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AI for American ThinkerBy Allan J. FeiferFrom Vietnam-era campus protests to institutional influence, progressive ideas reshaped American politics and the Democrat party from within and without.

Spencer Cox would like you to know he is not running for president. “No, really,” the Utah governor insists at the beginning of Off Ramp, a book introducing readers to his upbringing, governing philosophy, and vision for the nation’s future. Sure, dude.
Cox also promises he has no interesting stories about “killing dogs or old people.” The shots at Kristi Noem and Andrew Cuomo suggest that even America’s leading evangelist for political civility enjoys getting a few punches in. Unfortunately, much of what follows is less lively. Cox’s writing frequently lapses into platitudes and repetitive exhortations to recover our better selves. He seems like a good man who could use a more ruthless editor.
And yet Cox is consistently interesting. His book raises a question more consequential than whether Americans should be nicer to one another: Can a politician combine conservative convictions, a conciliatory temperament, and a willingness to confront industries that are making ordinary life worse? There may be a constituency for that combination, even if voters remain unmoved by generic appeals to civility. Whether Cox can build it is another matter.
Cox has a nose for emerging political debates and a willingness to enter them before the partisan battle lines have hardened. Beyond the book, he has become a forceful opponent of prediction markets, arguing that dressing up bets as financial instruments does not make them any less a form of gambling. He has supported age verification for online pornography and protections for children on social media. His administration’s AI framework, meanwhile, encourages experimentation while imposing oversight and consumer protections.
These commitments suggest a potentially compelling combination of free market economics and social conservatism updated for the 21st century. Cox’s Mormon faith clearly informs his outlook, but his case also draws on secular researchers across the political spectrum, including Jonathan Haidt on social media and childhood, Robert Putnam on civic decline, and Lilliana Mason on partisan identity. His concern is that the institutions and technologies shaping American life are weakening the relationships that make freedom worth having.
There is a compelling argument here that could resonate well beyond Mountain West Republicans. Parents worried about gambling, pornography, and their children’s phones do not have to become hostile to business or technological progress. Cox understands the problem with social media companies is the impact of their products, not the wealth of their founders. The case for AI guardrails need not entail slowing innovation or surrendering the technological competition with China. The Utah governor articulates legitimate critiques of the technology sector while avoiding Elizabeth Warren-style hostility toward financial success as such. He could become an early voice in debates that reshape the country—or another Andrew Yang, who identified real problems without building a durable constituency.
Off Ramp, however, is chiefly concerned with Cox’s effort to persuade Americans to “disagree better.” As chairman of the National Governors Association in 2023-24, he made that phrase the name of a bipartisan initiative encouraging healthier political conflict. Its activities included joint service projects and advertisements featuring officials from opposing parties. Cox had modeled the approach on his 2020 campaign, appearing with Democratic opponent Chris Peterson to urge mutual respect and acceptance of the election’s outcome.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University gave the project a terrible urgency. Cox describes responding to the murder, helping oversee the manhunt, and condemning those who celebrated it. Searching Kirk’s old posts for words that might discourage retaliatory hatred, he found quotations Kirk had shared over the years: “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” And, most directly: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
The political difficulty is that voters’ stated preference for civility coexists with a strong demand for politicians who fight. A 2025 Pew survey found 71 percent of Republicans considered it very important for Democratic officials to compromise with them, while only 39 percent demanded the same of their own officials. Democrats exhibited a similar double standard. Americans like compromise considerably more when their opponents are doing it.
Donald Trump embodies this tension. He has been flexible on substantive questions, moving the GOP away from some of its previously more rigid positions on trade, entitlements, abortion, and more. Yet his disposition is radical: No one could credibly accuse him of being insufficiently combative. Cox is something like the opposite. His policy commitments are fairly conservative, but his willingness to compromise and find common ground across party lines is increasingly unconventional.
This raises a question that has received less attention than the prospect of ideological realignment: Could American politics undergo a temperamental realignment? Voters regularly turn against the people in power, looking for something different. Perhaps a politician could offer mutual rhetorical disarmament to Americans who dislike both MAGA’s permanent state of gladiatorial combat and the ascendant socialists on the Islamist-sympathetic Left.
There are good reasons for skepticism. In a recent conversation, the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, whom Cox cites frequently throughout the book, and my Manhattan Institute colleague Christopher Rufo agreed that the left is over-institutionalized and the right under-institutionalized. Democrats operate within a dense organizational network that enforces ideological expectations. Republicans have become increasingly organized around Trump’s personal authority, with weaker institutions mediating between the leader and his supporters. Each structure creates obstacles for someone seeking to change his coalition’s political habits. A Republican peacemaker must navigate Trump’s demands for loyalty; a Democratic moderate must confront institutions that regularly treat ideological concessions as betrayal.
