Alice Cooper

No one does Grand Guignol quite like the original dark prince of shock rock. Vincent Damon Furnier first led a band called Alice Cooper, then started to inhabit that persona, and, in the early '70s, officially changed his name to cement the identity we know, love, and recoil in terror from today. Your trip through Cooper's twisted imagination begins here. Draw first blood with the hits, before sinking your teeth into the milky white neck of his Next Steps.

Before parting ways with the original band lineup and going solo in 1975, Alice Cooper hit a high point with Billion Dollar Babies, which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and featured guest slots from Marc Bolan and folk minstrel Donovan. The left-field touches on a track like "I Love the Dead" (cello meets necrophilia) make the album a standout. Let out a demonic cackle and bury your hatchet into the soft flesh of Cooper's Deep Cuts.

Explore the origins of Alice Cooper here, among several of the tracks that appeared on the band's 1969 debut, Pretties for You, and the following year's Easy Action. Note the transformation from "Reflected" (later redone as "Elected" — see The Basics) with its derivative "British Beat" feel to the more experimental "Mr. and Misdemeanor". Alice was growing up.

There are two accounts of how Alice Cooper — the band, the singer, the legend — came to be so named. One version says that a Ouija board session summoned the presence of a 17th century witch, called Alice Cooper, and the moniker stuck. Another says that budding shock rocker Vincent Furnier imagined a little girl holding an axe behind her back, and christened her Alice Cooper before adopting the name for himself. Whichever version you prefer, the metal legend quickly took root and sprouted these splendid tracks which spotlight his progress from ambitious garage rocker to blood-spattered pantomime villain to living icon.