Alice Cooper is looking back on a past incident involving a chicken that really ruffled some feathers.
In A&E’s new Biography: Alice Cooper episode airing Sunday, June 23, the rocker, 76, recalls how at one point during his band’s set at Toronto’s Rock and Roll Revival Festival in 1969, he looked down and there was “a chicken onstage.”
“You have to remember I’m from Detroit,” he says in the episode. “I had never been on a farm in my life. It had wings, it had feathers, it should fly. I picked up the chicken, and I flung it into the audience figuring it would fly away and somebody would take it and take it home and call it Alice Cooper.”
Instead, Cooper — not yet a household name at the time of the festival — realized chickens “don’t fly as much as they plummet.”
“I threw it out there, and it fell straight down into the audience,” he says. “The audience tears it to pieces. It was the peace and love festival. They tear it to pieces and throw it back up on the stage. So there’s blood everywhere. Feathers and blood.”
John Lennon and his then-wife Yoko Ono — who also performed during the festival — were watching in the wings and “loved it,” Cooper says. “They thought it was art ’cause it’s chaos.”
The next day, Cooper says record label executive Frank Zappa called him and asked, “Did you kill a chicken onstage last night?”
“I said, ‘There was a chicken. I didn’t kill it though,'” Cooper recalls. “He goes, ‘Don’t tell anybody. They love it.’ He says, ‘It’s everywhere in the press!’ I immediately went, ‘Perfect.’ The chicken story then became huge. Who is this monster who would do this at a rock show?”
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When the band got to Binghamton, New York, for their next show, Cooper says there were 50 people outside protesting. Stories evolved into him setting a “German Shepherd on fire.”
“My reputation was just insane,” he says. “I didn’t have to do anything. They were inventing their own Alice Cooper myth. People were just discovering Alice Cooper, and I was just discovering him, so we were all doing it at the same time.”
Along with the chicken incident, Biography: Alice Cooper explores Cooper’s journey from growing up in Detroit with asthma to becoming one of the most celebrated characters in music history as the frontman of the groundbreaking Alice Cooper Group. It also delves into the addiction struggles he faced along the way.
Biography: Alice Cooper premieres Sunday, June 23, at 10 p.m. ET on A&E.
