{"id":2695973,"date":"2026-11-02T17:25:52","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T22:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/alice-unchained\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T17:39:50","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T22:39:50","slug":"alice-unchained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/alice-unchained\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Unchained"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">4<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Falice-unchained%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2695973&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>A new memoir by Alice Cooper, Devil on My Shoulder, recounts his unlikely rise from a scruffy Midwestern teen band to shock-rock superstardom and reflects on the themes that shaped his career: an embrace of postwar American consumer culture, deliberate contrarianism, and a taste for theatrical provocation.Cooper &#8211; born Vince Furnier &#8211; and his band broke through in the early 1970s with albums such as Love It to Death and Billion Dollar Babies, pairing snarling, guitar-driven rock with increasingly elaborate and grotesque stage spectacles that enraged parents and moral guardians even as they packed arenas.<\/p>\n<p>The book rejects the idea that Cooper has remorsefully repented for fame; instead it\u2019s a buoyant, often funny account that frames his story as a Horatio Alger-style climb, while also celebrating his later sobriety, renewed Christian faith, and devotion to golf. Cooper uses the memoir to correct myths from his earlier, exaggerated 1976 book Me, Alice, and he stages a running conversation with his onstage persona &#8211; Alice &#8211; who acts as a devil\u2019s advocate in parts of the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Devil on My Shoulder traces Cooper\u2019s childhood curiosity for horror, comics and pulp fiction, his early bands (The Spiders, Nazz), and his move to L.A., than Detroit, where their chaotic shows attracted Frank Zappa and, eventually, mainstream success under manager Shep Gordon and producer Bob Ezrin. The memoir explains how the Alice character &#8211; a deliberate attempt to be rock\u2019s villain &#8211; evolved into increasingly extreme pageantry (mock executions, guillotines, elaborate props) and how the persona eventually contributed to dangerous excess in Cooper\u2019s personal life.<\/p>\n<p>Cooper details his descent into alcoholism and drug use and his recovery in 1983, when he was finally able to disentangle himself from the toxic aspects of the Alice act. He also revisits highlights from a long solo career &#8211; hits like \u201cI\u2019m Eighteen,\u201d \u201cschool\u2019s Out,\u201d and later oddities and successes such as \u201cYou and Me,\u201d \u201cClones (We\u2019re All),\u201d a cameo in Jesus Christ Superstar, and the rehab-themed From the inside &#8211; arguing that his influence on shock rock has been both lasting and distinctively art-school in sensibility.<\/p>\n<p>Now in his late 70s, Cooper has redefined success: he hosts a radio show, plays golf daily, attends church, runs the Solid Rock Teen Center with his wife Sheryl, and continues to tour. The memoir blends affectionate, detailed memories of suburban youth and band life with media-savvy myth-busting and an often self-deprecating sense of mission &#8211; that, in Cooper\u2019s words, he was somehow meant to do a strange kind of good.<\/p>\n<p>Devil on My Shoulder: A Memoir is by Alice Cooper with Daniel Richler (Da Capo, 464 pp.). The review is by Eddie Dean,coauthor of man of Constant Sorrow: my Life and Times.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In the summer of &#8217;71, as rock royalty played for charity at the Concert for Bangladesh in New York, a band of cretinous dirtballs emerged from the Midwest&#8217;s teenage wasteland with a breakout album that made mincemeat of the fashionable save-the-world vibe. It was titled <em>Love It to Death<\/em>, and the cover showed the group preening in the glare of a searchlight: menacing, androgynous-looking ghouls who&#8217;d apparently made Halloween a 24-7 proposition.<\/p>\n<p>Their music featured buzz-saw guitars and a snarling lead singer named Alice Cooper, which was also the name of the band\u2014which, rumor had it, was an homage to a 17th-century witch burnt at the stake. In the opening track, &#8220;Caught in a Dream,&#8221; Alice detailed the band&#8217;s aspirations after years of commercial rejection scraping by in the underbelly of the music biz:<\/p>\n<p><em>I need a houseboat and I need a plane\/I need a butler and a trip to Spain\/ I need everything the world owes me\/I tell that to myself and I agree.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Strange thing is, these swaggering delusions of grandeur came true. Not long after, the Alice Cooper group was one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/former-penthouse-model-accuses-axl-rose-of-violent-1989-assault-rose-attorney-claims-incident-never-happened\/\" title=\"Ex-Penthouse model accuses Axl Rose of 1989 assault; Rose&#039;s lawyer denies incident\">biggest rock acts<\/a> on the planet. By &#8217;73 came <em>Billion Dollar Babies<\/em>, a concept album with a title song inspired by their wild ride from scuzzy garage band to shock-rock arena stardom. The record-breaking tour had a fleet of semitrailer trucks with 22,000 sparklers, 300 baby dolls, 58 mannequins, 14 bubble machines, a giant dentist&#8217;s drill and surgical table, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a guillotine, among an array of stage props.