When Dennis Dunaway joins the other three surviving members of the Alice Cooper group on stage for Christmas Pudding, it’ll be the first time he’s set foot inside the historic Celebrity Theatre since 1966. 

That’s when the Spiders – an up-and-coming Phoenix band that also featured Cooper (or Vince Furnier as he was known then) and the late Glen Buxton – played the Birdies, Conrad Birdie’s backing band, in “Bye Bye Birdie.”

“I remember the backstage areas being very exciting as a barely out of high school teenager with all these dancers running around,” he recalls, with a laugh. 

They learned the songs from famed composer Elmer Bernstein and future Tony winner Michael Bennett tried to teach them how to dance. 

“Unsuccessfully, I might add,” Dunaway says, with a laugh.

The Spiders had been playing for about a year but their career was taking off thanks in part to the regional radio hit, “Don’t Blow Your Mind.”

As Dunaway recalls, “We were a big deal.” 

The Spiders would become a bigger deal, of course, after evolving into Alice Cooper, a name the group and singer shared for an amazing seven-album run.

Alice Cooper ‘invented the rock show’

In addition to packing their records with anthems of youthful rebellion as enduring as “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the Alice Cooper group’s macabre theatrics pushed the boundaries of the rock-and-roll experience to shocking new extremes.

Cooper staged his own beheading every night on their groundbreaking tour in support of the chart-topping “Billion Dollar Babies” album, having previously suffered execution by electric chair and hanging.

As Rob Zombie noted in 2011 while inducting the group to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Alice Cooper “invented the rock show.”

And Cooper was thrilled to share that honor with his friends and former bandmates.

“I was always afraid that they would nominate just me,” the singer told The Arizona Republic. “And to me, the guys in the band were the ones that did all the cutting-edge stuff. We were the guys that were blazing the trail for theater in rock and getting all the criticism at the same time.”

The band started in a high school cafetorium

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a long way from the Cortez High School cafetorium, where Dunaway, Buxton and Furnier first shared a stage as the Earwigs.

Dunaway says he’d been itching to start a band since 1963 when he saw Duane Eddy and the Rebel play between two movies at the Fox downtown theater. 

“I didn’t have enough money to go buy more popcorn,” he says. So he stayed in his seat and watched.

“I said, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” Dunaway says. “So then, my brand new friend at school, Vince Furnier, I told him, ‘Wow, we gotta start a band.’ Well, we didn’t play any instruments or anything. So that kind of stewed for about a year but then the Beatles broke and we said, ‘OK, now we really have to start a band.’”

The two friends belonged to the letterman’s club at Cortez, which was sponsoring a talent show, and they talked the jocks into letting them do a Beatles spoof. 

“We called ourselves the Earwigs,” he says. “Because it was a different bug similar to a beetle. We wore scuzzy Beatle wigs we got from Woolworths.”

They changed all the lyrics to be about sports, so the opening line of “Please Please Me,” for instance, was “Last night I ran four laps for my coach.”

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As Dunaway sizes up the lyrics now, “Well, I was a sophomore, so it was sophomoric.”

They drafted Buxton because he could actually play guitar and another letterman, Phil Wheeler to play the snare drum.

“We came out and did these four songs,” Dunaway recalls. “And the girls were screeching, the teachers were groaning. We got bitten by the theatrical bug right then and there and decided we’re gonna start a real band.”

After that, they were relentless.

“There was a stage at one end of the cafetorium with a curtain,” he says. “So during lunch, over and over, all the students would be in there having their lunch and the curtain would open and it would be the dumb Earwigs again.”

‘It was in our DNA to be theatrical’

It wasn’t long before they started gigging at the VIP, a popular teen club that Dunaway says could hold about 800 people. The only catch was the VIP owner, Jack Curtis, said they’d have to come up with a better name. So they became the Spiders.

“We got very popular and had by then learned how to play our instruments,” Dunaway says. “We were doing theatrics already. It was a very exciting time.”

Their interest in macabre theatrics had already been very much in evidence in 1964 when the Earwigs played the Cortez Halloween dance.

Cooper and Dunaway got refrigerator boxes, cut them up and painted them to look like coffins and tombstones, making giant spider webs out of clothesline. A friend’s dad who was a carpenter helped build a guillotine.

Cooper says, “We were just trying to be who we were, but it was in our DNA to be theatrical.” 

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They had no budget at the time. So their earliest efforts at being theatrical came down to “grabbing anything that wasn’t bolted down,” says Dunaway, “like tires from the alley, trash cans.” 

And they’d change it up from week to week.

“One night, they were remodeling the kitchen, ” he says. “So Alice got inside this old iron bathtub with claws on the bottom. This thing weighed a ton, but the rest of us heave-hoed it through the crowd up to the stage with Alice pointing forward like General Washington crossing the Delaware. Alice got out, we did our show, then Alice got back in the bathtub and we heave-hoed it back.”

