Alice Cooper Is Finally Ready to Tell the Truth

It’s 8:30 a.m., and Alice Cooper looks surprisingly serene for a man who’s missing tee time. “Golf is as addictive as crack, and I’ve done both,” he says, laughing, as he slides into a booth of an empty New York hotel bar. “If we’re on a regular tour, my guitar player and I play nine holes every morning before the show. But for a book tour like this, there’s just no time to do it. So I’ve got to go through a little bit of golf withdrawals.”

The performer, who is 78 and looks stage-ready in a black leather jacket, a frilly black pirate shirt, and leather boots, is trapped today in Manhattan, where he’s promoting his newly released third memoir, Devil on My Shoulder. His previous autobiography, 2007’s Golf Monster, staggered his life story between golf tips, and he long ago renounced his first, 1976’s Me, Alice, as a bunch of stories he made up about himself while drunk. This time, he says, he has told the fullest and most honest account of everything he’s lived through.

In Devil on My Shoulder, he details an idyllic yet unusual childhood in which his family, led by a preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ (also known as the Bickertonites), moved from the Detroit area to Arizona so Cooper could get relief from childhood asthma and his dad could do missionary work among Native Americans. He opens up about his urge for rebellion as he embraced sex, drugs, and rock & roll with his bandmates in the Seventies. The band pioneered theatrical rock spectacles in which his Alice character committed crimes and was “executed” onstage via gallows, cannon, and, most famously, guillotine — all while releasing some of classic rock’s most sophisticated and funniest FM radio hits: “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” and “Elected,” among them.

Cooper’s only device in the book is how his “Alice” alter ego serves as his conscience, reminding him to tell the truth about stories he exaggerated in the past. So while he retells the old “chicken incident” saw that made him (in)famous in 1969 for the thousandth time or so in Devil on My Shoulder, he acknowledges others’ accounts of it, too.

He also tells revealing stories about famous friends including John Lennon, Syd Barrett, and Jimi Hendrix, and discusses the inner struggles he felt in honoring his Christian faith amid his descent into drug and alcohol addiction, all leading to sobriety he’s maintained for more than four decades and a comeback that’s included hits (“Poison”) and star turns (Wayne’s World). The change in lifestyle has allowed him to maintain a schedule of close to 100 tour dates a year (he still has close to two dozen gigs left this year) and a positive outlook as he approaches 80.

“At this point, I’m just going, who cares? I did this. I did that,” he says during a wide-ranging chat. “You learn from your mistakes. I’m here. I’ve never been happier.”

I liked how the book’s premise has you correcting lies you’ve told about yourself. You’ve come around to Mark Twain’s adage: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
I can only talk about what I remember. I was with Dennis Dunaway last night. He’s my oldest friend, our bass player. I said, “You can’t remember what you said in 1965.” Like with the chicken story. I totally remember it the way I tell it. Dennis remembers it the way he tells it. Shep [Gordon, Cooper’s manager] remembers it the way he tells it. So whose story is right? I remember there was a chicken, and I threw it in the audience, and they killed it and threw it back. So that’s the guts of the story.

I do have the tendency to, let’s say, “decorate” a story. But there was nothing about the story that was wrong. The gist of it was there. The chicken was thrown, and the next day in the paper, it was “Alice Cooper Kills Chicken.” That’s when I realized that the audience wanted a villain.

Why did rock & rollers want a villain then?
We had all these Peter Pans and no Captain Hook. The audience wanted somebody dangerous. Jim Morrison was dangerous, but now he’s gone. The Stones were dangerous, but they were street guys. So there was something really dangerous about this “Alice” character that had a boa constrictor, makeup, and guillotines. If you can couple that with great music and hit records, wow, then they’ve got their villain.

