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Forget about Marilyn Manson and the Sex Pistols; when it came to sending shockwaves through the self-proclaimed enforcers of global morality, Alice Cooper essentially authored the manual.
Embracing a dubious history cloaked in urban myth and skillfully crafted tales involving witches, ouija boards, dismembered chickens, ambiguous genders, and necrophilia, Alice Cooper managed to provoke the forces of propriety like never before during his easygoing transition in the early 70s from cult status to mainstream fame.
Cooper’s notoriety was such that in May 1973, Leo Abse, then Labour MP for Pontypool, blurted out in the House of Commons: “I see his [Cooper’s] performance as inciting infanticide among his underage fans. He deliberately seeks to engage these children in sado-masochism. He is peddling a culture reminiscent of concentration camps. Pop music is one thing, but anthems of necrophilia are another.”
The nation’s leading figure of censorship, Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, eagerly supported Abse’s efforts to ban Alice Cooper from the UK. Yet, as public reaction spiraled towards hysteria, sales of Billion Dollar Babies (Cooper’s boldest album to date) skyrocketed; as it has always been, controversy sells, and in 1973, nobody was more sought after than Alice Cooper.
Back then, Alice Cooper was still a band; comprised of five members who transformed a mutual fascination for mop-tops and the macabre into a million-dollar enterprise that not only attracted universal vilification as depraved outcasts but also granted them celebrity beyond their wildest aspirations.
The story of the quintet begins simply in Phoenix, Arizona, when track athlete Vincent Furnier is volunteered to organize the Cortez High School’s autumn 1964 Letterman Talent Show.
Unfortunately, no one could be identified as particularly talented, so Vince persuaded some friends to take the stage as The Earwigs, miming to Beatles tracks while sporting Beatles wigs. Guitarist Glen Buxton actually could play, while drummer John Speer struggled with basic percussion, and bassist Dennis Dunaway refined his skills with assistance from Glen.
The Earwigs evolved into The Spiders; they participated in local Battle of the Bands contests, replacing their departing rhythm guitarist John Tatum with former Cortez High football star Michael Bruce from The Trolls.
After relocating to LA in spring ’67, the nascent Coopers, then called The Nazz (until they were forced to change due to Todd Rundgren’s band sharing the name), exchanged John Speer for fellow Phoenix migrant Neal Smith and endeavored to charm the Sunset Strip crowd by hosting regular séances.
Eventually, rubbing shoulders with notable figures like Jim Morrison of The Doors and Arthur Lee of Love, Miss Christine (of The GTOs: Girls Together Outrageously, the first all-female rock band) set up an audition for the band with Frank Zappa’s Straight label. The overly eager Coopers famously showed up for their 6:30pm appointment at 6:30am but were delighted to find that their naïve enthusiasm was generously rewarded with a record deal from Zappa.
Just two days after rebranding themselves Alice Cooper, they were welcomed as the house support act at the 20,000-seat Cheetah Ballroom, gradually building a following despite their vocalist—having abandoned the name Vince for the more memorable Alice—adopting full makeup and a pink clown costume.
Gradually, the defining Alice Cooper formula took shape, and after recording two exploratory albums under Zappa’s Straight label (1969’s Pretties For You and ’70’s Easy Action), the band signed with Warner Brothers. Collaborating with Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, they reached new heights with three spectacular albums released in quick succession: June ’71’s Love It To Death (the album that stunned America), December ’71’s Killer (the album that conquered America), and July ’72’s School’s Out (the album that conquered the world).
School’s Out, propelled by its iconic title track, swiftly became the top-selling album in Warner’s history. With the media frenzy reaching a fever pitch unseen since the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper emerged as the most newsworthy and contentious band on the planet. But the real challenge lay ahead.
Faced with universal disapproval from the righteous and self-righteous alike, the band needed to solidify their standing. More specifically, they sought to create their magnum opus: an extravagant Grand Guignol spectacular; a flamboyant, controversial, and extravagantly costly fusion of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Busby Berkeley, sure to widen the generational divide to Grand Canyon proportions.
Essentially, they had to craft Billion Dollar Babies. Following School’s Out was always going to be a daunting endeavor, but with the band’s morale at an all-time high, no one involved doubted their ability to not only achieve it, but to do so with flair.
“I knew we had a fantastic team,” Alice recalls today. “When you’re that age, you feel invincible. I don’t think we really understood how monumental School’s Out was. We were just going with the flow back then. You’d produce two albums a year and tour the world twice over. But again, we thought we were indestructible, so we felt no pressure at all.”
