Alice Cooper’s Viewers As soon as Killed a Hen Throughout a Live performance

Alice Cooper is wanting again on a previous incident involving a hen that actually ruffled some feathers.

In A&E’s new Biography: Alice Cooper episode airing Sunday, June 23, the rocker, 76, recollects how at one level throughout his band’s set at Toronto’s Rock and Roll Revival Competition in 1969, he regarded down and there was “a hen onstage.”

“It’s important to keep in mind I am from Detroit,” he says within the episode. “I had by no means been on a farm in my life. It had wings, it had feathers, it ought to fly. I picked up the hen, and I flung it into the viewers figuring it will fly away and any individual would take it and take it dwelling and name it Alice Cooper.”

As a substitute, Cooper — not but a family title on the time of the pageant — realized chickens “do not fly as a lot as they plummet.”

“I threw it on the market, and it fell straight down into the viewers,” he says. “The viewers tears it to items. It was the peace and love pageant. They tear it to items and throw it again up on the stage. So there’s blood all over the place. Feathers and blood.”

John Lennon and his then-wife Yoko Ono — who additionally carried out in the course of the pageant — had been watching within the wings and “beloved it,” Cooper says. “They thought it was artwork ‘trigger it is chaos.”

The following day, Cooper says report label government Frank Zappa known as him and requested, “Did you kill a hen onstage final evening?”

“I mentioned, ‘There was a hen. I did not kill it although,'” Cooper recollects. “He goes, ‘Do not inform anyone. They find it irresistible.’ He says, ‘It is all over the place within the press!’ I instantly went, ‘Good.’ The hen story then turned enormous. Who is that this monster who would do that at a rock present?”

When the band bought to Binghamton, New York, for his or her subsequent present, Cooper says there have been 50 individuals outdoors protesting. Tales advanced into him setting a “German Shepherd on hearth.”

“My popularity was simply insane,” he says. “I did not need to do something. They had been inventing their very own Alice Cooper fable. Folks had been simply discovering Alice Cooper, and I used to be simply discovering him, so we had been all doing it on the similar time.”

Together with the hen incident, Biography: Alice Cooper explores Cooper’s journey from rising up in Detroit with bronchial asthma to turning into one of the celebrated characters in music historical past because the frontman of the groundbreaking Alice Cooper Group. It additionally delves into the dependancy struggles he confronted alongside the way in which.

Biography: Alice Cooper premieres Sunday, June 23, at 10 p.m. ET on A&E.