{"id":877684,"date":"2026-10-10T17:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T17:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/877684\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T17:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T17:44:11","slug":"alice-cooper-on-devil-on-my-shoulder-memoir-john-lennon-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/877684\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Cooper on ‘Devil on My Shoulder’ Memoir, John Lennon, Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s 8:30 a.m., and Alice Cooper<\/a> looks surprisingly serene for a man who\u2019s missing tee time. \u201cGolf is as addictive as crack, and I\u2019ve done both,\u201d he says, laughing, as he slides into a booth of an empty New York hotel bar. \u201cIf we\u2019re on a regular tour, my guitar player and I play nine holes every morning before the show. But for a book tour like this, there\u2019s just no time to do it. So I\u2019ve got to go through a little bit of golf withdrawals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe performer, who is 78 and looks stage-ready in a black leather jacket, a frilly black pirate shirt, and leather boots, is trapped today in Manhattan, where he\u2019s promoting his newly released third memoir<\/a>, Devil on My Shoulder<\/a>. His previous autobiography, 2007\u2019s Golf Monster, staggered his life story between golf tips, and he long ago renounced his first, 1976\u2019s Me, Alice, as a bunch of stories he made up about himself while drunk. This time, he says, he has told the fullest and most honest account of everything he\u2019s lived through.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Devil on My Shoulder, he details an idyllic yet unusual childhood in which his family, led by a preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ (also known as the Bickertonites), moved from the Detroit area to Arizona so Cooper could get relief from childhood asthma and his dad could do missionary work among Native Americans. He opens up about his urge for rebellion as he embraced sex, drugs, and rock & roll with his bandmates in the Seventies. The band pioneered theatrical rock spectacles in which his Alice character committed crimes and was \u201cexecuted\u201d onstage via gallows, cannon, and, most famously, guillotine \u2014 all while releasing some of classic rock\u2019s most sophisticated and funniest FM radio hits: \u201cI\u2019m Eighteen,\u201d \u201cSchool\u2019s Out,\u201d and \u201cElected,\u201d among them.<\/p>\n

\n\tCooper\u2019s only device in the book is how his \u201cAlice\u201d alter ego serves as his conscience, reminding him to tell the truth about stories he exaggerated in the past. So while he retells the old \u201cchicken incident\u201d<\/a> saw that made him (in)famous in 1969 for the thousandth time or so in Devil on My Shoulder, he acknowledges others\u2019 accounts of it, too.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also tells revealing stories about famous friends including John Lennon, Syd Barrett, and Jimi Hendrix, and discusses the inner struggles he felt in honoring his Christian faith amid his descent into drug and alcohol addiction, all leading to sobriety he\u2019s maintained for more than four decades and a comeback that\u2019s included hits (\u201cPoison\u201d) and star turns (Wayne\u2019s World). The change in lifestyle has allowed him to maintain a schedule of close to 100 tour dates a year (he still has close to two dozen gigs left this year<\/a>) and a positive outlook as he approaches 80.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt this point, I\u2019m just going, who cares? I did this. I did that,\u201d he says during a wide-ranging chat. \u201cYou learn from your mistakes. I\u2019m here. I\u2019ve never been happier.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI liked how the book\u2019s premise has you correcting lies you\u2019ve told about yourself. You\u2019ve come around to Mark Twain\u2019s adage: \u201cIf you tell the truth, you don\u2019t have to remember anything.\u201d
I can only talk about what I remember. I was with Dennis Dunaway last night. He\u2019s my oldest friend, our bass player. I said, \u201cYou can\u2019t remember what you said in 1965.\u201d Like with the chicken story. I totally remember it the way I tell it. Dennis remembers it the way he tells it<\/a>. Shep [Gordon, Cooper\u2019s manager] remembers it the way he tells it. So whose story is right? I remember there was a chicken, and I threw it in the audience, and they killed it and threw it back. So that\u2019s the guts of the story.<\/p>\n

\n\tI do have the tendency to, let\u2019s say, \u201cdecorate\u201d a story. But there was nothing about the story that was wrong. The gist of it was there. The chicken was thrown, and the next day in the paper, it was \u201cAlice Cooper Kills Chicken.\u201d That\u2019s when I realized that the audience wanted a villain.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy did rock & rollers want a villain then?
We had all these Peter Pans and no Captain Hook. The audience wanted somebody dangerous. Jim Morrison was dangerous, but now he\u2019s gone. The Stones were dangerous, but they were street guys. So there was something really dangerous about this \u201cAlice\u201d character that had a boa constrictor, makeup, and guillotines. If you can couple that with great music and hit records, wow, then they\u2019ve got their villain.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tYou refer to Dennis Dunaway\u2019s memoir and other books and about you in the book. Did you really read all of those things about yourself while writing this?
