FEBRUARY 9 • 2023 | 55

ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

I

n Alice Cooper @ 75, Gary Graff cel-
ebrates the career of the famed shock 
rock musician in a glossy, big-format, 
coffee table book with dozens of photos, 
packed into 75 short chapters, one for 
each year of Cooper’s life. The publisher, 
Motorbooks, began the series with David 
Bowie @ 75 and Elton John @ 75. 
 Alice Cooper first showed up on the 
nation’s radar in the early 1970s, when 
the band’s stagey violence delighted fans 
and outraged guardians of morality. 
While playing their music, 
the band members dismem-
bered their lead singer (or 
hanged him or electrocuted 
him) only to have him reap-
pear whole before the end of 
the song. 
That macabre sequence 
disturbed people who also disapproved 
of the male performers of Alice Cooper 
wearing long hair and garish, ugly make-
up. And what about the band’s name? A 
thoroughly-out-of-fashion female name 
that also became the name of the lead 
singer.

ALICE’S EARLY YEARS
Graff’s book, though, 
begins before Alice Cooper 
got that name. Vincent 
Damon Furnier spent his first 10 years in 
Detroit, long enough to establish his endur-
ing love for the Tigers, Pistons, Lions, auto-
mobiles and imagined violence. He suffered 
from allergies and asthma and a doctor rec-
ommended that the family move to a warmer 
climate. They went first to Los Angeles and 
then to Phoenix. Vincent’s father worked as a 
draftsman, while also serving as lay minister 
in his own father’s evangelical church. 
Inspired by the example of the Beatles, 
Vincent and a few of his high school friends 
decided to form a band, although only one 
of them, John Tatum, knew how to play an 
instrument. Tatum really did play guitar. 
Their band, The Earwigs, were already scor-
ing paid gigs as John Speer began to learn 
drums, David Dunaway to play bass and 
Furnier to sing and play harmonica (and 
later, trombone). 
A few name changes and changes of 
personnel later, the band chose the name 

continued on page 56

Gary Graff

STACEY SHERMAN

A Portrait of a 
Famed 
Shock 
Rock 
Musician

Review of the book 
Alice Cooper @ 75 
by Gary Graff.

LOUIS FINKELMAN 
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Alice Cooper @ 75