“We had others doubting for us,” Dennis Dunaway chuckles, “It felt like it was us against the world, really. Even after we became successful and were surrounded by people praising us, there were still plenty ready to voice their disagreement.”
Reflecting the unwavering optimism that kept their spirits high in the face of relentless media backlash—and reminiscent of the classic showbiz tradition of ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’—the band opted to celebrate their elevated status with the album’s title.
“The concept of Billion Dollar Babies was simply poking fun at ourselves,” Alice Cooper reflects now. “Here was a band that nobody would take seriously three years prior, and now we’re the biggest band globally. We’d look at each other and say: ‘We’re like billion dollar babies’.”
“We were being voted best band in the world over Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles. We’d check that out and laugh. I almost called McCartney to say: ‘Hey, we didn’t vote on this’. Against Led Zeppelin, I’d say we could compete, but being ahead of The Beatles and the Stones was just embarrassing.”
“Billion Dollar Babies was our most extravagant album. It represented a time when we lived extravagantly — from limousine to penthouse to the very finest of everything, including… well, the very finest of everything. We were amazed that people were actually paying us to do this. We would have done it for free, as we were merely a garage band managing to be in the right place at the right time.”
Despite exhausting themselves on the road, appearing in every publication imaginable, and working on a film project titled Good To See You Again Alice Cooper (eventually released in 2005 through Rhino Home Video), the band remained creatively vibrant, writing exceptional songs.
“We had been writing almost non-stop since Easy Action,” Michael Bruce notes. “By this point, we had truly begun to find our footing. We were riding a wave of success.”
With this faith came a desire to delve even deeper into the realm of the bizarre.
“Dennis Dunaway greatly contributed to the band’s eccentricity,” Alice admits. “I let Dennis pursue the surreal as much as he wanted. He and I were both artists in school and were both into Salvador Dali. What’s more, Dennis often took more… shall we say, experimental approaches than I did.”
We were voted best band in the world over Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles
Alice
“I always championed the avant-garde,” Dunaway concurs. “Any sound that seemed too similar to another band, I was there to transform it. So, if the songs sounded too conventional, I would take issue with them.”
Ensuring that the Cooper’s collective vision came to life in the studio (regardless of how unconventional it became) was producer Bob Ezrin, commonly recognized as the band’s sixth member, who had helped shape the Alice Cooper sound since Love It To Death.
“It was like two trees growing side by side,” Alice illustrates. “Bob Ezrin was ready to produce a band, and we just so happened to need one. He was a young guy with a theatrical background, and we were a rock’n’roll band with a desire to be theatrical. Bob Ezrin was our George Martin.”
“I don’t want to undermine Bob’s importance,” Neal Smith warns, “but I also don’t want to exaggerate it. In capturing our sound on record, Bob was incredibly significant, but Billion Dollar Babies was a group effort. His biggest achievement was probably helping to create Alice’s character. From the time of Easy Action to Love It To Death, the character evolved vocally, solidifying into the genuine Alice Cooper, and Bob played a massive role in that.”
“Bob came in at just the right moment,” Dunaway adds. “Mike Bruce’s songwriting had improved immensely, Neal and I had evolved significantly, and Alice’s voice had matured—it was much stronger and less nasal than during our early days—but still, we were trying to cram a myriad of ideas into every song. It took him to say: ‘No, this isn’t a song; this is a complete album,’ to funnel our direction.”
The recording of the Billion Dollar Babies album unfolded in three phases. Initially, a mobile studio from New York’s Record Plant was stationed outside The Cooper Mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the core backing tracks were laid down. After months of secretive recording amidst their busy schedules, the band traveled to London’s Morgan Studios for overdubs and vocals, followed by a return to the Record Plant for mixing.
Unsurprisingly, considering the band’s penchant for revelry and their circle of acquaintances, the Morgan Studio sessions in London soon transformed into riotous, after-hours jam sessions featuring some of the day’s most prominent—and indulgent—musicians.
“We had access to many stars here,” Alice reminisces. “In fact, T.Rex, Donovan, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, and Keith Moon all made appearances on that album somewhere, but none of us could pinpoint where, given how inebriated the sessions were.”
“Keith Moon would swing by with Marc Bolan,” Neal Smith recounts. “Once, Alice, the two of us, Keith, and Marc were sitting at a table when Marc kept urging Keith to join him in a band, which struck me as hilarious because I couldn’t picture a worse combination.”