<\/p>\n<p>The band&#8217;s dream to make the big time at all costs stemmed from their hungry years broke and crammed together in a seedy L.A. group house, when they rejected with a proto-punk sneer the communal hippie utopia of the late &#8217;60s. &#8220;Our attitude was, &#8216;Be as one and all smell of patchouli?&#8217; <em>Nah<\/em>, we want Ferraris and a house in the Hollywood Hills!&#8221; writes Alice Cooper in his new memoir. &#8220;That was always the goal. We <em>liked<\/em> consumer culture.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A love of the dazzling abundance of postwar American pop culture, along with a streak of defiant contrarianism, are the defining themes of <em>Devil on My Shoulder<\/em>, dedicated to &#8220;the outsiders.&#8221; It chronicles the long and controversy-studded career of Cooper, still thriving today as rock&#8217;s mascara-eyed madman 51 years after the original band imploded and Alice went solo. The memoir is also a reminder of the status-quo rattling impact when the Alice Cooper phenomenon first hit and Cooper became the scourge of society\u2014the preachers and teachers and parents as well as rock critics who cried sell-out with the band&#8217;s every new outrage.<\/p>\n<p>Those expecting a dire mea culpa on the perils of modern celebrity will be disappointed. Cooper is one of rock\u2019s master raconteurs and most sociable creatures, from his droll cameos on &#8217;70s talk shows to hosting his current satellite-radio show. His memoir reflects an outlook both absurdist and upbeat (almost relentlessly so) and reads more like a Horatio Alger success story than any <em>Hollywood Babylon<\/em>-style gloom-and-doom expos\u00e9. It also celebrates his path to sobriety and salvation through his fanatical devotion to golf and his return to the Christian faith of his childhood\u2014not the typical pastimes of geriatric alumni of the Rock &#038; Roll Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n<p>The book also gives Cooper an opportunity to set the record straight. As he explains, he renounced his first memoir, <em>Me, Alice<\/em>, published at the height of his fame in 1976, because it consisted of drunken tall tales concocted on the fly to sell books. Long out of print, it was dedicated to &#8220;the other superstar, Richard Nixon&#8221; and included a foreword by Cooper&#8217;s minister father, Ether, who eerily predicted his wayward son would return to the fold.<\/p>\n<p>To help correct the lies and debunk the many urban myths that he helped stoke, from the Ouija board origins of the band name to a <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >notorious onstage chicken-killing incident<\/a>, Cooper enlists the help of his alter-ego Alice, who plays devil&#8217;s advocate in the narrative, his fact-checking interrogations rendered in Gothic font. &#8220;I&#8217;d like to describe to you my journey to Hell and back with Alice, because it&#8217;s not only rockers who lose their way,&#8221; writes Cooper. &#8220;Not to sound messianic, but in a perverse, crazy kind of way, I think I was assigned to do some good here. And if that&#8217;s not proof that God has a sense of humor, nothing is.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>At the heart of the story is an affectionate and granular portrait of growing up in early &#8217;60s suburbia and undergoing that era&#8217;s teenage rite of passage\u2014starting a rock band. Born Vince Furnier, he was weaned on horror movies and TV shows like <em>The Twilight Zone<\/em> and <em>Alfred Hitchcock Presents<\/em>, as well as comics and pulp fiction and Chuck Berry records. All fed his fertile imagination and obsession with the strange and uncanny.<\/p>\n<p>At Cortez High School in Phoenix, Ariz., Vince wrote a column for the school newspaper and was a star of the track team. In art class, he bonded with classmate Dennis Dunaway over the mind-bending Surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali, the outrageous provocateur who they&#8217;d seen on <em>The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson<\/em>. After Dunaway saw a concert by Duane &#8220;King of the Twangy Guitar&#8221; Eddy, the two decided to start a group with other students. The Spiders became a popular local garage rock act, with Vince&#8217;s father, a pastor and engineer, attending gigs and helping to design stage sets of webs and lights.<\/p>\n<p>As the renamed Nazz, the band headed to L.A. in the late &#8217;60s with little success. Another name change, due to another Nazz led by a young Todd Rundgren with a hit record out, showed their against-the-grain attitude. &#8220;We wanted to go in the opposite direction of the folksy or psychedelic trend of the day,&#8221; he notes in the memoir, &#8220;thinking we should give ourselves an old-fashioned, All-American grandma name like Betty Crocker, something deliberately <em>un<\/em>cool. And &#8216;Alice Cooper&#8217; just popped into my head.