The 75-year-old Detroit-born rocker Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier) has made himself, through shock and a lot of eye makeup, into one of the icons of rock. More specifically, an icon of rock performance. He is vaudeville with an electric six-string behind him.
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With dozens of albums to his credit, Cooper is also one of the most successful rockers of his generation. He’s sold more than 50 million albums and he’s wowed many more from the stage with his pyrotechnics and rebellious antics.
But what does Cooper have to say about the life he’s created? What are his thoughts on life, love, his career, his craft, and the world at large? Here are the 20 best Alice Cooper quotes.
1. “Mistakes are part of the game. It’s how well you recover from them, that’s the mark of a great player.”
2. “If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are.”
3. “I’m very romantic, I’m extremely romantic. I date my wife.”
4. “I always think that you should be striving to write your best song.”
5. “I appreciate an audience that reacts to the music, even if they jump on stage and try to beat us up, I think that’s a fantastic reaction. I think that they’re really hearing something then.”
6. “My granddad was an evangelist, and my grandma, she was as tough as nails. She watched ‘American Bandstand’ every day when she was in her 80s, 90s. She loved rock music. I never had anyone in my family that was anti-rock n’ roll.”
7. “The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.”
8. “I have never made fun of religion. Religion is something I don’t even want to mess with because I am really afraid of the clouds opening up and my being struck by lightning.”
9. “If you confine it, you’re confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous so that anything can happen, like we don’t want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen.”
10. “People that haven’t seen us yet are shocked because they think that Alice Cooper must be a female folksinger. They don’t expect the whole thing.”
11. “From the moment I leave my house or my hotel room, the public owns me. The public made Alice Cooper and I can’t imagine ever turning my back on my fans.”
12. “On stage, I’m this figure, this actor, who does things that people aren’t used to seeing and I relish in that reaction. In real life, though, I play golf, I shop and I walk around with no makeup on and my hair in a ponytail. I may not be the typical middle-aged Joe, but I’m closer to normal than you think.”
13. “The two most joyous times of the year are Christmas morning and the end of school.”
14. “My fastest time in high school was a 4:29 mile. I think cross-country has something to do with my longevity in my business. When you’re in an eight-mile race, you never give up.”
15. “They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I’ve written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I’d wake up and they’d be gone.”
16. “The minute you step onstage, you get eight feet taller.”
17. “Why be boring? Have some fun. Rock shows should be like movies: I don’t go to a movie hoping it’ll change my life.”
18. “The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes, and switchblades.”
19. “If it’s total freedom, I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer, with the performer projecting something he doesn’t even have to play.”
20. “Oh, I love to lie. That’s one of my favorite things in the world, coming up to somebody, especially press people, and telling them some enormous lie that couldn’t possibly be true.”
Photo by Didier Messens/Redferns
