Alice Cooper (born Vincent Furnier February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans five decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood and boa constrictors, Cooper drew equally from horror movies, vaudeville, heavy metal and garage rock to create a theatrical brand of rock music that would come to be known as shock rock.
"Alice Cooper" was originally a band name with Vincent Furnier portraying the lead persona. In 1974, Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and launched a solo career. Since their first single release in 1965, when the band was known as "The Spiders", the original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with 1971's monster hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album "Love it to Death", which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies. Cooper's solo career began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. Expanding from his Detroit garage rock and glam rock roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles including: conceptual rock, art rock, hard rock, pop rock, experimental rock and industrial rock. In recent times he has returned more to his garage rock roots.
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage, The Rolling Stone Album Guide going so far as to refer to him as the world's most "beloved" heavy metal entertainer. He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal. He is also credited as being one of the first to bring storylined theatrics to the rock/pop concert stage in the late 1960s. Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock shows "Nights with Alice Cooper" and "Breakfast with Alice".
