Alice Cooper recently shut down claims that he left the Alice Cooper Group for money, explaining his decision to keep the project alive during an appearance on CBS Mornings.
The legendary rocker addressed the 1974 breakup of the original band, expressing regret that he could not take some of his bandmates with him into the next stage of his career.
When asked about the different opinions surrounding the band’s split and how he addressed them in his book, Cooper reflected on their history and the moment they hit a wall.
“And you know, and believe we went to high school together,” Cooper said. “We ran track and cross country together. We did everything together. It got to a point where we hit a wall, and nobody wanted to say it. But we couldn’t go further.”
He then addressed the claims made by bassist Dennis Dunaway regarding his motivations for leaving.
“And to me, it was like, I don’t want Alice to die, so I’m going to keep Alice going,” Cooper explained. “That’s all there was to it. I think in Dennis’s book he said something about well Alice was chasing the money. I had no honest in all money never even was in my thoughts. It was the fact that I did not want Alice to die and Alice was dying a slow death in the business.”
Cooper also shared his feelings about not being able to bring his former bandmates along for the next chapter.
“And I felt if I could have taken Dennis and Neil with me I would have done that,” he continued. “I just, you just couldn’t. There was, there was other things going on in the band. One, you know, there was just it needed a whole new life. Alice needed another life.”
Despite the separation, Cooper emphasized that there is no lingering animosity between the members.
“And to this day, I mean, you know, we never were enemies,” Cooper concluded. “There were no lawsuits. There was no bad blood. It just we didn’t really divorce as much. We separated.”
This separation ultimately allowed Cooper to continue his career as a solo artist while maintaining a peaceful relationship with his former bandmates.
Cooper’s comments line up with the accounts of how the group came apart, which have long described the split as a slow-motion drift rather than a dramatic blowup.
The group’s 1973 album Muscle of Love failed to capitalize on the success of Billion Dollar Babies, and “the band began to have constant disagreements.” By 1974, the members agreed to what was expected to be a temporary hiatus.
Cooper has described that period in similar terms before. “When we broke up there was no bad blood,” he said. “Most bands break up and they start suing each other. We never broke up on that level. We broke up on a very friendly level. ‘You go do what you’re gonna do, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. Let’s see what happens.'”
Drummer Neal Smith offered his own version of events in a Q magazine feature. Smith said, “We took a year off, to do our own music, and basically never got back together.”
In his memoir Alice Cooper, Golf Monster, the singer pushed back on the idea that the band formally ended. Cooper wrote, “In my eyes, the Alice Cooper band never broke up,” adding, “There wasn’t any yelling.”
Dunaway’s own memoir, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!, frames the end differently, arguing that Alice left the group and kept performing under the Alice Cooper name. That gap in framing remains the core of the disagreement between the two accounts.
After the split, Cooper launched his solo career with Welcome to My Nightmare in 1975, which is widely regarded as his first solo album. Decades later, the surviving original members reunited for The Revenge of Alice Cooper, their first album together since Muscle of Love.