Cox’s own endorsement of Trump in 2024 illustrates the difficulty of operating within that environment. Still, his survival is worth considering. Booed at Utah’s Republican convention that year, he responded, “Maybe you hate that I don’t hate enough.” He later regretted returning contempt with contempt. He also won the primary. The activists demanding maximum hostility were not the entire electorate.
Milquetoast moderation from a friendly face is unlikely to sell. A tougher, more subversive centrism might: a project that picks fights with ideological activists and predatory industries while offering voters a way out of permanent partisan warfare. Ideological extremism and political passion are different things, and a candidate can reject the former without abandoning the latter. Cox understands this better than his reputation suggests: He explicitly rejects mushy civility and tells readers they do not hate social-media companies enough. His call for mandatory national service also gives his project a purpose beyond asking everyone to calm down.
Could a candidate in 2028 reject our familiar political dividing lines, remain pro-business and pro-AI, and instead pick fights over gambling, pornography, and social media? I think so. I am less certain Cox is the man to pull it off. He has lasted longer than many of Utah’s nice-guy Republicans—RIP Mitt Romney and Evan McMullin—in an era that rewards a different temperament. His book suggests there may be more fertile ground for his politics than conventional wisdom allows. Having experienced the pain of political polarization in my own family, I hope he finds it.
Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt
by Spencer Cox
Penguin Press, 304 pp., $30
Jesse Arm is vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute.
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When the story of Karyann Parkinson—a Virginia mom convicted of child abuse for letting her five-year-old walk alone to a nearby pond—went viral last month, I didn’t know what to think. Of course, the authorities’ reaction was disproportionate; trusting your kid shouldn’t be a crime. But as a parent, I wondered whether I would be comfortable giving my five-year-old that much freedom. Probably not.
And yet I’m convinced that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is correct when he suggests today’s kids are overprotected in the real world, and underprotected online—a toxic combination contributing to unprecedented levels of anxiety. In some ways, it seems more obvious what to do about the latter. Just keep your kids far away from screens and social media, and for as long as possible. But in “the real world,” the lines are less obvious. When and where is it okay to let your kid roam free?
To recover perspective, it’s sometimes helpful to recall what others have done, in simpler times, or in far-off places. Enter Meghan Cox Gurdon, with her new memoir, Free Range Girl. Cox Gurdon takes a look at the year of her life in 1976—between the ages of 12 and 13—when she moved from her mother’s home in New York and went to live with her father, a devotee of the back-to-land movement in rural Maine, and what it taught her about life’s ups and downs, and her sense of self.
Her father built the house from scratch and, for many years, it showed. When Cox Gurdon arrived, there was no hot water. She recalls bathing in a tin tub, which she sarcastically calls “an artifact from a time before electricity and hot running water and other cushy inventions that softened the body and weakened the character.” They had to haul the water indoors in a bucket from a spring, then heat it on the stove. “It was ridiculous.”
The homestead also featured a purely “decorative” pony named Dusty, who bit and kicked, as well as chickens that laid multicolored eggs. “Owning hens that laid such eggs was like having cows that produced chocolate milk, or trees that grew sugar plums,” Cox Gurdon recalls.
The memoir is charming: a classic North American coming-of-age story, as in Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie, but with a more modern bent, as in Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Perhaps I’m biased, having once been one, but the inner lives of girls that age are singularly endearing.
I loved Cox Gurdon’s account of when she tried to eat a real speckled blue egg at her father’s friend’s house, thinking it was chocolate, then had to spend the rest of the visit concealing her disgust and embarrassment “in terror of discovery.” Or her indignation and dismay at learning from her school teacher, in passing, “that ‘of course’ there would be no more books about Narnia because C.S. Lewis was dead.” (“I’d had no idea.”) Or the scene in which she tries explaining to her nonplussed father why she and her friends have raw egg smeared all over their faces. (Despite all three of them having clear skin, the women’s magazines they read warned about “oily T-zones.”)
Growing up in rural America in the 1970s—before the internet or the dark vortex of social media—Cox Gurdon had wild adventures: riding horses bareback, driving a Ford, surviving a horrifying brush with leeches, and cooking roast dinners. These experiences—mostly occurring beyond adult supervision—were not without mishaps. Once, while babysitting for her younger cousin, she accidentally burnt off her eyebrows when lighting an oven. On another occasion, after riding alone and losing control of her horse, she was found lying face down in a field with a bad concussion and two black eyes.
