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Fans know Alice Cooper as the "Godfather of Shock Rock," but before he became the rock music icon he is today, he was born Vincent Damon Furnier. While sitting down with Classic Rock, Cooper opened up about the difference between Alice, his on-stage alter-ego, and his true self.
"I can turn Alice on and off at will," he revealed. "I used to be a lot different, when I drank and took drugs I didn’t know where I began and Alice ended."
"I was living in that chaos for quite a while," he continued. "When I got sober I could separate the two; I could be talking about a movie when the curtain goes up, and in the time I turn from left to right I become Alice. It’s a different posture, brain, look, everything. When the curtain comes back down and the audience isn’t there anymore, I’ll go right back into talking about the movie as myself. I can turn the character on and off. That’s something I had to learn to do."
While Cooper is known for his stage antics, behind-the-scenes those who know him find him to be kind and mild-mannered. As the COVID-19 pandemic began almost two years ago, the rock star set aside money for his touring crew. “We could see that it was… something,” he recently told Forbes. “So we put money aside as a backup for them. Because we knew that their unemployment would run out, you know? And then they’d have something to go to. I think all responsible bands did that. Hopefully."
"These are people we live with. We work with them every day," he added. "The guys that run the stage are as important as the guys that play guitar. So we made sure that everybody was covered. And that was really important. Hey, we thought this thing was gonna last a month! 18 months?! Unreal.”
Unfortunately, Cooper himself would contract COVID amid the ongoing pandemic. “For three weeks, I felt like I went 12 rounds with [boxing legend] Roberto Duran; I was just beat up," he said of his experience with the virus.