa’s Straight Records and recorded a pair of feet-finding, if largely audience-baffling, albums: Pretties For You (’69) and Easy Action (’70). But Los Angeles simply didn’t ‘get’ them. It was time for Alice to go home; to let the Motor City work its magic.
“The first time we went to Detroit was because LA had had enough of us,” today’s Alice readily admits.”They couldn’t understand what we were doing because they were all on acid and we were scary. We were a bad trip. It was the same in San Francisco. So we went to the first place that gave us a standing ovation.
“We played the Saugatuck Pop Festival [4-5 July ’69], and I’d never heard of The Stooges, MC5 or Ted Nugent and the Amboy Jukes. They weren’t national bands,
