With His New Memoir, Alice Cooper Is Finally Separating Fact From Fiction: ‘I Want People to See’
Categoria: Musica
School's out, but shock-rock history is in session with Devil On My Shoulder.
Por Billboard | 06/10/2026
Alice Cooper has written a third memoir to set the record straight — or as straight as it can be. “Oh, there was a time we never would have done this book ’cause we never would have broken the mystique of Alice Cooper,” the shock rock Rock & Roll Hall of Famer tells Billboard about the new Devil On My Shoulder (Da Capo), which publishes on Tuesday (Oct. 6). “I’ve rarely allowed facts to get in the way of telling a good story.” He even acknowledges in the new book’s preface, “I’d go as far as to say I’ve been the most outrageously unreliable interviewee of all time, weaving a tangled web of embellishments and exaggerations as I went along…until even I couldn’t separate fact from fiction.” But this time, Cooper says, “Now we’re not trying to build a career anymore. I want people to see the fact that, yeah, this band really went through a hell of a lot to finally make it … I don’t mind decorating a story, but 90% of these stories are true.” The 445-page Devil On My Shoulder follows 1976’s Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper , which he dismisses as “a drunken rant,” and 2007’s Alice Cooper, Golf Monster , which blends biography with his passion for the links but offers a generally more coherent, detailed and trustworthy account. “Nobody really pushed Me, Alice ,” he notes. “Nobody pushed Golf Monster . They were kind of OK, and they were fun. But this was the book we actually took a lot of time on. I spent five hours a day with [co-author Daniel Richler] just trying to remember stories and actually admitting that, ‘OK, that might be wrong, but I remember that this did happen — I don’t know exactly how it happened, so I’ll just tell you my version of it.’ “I think any book that you read that’s an autobiography is what probably happened, not really what did happen. If you remember what you said to somebody 50 years ago, I challenge that. The best you can do is (write) what you remember and make it fun, ’cause to me, honestly, that’s what a book like this should be. It should be fun to read.” Alice vs. Alice For Devil On My Shoulder , Cooper particularly enjoyed a device suggested by Richler — who also co-wrote Rush bassist Geddy Lee’s best-selling 2023 memoir My Effin’ Life — which was to engage the “real” Cooper (born Vince Furnier) in periodic oral dialogues with the Alice Cooper alter ego he created. The two spar in spirited, quick-paced exchanges dotted throughout the book, with the Cooper character questioning the accuracy of his creator’s tales and the real-life Cooper alternately pushing back or conceding the points, often grudgingly. “I like the confrontation of Alice and me,” says Cooper, who learned to separate himself from the character after becoming sober during the mid-‘80s, overcoming alcoholism