Alice Cooper is known for his wide catalog of songs like “School’s Out,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” and “Only Women Bleed.” What’s perhaps less known about him: He worked behind the scenes to rebuild the Hollywood Sign in the late 1970s.
“The sign was falling off the hill, basically,” Cooper explains. “It looked like something in an apocalyptic movie. We went to the Chamber of Commerce and I just said, ‘How much is each one of these letters?’ And they said, ‘Well, it's $27,000.’ And I said, ‘Well, I'm gonna buy the first ‘O’ for Groucho [Marx].’ I said, ‘At least when people look at the first ‘O’ up there, they'll think of Groucho.’”
Cooper and Marx had become friends when he and his band moved to Los Angeles, chasing their rock and roll dreams. Their shared love of vaudeville and early Hollywood cinema bonded them.
“[Groucho] saw it as vaudeville because he was a vaudeville guy. We'd be doing a show, and I'd look into the wings on the side and there would be Groucho. And George Burns, Jack Benny. And then the next time I looked over on the other side, and there's Mae West, and he would bring all the vaudeville people to see the show. And they weren't shocked in the least bit about what we were doing.”
The rest of America at the time, however, was shocked by his onstage antics.
“I was the scourge of rock and roll. They were burning my albums on the ‘700 Club,’” explains Cooper. “But I mean, it felt right because as long as the parents hated us, the kids were gonna love us.”
With an upcoming 150-date tour, Cooper, now 75, managed to outlive his detractors and looks back on his early, tumultuous days with fondness.
“Everybody wanted to go to Hollywood and become a star, you know? Well, we didn't do it in the movies. We did it in rock and roll. I just always felt a responsibility towards the Fred Astaires and the Errol Flynns and all those people that did those great movies that I lived on, and that we had an opportunity to actually do something about it.”