Alice Cooper, "School's Out" (Warner Bros., 1972)

Considering the degree of shock value some musical acts aspire to nowadays, the onstage antics of the Alice Cooper group in the early 1970s may seem rather innocuous.

True, the lead vocalist - born Vincent Furnier, later taking on the feminine-sounding moniker - used to pull all kinds of stunts involving snakes, gallows, guillotines and the like, while wearing makeup and crooning about escaping from an asylum. And yes, that outraged slews of parents, which in turn made the band all that more popular.

But all in all, the Cooper version of rock theater would rate no worse than around a PG-13.

Plus, once you strip away all the histrionics, there's the music, which still sounds good after all these decades. And that reason, more than the freak show, is why Alice Cooper was a top-selling act then and continues to have a wide fan base today.

The road of Alice the singer to superstardom was a strange one, starting in the mid-'60s in Phoenix, where young Vince met a number of like-minded aspiring musicians: guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith. Calling themselves the Earwigs, then the Spiders, then the Nazz, the guys eventually realized they weren't going anywhere in Arizona, and they ventured west to Los Angeles.

As the story goes, the band members were fooling around with a Ouija board one night when they were delivered the tale of a 17th-century girl who was burned at the stake for witchcraft. The girl's name supposedly was Alice Cooper, and they thought that would be a great name for the group.

They eventually crossed paths with Frank Zappa, who was starting a subsidiary record label for, uh, unique types of musicians. Along with the likes of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Wildman Fisher and the collection of warbling groupies known as the GTOs, Alice Cooper recorded on Zappa's ironically named Straight label, releasing two albums that make for some rather interesting listening, if not in a room full of people.

Meanwhile, the Cooper boys were trying to cut it on the L.A. club scene, where they earned a reputation as the worst band in town. They also had the longest hair in town, and played up the length of their locks by dressing in a manner that qualify from androgynous to downright feminine, especially Alice the singer.

One night, according to Alice's power of recall, they cleared L.A.'s Cheetah Club of paying customers in short order, leaving only a guy named Shep Gordon, who was clapping like a seal. Any band that held that kind of sway over an audience, he reasoned, had potential. So he signed on as its manager.

Band members decided to try their luck in Detroit, where they met a teenage musical whiz from Toronto, Bob Ezrin. He worked with the group to rein in its esoteric style, and their combined efforts resulted in Alice Cooper's first hits: the album "Love It to Death" and the classic single "Eighteen."

Meanwhile, the Cooper folks were taking stock of what was going on around the Detroit rock scene, especially the manic stage act of the Stooges and front man Iggy Pop. He served as inspiration for Alice the singer to come up with his own persona, one that quickly drew the ire of the outraged, and inspired the curious to buy more records.

The Cooper group did even better with its fourth album, "Killer," which nearly reached the Top 20 in the spring of '72. Then came a marketing stroke of genius: a song called "School's Out," released just as educational institutions across the land closed for the summer. For a time, it was the biggest-selling single in the history of Warner Bros. records, and it wasn't just for the novelty value. The tune is a great slice of hard rock, with Buxton's guitar burning all the way through.

The album of the same name came out a few weeks later and went Top 10, although many of the kids who bought it didn't realize it was a concept album, loosely based on "West Side Story" and integrating music from that show, especially on the song-story "Gutter Cat vs. the Jets" and the epic instrumental "Grand Finale."

The rest of the album contains some relatively little-known gems in the Cooper catalog: "Luney Tune," a going-insane ballad that plays like a sequel to the show-climaxing "Ballad of Dwight Fry" from "Love It to Death"; "Public Animal No. 9," in which Alice the singer's vocals degenerate into something resembling the subject matter; and especially the jazzy "Blue Turk," which does an unexpected turn into a horn section.

The Cooper group rode the popularity of "School's Out" into the No. 1 "Billion Dollar Babies" in 1973. But with success came problems - alcohol is usually mentioned as the main culprit - and the band imploded, recording one more album, the disappointing "Muscle of Love," before calling it quits.

Alice the singer, of course, carried on without missing a beat, continuing his career with many fans unaware that Alice Cooper once was the name of a quintet, not just one guy with snakes around his neck. But the other four haven't been heard from much since; sadly, Buxton died in 1997.

By then, he'd seen the imitators of what his band - and especially its singer - made popular decades before.