But what permeates throughout her account is that Cox Gurdon was a child who, through repeated risk-taking and exposure to the elements, cultivated the most important quality (after virtue), which is resilience.
After her dad’s car got stuck in the mud, and he insisted she put it in gear and drive it forward while he pushed from behind, she was daunted. “I was just a kid. There were so many steps to follow. What if I missed one? I was afraid to try and I was afraid not to try,” she wrote. But try she did, and in doing so, gained confidence. Less than a year later, she was telling him: “Dad, I’m thirteen. I know how to drive.”
Her father did have some boundaries. He drew a red line at amusement park rides after the nephew of his friend was killed in a freak accident. And when she briefly thought smoking was cool, he quickly disabused her of the notion. “No goddamn cigarettes,” he told her, throwing them in the fire and grounding her for two weeks.
Being a free-range girl was hugely formative for Cox Gurdon. In the 1970s, there was no virtual world from which she needed protecting. Instead, there was an adult world full of adult vices. And it’s here, out of the mouths of babes, that Cox Gurdon conveys the immense pain this underprotection caused.
Cox Gurdon’s parents divorced when she was six and though the aftermath was amicable, she pined away, futilely, for their getting back together. She writes of “the wistfulness I sometimes felt for a way of life I had never known.” More specifically, “the older adults I knew, those of my grandparents’ generation, lived with more order and less disruption. They had fewer divorces.”
And it wasn’t just her own parents. Divorce shattered the stability of her extended family, too. A much-beloved aunt, Mickey, who had been such a warm and lively presence in Cox Gurdon’s life on the homestead, vanished when she abruptly left her husband, Uncle Bill, and son—and took her daughter to live with another man. Devastated, a 12-year-old Cox Gurdon nevertheless “recognized with a kind of cold maturity how little my opinion mattered in this affair.”
Cox Gurdon had moved from New York to Maine to live with her father as her mother moved to Massachusetts to live with her boyfriend, Ronnie. And Cox Gurdon recalls the irrational resentment she felt toward Ronnie’s kids, who, by virtue of visiting their father every weekend, got to see her mother more than she did. Still, she wrote: “They probably hadn’t wanted their parents to split up any more than I had. I didn’t like having to share Mom with them, but they hadn’t arranged things that way. The grown ups had.”
One thing I marvel at—as a parent daunted by the AI revolution—is how conducive Cox Gurdon’s childhood was to deep and wide reading. “I would read everything. I read labels and cereal boxes. I read over people’s shoulders. I read books I picked up at school. I read what my parents were reading,” she wrote. She even recalls a report card noting that, “Meghan needs to take time from her outside reading to pay better attention in class.” Oh, if only that were the problem facing today’s kids instead of the dreadful opposite! In 1976, the year Free Range Girl is set, “40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, while 11.5 percent said they hadn’t read any,” as noted in the Atlantic. By 2022, those percentages had reversed.
Cox Gurdon was an admirably innocent child, but even when she did go astray—she and a friend once got caught shoplifting red-handed—the experience reinforced the moral framework that was observable to her in the real world and still very much discernible in the world of books she so frequently inhabited.
“We’d simply been selfish. We’d been reckless too,” she wrote, reflecting on her behavior. “We had not thought about right and wrong. We certainly had not thought about consequences.” She was resolved: “There would be no more of this, I decided. I was not a thief and a liar.”
None of us gets through adolescence with a clean conscience. But it is not the immorality of the internet and social media that frightens today’s parents as much as its thundering amorality. AI isn’t so much usurping right with wrong as obliterating these categories all together. What, then, can we do to preserve the moral sense and imagination of our children?
In truth, most of us aren’t going to do something as drastic as Cox Gurdon’s father: build our own homestead and go “back to the land.” But we might settle for more walkable neighborhoods, limiting screen time in favor of books, and plugging into a community of like-minded parents eager to let their kids play outdoors unsupervised.
Free Range Girl: A Memoir
by Meghan Cox Gurdon
Morehouse Publishing, 256 pp., $28.95
Madeleine Kearns is a contributing writer at the Free Press.
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“A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a research program funded by NASA to talk about the intersection of God and aliens,” quipped Business Insider after NASA gave more than $1 million to Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry to study how the world’s religions might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Scholars representing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism gathered to contemplate a question that seemed distinctly modern: What happens to religion if we discover Earth is not alone? But, as Indiana University’s Paul Gutjahr demonstrates in Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life, NASA was late to the party. Americans have been thinking about aliens for a surprisingly long time.
