From Raising Cain to Raising Money

Former ‘poster boy for sin’ Alice Cooper has taken on a decidedly different role: Christian philanthropist

It’s a cloudless and clement day at Grayhawk Golf Club, a verdant oasis carved out of the desert scrub northeast of Phoenix.

The veteran rock vocalist Alice Cooper, his shoulder-length hair swept into a ponytail bobbing behind a floppy white golf hat, steps gingerly out of

a golf cart to approach the ball he just drove off the 14th tee. With a deft swing, the man behind such hit teenage anthems as “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out” sends his ball soaring.

Pleased with his shot, the 58-year-old father of “shock rock,” who brought simulated beheadings and dismembered baby dolls to his concert stage, returns to his cart. It’s only a short journey to the green for Mr. Cooper, but in a broad sense, it has been a long and at times turbulent trip that has brought him to this desert golf course and his latest role in life: Christian philanthropist.

This is the third and final day of the 10th annual Alice Cooper Celebrity AM golf tournament. Some 225 people have paid $3,000 each to play golf and party alongside Mr. Cooper and a diverse mix of celebrities, including Pat Boone, Dick Butkus, and Dennis Hopper.

The money goes to support the Solid Rock Foundation, a charity Mr. Cooper helped start in nearby Scottsdale in 1995 that has raised nearly $1.5-million for its mission, to “honor Christ by helping to meet the spiritual, economical, physical, and social needs of teenagers and children within our community.” And just this month, the charity announced that it plans to build a $3-million teen center in Phoenix.

The ‘Prodigal Son’

Charitable work was far from the singer’s mind back in the early 1970s, when he first ascended to rock stardom as the front man for a band named Alice Cooper. The group’s roots go back to a band he formed with classmates at a Phoenix high school. He later legally adopted the band’s name as his own (changing from his birth name of Vincent Furnier) while pursuing a successful solo career. He intensified his penchant for dark theatrics — his concerts featured real snakes and fake blood — and built on his reputation for being one of the most reckless and twisted performers in the business.

“In my 20s, people were throwing millions of dollars at me,” says Mr. Cooper. “And the crazier and sicker I got, the more money I got.”

By the early 1980s, his music career was stumbling and he was battling alcoholism — challenges that ultimately contributed to a reawakening of a Christian faith first instilled in him by his father, a preacher and missionary. A clean and sober Mr. Cooper now refers to himself as the “prodigal son.”

“I grew up in a Christian home, went out and became the poster boy for sin, and then came back to Christianity,” he says.

Mr. Cooper continues to record and go on concert tours. He has also opened two restaurants (Alice Cooper’s Town eateries in Phoenix and Cleveland that combine rock and sports themes) and has reportedly earned more from real-estate investments than from rock — though estimates of his wealth are unavailable. He hosts a nightly nationally syndicated radio show (where he spins both classic rock and yarns about his decades-spanning career). But he says he is just as proud of his philanthropic work as he is of the seven platinum-selling records he placed on the charts.

“My whole career has been about gimmicks,” Mr. Cooper says. “Solid Rock is one thing that’s not a gimmick. I’ve been doing this for 11 years because I care about it.”

Helping Kids in Phoenix

The organization grew out of discussions Mr. Cooper had in the early 1990s with Chuck Savale, then the youth pastor at Camelback Bible Church, in Phoenix, which the singer attended. Both men had teenage children at the time and were concerned about the plight of the city’s less-privileged youth.

“Everybody thinks of Phoenix as being a resort, but we looked around and saw that we’re the fifth-biggest city in United States and we have the fifth-biggest problem with guns, gangs, and drugs,” Mr. Cooper says. “I was thinking there must be something we can do to use the Alice celebrity for some really good use.”

Mr. Savale, now Solid Rock’s executive director and sole paid employee, says he never doubted Mr. Cooper’s sincerity, despite his curious name and checkered past. “We all do foolish and selfish things before we know Christ,” he says. “Alice’s were exaggerated because they occurred in public.”

The pair decided that forming their own charity would be the best way to capitalize on Mr. Cooper’s fame. However, they stopped short of naming the new organization after the singer.

