Alice Cooper is sober, polite, mild-mannered and softly spoken. He is witty and sociable and has become a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur, and a popular radio DJ. Also, unusually for a rock and roll star, Cooper has remained married to Sheryl since 1976, and they have three children. His eldest daughter performs at his shows, either being decapitated or in some other gory stunt.
Cooper has also written a book about his relationship with golf. In Golf Monster: My 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict, he recalls how the sport saved him from his alcoholic problems. Those close to him know just how important golf is to him. In 2015, he was presented with a gift usually given by those looking for unique anniversary gifts by year. He was presented with an Eternity Rose gold dipped golf ball and tee set by Rebel FM, during his Australian tour.
Yet the legend that is Alice Cooper began delighting fans more than 50 years ago with his distinctive vocals and his villainous antics onstage and alcoholic antics offstage. Born in Arizona, USA and a member of the Alice Cooper band in the late 1960s (which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011), his reputation for shocking behaviour, came when someone threw a live chicken on stage at one of the band’s concerts and Cooper, thinking it would fly off, picked it up and threw it in the air. Instead, it fell among the audience and was torn apart. The America press said that Cooper, the lead singer, had killed the chicken on stage and drank its blood.
In the 1970s, Cooper took on the band’s name as his own when his solo career began. He hit the headlines in 1972 with his number one hit School’s Out with his use of guillotines and vast quantities of fake, which lead to a campaign to ban him from performing in the UK, which of course had the opposite effect, offering Cooper free publicity and a surge in fan numbers who acknowledged his villain act and the humour of the glitz and the glamour juxtaposed with the blood and guts that led to his honorary title of The Godfather of Shock Rock.
Cooper’s alcohol problems began in the Alice Cooper band years, and he was soon drinking a bottle of whisky daily to deal with his struggle with where he ends, and the character of Alice began. Now, Alice is left on stage. To aid in his recovery from alcohol, Cooper tries to play a couple of rounds of golf each day and has a handicap of seven. He has teed off with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh and has been an ambassador for Callaway golf clubs.
The distance between his hellraising, dark villain character and who he really is, is absurd. It’s a fact that causes him to laugh. Some people don’t understand this Monty Python-esque humour, except the British.