I didn\u2019t have time to read books about me or anything like that. In fact, I just finished reading this book [Devil on My Shoulder] maybe a week ago, and there were two or three things in it where I went, \u201cOh, that\u2019s not right.\u201d [Note: Daniel Richler co-authored \u201cDevil on My Shoulder\u201d with Cooper.]<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat were those?
One was I was talking about Elton John. I said that seeing Alice Cooper gave him the idea to be the next Liberace, but the modern day hip, cool, rock & roll Liberace. In the book it says, \u201cAnd then Elton came running in saying, \u2018I\u2019ll be Liberace.’\u201d When I read that, I went, \u201cThat sounded awful.\u201d So I got in touch with Elton and said, \u201cThat\u2019s not what was said.\u201d I said that you could possibly take on that image. It\u2019s such a great correlation between the two. Liberace was brilliant, of course. And so I went, \u201cWell, so are you, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI found what you wrote about your childhood interesting. You wrote that Steven Spielberg graduated the same year as you at a nearby school. Did you see The Fabelmans, which dramatized that time in his life?
No, I never saw it. He went to Arcadia High School, where my kids went, and I went to Cortez on the west side. The thing I really understood about him was when I saw Close Encounters. There\u2019s the big rock, and here comes the mothership and its clouds and all this color behind it. That\u2019s exactly what it looks like when we\u2019re going to have a haboob<\/a> in Arizona. When it\u2019s coming in, it\u2019s black clouds and all this lightning behind it. I looked at it, I went, \u201cOh, he got that from our monsoons coming in because every night it looked just like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYou grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ, which believes in the Book of Mormon, but its followers are not part of the main LDS church. Did you grow up feeling like people treated you differently because of your religion?
Yeah, I guess so, since my dad was named Ether Moroni \u2014 that\u2019s right out of the Book of Mormon. But he couldn\u2019t be more down-the-middle Bible than anybody.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the book, you wrote that your dad and grandfather believed Native Americans were the lost tribe of Israel.
If you read the Book of Mormon as a piece of history, it makes sense. My dad and my granddad basically only worked with the Sioux and the Apaches. And yeah, they believed that that was a tribe of Israel.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you believe that yourself?
I think it\u2019s very possible. I would never canonize the Book of Mormon and say the Book of Mormon is legit. If it isn\u2019t legit, it\u2019s really well-written. Most people read the Book of Mormon, and they think [of] all the stuff about polygamy \u2014 that\u2019s all Brigham Young. That\u2019s all the Pearl of Great Price<\/a>. There\u2019s nothing in the Book of Mormon about any of those things. I totally believe the Bible, totally in every word, but I can\u2019t say that about the Book of Mormon.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the book, you wrote that your dad complained that Circus magazine described the band as \u201ca bunch of gypsies,\u201d possibly because of how his family was on the move during the Great Depression. How did you reconcile the band and how he saw it for yourself?
Well, my dad was one of those guys that really liked the Beatles and the Stones. He was a jazz musician when he was a kid, and he played saxophone. He was a jitterbug champion. My mom and he could really dance. His favorite bands were the Animals and the Yardbirds because they were blues-oriented.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe had no problem with the music at all. He had no problem with the show. He says, \u201cWhat I have a problem with is the lifestyle. I can\u2019t condone sleeping around,\u201d which we were all doing, of course, \u201cand drugs and alcohol.\u201d He said, \u201cBut I\u2019ve got no problem with your show. I know you\u2019re not Satanic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tRecalling when you were doing drugs and sleeping around, you wrote in the book that you justified your faith by telling yourself at the time, \u201cThis is what I need to be doing right now.\u201d When did you close the loop?
When I got sober, finally, 43 years ago, what occurred to me was the fact that I needed my relationship back with Jesus Christ. I knew in my brain that if I had died, and I had not accepted Christ, that that was very dangerous.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I did get baptized and become Christian, I told my pastor, \u201cI think I have got to put Alice Cooper away.\u201d And he goes, \u201cReally? Do you think God makes mistakes?\u201d I went, \u201cNo.\u201d And he said, \u201cWell, look where He put you. He put you in the camp of the Philistines.\u201d He says, \u201cYou weren\u2019t just in the gang, you were the Fonz. So rock & roll all you want, but live the lifestyle that the Lord wants you to live.\u201d And I do. The two can live together.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you feel your upbringing led to Alice Cooper\u2019s character in any way?