How Michael Bruce joined the Spiders

It was shortly after “Bye Bye Birdie” – “just out of the blue,” as Dunaway recalls – that guitarist John Tatum left to join a band with Bill Spooner, who in turn went on to be a founding member of the Tubes.

That’s when the fourth piece of the Alice Cooper puzzle, Michael Bruce, fell into place.

As Dunaway recalls, “We’d done this Battle of the Bands at Christown Mall. And we liked this other guitar player who sang harmony and knew a lot of chords.”

So they invited him to the VIP to see if things would click.

“I came over and learned how to rave-up like the Yardbirds and I guess I got the gig,” Bruce says. “They never really told me I was in the band. They just said ‘Is that your jeep?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘Wow, you could put gear in that, couldn’t you?’ I guess that was my clue that I was in the band.”

With Bruce on board, the Spiders made their first of several trips to California.

By the time they got there, they were broke.

“We slept in Griffith Park on the park benches,” Dunaway says. “Then, in the morning, we happened to come across this parking lot where this guy had a sandwich truck and he was throwing the previous day’s sandwiches into the dumpster. We pushed Vince upfront because he was the skinniest and looked the most pathetic and he watched the guy for a while until he finally said ‘Take them.”

Dunaway laughs, and says, “And we moved in like locusts.”

The Spiders eventually landed a gig as the house band at the Cheetah Club.

“We played there and opened for all kinds of great bands,” Dunaway says. “That’s when we met the Doors, Iron Butterfly, the Animals, Janis Joplin, you name it.”

Neal Smith: ‘The final element we needed’

They were living a house in Santa Monica and had changed their name to the Nazz when future drummer Neal Smith showed up on their doorstep. Smith had moved to San Francisco with another Phoenix band, the Holy Grail. When that ended badly, he asked the Nazz if he could crash at their place while he tried to find a new one.

Smith was a Camelback High School grad who befriended the guys in the Nazz while taking art classes together at Glendale Community College. 

“We got to be friends,” Smith says. “And then I found out Glen, the lead guitarist, was from Akron. I’m from Akron. So we created an instant bond.” 

As fate would have it, drummer John Speer quit the Nazz while Smith was staying in their house.

Dunaway says, “All John wanted to do was write more garage band hits to follow up ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind.’ He was probably the only one that was thinking realistically, but he was one against the rest. We all wanted to go into an avant-garde direction.”

Speer didn’t want to go in that way, so he quit. And as Dunaway says, “Immediately, Neal became the drummer. That was the final element we needed for the chemistry of the group.”

Why they named the band ‘Alice Cooper’ 

In 1968, they changed their name to Alice Cooper, having found out that Todd Rundgren had a band called Nazz.

Cooper and Dunaway have both disputed the story that the name came from a session with a Ouija board but Smith says he was there.

They’d come back to the Valley from LA. — as they often did when funds were running low because as Smith says, “we could make 10 times the amount of money in Phoenix for one night” — and were hanging with their friends, the Weeds of Idleness.

“Somebody brought out a Ouija board,” the drummer says. “I was the first one to sit down to it. I had a couple beers and started talking about past lives, what your name was, where you lived, how you died. Then Vince sat down and he asked it his name in a previous life. It spelled out Alice Cooper. I was right there. And I saw it.”

By March, they had restocked their bank accounts and moved back to LA. That’s when the conversation turned to renaming the band.

“After going over a couple of names and discussing it,” Smith says, “we all just almost simultaneously said ‘Let’s just change the name to Alice Cooper.'”

Smith thought it was a brilliant name.

“It’s a girl’s name for a crazy bunch of long-haired guys from Phoenix, Arizona,” he says. “And it was like a blank page. We could make Alice Cooper anything we wanted.” 

The band initially struggled to find success

It wasn’t long before the newly christened Alice Cooper came to the attention of Shep Gordon. He became their manager and arranged an audition with Frank Zappa, who responded well to their experimental urges, releasing their first album, “Pretties for You,” on Straight Records.

“I was the crusader for that avant-garde thing,” Dunaway recalls. “When Alice and I started the band, we were friends because we were both in art class and loved the surrealists, Salvador Dali and pop art. We decided we were gonna start a band that incorporated art.”

That album failed to find an audience, and for a struggling band, that meant rethinking their priorities.

“When it was obvious that ‘Pretties for You’ wasn’t putting any food on the table, the band decided we should try to write some songs that were more relatable,” Dunaway says. “I was outvoted on that, but I was as hungry as they were.”

A hastily recorded second album “Easy Action” was intended to provide the breakthrough they were after, but it failed to chart. 

Dunaway says, “We had a reputation by then. We had toured with the Mothers, recorded with Zappa. But we didn’t have one important ingredient – a single.”

Bob Ezrin helped get their sound together

To that end, they reached out to Jack Richardson, a Canadian producer enjoying a hot streak with a run of big hit singles for the Guess Who. 