“I get enough praise in my career,” Mr. Cooper says. “I don’t need it for doing charity work. But we know the Alice name opens doors and gets people interested, and that’s how we use the name.” (Neither Mr. Cooper nor Mr. Savale would say how much of the singer’s own money he has contributed to Solid Rock.)

The performer gathered local residents with similar concerns — all of whom, he says, were novices at nonprofit management. Initially, the group hoped to open its own teen center, where kids could go after school for sports and other activities. However, locating a site and developing such a facility proved problematic for the fledgling charity.

“We were trying to jump into something we didn’t know enough about,” Mr. Cooper says. “We decided it would be smarter to concentrate on raising money, which we thought we’d be good at, and distributing it to organizations and neighborhood ministries that were already doing good work.”

Golf and Christmas Pudding

The first Alice Cooper Celebrity AM golf tournament was held in 1997, and the annual event is now one of the charity’s main sources of funds. It has proved to be a natural way to combine Mr. Cooper’s passion for the game and his connections in the entertainment world.

“Alice is a walking, talking chamber of commerce for Solid Rock,” says his wife, Sheryl Cooper, who is on the charity’s board. “He is always looking for new celebrities to invite to our events.”

This year’s tournament, held in April, raised $80,000 for the organization after expenses. The event includes a silent auction, which this year included a new Jeep donated by a local car dealer. Perhaps the most unusual auction item was Mr. Cooper’s offer to write and record a custom song, which sold for $5,000 to a fan who came to the tournament from Britain.

Five years ago, the charity started Alice Cooper’s Christmas Pudding, a holiday-themed variety show held in a Phoenix theater each December. Last year’s Pudding brought in $140,000 after expenses and featured performances by Mr. Cooper, Styx, the Tubes, Don Felder (a former member of the Eagles), and the comedian Gary Mule Deer.

“I really want to see the Pudding become a Christmas tradition in Phoenix,” says Sheryl Cooper, who came up with the name for the event to evoke the mix of entertainment included.

Christian Charity

With Mr. Cooper frequently away on lengthy concert tours, Mr. Savale says Solid Rock doesn’t keep a rigid schedule of board meetings. Trustees generally try to convene shortly after the two major fund-raising events to decide how to distribute the proceeds.

“We’ve become pretty highly visible in the Phoenix area, and people approach us for grants now,” Mr. Savale says. “The board has the formidable task of going over everything with a fine-tooth comb to see what meets our criteria. We don’t just automatically roll over and help the same organizations every year.”

Adds Mr. Cooper, “It’s easy to give money away if you don’t really care where it goes.”

Solid Rock’s “assistance guidelines” explain that grants are awarded to charities that promote “the advancement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” to children and teenagers while also catering to their physical, mental, or social-welfare needs, which can include “education, food and clothing, housing, medical care, summer activities, and after-school care.”

Last year Solid Rock gave out more than $150,000 to eight charities in and around Phoenix.

The foundation has provided more than $180,000 in scholarship money over the past six years to students attending Grand Canyon University, a Christian college in Phoenix. Other grantees include Tonto Rim Christian Camp, in the mountains north of Phoenix, and the Phoenix Rescue Mission, which serves homeless families.

Solid Rock has given the Navajo Christian Foundation, in Dilkon, Ariz., $155,000 over the past four years. The group provides social services to families who live on a large Navajo Indian reservation northeast of Phoenix. The money covered nearly a third of the costs of building a recreation center on the reservation, which opened last year. Mr. Cooper spoke at the opening ceremonies and sang a few songs backed by his son Dash Cooper’s band, Runaway Phoenix.

“We consider them our partners,” says James Paddock, Navajo Christian Foundation’s co-founder, of Solid Rock. “They heard about what we were doing a few years ago, came up to visit us, and jumped on the bandwagon and started helping us.”

Tonto Rim Christian Camp, in Payson, Ariz., a mountain camping complex that provides outdoor activities for children and families, has received $14,000 from Solid Rock. The money will help build a multipurpose center at the camp.