Gutjahr’s learned and engaging study includes a gallimaufry of American characters, including Puritan ministers, presidents of Yale, Benjamin Franklin, Mormon theologians, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Scientologists, and leaders of the Nation of Islam. The details of their beliefs vary considerably. But their fascination with the heavens does not.
Cotton Mather was among the first Americans to consider the possibility that other worlds might be inhabited. The 18th-century Puritan minister was an enthusiastic student of science, and in his 1721 The Christian Philosopher, he considered whether the Moon, comets, and other celestial bodies might contain life. Mather saw no conflict between such speculation and Christian faith. Quite the contrary, he believed—an inhabited universe offered another reason to marvel at the Creator. After contemplating the plurality of worlds, Mather exclaimed, “Great GOD, what a Variety of Worlds hast thou created! … How stupendous are the Displays of thy Greatness, and of thy Glory, in the Creatures, with which thou hast replenished those Worlds!”
Mather was hardly alone in suspecting we are not alone. Long before he printed his first almanac, Benjamin Franklin recorded in his diary his belief in the plurality of worlds, writing in 1728, that “the INFINITE has created many Beings or Gods … and that Each has made for himself one glorious Sun, attended with a beautiful and admirable System of Planets.” Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, believed other planets contained beings capable of moral action. Timothy Dwight, another Yale president, imagined a vast multitude of worlds. Henry David Thoreau wondered about the inhabitants of distant stars. For these prominent thinkers, the universe was so immense it seemed almost presumptuous to assume God had populated only one small planet.
Thomas Paine possessed a different use for the idea. In The Age of Reason, he turned the plurality of worlds against Christianity. If God had created countless inhabited planets, Paine asked, what would that mean for the Christian doctrine of redemption? Would Christ have to be incarnated and sacrificed on every inhabited world?
The stars, it seems, could therefore provide ammunition for both religious belief and religious skepticism.
The 19th century brought still more possibilities and permutations. Spiritualism promised communication with the dead. The famous 1835 “Moon Hoax” persuaded newspaper readers that astronomers had discovered lunar inhabitants, complete with humanoid creatures, animals, and temples. The reports were fabricated, but their enormous popularity revealed a public already eager to believe the heavens might contain other forms of life.
Speculation was enhanced by technological advancements. The telegraph had made invisible communication across great distances a familiar fact. The Civil War left hundreds of thousands of Americans grieving for dead relatives. If electrical signals could traverse enormous distances without carrying a physical object, perhaps, some wistfully posited, communication between the living and the dead did not seem quite so impossible.
Mormonism, that quintessentially homegrown American faith, developed an especially elaborate cosmic theology. Joseph Smith and his followers envisioned a universe filled with worlds and intelligences, with human existence forming part of a larger drama of eternal progression. Around the same time, Theosophists, led by their founder, the Russian Helena Blavatsky, constructed their own spiritual hierarchies. Transcendentalists contemplated humanity’s place amid the immensity of creation.
By the 20th century, extraterrestrial speculation had moved into still more unconventional religious territory.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology placed humanity within an intergalactic history involving the Galactic Federation and the extraterrestrial ruler Xenu. The late 20th-century UFO phenomenon gave these as-old-as-America questions a new vocabulary. The atomic bomb, the Cold War, rockets, airplanes, and the space race all changed Americans’ sense of human power and vulnerability. Extraterrestrials came to represent an advanced civilization that might save humanity, or an incomprehensible force that might destroy it.
The Nation of Islam developed an extraterrestrial cosmology centered in part on the enormous Mother Plane. Louis Farrakhan later incorporated UFO experiences into his religious worldview and encouraged his followers to engage with Scientology.
Extraterrestrial beings, it turns out, make strange bedfellows.
Sometimes, the belief in aliens caused us to destroy ourselves. Case in point being Heaven’s Gate. In 1997, members of the cult committed mass suicide because they believed a spacecraft associated with the Hale-Bopp comet would transport them to another level of existence.
Gutjahr’s argument is, ultimately, that all this is less surprising than at first glance. After all, speculating about nonhumans is an invitation to ask ourselves distinctly human questions like why are we here? Why do we suffer? Is humanity special? Where did we come from? And where, ultimately, are we going?
