56 | FEBRUARY 9 • 2023 

Meet Gary Graff

JACKIE HEADAPOHL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Gary Graff admits that he’s been a “geeky music 
fan” since he was very young and listened to his 
older brother’s albums at his childhood home in 
Pittsburgh. “Music became always on the side of 
whatever I was doing,” he said.
He grew up at the Tree of 
Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, 
where 11 people were killed 
by an armed terrorist in 2018. 
Graff knew several of the vic-
tims and says the attack has 
had a “profound” impact on 
his life. 
After pursuing a journalism 
degree at the University of 
Missouri, he learned there was 
an opening for a music report-
er at the Detroit Free Press. “I 
was 21, and it was great timing 
and a great circumstance,” 
Graff said. 
What followed was a remarkable career.
Since being hired by the Freep back in 1982, 
he’s been a contributor to Billboard, the Cleveland 
Plain Dealer, Media News Group, Ultimate Classic 
Rock, Consequence among others, as well as to 
radio stations in Detroit and Milwaukee. 
He is the co-author of Neil Young: Long May You 
Run, Rock 'n' roll Myths: The True Stories Behind 
the Most Famous Legends and Travelin' Man: On 
the Road and Behind the Scenes with Bob Seger, 
editor of The Ties That Bind: Bruce Springsteen A 
to E to Z, and the series editor of the MusicHound 
Essential Album Guides. He is also co-founder and 
co-producer of the Emmy Award-winning Detroit 
Music Awards.
He calls himself a “hack-bass player.” He’s been 
playing since age 14 in small bands, including an 
in-house band at the Free Press back in the day.
Graff lives in Beverly Hills and is on the Board of 
Trustees at Adat Shalom Synagogue and serves as 
an usher on Shabbat Saturday. He has a married 
daughter and grandchild, and two former stepsons 
he’s still close with. 
Graff has had a friendly relationship with Alice 
Cooper since 1986, speaking every year and play-
ing the occasional round of golf. In October, Graff 
served as moderator at the Motor City Comic Con, 
where 600 people mimicked Wayne and Garth 
saying, “We’re not worthy” to Alice Cooper a la 
Wayne’s World.
“I have a great amount of respect for Alice 
Cooper,” Graff said. “He walks the walk and does a 
lot of good stuff.” 

continued from page 55

“
Alice Cooper.
” 
Graff records some of the fanciful 
legends about how that name came 
about and also the singer’s own more 
pedestrian version: Furnier liked 
the incongruous use of a woman’s 
name for an all-male group. The 
name sounded vaguely sinister to 
him. Besides, the singer wrote, “On 
top of that, everyone in the band was 
straight.
”
The band moved from Phoenix to 
L.A., where it struggled, but where it 
acquired a manager and a record label. 
Entertainment managers have often 
earned reputations for shady dealings. 
Luckily, Alice Cooper shook hands 
with Shep Gordon, the famously hon-
est Jewish (and Buddhist) philanthro-
pist and music manager, a man called 
“The Supermensch.
” 
According to Graff, Gordon and 
Cooper have worked together ever 
since and “never needed a piece of 
paper between them.
” 
Alice Cooper wrote, “We made a 
deal. ‘I do the music and the art thing. 
You do the money.
’ It was a risky pro-
cedure for most people, I realize, but 
since the day we met, my trust in Shep 
has always paid off.
”
Frank Zappa signed Alice Cooper 
to a record contract in 1969, explain-
ing, counterintuitively, “Invariably 

when they would play, thousands of 
people would leave the room, and I 
knew they had something.
” 
Graff records how the band’s name 
became the singer’s name. After 
performances, fans would point at 
Furnier and call out, “You’re Alice 
Cooper.
” It was not worth correcting 
the identification. 

THE ROAD TO SUCCESS
But plenty of people did not appreciate 
the music; some really did walk out on 
performances on the West Coast, so 
Gordon arranged for the group to go 
east to tour. At the Toronto Rock and 
Roll Revival Festival on Sept. 13, 1969, 
the band had a defining moment. 
Alice Cooper threw a chicken off the 
stage into the audience. The chicken 
did not survive. Rumors spread that 
Cooper had bitten the chicken’s head 
off on stage, and that became the most 
iconic moment in the band’s history. 
Alice Cooper characterized the 
band at that time as “stray dogs with-
out a home, just wandering around, 
playing where we could play.
” Gordon 
recalled deciding “the first city that 
gives us a standing ovation, we’ll stay 
there. That wound up being Detroit.
” 
They made their next album in an 
abandoned farmhouse in Pontiac. 
Fifty years later, Cooper created his 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

LEFT: Graff 
interviewing Andrew 
Lloyd Webber at the 
Fisher Theatre.

BELOW: Graff 
interviewing country 
legend Garth Brooks.

SCOTT MYERS

COURTESY OF GARY GRAFF