“Harry Nilsson negatively impacted the sessions,” Dunaway claims. “We could have derived a lot of fantastic material from that group jam-wise, or even used it for the album, had Harry Nilsson not been there, stumbling onto the mixing board and wrecking everything. The guy could hardly walk, yet he would sit at the piano and belt out beautiful melodies. I never figured out how he managed that.”
Also present at the Morgan sessions were session guitarists of Bob Ezrin’s acquaintance: Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, who, unbeknownst to many contemporary fans, often filled in for an increasingly unreliable Glen Buxton.
“Hunter and Wagner were definitely on the album,” Alice confirms. “We wanted everyone to be aware of it. We weren’t about to pretend that Glen was playing everything. We were upfront about it, so we credited them. Later, I enlisted them solely for Welcome To My Nightmare.”
“We were familiar with Dick from Michigan,” Michael Bruce explains. “There were always musicians superior to us in every studio we entered. Bringing in such talent wasn’t seen as a dire portent of things to come; they were just incredible players. If a library doesn’t have the book you need, you find another library. We’d already worked with Dick on School’s Out and Under My Wheels.”
While in London, the band was photographed by David Bailey for the inner sleeve of Billion Dollar Babies. It provided yet another thrilling opportunity to audaciously taunt their many outraged critics, and the band met this challenge head-on.
Dressed in flowing white silk and surrounded by literal towers of cash, the musicians casually cuddle albino bunnies, as their vocalist presents a live, naked baby to the camera, adorned only with a splash of signature Alice Cooper eye makeup.
“Every opportunity we had to exaggerate, we seized,” Alice reflects on the groundbreaking cover design of Billion Dollar Babies. “We created a giant billionaire’s wallet, containing a billion-dollar bill: a quintessentially American, larger-than-life concept. We brought in the best photographer, the one we believed to be the guy from Blow Up, expecting to encounter models posing naked, and there were indeed a few.”
“The cover shoot is essentially a remake of one we did for Love It To Death,” Dunaway points out. “We had a photographer come to our farm in Pontiac, styled a brass bed in the living room, and posed with some white rabbits my wife Cindy owned. Of course, at that time, we couldn’t manage to pay the photographer, so those shots never got released.”
Just before the launch of Billion Dollar Babies, a promotional flexi-disc single was given out with the February 17 issue of New Musical Express. The B-side featured brief snippets from the album, while the A-side showcased the unique track Slick Black Limousine.
“That was one of the few songs we had lying around,” Neal Smith clarifies. “Originally intended as an Elvis Presley rock’n’roll type of number, it ultimately morphed more into the Alice Cooper vibe, featuring rolling drums and dark psychedelics.”
Upon its release in March 1973, Billion Dollar Babies, though critically lambasted for its apparent lack of taste, debuted at No. 1 in the UK charts. Within days, with the band already out touring to promote it with their upcoming record-breaking Billion Dollar Babies Show, the album achieved the same chart-topping status in the USA.
By this time, the media was in a frenzy. Just four days into the tour, Melody Maker reported that Alice had died from a mishap during his I Love The Dead guillotine act. Almost as soon as this claim was eventually proven false, yet another urban legend emerged: supposedly, the baby featured on the B$B cover had been blinded by mishandled eye makeup. (Rest assured, it hadn’t.)
The Billion Dollar Babies Show may have been the top-grossing rock tour ever, but it was also excruciatingly demanding. Jetting from city to city for months on end is one challenge, but getting decapitated twice nightly is quite another.
“Once again, you’re invincible,” Alice explains. “When you sell out six nights a week, with 15,000 attendees each evening, you feel no discomfort. But beneath the surface, I was deteriorating. You couldn’t perceive it by the stage show or my demeanor, but each night the alcohol felt a little more medicinal and less fun.”
“By the time I began …Nightmare, I was prepared to die, go to the hospital, or have a nervous breakdown. I got to a point where seeing my costume would cause me to nearly weep and feel nauseous.”
“The Billion Dollar Babies tour concluded horrendously,” Mike Bruce grimaces. “It began as sixty dates in ninety days, but ultimately swelled to almost eighty.”
“You’re driving yourself into exhaustion,” Dunaway adds. “You’d be fortunate to get to bed by four in the morning, only to have to arise early to catch a flight or drive to the following city. But Alice and I were long-distance runners—that’s how we connected—so we maintained this keep-going-at-all-costs mindset that pulled us through situations where other bands might have thrown in the towel.”