“Perhaps most importantly,” Gutjahr writes, faith in life beyond Earth “teach[es] us that the path toward enlightenment and salvation is intimately tied to a greater cosmic whole.” The book traces an idea that has appeared among respectable pulpits, philosophical treatises, Founding Fathers, popular newspapers, university presidents, new religious movements, and the curious minds of UFO kooks. The line from Cotton Mather to a late 20th century cult, in other words, is a strikingly short one.
For three centuries, then, Americans have looked toward the heavens and asked whether someone—or something—is looking back. In many cases, the query was never really about the aliens, but about why we are here.
Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life
by Paul C. Gutjahr
Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $35
Stuart Halpern, senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, is the author, with Wilfred M. McClay, of Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story (Encounter).
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In the summer of ’71, as rock royalty played for charity at the Concert for Bangladesh in New York, a band of cretinous dirtballs emerged from the Midwest’s teenage wasteland with a breakout album that made mincemeat of the fashionable save-the-world vibe. It was titled Love It to Death, and the cover showed the group preening in the glare of a searchlight: menacing, androgynous-looking ghouls who’d apparently made Halloween a 24-7 proposition.
Their music featured buzz-saw guitars and a snarling lead singer named Alice Cooper, which was also the name of the band—which, rumor had it, was an homage to a 17th-century witch burnt at the stake. In the opening track, “Caught in a Dream,” Alice detailed the band’s aspirations after years of commercial rejection scraping by in the underbelly of the music biz:
I need a houseboat and I need a plane/I need a butler and a trip to Spain/ I need everything the world owes me/I tell that to myself and I agree.
Strange thing is, these swaggering delusions of grandeur came true. Not long after, the Alice Cooper group was one of the biggest rock acts on the planet. By ’73 came Billion Dollar Babies, a concept album with a title song inspired by their wild ride from scuzzy garage band to shock-rock arena stardom. The record-breaking tour had a fleet of semitrailer trucks with 22,000 sparklers, 300 baby dolls, 58 mannequins, 14 bubble machines, a giant dentist’s drill and surgical table, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a guillotine, among an array of stage props.
The band’s dream to make the big time at all costs stemmed from their hungry years broke and crammed together in a seedy L.A. group house, when they rejected with a proto-punk sneer the communal hippie utopia of the late ’60s. “Our attitude was, ‘Be as one and all smell of patchouli?’ Nah, we want Ferraris and a house in the Hollywood Hills!” writes Alice Cooper in his new memoir. “That was always the goal. We liked consumer culture.”
A love of the dazzling abundance of postwar American pop culture, along with a streak of defiant contrarianism, are the defining themes of Devil on My Shoulder, dedicated to “the outsiders.” It chronicles the long and controversy-studded career of Cooper, still thriving today as rock’s mascara-eyed madman 51 years after the original band imploded and Alice went solo. The memoir is also a reminder of the status-quo rattling impact when the Alice Cooper phenomenon first hit and Cooper became the scourge of society—the preachers and teachers and parents as well as rock critics who cried sell-out with the band’s every new outrage.
Those expecting a dire mea culpa on the perils of modern celebrity will be disappointed. Cooper is one of rock’s master raconteurs and most sociable creatures, from his droll cameos on ’70s talk shows to hosting his current satellite-radio show. His memoir reflects an outlook both absurdist and upbeat (almost relentlessly so) and reads more like a Horatio Alger success story than any Hollywood Babylon-style gloom-and-doom exposé. It also celebrates his path to sobriety and salvation through his fanatical devotion to golf and his return to the Christian faith of his childhood—not the typical pastimes of geriatric alumni of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The book also gives Cooper an opportunity to set the record straight. As he explains, he renounced his first memoir, Me, Alice, published at the height of his fame in 1976, because it consisted of drunken tall tales concocted on the fly to sell books. Long out of print, it was dedicated to “the other superstar, Richard Nixon” and included a foreword by Cooper’s minister father, Ether, a pastor and engineer, attending gigs and helping to design the stage set with a giant spider web.
To help correct the lies and debunk the many urban myths that he helped stoke, from the Ouija board origins of the band name to a notorious onstage chicken-killing incident, Cooper enlists the help of his alter-ego Alice, who plays devil’s advocate in the narrative, his fact-checking interrogations rendered in Gothic font. “I’d like to describe to you my journey to Hell and back with Alice, because it’s not only rockers who lose their way,” writes Cooper. “Not to sound messianic, but in a perverse, crazy kind of way, I think I was assigned to do some good here. And if that’s not proof that God has a sense of humor, nothing is.”