You refer to Dennis Dunaway’s memoir and other books and about you in the book. Did you really read all of those things about yourself while writing this?
I didn’t have time to read books about me or anything like that. In fact, I just finished reading this book [Devil on My Shoulder] maybe a week ago, and there were two or three things in it where I went, “Oh, that’s not right.” [Note: Daniel Richler co-authored “Devil on My Shoulder” with Cooper.]

What were those?
One was I was talking about Elton John. I said that seeing Alice Cooper gave him the idea to be the next Liberace, but the modern day hip, cool, rock & roll Liberace. In the book it says, “And then Elton came running in saying, ‘I’ll be Liberace.’” When I read that, I went, “That sounded awful.” So I got in touch with Elton and said, “That’s not what was said.” I said that you could possibly take on that image. It’s such a great correlation between the two. Liberace was brilliant, of course. And so I went, “Well, so are you, of course.”

I found what you wrote about your childhood interesting. You wrote that Steven Spielberg graduated the same year as you at a nearby school. Did you see The Fabelmans, which dramatized that time in his life?
No, I never saw it. He went to Arcadia High School, where my kids went, and I went to Cortez on the west side. The thing I really understood about him was when I saw Close Encounters. There’s the big rock, and here comes the mothership and its clouds and all this color behind it. That’s exactly what it looks like when we’re going to have a haboob in Arizona. When it’s coming in, it’s black clouds and all this lightning behind it. I looked at it, I went, “Oh, he got that from our monsoons coming in because every night it looked just like that.”

You grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ, which believes in the Book of Mormon, but its followers are not part of the main LDS church. Did you grow up feeling like people treated you differently because of your religion?
Yeah, I guess so, since my dad was named Ether Moroni — that’s right out of the Book of Mormon. But he couldn’t be more down-the-middle Bible than anybody.

In the book, you wrote that your dad and grandfather believed Native Americans were the lost tribe of Israel.
If you read the Book of Mormon as a piece of history, it makes sense. My dad and my granddad basically only worked with the Sioux and the Apaches. And yeah, they believed that that was a tribe of Israel.

Do you believe that yourself?
I think it’s very possible. I would never canonize the Book of Mormon and say the Book of Mormon is legit. If it isn’t legit, it’s really well-written. Most people read the Book of Mormon, and they think [of] all the stuff about polygamy — that’s all Brigham Young. That’s all the Pearl of Great Price. There’s nothing in the Book of Mormon about any of those things. I totally believe the Bible, totally in every word, but I can’t say that about the Book of Mormon.

In the book, you wrote that your dad complained that Circus magazine described the band as “a bunch of gypsies,” possibly because of how his family was on the move during the Great Depression. How did you reconcile the band and how he saw it for yourself?
Well, my dad was one of those guys that really liked the Beatles and the Stones. He was a jazz musician when he was a kid, and he played saxophone. He was a jitterbug champion. My mom and he could really dance. His favorite bands were the Animals and the Yardbirds because they were blues-oriented.

He had no problem with the music at all. He had no problem with the show. He says, “What I have a problem with is the lifestyle. I can’t condone sleeping around,” which we were all doing, of course, “and drugs and alcohol.” He said, “But I’ve got no problem with your show. I know you’re not Satanic.”

Recalling when you were doing drugs and sleeping around, you wrote in the book that you justified your faith by telling yourself at the time, “This is what I need to be doing right now.” When did you close the loop?
When I got sober, finally, 43 years ago, what occurred to me was the fact that I needed my relationship back with Jesus Christ. I knew in my brain that if I had died, and I had not accepted Christ, that that was very dangerous.

When I did get baptized and become Christian, I told my pastor, “I think I have got to put Alice Cooper away.” And he goes, “Really? Do you think God makes mistakes?” I went, “No.” And he said, “Well, look where He put you. He put you in the camp of the Philistines.” He says, “You weren’t just in the gang, you were the Fonz. So rock & roll all you want, but live the lifestyle that the Lord wants you to live.” And I do. The two can live together.

