(Credits: Far Out)
Sat 18 October 2025 14:45, UK
Rock and roll has been no stranger to a few nefarious characters throughout its history.Â
While there are no doubt some truly heinous things that musicians have done, the biggest crime that the general public saw from people like Elvis Presley in their early days was how controversial the music sounded compared to the more sophisticated music of people like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Having that shock factor may have been an extra focus on those early days, but it was only a matter of time before someone harnessed that the right way.
Because right around the same time that Presley was strutting his stuff across the airwaves, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was right there beside him wielding his mojo stick. He may have been the same traditional blues singer that most people had been used to, but when you look at the lyrics in his tunes, not many people were talking about witchcraft, cannibalism, and the occasional novelty song like ‘Constipation Blues’.
Despite those songs being absolutely hilarious for their time, there was no way that anyone was going to go for that kind of music. This was around the same time when The Beatles were getting banned on the radio for the suggestion of drugs in their songs, so having someone outright talking about it was going to be a hard sell.
And while the Summer of Love did open the world up to new ideas, a young kid named Vincent Furnier did have a better idea for what stagecraft could be. He had been working with some of his buddies to make a more macabre version of a stage show, but as soon as the band changed their name from The Nazz to Alice Cooper, they became one of the most disturbing things to come out of rock and roll.
It wasn’t uncommon for them to mutilate baby dolls and have Cooper decapitated at the end of the show, but with the help of Bob Ezrin, they had the catchy singles to back it up. This was well before working with the likes of Pink Floyd, but as soon as Ezrin took a hold of their sound on ‘I’m Eighteen’, they at least had a format that was going to work with the teenagers in the crowd.
Even if they had a lot of hooks going for them, it was going to be a miracle if they managed to get anywhere near the top of the charts. This was still a time when the biggest names in the world were James Taylor and Paul Simon, but after they came up with the idea of ‘School’s Out’, they had made the unofficial anthem to summer for every single kid, rocketing the tune all the way to the top of the charts in the UK.
Once they had a firm handle on the charts, though, they weren’t going to suddenly go away, either. The likes of Kiss may have become a bigger household name by comparison, but when listening to Cooper’s back catalogue, all of his work with his band and solo career came from chasing after that magic, whether it was making the perfect Halloween song like ‘Feed My Frankenstein’ or showing the world his more sensitive side on ‘Only Women Bleed’.
There are a thousand ways that an act this disturbing could have flamed out on the charts, but Alice Cooper hitting number one meant more than having a hit song. The 1970s had already given way to people like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath dominating the album charts, and while people still held onto those hippy dreams from the 1960s, it was time for the world to see the darker side of life as well.
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