The name of the extraordinary new book is Alice Cooper @ 75. The question you’re asking: why would Detroit’s own shock-rock originator, who’s still performing and cutting off his head in arenas and stadiums around the world, want to call attention to his 75th birthday this Friday with a big splashy book?
The answer: he didn’t. “It isn’t an authorized biography,” says Detroit’s own Gary Graff, who crafted the words that connect 75 key events in Cooper’s life and career with a dazzling array of concert and candid photos, album covers, a gatefold timeline, and two pullout posters. “Alice and his camp had nothing to do with it, other than being remotely encouraging and helping when I needed a fact check here or there,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s not theirs. And when it’s not theirs, they don’t get involved, which is fine. Besides, it’s not like his turning 75 is a news flash.”
The book, officially released Tuesday, is the third in a series of illustrated biographies celebrating rock ’n’ roll immortals on their platinum birthdays, preceded by Bowie @ 75 and Elton John @ 75. It’s also the third book Graff has done with this publishing house, following Neil Young: Long May You Run and Rock ’n’ Roll Myths: The True Stories Behind the Most Infamous Legends, both co-authored with Daniel Durchholz.
“For this series they really are trying to pair the right people with the projects, people who have a real background with a specific artist,” explains Graff, who will sign copies of Alice Cooper @ 75 Friday night at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor before a screening of documentary Super Duper Alice Cooper. “So the Bowie and Elton books, for example, were both done by British authors. They came to me because of the Detroit connection.”
It’s hard to imagine they could have made a better choice. Not only has Graff, 62, been chronicling the rock ’n’ roll vagaries of Detroit since 1982, but he also has maintained a personal relationship with the man born here as Vincent Damon Furnier for over 35 years.
“It started in ’86 with the comeback, ‘The Nightmare Returns’ tour, after spending a few years finally getting clean and sober,” Graff relates. “If you remember, they started the comeback in Michigan. He did a series of four shows in smaller markets like Saginaw and Kalamazoo, culminating in two shows at Joe Louis Arena, one of which was broadcast on MTV as a Halloween special. That’s when I first got to meet him, spend significant time with him, start the connection. So from ’86 on it’s been talking to him at least once a year, sometimes two or three times, about specific projects or a concert coming to town. Or sometimes, just for the hell of it.”
Graff moderated Cooper’s Q&A session at the Motor City Comic Con last October. He has even played rounds of golf, Cooper’s all-consuming passion when not onstage, alongside him. “It’s a very pleasant experience because he’s a great conversationalist and a tremendous golfer,” he says. “But talk about ‘we are not worthy.’ I’m just trying to keep my ball going in the right direction.”
He doesn’t recall anything particularly surprising him during his intense research and writing of the text, but Graff says the experience did refresh his memory about the impact of Alice Cooper’s career.
“A lot of things I remembered that I had forgotten,” says Graff. “The idea is, this is your Alice Cooper primer. It’s set up in such a way that it’s what I call a ‘needle drop:’ you can stick your finger in at any point in the book, open it up and there’s a self-contained chapter there. But if you read it from front to back it’s still a nice, linear biography about him.”
And what a biography it is. “You know, Alice’s great saying, the mantra that he says very frequently, is, ‘We were the stake in the heart of the love generation.’ That’s what got me in. Not that I was anti-hippie myself. I got into music because I had a brother who was a hippie. But Alice Cooper was part of the counterculture to the counterculture.”
And that was mighty attractive to a whole generation of young music lovers like a teenage Gary Graff. “He was an act that my parents, and even my older brother didn’t like, so great. He can be mine,” Graff remembers. “I think a lot of people felt that way. Here was the next wave, a wave the youth of that particular era could make their own. Alice Cooper was certainly a rebellion, but I also felt he was more of an alternative. He wasn’t the Beatles or the Stones or the Yardbirds or Cream. Alice was one of the first bands that a generation of kids in the early ’70s could make their own.”
Yet even in the ’70s, when Cooper was choking chickens and chopping up baby dolls onstage and being boycotted as the embodiment of everything wrong with rock ’n’ roll, Graff says he was making some very wise moves. “What often gets obscured in the Alice Cooper legend and imagery is that he and his band, especially the band he had during the ’70s, wrote really good songs,” he notes. “‘I’m Eighteen’ and ‘School’s Out,’ those are enduring anthems. We’ll hear those songs forever.
“Plus, he had the good sense to cross over into other elements of society and pop culture beyond the rock ’n’ roll world. While people were going crazy over Alice Cooper getting his head cut off onstage, he was on Hollywood Squares. He was on The Muppet Show. Wayne’s World in the ’90s brought him back in a big way. He’s done commercials for Progressive Insurance, Callaway Golf, Staples. That’s my favorite part about him, that he shows up in places you never expect him to be. And being raised in Detroit helped give Alice some of his creative and artistic sensibilities, as well as his work ethic. He grew up on Soupy Sales, that kind of showmanship. He realized it was all just entertainment, and he’s an entertainer. He’s out here in our world, not just on rock radio.”
You could say the same about Gary Graff. After cementing his reputation here for years as rock critic for the Detroit Free Press, he now currently works for Billboard magazine, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Media News Group (including The Oakland Press, Macomb Daily and Royal Oak Daily Tribune), Guitar Player, ultimateclassicrock.com, Music Connection, VenuesNow, the United Stations Radio Network and, occasionally, Rolling Stone. He’s also the co-founder and one of the creative forces behind the annual Detroit Music Awards. The old saying goes that if you want something done ask a busy person, but when the publishers of Alice Cooper @ 75 told Graff they needed his entire 75-chapter manuscript written and submitted in five months or less, he had to tell them… yes?
“It was tight,” he acknowledges. “And I got COVID during it, too. But the good news for this project was that I had so much first-person material with Alice. But I guess I’m efficient. Because I kept up with all my TV shows during that time, too. We even binged occasionally. But yeah, I’m just kind of wired to be productive.”
While Cooper won’t be at the Michigan Theater — “He’ll be there in spirit, on the big screen,” Graff notes — his continuing presence around the world could indirectly help promote the book. “He’ll be on tour playing stadiums with Def Leppard and Motley Crüe this year,” says Graff. “Another tour in the spring and summer in Europe, Australia. He’s still very much active. And I think there’s a convincing case to be made that Alice is performing at a higher level now than he ever has. Now his shows are very professional, very slick in a blood-soaked stage kind of way. I think he enjoys being Alice Cooper more than he ever has now that he can separate the character from the man.” On Monday, as this story was going to press, Cooper announced a joint tour with fellow shock rocker Rob Zombie, which makes a stop at Pine Knob Music Theatre on Sept. 5.
What’s more, “The last time I talked to him he told me he has three albums in the works, one we’ll probably hear this year (as a followup to his surprising 2021 Detroit Stories).” That’s not the only thing Graff wants to hear from Cooper and his camp.
“I would be very surprised if they didn’t like the book,” he says. “Or if they found something objectionable. Alice is an open book. The worst parts of his life he’s revealed many times over.”
He adds, “He is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Super smart, very spiritual. One of the things I respect about him most is that he walks his walk louder than he talks his talk. He’s living his life and his faith without having to be celebrated for that. And I think that’s commendable.”
Acclaimed Detroit rock journalist Gary Graff will be signing copies of his new book, Alice Cooper @ 75, Friday, Feb. 3, at the Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor. Doors open at 7 p.m. for book signing, followed at 7:30 by a pre-screening discussion with Graff and Rob Reinhart before a showing of the 2014 documentary Super Duper Alice Cooper at 8. See michtheater.org for tickets and information.
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