Alice Cooper says fear is still what drives him on stage. In an extended interview with Anthony Mason for CBS Mornings, recorded ahead of his new autobiography Devil On My Shoulder, the 78-year-old shock-rock pioneer explained why he has never been able to coast: "I've always felt that I had to prove myself."
Cooper told Mason that the pressure of facing 20,000 people a night keeps him honest. Audiences, he said, expect to see an old man who sits through half the set, and he takes it as his job to prove them wrong. He called that fear "a good agent to have," because it means he never phones it in. If he can no longer look or perform like Alice, he added, the character should go to someone else, and he joked that his daughter Calico could take over.
He also described Alice as the rock star he always wanted to see: a top-hatted, cane-wielding, condescending villain who never speaks to the crowd until the very end, because the moment he does, he becomes human. The early shows, he recalled, were "guerrilla theater" built from whatever the band found backstage, with the absurdist comedy Hellzapoppin' as their bible. The more the parents hated it, the better it worked.
Asked whether he would ever sell the rights to the Alice Cooper character, as KISS did, he said no, joking that he doesn't need the money. He also dismissed the old talk of a feud with David Bowie, saying the two were friends and that Bowie took the theatrical idea "into outer space" with his own character.
Devil On My Shoulder comes out in the U.S. on October 6 through Da Capo, the new imprint of Grand Central Publishing.
ALICE COOPER spent much of 2026 on the road, and we covered his North American tour announcement in January and the start of rehearsals for the "Alice's Attic" spring run in March.