Alice Cooper punished in SLC concert
From being electrocuted, to being hanged, to chopping off his head, Alice Cooper still stays true to his overboard style of non-stop blood, gore and theatrics for every concert he performs.
Some may ask “Who is Alice Cooper?” Alice Cooper was originally Vincent Furnier, and has been around for decades. It was our grandparents who cursed and shunned him, it was our parents who were there when he released his first album, “Pretties For You” in the 1960s. The name Alice Cooper was adopted by the group and was nothing more than part of the stage show.
This archived article was written by: Jake Cottam
From being electrocuted, to being hanged, to chopping off his head, Alice Cooper still stays true to his overboard style of non-stop blood, gore and theatrics for every concert he performs.
Some may ask “Who is Alice Cooper?” Alice Cooper was originally Vincent Furnier, and has been around for decades. It was our grandparents who cursed and shunned him, it was our parents who were there when he released his first album, “Pretties For You” in the 1960s. The name Alice Cooper was adopted by the group and was nothing more than part of the stage show.
There are different stories for where the origin of the name came from. One says that the group’s manager at the time, Dick Phillips’ mother pulled out an Ouija board and the indicator spelled Alice Cooper out. Another story is that Furnier just says that it’s an all-American name. The story behind the name was one to be remembered. It told the story for everything that their music was and what everyone hated. The story behind the name was that Furnier was a reincarnation of a woman named Alice Cooper who was burned at the stake centuries earlier.
Cooper has been known for putting non-stop theatrics during his concerts. Every show he puts on is a morality play. In every concert Cooper is killed for his sins he commits during the show. At first he was strapped down in the electric chair and executed but as the music progressed, so did his sins on stage and as his sins became worse, so did his executions. He hung at the gallows and eventually was being beheaded by a working guillotine, which is now set off by his own daughter on stage.
Cooper can be called a revolutionary in Rock n’ Roll. He set the standards for theatrics by putting on real shows and not just singing on stage. Just like most bands, the Alice Cooper group had problems but not with drugs like a lot of other bands in the era. They had a rule that no one in the band was allowed to do drugs so they stuck to beer. They drank a lot of it. In fact some of Cooper’s best stuff was written while he was in rehabilitation. Hits that include “Jackknife Johnny” and “Millie and Billie”.
For Cooper, times could be trying with disco making such a big entrance and punk rock growing less and less popular among parents and his original band breaking up. Cooper was quiet for a while … quiet as in he stopped performing. He did raise trouble by showing up on his parent’s favorite TV programs, to show that you can never get rid of him, shows such as Hollywood Squares.
He never really stopped performing and successfully released several more albums including his newest release “Dirty Diamonds” which he is touring. Cooper came through and performed at Saltair in Salt Lake City on August 12 as a pit stop to his normal tour schedule. While in Utah, he enjoyed his favorite pastime of golfing, which he took up after overcoming alcoholism.
During his show Cooper, lived up to everyone’s standards as one of the best stage performers with his non-stop theatrics and story telling including, his death at the guillotine and his resurrection as the Frankenstein monster he created on stage out of various body parts scattered across the stage with his head to complete the body.