No, I invented Alice Cooper to be my favorite rock star. I said, \u201cIf I wanted to see my ultimate rock star, what would he look like?\u201d All black leather, like The Avengers\u2019 Emma Peel. What would the makeup be? It would be haphazard. It would be Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, kind of caked and broken, almost like a porcelain doll, and then with black under [the eyes] so it\u2019s disturbing. You have to remember, this is 1970, so this is really pushing the envelope for what was going on, everything with David Cassidy.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat attitude translated well to the music, too.
It had to be great music. We take the music more seriously than the theater by far. If there\u2019s a six-hour rehearsal, five hours is on the music because we\u2019re up against Led Zeppelin. And back in those days, you had to be a great band before you even got a recording contract. We were more proud of the band than we were of the theatrics.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tYou wrote a lot in the book about your friendship with John Lennon. He\u2019d tell you to speak about your political beliefs, and you\u2019d refuse. How did he take that?
He got it. He\u2019d laugh because it was funny. \u201cYou\u2019re trying to save the world. I\u2019m just trying to entertain them.\u201d But he saw the Beatles, I think, as a gigantic voice. And I don\u2019t think Paul thought like that. I don\u2019t think Paul thought politically at all. I think Paul was like, \u201cYeah, I\u2019ll talk against evil. I\u2019ll talk against hypocrisy or whatever it is, but I\u2019m not going to tell you who to vote for.\u201d Ringo\u2019s always \u201cpeace and love,\u201d which are two great ideas. John was an activist, and he always tried to get all of his people to be an activist, a huge movement.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I was a kid, I ran from politics. When my mom and dad were watching the news, I\u2019d go in my room and put on Chuck Berry as loud as I could because I hated politics, just hated it. And I hope that rock & roll, my show, was an escape from it, not a magnet for it. I just said, \u201cJohn, it\u2019s the last thing I want to do.\u201d And he got that. He understood it. There were other guys that wanted to be political. I just wasn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tEd Sheeran, who has kept politics out of music, recently said that he felt he had to speak out politically<\/a> after what happened to Macklemore opening up his tour. How do you see that?
It\u2019s still pretty much the same thing. I\u2019ve always looked at Springsteen, Sting, and Bono as being humanitarian. The minute it gets to the point of saying who to vote for and why, and \u201cLet\u2019s do this and that,\u201d then I start going, \u201cOK, guys, now you\u2019re not musicians anymore, you\u2019re politicians.\u201d And to me, I will never use that platform to tell anybody what to do. But I do vote.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou wrote about John Lennon\u2019s assassination in your book, and you mentioned you were drinking then.
I was coking then.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen did the horror of his assassination hit you?
We were working on the Flush the Fashion album with Roy Thomas Baker in my pool house, so we\u2019re getting high, of course. And all of a sudden it comes on TV. And I\u2019m telling you, it was like a vacuum. It was just like, \u201cThat can\u2019t be right. Why him? Why not somebody political?\u201d And it wasn\u2019t a political thing. But to this day, it seems unreal. I could understand somebody having a grievance over a politician, but John, \u201cGive Peace a Chance\u201d? And then after it all unfolded, you realize it only had to do with an insane fan. But it\u2019s still just hard to digest that.<\/p>\n

\n\tI know that all of my friends started carrying [guns]. I started carrying back then because all of a sudden it was a threat to all of us, even though we don\u2019t put ourselves on the level of John Lennon. It scared a lot of musicians because it was a reality now. David Bowie used to talk about that all the time, and I kept going, \u201cDave, don\u2019t talk about that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tYou continued with your career and sobered up. I noticed the last 40 years of your life are condensed into two chapters. Why is that?
Every time you end a book, then everything else happens after that. Maybe I\u2019ll write a Volume Two in 20 years. Right now, everything is exactly how it should be.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re touring and you\u2019re helping at-risk teens with your Solid Rock Foundation<\/a>.
Nobody wants to work with teenagers because they\u2019re a cyclone of hormones, but I understand it. I get it. And I love it now. I see a lot of these kids that start out being one thing, end up being another thing. We give free music lessons. It gets the kid off the street.<\/p>\n

\n\tReading the book, you seem like someone who\u2019s never had trouble believing in yourself.
I never had trouble believing in me. I always had a lot of confidence. I made all the mistakes, but to me, it was like, you make the mistakes and then you move on. We always believed in what we were doing, and that was really it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s 8:30 a.m., and Alice Cooper looks surprisingly serene for a man who\u2019s missing tee time. \u201cGolf is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":877685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[32393,88,36077,216],"class_list":["post-877684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-alice-cooper","tag-entertainment","tag-memoir","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/877685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}