Alice Cooper has revisited the crack cocaine addiction that threatened his life and marriage ahead of his memoir, Devil on My Shoulder. In an interview with The Telegraph, published September 30, the singer described a period when earlier treatment for alcohol misuse had given way to another addiction.
“That was really the thing that almost killed me,” Cooper said.
The consequences reached his relationship with his wife, Sheryl. Cooper recalled that they were approaching divorce when she insisted on Christian marriage counseling, with the responsibility on him to arrange it. He credited those sessions with helping them reconcile. In 1983, he entered rehab again.
Finding a way to separate himself from his stage character became another part of rebuilding his life. Speaking to Kerrang! in 2021, Cooper explained that he had once believed he needed to remain Alice Cooper around the clock. The character’s appetite for excess had become something he felt expected to match away from the stage. Recovery allowed him to preserve the performance while developing a different life outside it.
He also acknowledged gaps in his memory of his work during that period. There were albums he had written, recorded and toured that he could barely remember, even as fans continued to tell him how much those records meant to them.
Changing his routine gave him something practical to do with the hours between shows. Cooper told Kerrang! that spending entire days in hotel rooms left him facing temptation, so he began looking for an activity that would get him outside. Golf filled that space. He recalled initially keeping the hobby quiet because he thought fans would associate it with their fathers rather than a rock singer.
By a January 2025 interview with People, Cooper was openly challenging the idea that intoxication was essential to his profession. “You don’t have to be drunk or high to be a rocker,” he said. He explained that he could not approach alcohol as a casual drinker and had no desire to return to it. Sobriety, in his account, had not taken away his ability to perform.
Those experiences are central to the memoir’s examination of the person behind the makeup. Written with Daniel Richler, the book addresses Cooper’s addictions, the years he struggles to remember and the difficulty of distinguishing his own life from the mythology surrounding his character. It also explores his marriage and Christian faith alongside the development of his stage show.
Devil on My Shoulder will be published in the US on October 6, 2026, through Da Capo. Ebury Spotlight will publish the UK hardback on October 8.