Do you feel your upbringing led to Alice Cooper’s character in any way?
No, I invented Alice Cooper to be my favorite rock star. I said, “If I wanted to see my ultimate rock star, what would he look like?” All black leather, like The Avengers’ Emma Peel. What would the makeup be? It would be haphazard. It would be Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, kind of caked and broken, almost like a porcelain doll, and then with black under [the eyes] so it’s disturbing. You have to remember, this is 1970, so this is really pushing the envelope for what was going on, everything with David Cassidy.

That attitude translated well to the music, too.
It had to be great music. We take the music more seriously than the theater by far. If there’s a six-hour rehearsal, five hours is on the music because we’re up against Led Zeppelin. And back in those days, you had to be a great band before you even got a recording contract. We were more proud of the band than we were of the theatrics.

You wrote a lot in the book about your friendship with John Lennon. He’d tell you to speak about your political beliefs, and you’d refuse. How did he take that?
He got it. He’d laugh because it was funny. “You’re trying to save the world. I’m just trying to entertain them.” But he saw the Beatles, I think, as a gigantic voice. And I don’t think Paul thought like that. I don’t think Paul thought politically at all. I think Paul was like, “Yeah, I’ll talk against evil. I’ll talk against hypocrisy or whatever it is, but I’m not going to tell you who to vote for.” Ringo’s always “peace and love,” which are two great ideas. John was an activist, and he always tried to get all of his people to be an activist, a huge movement.

When I was a kid, I ran from politics. When my mom and dad were watching the news, I’d go in my room and put on Chuck Berry as loud as I could because I hated politics, just hated it. And I hope that rock & roll, my show, was an escape from it, not a magnet for it. I just said, “John, it’s the last thing I want to do.” And he got that. He understood it. There were other guys that wanted to be political. I just wasn’t one of them.

Ed Sheeran, who has kept politics out of music, recently said that he felt he had to speak out politically after what happened to Macklemore opening up his tour. How do you see that?
It’s still pretty much the same thing. I’ve always looked at Springsteen, Sting, and Bono as being humanitarian. The minute it gets to the point of saying who to vote for and why, and “Let’s do this and that,” then I start going, “OK, guys, now you’re not musicians anymore, you’re politicians.” And to me, I will never use that platform to tell anybody what to do. But I do vote.

You wrote about John Lennon’s assassination in your book, and you mentioned you were drinking then.
I was coking then.

When did the horror of his assassination hit you?
We were working on the Flush the Fashion album with Roy Thomas Baker in my pool house, so we’re getting high, of course. And all of a sudden it comes on TV. And I’m telling you, it was like a vacuum. It was just like, “That can’t be right. Why him? Why not somebody political?” And it wasn’t a political thing. But to this day, it seems unreal. I could understand somebody having a grievance over a politician, but John, “Give Peace a Chance”? And then after it all unfolded, you realize it only had to do with an insane fan. But it’s still just hard to digest that.

I know that all of my friends started carrying [guns]. I started carrying back then because all of a sudden it was a threat to all of us, even though we don’t put ourselves on the level of John Lennon. It scared a lot of musicians because it was a reality now. David Bowie used to talk about that all the time, and I kept going, “Dave, don’t talk about that.”

You continued with your career and sobered up. I noticed the last 40 years of your life are condensed into two chapters. Why is that?
Every time you end a book, then everything else happens after that. Maybe I’ll write a Volume Two in 20 years. Right now, everything is exactly how it should be.

You’re touring and you’re helping at-risk teens with your Solid Rock Foundation.
Nobody wants to work with teenagers because they’re a cyclone of hormones, but I understand it. I get it. And I love it now. I see a lot of these kids that start out being one thing, end up being another thing. We give free music lessons. It gets the kid off the street.

Reading the book, you seem like someone who’s never had trouble believing in yourself.
I never had trouble believing in me. I always had a lot of confidence. I made all the mistakes, but to me, it was like, you make the mistakes and then you move on. We always believed in what we were doing, and that was really it.