Alice Cooper explained his decision to break up the Alice Cooper Group in 1974, and expressed regret that he hadn’t been able to take some of them with him into the next stage of his career.
Cooper, guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce plus bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith had been school friends before finding fame. But problems began to arise as they became increasingly successful, leading to the frontman’s decision to go solo. The success of his 1975 debut album Welcome to My Nightmare proved him right.
“It got to a point where we hit a wall, and nobody wanted to say it,” Cooper told CBS Mornings in a recent interview. “But we couldn’t go further.”
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He added that he and manager Shep Gordon knew a change had to be made. “To me it was like, ‘I don’t want Alice to die. So I’m going to keep Alice going.’ That’s all there was to it.”
In his upcoming memoir Devil on My Shoulder, Dunaway says he believed Cooper’s decision was money-oriented – but the singer countered: “Money never was even in my thoughts… Alice was dying a slow death in the business. If I could have taken Dennis and Neal with me, I would have done that. I just couldn’t. There was other things going on… Alice needed another life.
He added: “We never were enemies – there was no lawsuits; no bad blood. We didn’t really divorce as much as we separated.”
Alice Cooper Group Hope to Make Another Album
Welcome to My Nightmare left him rethinking the split, he continued. “I wasn’t expecting Nightmare to do what it did. It went through the roof.” But he went on: “I didn’t want to look back… and fall back into this thing that was not going any more.
“If I could have said, ‘Guys, come here,’ the other two guys would have been left behind. Glen was almost out of it and Mike was almost out of it. Dennis and Neal were the only two that really got what ‘rock star’ is.”
Cooper shared his enthusiasm for Smith’s approach: “He had blond hair down to here. He wore all chrome. He would find out how many drums Keith Moon had and he’d get one more. And they were all pink!”
The band reunited for 2025’s The Revenge of Alice Cooper after Cooper had spent years reconnecting with them. “I kept bringing them in, bringing them in, bringing them in, knowing that we were… hopefully going to make an album. And we did.
“We’re still looking to make another album. So we’re back together again in some ways.”
