Alice Cooper bio

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, February 4, 1948), is a rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans four decades. With a stage show that featured guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood and boa constrictors, Cooper drew equally from heavy metal, horror movies and vaudeville 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 frontman Vincent Furnier portraying the lead persona. In 1974 Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and launched a successful solo career. Since their first single release in 1966, when the band was known as "The Spiders", the original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1972 hit "School's Out" and reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album "Billion Dollar Babies". Cooper's solo career began with the popular 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 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 is universally recognized as one of the most influential artists in rock music, and he helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal and punk rock. 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".

Source: Wikipedia