Alice Cooper revisited one of the most infamous stories of his career during a recent SiriusXM Front Row event hosted by Stevie Van Zandt on Little Steven’s Underground Garage.
During the conversation, Cooper recalled the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival and the incident that helped shape his reputation as rock’s resident villain: the night a live chicken unexpectedly ended up on stage during Alice Cooper’s performance.
“We’re on stage, the very end of our show. We were on between John Lennon and Yoko, their first show, and The Doors, 30,000 people in Toronto,” Cooper recalled.
According to Cooper, the band’s show at the time ended with two feather pillows being blasted with CO2 amid strobe lights and noise. During the chaos, he noticed a chicken on stage.
“I’ve never been on a farm in my life. I’m from Detroit. So, it had feathers. It had wings. It should fly,” he explained. “I pick it up and I toss it in the audience figuring that it would fly away and somebody would take it home as a pet and call it Alice.”
“Chickens don’t fly as much as they plummet,” Cooper added. He said the crowd tore the chicken apart and threw pieces back onto the stage, leading to sensationalized reports the following day that he had killed the animal and drank its blood.
“That’s when I knew that rock and roll wanted a villain,” Cooper said.
Cooper also recalled receiving a phone call from Frank Zappa after the incident. When Zappa asked whether he had killed a chicken on stage, Cooper told him no.
“He says, ‘Well, don’t tell anybody. They love it.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cooper discussed the distinction between his onstage character and his life away from music, explaining that getting sober helped him separate the two.
“The fact that I play Alice Cooper. He’s a character that I play like Captain Hook or Dr. Jekyll,” he said. “It took me a while. I had to get sober before I understood that, that he was one thing, I was another.”
During the SiriusXM Front Row event, Cooper also announced his new weekly SiriusXM show, Alice in Underland, airing on Little Steven’s Underground Garage.
Check out clips from Alice Cooper’s conversation with Stevie Van Zandt below.
