The Myth of How Alice Cooper Got His Name Ended Up Helping His Career

Sometimes, a little bit of extra lore can be what transforms a rock musician into a bona fide rock star, and the myth around how Alice Cooper got his stage name is certainly no exception. Before Alice Cooper became the moniker for one man, Vincent Damon Furnier, there was the Alice Cooper Band. After so many people started mistaking Furnier as Alice because he was the frontman, he decided to adopt the persona for good, becoming the dark-eyed, crazy-haired shock rocker we know him as today.

But how did the band settle on the name Alice Cooper in the first place? Depending on who you ask, that answer lies somewhere beyond this mortal coil.

The Myth Of How Alice Cooper Got His Name

The Alice Cooper Band cycled through a number of potential monikers, including the Earwigs, the Spiders, and, finally, Nazz. After Todd Rundgren released his debut under Nazz and landed a hit with “Open My Eyes,” the band had to return to the drawing board to brainstorm a new name. Sometime in the late 1960s, the band visited the mother of their manager, Dick Phillips. Phillips’ mother was reportedly a medium who pulled out an Ouija board “to have a little fun,” according to Gary Graff’s Alice Cooper: The Godfather of Shock & Roll.

Frontman Vincent Furier asked the Ouija board who he had been in a past life. Slowly but surely, the planchette moved around the board to spell out the name “Alice Cooper.” This ghostly presence was supposedly a 17th-century witch. In that moment, the matter was settled: the band would be called Alice Cooper, in honor of Furier’s past incarnation.

In reality, the decision was far less supernatural and more imaginative on Furier’s part. “I just kind of said, ‘Alice Cooper.’ It just came out of my mouth. That was it. It had a quality to it—a little deranged, a little wholesome, a little spooky maybe. I conjured up an image of a little girl with a lollipop in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Lizzie Borden. Alice Cooper. They had a similar ring.”

That Wasn’t The Only Story That Elevated The Band’s Reputation

Claiming to be named after a murdered 17th-century witch that reincarnated itself into the body of frontman Vincent Furier was an effective way to develop street cred as an especially gnarly, gruesome shock rock band. So, even though the band didn’t come up with their name via Ouija board, they rolled with the story anyway. “It gave us a myth, a great story,” Furier, who had legally changed his name to Alice Cooper by then, later said. “People loved it even better than the truth.”

Interestingly, this wasn’t the only myth that the Alice Cooper Band decided to play along with in the early stages of their career. During one of their first major appearances at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival in 1969, someone threw a live chicken on stage while the band was playing. Cooper, a Detroit native largely unfamiliar with farm animals, threw the chicken back toward the audience, incorrectly assuming it would fly away. The chicken landed in the raucous crowd, which promptly began tearing the poor bird apart. Later, newspapers reported that it was frontman Cooper who killed the bird, tearing off its head and drinking its blood on stage.

Frank Zappa, who had just signed the band to his record label, called Cooper to see if the story was true. Cooper assured him it wasn’t, to which Zappa replied, “Don’t tell anybody. They love it.” Indeed, for the most part, Cooper didn’t have to try too hard to develop his reputation for shock rock. “I didn’t have to do anything. They were inventing their own Alice Cooper myth. People were just discovering Alice Cooper, and I was just discovering him, so we were all doing it at the same time.”

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