INTERVIEW: Neal Smith reflects on his years in Alice Cooper

Photo: Neal Smith is the original drummer of the Alice Cooper band. Photo courtesy of the musician / Provided by Glass Onyon PR with permission.

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The music of the Alice Cooper band continues to live on 50 years after its initial release. There is hardly a school year that doesn’t end with “School’s Out” blaring on the radio. Ditto for that adolescent anthem “I’m Eighteen.” Throw in “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Under My Wheels,” “Billion Dollar Babies” and “Teenage Lament ’74,” and there’s clear evidence that this iconic band continues to influence multiple generations.

The group first formed in the mid-1960s, with their roots found in their native Arizona. They tried on a few band names, including the Nazz, but they settled on Alice Cooper … and the rest is history.

The lineup for the Alice Cooper band included Vincent Furnier, the lead singer who later changed his name to Alice Cooper and who still tours under that name; bass guitarist Dennis Dunaway; drummer Neal Smith; guitarist and keyboardist Michael Bruce; and the late guitarist Glen Buxton.

They dominated concert halls and the record charts for a decade, and the surviving members still remain friends to this day. That’s a rarity in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll. Yes, the band stopped touring and recording together, but their personal ties overshadowed any professional disagreements.

For Smith, those early days still linger in his memory.

“I think about everything,” he said in a long-ranging phone interview with Hollywood Soapbox. “We were all best friends, and so it’s like when people go to college, that time in their late teens / early 20s, and they make really good friends. It’s like a lifetime bond, and so I think differently than just the success and what we did as a group. I also think about Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce and Dennis Dunaway and Alice and myself; the friendship that we created has been strong ever since.”

Smith has stayed busy since Alice Cooper disbanded in the mid-1970s. He was part of the Billion Dollar Babies with a few other original members and also has found success with his own outfit, KillSmith (celebrating 10 years in 2018 with a new album, KillSmith Halloween 2008-2018). Still, those memories with A.C. are so present, as if they occurred yesterday.

“Since we were inducted into the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame in 2011, we’ve gotten together many times socially and as a band, so it’s never really gone away, especially in the last eight or nine years,” Smith said. “There’s been a lot that we’ve done, and the most exciting part again is the fans.”

Alice Cooper’s early albums were Pretties For You and Easy Action. It wasn’t until 1971’s Love It to Death, featuring “I’m Eighteen,” that the band started climbing the charts and gaining more of a place in the headlines. Then the song “School’s Out,” the title track off their 1972 album, catapulted them to newer heights.

“We just tried to do one album, one song at a time and pick a single off the album and have it do as well as the previous one or maybe even better,” he said. “But, of course, when ‘School’s Out’ came out, it just blew the whole thing out of the water. It was great, and I’ve got to tell you the truth, I’m still shocked. That was 1972. We’re closing in on 45, close to 50 years now, and the fact that it’s become a perennial song, comes around every year, it’s just amazing. I’m still surprised by it. I knew that back in the ’60s and ’70s, there were great summertime songs, but I never realized that half a century later that they’d still be playing ‘School’s Out’ every time the school year came around to an end and summer vacation was ready to go.”

IN THE BEGINNING …

Here’s what the earliest days looked like: Smith was in a band called the Holy Grail in Phoenix. On a personal level, he knew the guys that would eventually form Alice Cooper; they were all students at Glendale Community College in Arizona. Interestingly they didn’t run into one another in music class, but art class.

While Smith was in the Holy Grail, the other musicians were in a band called the Spiders, which morphed into the Nazz.

“Actually they went to Los Angeles to ‘make it,’ and the band I was in called the Holy Grail was more like a San Francisco kind of a band,” Smith remembered. “We were like the #1 and #2 bands in Arizona. … [The Holy Grail] moved to San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967. Monterey Pop Festival with the Who and Jimi Hendrix broke like a monster out of that. That was a heck of a summer for music, and everything that was going on in the ’60s, it seemed like it erupted big time in ’67. So my band unfortunately broke up, and I went to back to Phoenix and then came back to Los Angeles in the fall of ’67 and moved in with my buddies, the Nazz.”

When Smith was in Los Angeles, he was looking for a band to play in. While waiting for the right opportunity, he crashed with his old community college friends. Luck would have that their drummer left the band (the details are still murky to Smith), and he was asked to sit in.

“I had already jammed with the guys a couple of times,” he said. “They asked me right away if I wanted to jump in and take over the job of playing the drums. It took me like 20 seconds to say yes. It was one of those things I wasn’t expecting because that wasn’t the reason I was there, but that’s the way it worked out. That was the fall of ‘67, and March 16, 1968, about six months later, we changed the name of the band from the Nazz to Alice Cooper once we heard Todd Rundgren had a band called the Nazz, and he had a signed record deal. So we changed our name.”

