Alice Cooper’s audience once killed a chicken during a concert

Alice Cooper recalls an incident in the past involving a chicken that caused quite a stir.

In the new Biography: Alice Cooper In the episode, which airs on Sunday, June 23, the 76-year-old rocker recalls how he once looked down during his band’s performance at the Rock and Roll Revival Festival in Toronto in 1969 and there was “a chicken on the stage.”

“You have to remember I’m from Detroit,” he says in the episode. “I’ve never been on a farm in my life. It had wings, it had feathers, it was supposed to be able to fly. I took the chicken and threw it into the audience, thinking it would fly away and someone would take it home and call it Alice Cooper.”

Instead, Cooper – not yet a household name at the time of the festival – realized that chickens “don’t fly so much as they plunge.”

“I threw it out there and it fell right into the audience,” he says. “The audience is tearing it to pieces. It was the Peace and Love Festival. They’re tearing it to pieces and throwing it back on the stage. So there’s blood everywhere. Feathers and blood.”

John Lennon and his then-wife Yoko Ono – who also performed during the festival – watched from behind the scenes and “loved it,” says Cooper. “They thought it was art because it’s chaos.”

The next day, Cooper said, record label executive Frank Zappa called him and asked, “Did you kill a chicken on stage last night?”

“I said, ‘There was a chicken. I didn’t kill it,'” Cooper recalls. “He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone. They love it.’ He said, ‘It’s all over the press!’ I immediately thought, ‘Perfect.’ The chicken story became huge. Who is this monster that would do something like that at a rock show?”

When the band arrived for their next show in Binghamton, New York, Cooper said 50 people were standing outside protesting. Rumor has it that he “set a German Shepherd on fire.”

“My reputation was just insane,” he says. “I didn’t have to do anything. They created their own Alice Cooper myth. People were just discovering Alice Cooper, and I was just discovering him, so we all did it at the same time.”

Together with the chicken incident, Biography: Alice Cooper explores Cooper’s journey from his childhood with asthma in Detroit to his time as frontman of the groundbreaking Alice Cooper Group, one of the most famous figures in music history. It also delves into the struggles with addiction he had to overcome along the way.

Biography: Alice Cooper Premieres Sunday, June 23 at 10pm ET on A&E.