Muppet Maestros -- Alice Cooper

Today marks the beginning of a brand new article series here on The Muppet Mindset. Muppet Maestros is a series of articles about various musicians, composers, and singers that our friend and previous contributor to the blog, Hilarie Mukavitz first learned about by watching The Muppet Show or Sesame Street. I think this is a really fun idea for an article series, considering quite a bit of my musical favorites were first discovered because of their appearance on a Muppet-related program. Please enjoy the first in the series, featuring Alice Cooper!

ALICE COOPER
Guest on The Muppet Show Episode 307

Hilarie Mukavitz - One night I was having a jam session with one of my friends. He was continually surprised at some of my song choices. "Where did you learn THAT one?" My response more often than not was The Muppet Show. It struck me just how many artists and composers I learned about for the first time because of watching The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. I thought it would make for a fun article series to explore some of them.

It just goes to show the magic of the Muppets that, being the hypersensitive child that I was, I could get nightmares from Scooby Doo, and yet have absolutely no problem with Alice Cooper. I'm enough of a fan that on a recent trip to Phoenix, the very first touristy thing I did was visit his restaurant. (Rumor has it that you can have anything you want at Alice's restaurant.) Plenty of waitresses with the Alice Cooper style eyeliner... but I didn't see any pictures of him with the Muppets. Alas.

Alice Cooper was born Vincent Furnier in 1948. "Alice Cooper" originally was the name of his band, not the man. Cooper has stated repeatedly that in late 60's rock and roll he saw mostly Peter Pans and wondered "Where's Captain Hook?" The dark, flamboyant, mostly tongue-in-cheek style of performance that became Alice Cooper's signature... which was later a perfect fit for The Muppet Show.

Alice Cooper was a solo artist by the time he came on The Muppet Show, where he performed 3 songs: "Welcome To My Nightmare" with a collection of Muppet monsters and ghouls, "You And Me" with Miss Piggy after he had turned her into a hideous bird-like creature, and "School's Out" with most of the Muppet monsters. In 1991 his song "I'm Eighteen" was parodied on Sesame Street. All are included in the playlist below. Enjoy!







The Muppet Mindset by Ryan Dosier