During a November 7 question-and-answer session at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, legendary rocker Alice Cooper was asked what piece of advice he would give to musicians who are just starting out. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Listen to THE BEATLES. Yeah. I’m not kidding. When it comes to writing songs, listen to the simplicity of THE BEATLES. I don’t care if you’re writing a death metal song. A song, first of all, isn’t just a riff and a drum beat. You should be able to sit down — I don’t care who it is — and be able to play that melody and sing that song. You could be the most angry person in the world.”
Alice continued: “I’ve had young bands come to me and they go, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I say, ‘I get it. You’re angry.’ ‘Cause you’re just yelling at me. I said, ‘Well, where’s the song? There’s no song there. There’s a great beat and there’s a great riff, but there’s no song.’ So I said, ‘What I want you to do is, for one week, listen to nothing but the BEACH BOYS, THE BEATLES and THE FOUR SEASONS — any [of the bands] that wrote songs, or Burt Bacharach, that write songs. And then, I don’t want you to sound like that, but I want you to get the idea of a verse, a B section, af bridge going into the chorus, going back into the bridge. But it means it has to have a melody. You can’t just yell at me. And it’s fine if you do yell at me, but you’re not gonna stick around very long.”
Cooper added: “Why are those songs [from THE BEATLES] still being played on the radio? Because of melody, the melody — we all want to hear the melodies.”
Back in 2017, Alice told NME that THE BEATLES was one of his biggest influences. Cooper added that he heard “She Loves You” as a child, saying it was “the first song by THE BEATLES I ever heard and it literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became.”
In 2020, Alice included “Meet The Beatles!” in his list of top albums of all time, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “It was the first one that totally knocked me out because I’d never heard anything like that before. We were listening to the BEACH BOYS and THE FOUR SEASONS, and all of a sudden, here’s this band coming along with all this hair and Beatle boots and these suits, and they were singing these songs that you could hear them one time, and you knew them.”
He continued: “I’ve always said this, and people might disagree with me, but it’s easier to write something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than it is to write something like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. I’m still pretty sure they’re aliens. I don’t think they’re from this planet.”
Cooper pioneered a grandly theatrical brand of hard rock that was designed to shock. Drawing equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock, the group created a stage show that featured electric chairs, guillotines, fake blood and boa constrictors. Known as the architect of shock-rock, Cooper (in both the original ALICE COOPER band and as a solo artist) has rattled the cages and undermined the authority of generations of guardians of the status quo, continuing to surprise fans and exude danger at every turn, like a great horror movie, even in an era where CNN can present real life shocking images.
Few performers in the history of rock and roll have blended music, theater, and pure shock the way Alice Cooper has. For more than five decades, the godfather of shock rock has terrified, thrilled, and captivated audiences around the globe with a stage show unlike anything else in music. From the guillotines and snakes to unforgettable anthems like “School’s Out” and “Poison”, Alice Cooper turned concerts into experiences that blurred the line between rock and horror.
Video below filmed and uploaded to YouTube by Robert Moseley