“When we tell people that Alice Cooper’s foundation funded us, they kind of look at us twice,” says Brian Crandall, the camp’s director. “But we’ve had a great relationship with them over the past couple of years. They believe in what we’re doing and have been a blessing for us.”

Solid Rock has made a grant to a group that fights poverty in Haiti, but the rest of its money has gone to groups that work in Arizona.

“I can do more in Phoenix just by concentrating the energy here than I can by going out to save the world,” Mr. Cooper says. “And, besides, I don’t think people would buy Alice Cooper as a world saver.”

“I’m not Bono and I’m not Sting,” he adds, taking note of two prominent rock musicians involved in global human-rights charity work. “My image doesn’t match up with what they’re doing.”

In deference to his embrace of Christianity, Mr. Cooper no longer performs a few of his older songs that allude to promiscuity or drug and alcohol abuse. His stage shows, however, continue to feature the trappings of horror movies: guillotines, straitjackets, and other outlandish props.

He speaks of Alice Cooper in the third person when discussing his on-stage antics and persona. “I play Alice Cooper the way Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter,” he says. “It’s a fictional character I created that has nothing to do with my normal life.”

His wife concurs with that notion. “Alice is really more Ozzie Nelson than Ozzy Osbourne,” says Ms. Cooper, a trained ballet dancer who met her husband in 1975 when she was hired as a dancer for one of his concert tours. Ms. Cooper adds that, even in his heyday, her husband’s shows never included Satanism, nudity, or obscenities.

Nevertheless, Mr. Cooper is mindful that his outlandish performance persona can appear at odds with Christian philanthropy. He says that because of his musical image, it wouldn’t work for him to release a charity song or promote the foundation at his concerts.

“I understand the Alice image and it’s very important we use it correctly,” Mr. Cooper says. “If we don’t, it can make us look like a joke. You can’t have this sort of a villainous character scaring money out of people — that would not work at all, and we don’t go that route. I know where the lines are, where the boundaries are, between Alice and Solid Rock.”

Mr. Paddock admits he was initially “kind of leery” about the Navajo Christian Foundation accepting money from an organization connected to a flamboyant rock star.

“When Alice Cooper spoke here, he told our youth how he had experienced drugs and alcohol and how he was able to get out of that,” Mr. Paddock says. “It was a real plus for our community. We are a conservative, faith-based organization, but I now feel real comfortable working with him.”

“I can talk to kids through experience,” says Mr. Cooper, whose work with Solid Rock does include occasional speeches to youth groups. “I think they listen a lot more to a guy who has been there.”

He pulls no punches: “I tell the kids that hell isn’t really a party with Jim Morrison.”

Future Plans

To mark Solid Rock’s 10th anniversary last year, the board decided this past spring to revisit its original goal of opening its own youth facility. After searching for suitable sites in the greater metropolitan area, the charity just recently unveiled preliminary plans to construct a 20,000-square-foot facility on the Phoenix campus of Grand Canyon University. The college will donate the land for the center, which it is estimated will cost $3-million to build. The center, to be called the Rock, will likely feature a gym along with a performance stage and music studio where teenagers can perform and record music.

“We look forward to a beautiful facility and a fulfilling relationship,” says Brent Richardson, Grand Canyon’s chief executive officer, who adds that the college’s “heritage and values” fit well with Solid Rock’s mission.

If the center becomes a reality, Solid Rock will stop financing other charities to focus all its energy on its own programs. The organization will also begin seeking grants of its own, though Mr. Savale says it has yet to develop a strategy for soliciting such funds.

Mr. Savale would like to have the project under way by the end of the year, but cautions that planning is still in the very early stages. Mr. Cooper is hopeful that Solid Rock’s longevity and track record will help attract financial and community support for the ambitious project.

“Now we’ve proved to people in Phoenix that we are for real,” Mr. Cooper says. “We’ve shown that we’re not going come in and do this for a year and then say we’re tired of it.”

Indeed, Mr. Savale notes that he has gone from a nonprofit novice to a charity leader others approach for advice.

“So many people come to me here in town and say, Can you help us get a group started?” Mr. Savale says. “I tell them to go get a celebrity that’s willing to give their time. That’s the reality of it.”