“It was grueling,” Smith concludes, “but it wasn’t intolerable… This band thrived on life on the road.”
Of course, life on the road had its perks: “The groupie scene was beyond your wildest imagination,” Alice leers. “If you check backstage today, it’s a bunch of overweight guys moving amplifiers. But during the seventies, touring with Rod Stewart and The Faces, you’d witness anything. It was the heyday of decadence.”
Over the years, Alice Cooper has shifted from being viewed as a band to being regarded primarily as the stage persona of the artist formerly known as Vince Furnier—a sort of nefarious Dame Edna, if you will; a Mister Hyde-esque alter ego so overwhelmingly dominant that it’s all too simple to forget about Vince’s golf-loving Dr. Jekyll—at least until he pops up to chat with Ronnie Corbett on TV.
While the former Furnier maintains exclusive rights to the lucrative Cooper brand—as he rightfully should, since he alone coined the name—the actual refinement of Alice Cooper’s character was certainly a collaborative effort.
“Alice proposed the name,” Dunaway reflects, “and I thought it was a brilliant idea. I was shocked when he first mentioned it, but once I ran it by my parents and witnessed their jaws drop, I knew it was the name for us.”
“The name did belong to the band, but we didn’t want to disclose that we helped Alice craft the character. However, the makeup was my idea, the snake belonged to Neal, and the executions were band ideas.”
“The Alice character emerged from a necessity; in the early days of Pretties For You, Alice was quite shy. He struggled with stage fright and would face away from the crowd throughout the entire performance. We were uncertain how to tackle this. Then, during a rehearsal, when the band was still struggling in California, I suggested he adopt a different persona for each song, as he displayed no issues when embodying Keith Relf or Mick Jagger; it was only when performing original material that he faltered in understanding who he was and what he wanted to convey.
“So during Nobody Likes Me, he was a desolate figure singing through a window; for Levity Ball, he developed a sort of Gloria Swanson character from Sunset Boulevard, which swiftly became central to the Alice Cooper persona. Through a song called Fields Of Regret, that included this dirge-like interlude that I think stemmed from Alice’s father, a minister, Alice revealed a darker, more sinister character for that track. Audiences loved it, so I remarked: ‘We should write more songs featuring that character’. It wasn’t an instant development, but by the time we reached Love It To Death, the concept of the Alice character had firmly entrenched itself.”
Alice, of course, has justified his need to embody Cooper thus: “Alice emerged because there were numerous Peter Pans and no Captain Hook.”
He also acknowledges having shaped Alice’s unique style inspired by Anita Pallenberg’s sadistically seductive Black Queen character from Roger Vadim’s cult classic Barbarella: “I saw the Black Queen and thought: ‘That’s Alice right there’. Black gloves with switchblades, black makeup, and an eyepatch over her eye… it was perfect. Then various aspects emerged from comic books. As I pieced together all these figures, Alice began to take form.”
Surprisingly, Alice Cooper was never really labeled a drug band. “We were far too American for that,” Alice asserts. “Too Midwestern and too wholesome. We drank, watched football and baseball, indulged in horror movies, called our moms, shared Thanksgiving dinner, and were just as all-American as you could imagine. All of us were lettermen on the track and cross-country teams; we were incredibly wholesome.”
Okay, that’s enough. But can we entirely trust Alice’s memory?
“Put it this way,” Neal Smith comments: “Alice was the one who went through rehab. I tried everything available back then. Michael, Dennis, Glen and I all did. You could find it without spending a dime, it was always present wherever we went. But I never enjoyed anything quite as much as drinking beer, and we probably downed more alcohol than any band around.”
Alice had begun drinking in Los Angeles and continued doing so ever since. He and Glen Buxton would consistently split a case of beer daily, with Alice refusing to take the stage without downing at least six cans first. Yet luck was on his side: he was an exceptionally ‘functional’ drinker.
“I could wake up, drink beer throughout the day, yet during interviews, I would never slur my words, and when it was showtime, I knew each line.”
“Alice was a true professional when it came to drinking,” Mike Bruce concurs. “He was always present where needed and never complained. So I was taken aback when he opened up about his struggles with alcoholism. I mean, he always appeared gaunt and fragile, so it didn’t quite register.”
