10 Most Infamous People In Rock Music History
3. Alice Cooper
In the days before hard rock, the Summer of Love was populated by a more wholesome flavor of music. Though you had bands like the Rolling Stones that were mining a more bad boy version of what rock had to offer, this was the year of the guitar hero, looking to save rock and roll from a teenage fad and make it something much more important for music at large. Heroes are only as good as their villains, and Vincent Furnier gave us the first sinister figure of rock with Alice Cooper.
As much as Mick Jagger may have been a bad boy in the eyes of concerned parents, Cooper was ripped straight out of your nightmares, donning horrifying makeup whenever he took to the stage and writing songs about much more macabre subjects, from being trapped in a mental institution to killing children.
Though the whole thing was being filtered through Cooper’s warped sense of humor, he was still looking to shock the public at every turn, from the live shows where he would be killed in many different grotesque ways to promoting his string of dates in England by sticking a naked picture of himself on a double decker bus and having it break down in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Rock and roll has always been about having fun, but Alice found out a long time ago that it’s a lot easier to be remembered if you tap into something a little more gruesome.