Wild thing: Alice Cooper in Detroit, 1970
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In 1970, Alice Cooper decided to leave Los Angeles. Stymied by commercial failure, in two fruitless years the theatrical rocker had caught the ear of almost no one. “I don’t get what you’re doing,” Frank Zappa had told him, “and I think that’s great.” Few agreed. With “20,000 groups from around the world heading to [LA],” in the first revolutionary act of a career that has endured for more than half a century the singer moved to Detroit. In the Motor City, he found his crowd.
“As a hard rock band we didn’t really fit into Los Angeles,” Cooper tells me. “LA was The Doors and bands like that. Detroit, though, now that was a blue collar town. That was the hard rock capital of the United States. The people in the blue collar parts of that town did not want soft rock. They only wanted hard rock. And we gave it to ‘em.”