While Alice maintained some level of control over his drinking, the same couldn’t be said for his drinking companion. “Everyone was concerned about Glen,” Alice has since remarked, “because he just wasn’t improving. While everyone else was progressing, Glen wanted nothing more than his drink, his cigarette, and to simply coast along.”
Shortly before the Billion Dollar Babies tour, Glen Buxton’s excessive drinking resulted in his pancreas literally bursting. Following life-saving emergency surgery, the guitarist returned to the Cooper Mansion in Connecticut to recover. With regular substitute Dick Wagner unavailable, guitarist Mick Mashbir and keyboardist Bob Dolan were brought in to patch the gaps in the band’s live sound.
As previously mentioned, the sabbaticals enjoyed by today’s major artists were simply not an option in the 1970s, and before long, the severely depleted Alice Cooper found themselves thrust back into the recording cycle. However, this time not only was Buxton’s performance noticeably subpar, but Bob Ezrin—who had already committed to producing Lou Reed’s Berlin—was also off the project.
Consequently, Muscle Of Love, the long-awaited follow-up to Billion Dollar Babies turned out to be a commercial, as well as creative, disaster. Relative to the broader picture, it still managed to sell 800,000 copies, but the band should have anticipated challenges—they had received ample warnings.
“Bob Ezrin listened to the songs and remarked, ‘Guys, this isn’t up to par’,” Alice admits. “But we were riding a wave of popularity at that moment, believing we could do no wrong. It served as a perfect example of a band being overconfident. The songs were fine, but collectively, they didn’t resonate.”
“We just aimed to produce an album filled with great tracks,” Neal Smith shrugs. “Amidst rumors of a new James Bond movie coming out, we penned The Man With The Golden Gun specifically for that (ultimately, our submission was overlooked in favor of Lulu). A key difference with Muscle Of Love was that, not being a concept album, we lacked a corresponding show to go with it. The previous four albums had all been accompanied by a stage presentation. I suppose we just couldn’t decide how to eliminate Alice.”
“Glen’s issues took precedence,” Dunaway acknowledges, “so we couldn’t focus on song development like we used to. Different musicians came in, and the entire album felt much safer since Bob Ezrin wasn’t involved. He was always very open to my desire to explore the avant-garde, but that’s not exactly Jack Richardson’s approach.”
“As a producer, Jack Richardson was about as close to Bob Ezrin as one could get,” Mike Bruce contributes. “He too came from Nimbus 9 Productions in Canada and had engineered a few of our previous albums alongside Bob Ezrin. Thus, it wasn’t so much about what went wrong with Muscle Of Love, but rather what didn’t go right.”
“We insisted on packaging it in a cardboard carton, which posed another issue. During the tour, a truckers’ strike impeded our ability to utilize our usual stage set; frequently, we simply showed up and performed.”
With their lead guitarist sinking into oblivion and their sales figures seemingly following suit, the Alice Cooper group opted for a year-long hiatus that has ultimately extended over three decades. At least, that’s how three of them perceive it.
“The guys grew weary of shelling out cash for the performances,” Alice explains. “I can understand that, but it was what got us to our current position. They wanted to wear Levi’s. So I replied: ‘If that’s the case, I can’t participate. I can’t be the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater here’.”
“In the end, everyone wanted to work on their individual albums. So, I said: ‘If that’s going to occur, I have to inform you right now that I’m going to invest every cent I possess into the next album [which was Welcome To My Nightmare]. If you thought Billion Dollar Babies represented the biggest spectacle you’ve ever encountered, I desire this to be even bigger’.
“Thus, worried about seeing all their money go down the drain, they said: ‘You’re on your own’. I shrugged and said: ‘Okay. No hard feelings’. At least we knew where everyone stood. Nobody disputed, nobody shouted; it was all cordial.”
“That’s not quite accurate,” Dunaway insists. “Mike, Neal, and I were involved in the ‘Battle Axe’ show [billing ourselves as The Billion Dollar Babies] after that, and I believe we spent more on that than we did on the prior Alice Cooper tour. So, no, that wasn’t the reason at all. I also dislike that narrative about us declining to wear stage costumes. I mean, who could believe that? Just stepping outside, we looked wilder than most bands.”
“I didn’t appreciate the idea of including trained dancers. I felt it would make the performance too polished and strip away the raw edge that constituted our power. Likewise, I wasn’t fond of the concept of large, fluffy monsters; I wanted a grittier approach—the chopped-up mannequin vibe.”