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Their unhinged, chaotic stage show with <em>West Side Story<\/em>-style street-fight antics found a fan in Frank Zappa, who watched them clear out an audience in minutes and signed them to a deal on his Straight Records label, a home for eccentric acts. Two albums went nowhere. It took a move to the Detroit area where other high-energy bands like the Stooges and MC5 had found a rabid following.<\/p>\n<p>Manager Shep Gordon encouraged the mayhem and myth-making, and producer Bob Ezrin boiled down their music to concise, hook-laden songs with Cooper honing lyrics with weird characters and surprise endings\u2014the storytelling devices, he notes, that &#8220;I learned reading O. Henry, listening to Chuck Berry and watching Alfred Hitchcock when I was young: always a twist at the end of the story, at the end of the lyric, at the end of the episode.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The result was a string of early &#8217;70s monster hits: &#8220;I&#8217;m Eighteen,&#8221; &#8220;School&#8217;s Out,&#8221; &#8220;Elected,&#8221; among others, that bottled for all time the joys and confusion of youth rebellion. The fusion of ballistic rock and off-the-wall theatrics was the band&#8217;s golden ticket, but it was the sound and fury of the Alice character that really set the band apart.<\/p>\n<p>In 1975 Cooper had legally changed his name, and he created his onstage alter-ego as pop culture&#8217;s most diabolical arch-villain. &#8220;At that time there were no villains in rock and roll,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;There were all these Peter Pans but no Captain Hook. And I said to myself, &#8216;<em>Well, I&#8217;ll gladly be Captain Hook!<\/em>&#8216;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The shows, which Cooper at the time described as &#8220;kinetic art,&#8221; grew into increasingly wigged-out rituals, with Alice as sacrificial scapegoat paying for his evil deeds in mock beheadings and electric-chair executions as audiences went wild. Cooper likens the crime-and-punishment themes to medieval morality plays, but he now admits the violence became too extreme.        <\/p>\n<p>Cooper&#8217;s alter-ego outgrew the band, and after he went solo, the Alice character nearly destroyed him as well. Even as he hobnobbed with celebs like his hero Dali, and Groucho Marx, who loved the vaudeville aspects of Alice&#8217;s antics, Cooper&#8217;s addictions to alcohol and cocaine deepened. It was 1983 before he got clean and able to finally separate himself from his toxic stage persona.<\/p>\n<p>Diehard Alice Cooper aficionados will tell you his music peaked with the original band. Even so, one of the memoir&#8217;s guilty pleasures is rediscovering gems from Cooper&#8217;s up-and-down, six-decade solo career where he has gained legions of new fans that span generations, and which has influenced countless shock-rock acts\u2014most of which have lacked the surreal and satirical art-school sense of humor that began with his garage band, The Spiders. Solo highlights include his 1977 ballad, &#8220;You and Me,&#8221; a Top 10 hit he crooned on <em>The Muppet Show<\/em>; &#8220;Clones (We&#8217;re All),&#8221; his 1980 nod to New Wave; his cameo as King Herod in <em>Jesus Christ Superstar<\/em>; and his 1978 detox album, <em>From the Inside<\/em>, detailing the horrors of his stint in rehab.<\/p>\n<p>At 78, Cooper has found his own version of the American Dream: Avuncular radio personality, daily golfer, churchgoer, and proprietor, along with his wife Sheryl, of the Solid Rock Teen Center in Phoenix, a nonprofit facility for local youth to pursue the arts. And he still tours. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been singing &#8216;I&#8217;m Eighteen&#8217; for forty-six years, and now the crutch that I&#8217;ve always used as a prop during that song as a nod\u00a0to Salvador Dali has taken on a second, ironic meaning,&#8221; he writes, adding: &#8220;I&#8217;m not hanging up my spurs at least until after Mick Jagger does.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>Devil on My Shoulder: A Memoir<\/em><br \/>  by Alice Cooper with Daniel Richler<br \/> Da Capo, 464 pp., $32.50<\/p>\n<p><em>Eddie Dean is the coauthor of Dr. Ralph Stanley&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/w\/man-of-constant-sorrow-ralph-stanley\/1111008043?ean=9781592405848\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summer 1971: Midwest band Love It to Death debuts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4468,"featured_media":2695974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/MixCollage-26-Oct-2026-11-45-AM-4186-scaled.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[548,544],"tags":[24501,24169,4439,52657],"class_list":["post-2695973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conservative-news-daily","category-the-free-beacon","tag-coming-of-age","tag-dystopian","tag-freedom","tag-rebellion-2"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/MixCollage-26-Oct-2026-11-45-AM-4186-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4468"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2695973"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2695977,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695973\/revisions\/2695977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2695974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2695973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2695973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2695973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}