At the heart of the story is an affectionate and granular portrait of growing up in early ’60s suburbia and undergoing that era’s teenage rite of passage—starting a rock band. Born Vince Furnier, he was weaned on horror movies and TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as comics and pulp fiction and Chuck Berry records. All fed his fertile imagination and obsession with the strange and uncanny.
At Cortez High School in Phoenix, Ariz., Vince wrote a column for the school newspaper and was a star of the track team. In art class, he bonded with classmate Dennis Dunaway over the mind-bending Surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali, the outrageous provocateur who they’d seen on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. After Dunaway saw a concert by Duane “King of the Twangy Guitar” Eddy, the two decided to start a group with other students. The Spiders became a popular local garage rock act, with Vince’s dad, a minister and engineer, helping to design stage sets of webs and lights.
As the renamed Nazz, the band headed to L.A. in the late ’60s with little success. Another name change, due to another Nazz led by a young Todd Rundgren with a hit record out, showed their against-the-grain attitude. “We wanted to go in the opposite direction of the folksy or psychedelic trend of the day,” he notes in the memoir, “thinking we should give ourselves an old-fashioned, All-American grandma name like Betty Crocker, something deliberately uncool. And ‘Alice Cooper’ just popped into my head.”
Their unhinged, chaotic stage show with West Side Story-style street-fight antics found a fan in Frank Zappa, who watched them clear out an audience in minutes and signed them to a deal on his Straight Records label, a home for eccentric acts. Two albums went nowhere. It took a move to the Detroit area where other high-energy bands like the Stooges and MC5 had found a rabid following.
Manager Shep Gordon encouraged the mayhem and myth-making, and producer Bob Ezrin boiled down their music to concise, hook-laden songs with Cooper honing lyrics with weird characters and surprise endings—the storytelling devices, he notes, that “I learned reading O. Henry, listening to Chuck Berry and watching Alfred Hitchcock when I was young: always a twist at the end of the story, at the end of the lyric, at the end of the episode.”
The result was a string of early ’70s monster hits: “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” “Elected,” among others, that bottled for all time the joys and confusion of youth rebellion. The fusion of ballistic rock and off-the-wall theatrics was the band’s golden ticket, but it was the sound and fury of the Alice character that really set the band apart.
In 1975 Cooper had legally changed his name, and he created his onstage alter-ego as pop culture’s most diabolical arch-villain. “At that time there were no villains in rock and roll,” he writes. “There were all these Peter Pans but no Captain Hook. And I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll gladly be Captain Hook!'”
The shows, which Cooper at the time described as “kinetic art,” grew into increasingly wigged-out rituals, with Alice as sacrificial scapegoat paying for his evil deeds in mock beheadings and electric-chair executions as audiences went wild. Cooper likens the crime-and-punishment themes to medieval morality plays, but he now admits the violence became too extreme.
Cooper’s alter-ego outgrew the band, and after he went solo, the Alice character nearly destroyed him as well. Even as he hobnobbed with celebs like his hero Dali, and Groucho Marx, who loved the vaudeville aspects of Alice’s antics, Cooper’s addictions to alcohol and cocaine deepened. It was 1983 before he got clean and able to finally separate himself from his toxic stage persona.
Diehard Alice Cooper aficionados will tell you his music peaked with the original band. Even so, one of the memoir’s guilty pleasures is rediscovering gems from Cooper’s up-and-down, six-decade solo career where he has gained legions of new fans that span generations, and which has influenced countless shock-rock acts—most of which have lacked the surreal and satirical art-school sense of humor that began with his garage band, The Spiders. Solo highlights include his 1977 ballad, “You and Me,” a Top 10 hit he crooned on The Muppet Show; “Clones (We’re All),” his 1980 nod to New Wave; his cameo as King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar; and his 1978 detox album, From the Inside, detailing the horrors of his stint in rehab.
At 78, Cooper has found his own version of the American Dream: Avuncular radio personality, daily golfer, churchgoer, and proprietor, along with his wife Sheryl, of the Solid Rock Teen Center in Phoenix, a nonprofit facility for local youth to pursue the arts. And he still tours. “I’ve been singing ‘I’m Eighteen’ for forty-six years, and now the crutch that I’ve always used as a prop during that song as a nod to Salvador Dali has taken on a second, ironic meaning,” he writes, adding: “I’m not hanging up my spurs at least until after Mick Jagger does.”
Devil on My Shoulder: A Memoir
by Alice Cooper with Daniel Richler
Da Capo, 464 pp., $32.50
Eddie Dean is the coauthor of Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times.
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