Alice Cooper Gives Crucial Advice To Aspiring Musicians: ‘Listen To The Beatles’

Legendary shock rocker Alice Cooper recently shed light on the most critical missing piece he sees in much of modern rock music: simple, unforgettable melody. During a question-and-answer session at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 7, Cooper was asked what essential advice he offers young musicians starting their careers. You can find the video down below, courtesy of Robert Moseley.

His answer was immediate and perhaps surprising, given his theatrical brand of hard rock.

“Listen to The Beatles. Yeah. I’m not kidding. When it comes to writing songs, listen to the simplicity of The Beatles,” Cooper stated (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).

The “School’s Out” singer elaborated that regardless of genre, a song must transcend a mere rhythmic foundation. He challenged the notion that a powerful sound alone constitutes a complete track.

“A song, first of all, isn’t just a riff and a drum beat. You should be able to sit down — I don’t care who it is — and be able to play that melody and sing that song. You could be the most angry person in the world.”

Cooper stressed that many angry young bands fail to grasp the core structure that makes music enduring. He recounted his typical critique when listening to novice groups.

“I’ve had young bands come to me and they go, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I say, ‘I get it. You’re angry.’ ‘Cause you’re just yelling at me. I said, ‘Well, where’s the song? There’s no song there. There’s a great beat and there’s a great riff, but there’s no song.'”

To fix this structural gap, Cooper assigns a homework regimen to the young rockers.

“So I said, ‘What I want you to do is, for one week, listen to nothing but The Beach Boys, The Beatles and the Four Seasons — any [of the bands] that wrote songs, or Burt Bacharach, that write songs. And then, I don’t want you to sound like that, but I want you to get the idea of a verse, a B section, a bridge going into the chorus, going back into the bridge. But it means it has to have a melody. You can’t just yell at me. And it’s fine if you do yell at me, but you’re not gonna stick around very long.'”

For Cooper, who pioneered a theatrical rock show featuring guillotines, fake blood, and boa constrictors, the power of simple melody is the key to longevity.

“Why are those songs [from The Beatles] still being played on the radio? Because of melody, the melody — we all want to hear the melodies.”

This reverence for the Fab Four is not new for the shock-rock architect. Cooper previously cited the Beatles as one of his biggest influences, even telling NME that hearing “She Loves You” as a child “literally changed something in my brain. It inspired what Alice Cooper became.” He later told Rolling Stone that their debut U.S. album, Meet The Beatles!, “totally knocked me out because I’d never heard anything like that before.”