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Alice Cooper, the early days, and being hated

Rock Hall inductees recall rust belt, Ghoulardi and a Midwest work ethic

Before shock-rock superstardom beckoned for singer Alice Cooper and his group, which included two Northeast Ohio natives, they were just another garage band.

Literally. They used to rehearse at the Phoenix home of guitarist Glen Buxton's family, in the attached garage.

"When the pictures on the wall in the living room would start to rattle, my mom would go out and tell them to turn it down," recalled Janice Davison, Buxton's younger sister.

"She'd go back in the house, and pretty soon they'd turn it up a bit more and a bit more and a bit more, until the pictures started to rattle again."

The high-decibel hijinks paid off eventually.

Alice Cooper, which was the name of the band as well as the stage name of frontman Vincent Furnier, stormed the charts in the 1970s with sneering anthems such as "Eighteen" and "School's Out."

Inductees recall rust belt, Ghoulardi

The group became a top draw on tour with its darkly theatrical brand of rock 'n' roll, complete with mock executions onstage via guillotine and electric chair. Cooper was fond of sporting a boa constrictor around his neck, too.

The band will be ushered into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during the 26th annual induction ceremony Monday night at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Set to be enshrined alongside Cooper himself are drummer Neal Smith, bass player Dennis Dunaway, keyboardist Michael Bruce and the late Buxton, who died of complications from pneumonia in October 1997, a few weeks shy of his 50th birthday.

"The original band did all the groundbreaking work," Cooper, 63, said by phone recently from his Phoenix home.

"We were the ones who started in a garage, brought theater to rock 'n' roll and paid the price for it. I mean, people hated us. Not just the press. Other rock 'n' roll fans hated us. They didn't like the idea of where we were taking the future of rock."

Reviewing a 1973 concert by the group at Cleveland's Public Hall, The Plain Dealer's Jane Scott wrote:

"Alice Cooper bounces out on stage in see-through white. He spears a baby doll, chops off its arms and legs and gleefully tosses it to the audience. He's...way beyond. He's sadistic. He's unisex gone berserk."

Originals from Akron

The band had deep rust belt roots. Cooper was raised in Detroit, and Buxton and Smith grew up in Akron.

"To this day, I still have that Midwestern work ethic, and so did the other guys in the band," Cooper said.

"People would throw stuff at us on the stage," Smith, 63, said in a separate interview. "Hey, we're Midwest guys. We started throwing it back!"

Buxton and Smith never crossed paths during their childhood years here, although they became fast friends in Arizona. Their families moved there in the early 1960s.

"We were long-haired musicians in Phoenix, back in the days when there weren't too many people who looked like that," Smith said. "Glen was like the brother I never had."

Buxton's first six-string was a Roy Rogers toy guitar. By the time he was 12, he was taking lessons in Akron on a proper acoustic guitar.

On one occasion, he offered to play a song for his mother.

"That was very good," she told him. "What's the name of it?"

"Bicycle Built for Two," Buxton said.

The memory still makes his sister laugh.

"His timing was so off, you couldn't tell," Davidson said.

Buxton "was a total original," Cooper said.

"He wrote the riff on 'School's Out,' one of the most memorable riffs of all time. And he had his moment of being an absolutely brilliant guitar player. Nobody played like him... Glen was the heart and soul of the band."

Smith, who had polio as a young boy, started playing drums when he was 9. As a teenager, he performed in "The Fantasticks" and "The Threepenny Opera" at Akron's Weathervane Playhouse.

"The surf sound was huge in the early '60s," Smith said. "When my mom said we were moving to Arizona, I thought, 'Great — closer to the West Coast!'"

During Alice Cooper's heyday, Smith had 22 drums in his monstrous set.

"When he used to stand on top of his seat, lift up his arms and twirl his sticks, he looked like some kind of strange sculpture," Cooper said.

"He was the ultimate rock star. When everybody else brought a sports car, Neal had a white Bentley with a leopard-skin interior. But he was a consummate pro, too. When it was time to play, he was ready to play."

Schoolboys on stage

Cooper met Buxton and Dunaway at Phoenix's Cortez High School, where all of them were on the staff of the school newspaper. (Cooper and Dunaway ran cross-country and track, too.) They started a band in 1964.

At first they were known as the Earwigs. Then the Spiders, when Bruce joined. Then the Nazz, when Smith was brought into the fold.

In 1968, they rechristened themselves Alice Cooper and landed a record deal from Frank Zappa. Their debut album, "Pretties for You," came out the following year.

Early on, their outrageous stage show overshadowed their music.

"People said, 'If you have to do theater, you've not a very good band,'" Cooper said.

"It took a long time for our records to sink in... Then Bob Dylan mentioned that I was one of his favorite lyricists. And John Lennon said that 'Elected' was one of his favorite records.

"When people like that start talking about your records — not your theatrics, but your songs — then all of a sudden other people go, 'Oh, OK!'"

Everyone in the band loved horror movies.

"The first time I ever saw 'Dracula' was on Ghoulardi's TV show," Smith said. "That band's theatrical dimension... went back to those movies, without a doubt."

They also bonded over Busby Berkeley musicals and Bowery Boys films, of all things.

"If there ever was a guy who was right out of the Bowery Boys, it was Glen," Cooper said. "He was a smart aleck."

Buxton lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle to the hilt.

"We both drifted into alcoholism at the same time," said Cooper, who has been sober since the early 1980s.

"We were drinking two six­packs apiece a day, which seemed like par for the course in the '70s for a rock band. We proved that you could live on beer, with no food and no sleep. I watched Glen get progressively more and more into harder liquor, and then into harder things. Even when he was in the band at the end, he wasn't really there."

Friends through the years

By 1974, the original lineup had run its course. Cooper recorded a solo album, "Welcome to My Nightmare," while other band members pursued their own projects.

They parted on good terms and remained that way through the years, Cooper said.

"We wished each other the best of luck," he said. "I don't think there ever was a point wehre we weren't talking or where we didn't know there would be a reunion. We just didn't know when."

The surviving band members will perform at the Rock Hall ceremony, with Steve Hunter filling in for Buxton on guitar.

"I want to do more shows with them — not in big venues, but in clubs, like where we started," Cooper said.

He's recording a sequel to "Welcome to My Nightmare" with producer Bob Ezrin, who started working with Alice Cooper on the 1971 album "Love It to Death."

Offstage, Cooper morphed into an avid golfer and respectable businessman. He brought his Cooper'stown restaurant chain to Cleveland in 2002, but the eatery across from the Gateway sports complex closed five years later. The flagship Cooper'stown is still open in Phoenix.

For Smith, now a real estate agent in Connecticut, the Rock Hall recognition is bittersweet without Buxton.

"It would've been nice to have this happen while Glen was still with us," Smith said.

Alice Cooper became eligible for the Rock Hall in 1994, although the nominating committee didn't put the band on the ballot until last year.

After parting ways with the group, Buxton played with other bands, none of which came close to Alice Cooper's success. Less than a week before he died, he performed with Smith and Bruce in Houston.

Latter-day headbanger Rob Zombie will induct Alice Cooper into the Rock Hall.

Davison, 58, and her older brother, Ken, plan to attend the ceremony.

"Glen didn't want to do anything else with his life except play guitar," Davison said. "If he didn't have a nickel to his name, he still had a guitar."

And what would Buxton make of the Rock Hall fuss?

"He would flip his finger," Cooper said, chuckling at the thought.

"And he would go, 'It's about time!'"