The five musicians considered many different names, but they all responded positively to Alice Cooper. Smith thought it sound like the Who, a name that no one else had. The fact that it was a woman’s name fit the vibe of the times and what the group wanted to accomplish.

“We changed the name, and then in the summer of ’68, somewhere around that time frame, we just started calling Vince, our lead singer, Alice,” Smith said. “He didn’t mind. We thought it’s crazy to have a band called Alice Cooper, why not call our singer Alice Cooper? And it’s a guy, crazy as that was back then. Times were really changing. … All the different movements at the time seemed to fit right in. We were as controversial as the times. One thing led to another. We started forging our direction in music, and like they said, the rest was history.”

Alice Cooper the band is known for its dark lyrics and horror-filled stage theatrics. At concerts back then, and even in Cooper’s solo gigs today, the singer is killed multiple times on stage. There are masks, splatters of blood and graveyard sets. It’s all in good fun, as if Halloween is being celebrated year round.

“One of the first songs that we wrote was called ‘Lay Down and Die, Goodbye’ … so there was already some more macabre darker side of our lyrics,” he said. “And it was real crazy psychedelic music. … We were trying to find that real delicate balance between being commercial and being original. That actually took three albums.”

THE ZAPPA CONNECTION

Frank Zappa discovered the band and released Alice Cooper’s first two albums, Pretties for You in 1969 and Easy Action in 1970, both on Straight Records. They are solid recordings, but the band was still finding itself musically.

“It wasn’t until our third album [Love It to Death] when we really figured out that balance, with the help of Bob Ezrin, between what Alice Cooper was musically … and then how that could be commercial as well, which wasn’t easy to do with what we were doing on stage, killing our lead singer,” Smith said. “It was a transitional phase that we went into. The early days, going back to our days in college, we had a blank canvas to work with, and whatever Alice Cooper was, we were creating from day to day. We rehearsed every single day. We rehearsed tons of time, 24/7. We lived under the same roof. We were motivated. We had a really great work ethic, and it was a joy and pleasure when we got together to rehearse. There was never any fighting or any arguing. It was just all pure energy and creativity, and we just had to figure out what we were, channel it with our clothing, our image, our stage. We started using props that worked really well for us, and then it kind of grew from there.”

The album’s name, Love It to Death, was based on a phrase Smith and the guys remember hearing in Los Angeles. They loved the saying and used it for the recording, which eventually went gold.

“The phrase caught on, and it had the hit ‘I’m Eighteen’ on it,” the drummer said. “Back in the early days, we were starting to toy with the real dark side with death and killing and all that sort of thing, but it was an evolution that by the time the band was at our peak, we had really figured out who we were. And that was what we projected on stage, but not only that, the timing was right. For some reason, the kids back in the late ’60s and early ’70s were looking for something really crazy like that. I don’t know if it was the Vietnam War or the times.”

There was also the fact that the musicians loved old horror and western movies. Their cinematic taste was varied and even included West Side Story and A Clockwork Orange, which Smith believes is a perfect way to define Alice Cooper’s sound and image.

“We sort of combined that feel for the School’s Out album, and that became our first really big, breakthrough album, went to #2 on the charts,” he said. “By the mid-’70s, we had our huge following. All of our albums were going platinum, so after that, it was just how much longer we want to do this and keep touring. I would have done it until I dropped dead because we weren’t doing anything differently than any other band, but we basically stopped playing in 1975, took a year off and never got back together.”

There doesn’t appear to be any hard feelings that Cooper took the name of the band and continued with a successful solo career. Some of the other musicians, including Smith, founded the Billion Dollar Babies band and kept on playing together.

“We took a year off to do solo projects, and that’s when Alice did Welcome to My Nightmare,” Smith said. “He found success with that, and he wanted to continue as a solo act. The thing was we all equally owned the name, Alice Cooper, so there were things that had to be worked out. But I was never going to go to war with my best friends and make a bunch of lawyers really rich. … I mean, we starved together. We were frigging starving. We had nothing. We literally came up poor as a church mouse. We had no money, and we played gigs for like $60. There were five people in the band, and we had three roadies with us all the time. … I was not ever going to go to war with those people. It just wasn’t going to happen. “

Over the years, the guys have gotten back together to remember the old days and play some new music. There are four surviving members (Buxton died in 1997), and some surprise reunions have taken place. There are always rumors of a longer tour involving Dunaway, Smith, Cooper and Bruce.

Right now, Smith will wait and see.

“My bags, Dennis’ [bags], Mike Bruce’s bags are all packed, so it’s up to Alice and our manager,” he said. “We’re ready to go whenever they want to do something.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Neal Smith’s new album is KillSmith Halloween 2008-2018. Click here for more information.