THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: Named for the city that launched the original Alice Cooper group on the road to success, Detroit Stories follows last year’s Breadcrumbs EP as a modern-day homage to the toughest and craziest rock scene there ever was.
In 1970, Alice Cooper abandoned the flower power of Los Angeles — where he proved to be the opposite of the hippie peace and love ideal — and took his decidedly darker gang back to his birthplace, and to the legendary rock scene that gave birth to hard rock, garage rock, soul, funk, punk and more.
“Detroit was Heavy Rock Central then,” Alice recalls. “You’d play the Eastown and it would be Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, The Stooges and The Who, for $4! The next weekend at the Grande it was MC5, Brownsville Station and Fleetwood Mac, or Savoy Brown or The Small Faces. You couldn’t be a soft-rock band or you’d get your ass kicked.
“Los Angeles had its sound with The Doors, Love and Buffalo Springfield,” he says. “San Francisco had The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. New York had The Rascals and The Velvet Underground. But Detroit was the birthplace of angry hard rock. After not fitting in anywhere in the U.S. (musically or image wise), Detroit was the only place that recognized the Alice Cooper guitar-driven hard rock sound and our crazy stage show. Detroit was a haven for the outcasts. And when they found out I was born in East Detroit… we were home.”