“And he hated us,” Smith says, with a laugh. “It was just nothing that made sense to normal people. And Jack Richardson, if you think about the Guess Who, he wanted to stay as far away from us as he possibly could.”

So Richardson dispatched Bob Ezrin, an apprentice at his studio, to check them out at Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York City club.

“Not only did he go back to Toronto raving to Jack Richardson about the band,” Smith says. “He told Jack he saw a whole new wave of music coming. We needed a producer that would be like our George Martin for the Beatles. Somebody that really got us. And not only did he get what we were doing, he became like a sixth member of the band.”

Ezrin and Richardson co-produced their breakthrough single, “I’m Eighteen,” which helped make their third album, “Love it to Death,” the commercial success they so desperately needed. 

By that point, they’d relocated to Michigan, where their outrageous stage show proved a huge hit on a Detroit scene accustomed to the proto-punk abandon of such kindred spirits as the Stooges and the MC5.

“We had a farm out there in Pontiac,” Bruce says. “And it had a big horse paddock. It was indoors so they could train horses. It was literally the size of a football field. And we were able to play 24/7 every day as loud as we wanted.

“That’s where we really started getting our sound together.”

How ‘I’m Eighteen’ became a proper hit

Dunaway says he knew that Ezrin was exactly what they needed by the time he finished turning “I’m Eighteen” into a proper hit.

“It was this sprawling song that started with a slower, moody keyboard thing,” he recalls. “And Bob Ezrin came in and the first thing he said was ‘Get rid of that intro. If it’s gonna be a single, nobody’s gonna wait that long.’ So we whittled it down to the single version. It took an afternoon and it was done.”

That song became the breakthrough hit they needed.

“We were playing all over the place and ‘I’m Eighteen’ came on the radio,” Bruce recalls. “We were in shock. We pulled the car over and all got out. We were pinching ourselves, you know? It was a dream. And it just kind of escalated from there.”

They followed “Eighteen” with an even bigger, more enduring hit in “School’s Out,” and their U.S. tour in support of the chart-topping “Billion Dollar Babies” broke box-office records held by the Rolling Stones in 1973.

Becoming such a huge part of American pop culture was a strange experience for Smith, who was used to a certain amount of resistance to their brand of shock and awe.

“All of a sudden it started to work,” he says. “And we became accepted. Now we’re in the Hall of Fame. And I still am a little bit uncomfortable with that. Not being a rebel or anything, but being a creative person that likes to be on the cutting edge.”

The bandmates went their separate ways after “Muscle of Love” in 1974, Cooper launching his solo career with “Welcome to My Nightmare” the following year.

The Alice Cooper group reunions

The four surviving members have reunited several times, onstage and in the studio, since Buxton’s death in 1997.

The first time was in 1999 for Glen Buxton Memorial Weekend at Cooper’sTown in Phoenix. In 2010, they cut some tracks for Cooper’s “Welcome 2 My Nightmare” album and played Christmas Pudding with another fixture of the Cooper universe, Steve Hunter, on guitar.

It was during rehearsals for that Pudding show that they found they were about to be inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since that induction, Smith says, their reunions have been more frequent.

A 2015 concert at Good Records in Dallas as part of a book signing for Dunaway’s autobiography, “Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group” became the subject of a film called “Alice Cooper: Live From the Astroturf,” which won best documentary at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2019.

“That was a lot of fun,” Bruce says of that record-store reunion. “I didn’t really think Alice was coming. When I saw the film, I totally forgot I sang ‘Caught in a Dream’ at the beginning and then in comes Alice. I was like ‘Oh wow.’ I mean, I knew Chris at the record store wanted to get him down there but I didn’t really know that it was happening. It was very impromptu and raw.”

It also paved the way for a U.K. tour in 2017 for the four surviving original members, who recorded with Cooper again for the “Paranormal” album.

‘It’s a family that will never go away’

There’s a certain chemistry that kicks in when the four surviving members of that original Cooper group get back together. And it goes beyond nostalgia.

As Dunaway says, “As soon as we start playing, it sounds like you’re back home again. It just sounds right.”

With everyone in Phoenix for the Pudding show, they’ve scheduled two days of recording with Ezrin for a project that grew out of “Breadcrumbs,” Cooper’s recent six-song tribute to the Detroit sound.

“They wanted to continue that theme,” says Bruce. “So Dennis wrote a song. Neal’s got a song. And we’re gonna record.” 

To Smith, it’s like they never stopped.

“When we get together, it’s all the same stupid jokes, same stupid sense of humor, and a lot of creative juices flowing,” he says. “That’s what I cherish more than anything.”

And he’d do more if he could.

“Michael’s bag and mine and Dennis’ are always packed,” he says. “We’re just waiting. If Alice and Bob want us to do recording, we’re there for them. It’s a family that will never go away and we’ll keep doing it as long as we can.” 

Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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