“Well, Alice shares that perspective,” Mike Bruce comments, “and it’s as if he believes it so strongly that it has melded into his reality. But no, it wasn’t that the band rejected a stage show; we simply intended to tone it down a bit, shaping it into a funkier, West Side Story kind of experience rather than an extravagant, Billion Dollar Broadway Babes spectacle. We had also been touring non-stop to the point where we needed to ease off the accelerator and let the momentum carry us. The road had taken its toll; physically, our checks were cashed and the bank was alerted.”
“After returning from Europe,” Neal Smith explains, “with Michael wanting to record some material on his own, we collectively agreed to take a year off and explore our various solo endeavors. Michael worked on In My Own Way, I focused on Platinum God, and Alice crafted Welcome To My Nightmare. Alice achieved success with …Nightmare, and given the ongoing Glen situation, we never regrouped.”
And do the former Billion Dollar Babies harbor any regrets? As you might expect, some more than others.
“I would have absolutely loved to continue with the band,” Smith acknowledges. “I wish that after we completed our solo projects, we returned to our commitment and reunited to record the ninth Alice Cooper album. And who knows, perhaps one day we will.”
“If given another chance,” Bruce reflects, “I’d likely strive to maintain the band longer than it did.”
“I just wish we had recorded more,” Dunaway laughs. “We never had a tape recorder, resulting in losing many outstanding tracks just because we couldn’t recall them.”
“I wish I could have experienced a bit more of those days while sober,” Alice confesses, “so I could retain more memories. Occasionally, I’ll have a flashback—like the time I was driving, and Steven Tyler possessed a gun while we were on some mission. We ended up at my house, but all I can remember is a Rolls-Royce, Tyler, a gun, and a whole lot of alcohol. Did we shoot someone and bury them? I honestly have no clue.”
Ironically, while Glen Buxton’s untimely death from pneumonia in October ’97 effectively prevented a complete Alice Cooper reunion, it may have actually made it easier for the four surviving members to eventually come together. After all, the band was just as much Glen Buxton’s as it was anyone else’s, and while he was not in a position to tour, reuniting without him would have felt unthinkable for the others.
But now that their former comrade has finally been laid to rest, it could be argued that there are no remaining barriers preventing the quartet from performing on the same stage again. Indeed, they’ve already done so: at Alice’s Cooper’stown restaurant in Phoenix during the second annual Glen Buxton Memorial Weekend in October ’99.
So, could this ongoing reconciliation between Bruce, Cooper, Dunaway, and Smith potentially evolve into something of greater significance?
“I would jump at the chance to work with those guys again,” Alice asserts, albeit cautiously adding, “if it were the right project. I’m uncertain how we could accomplish it authentically without Glen. As for Mike… [Alice ponders thoughtfully] Well, Neal and Dennis are quite agreeable. I’ll simply say that. They both still play exceptionally well, but I’m not sure if they could handle an entire tour. I mean, I’m in fantastic shape, but we’re not in our twenties any longer.”
“I can’t predict whether it will happen,” Neal Smith states, “but if it does, it will be a decision made collectively by all four of us. It won’t merely be Alice proclaiming: ‘Hey, guys, let’s reunite’. And if that moment arrives, there would be nobody happier than I.”
“I mentioned to Shep Gordon on the night I performed on School’s Out with Alice at Wembley in 2002,” Mike Bruce remembers, “how wonderful it would be if we got together to recreate the Billion Dollar Babies Show for Europe—performing the songs on the same stage set. We never toured Europe with that show.”
“I would absolutely welcome the opportunity to collaborate with the four of us, but it rests with Alice to figure it out and incorporate it into his game plan, as he’s the face of the band. The impact of any move we made would primarily rest on him. If it succeeded, critics would claim he should have done it sooner, and if it failed, they’d say: ‘So, you no longer have it, huh?’. Thus, Alice finds himself in a difficult position.”
“Well,” Dennis Dunaway concludes with a sigh, “Neal and I have been extending that offer to Alice for thirty years now. I mean, he was supposed to provide vocals for the Battle Axe album, but we couldn’t even get a callback. I’m fully aware that it isn’t Michael, Neal, or myself — and not even Glen — who have hindered this band from ever reuniting. That much I know.”
This feature was originally published in Classic Rock 67, in April 2004. In 2025, the Alice Cooper Band announced a new studio album, their first together since 1973. The Revenge Of Alice Cooper will be released on July 25.
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