Alice Cooper on the classical composers: "These guys were out of their minds."

Alice Cooper and Keith Moon. None were as crazy as Moon the Loon.

It probably depends on what the meaning of "crazy" is.

These classical writers were insane, when you think of how crazy they were. These guys were out of their minds. They were just eaten by this music, they were mentally insane over it. They were the rock stars of their time. But I think they would have been a lot crazier than we were.

Alice Cooper may have been an alcoholic, now long since dry, but I'm not sure he ever was crazy. When I saw him perform in Louisville, circa early-2000-something (the time before that was 1977), he seemed to me the last of the vaudevillians. Not that I doubt his sincerity in promoting classical music; as he makes clear, the quality of timelessness hops genres, and constructing memorable music spans them.

Alice Cooper: 'These classical composers were crazier than me!', by Tom Service (The Guardian)

Alice Cooper has been many things in his time: a rock god, a chicken-chucker, a guillotine-operator, a welcomer of nightmares – and now, it seems, a dewy-eyed advocate for the teaching of classical music in schools. Seriously. In a recording studio in central London, Cooper is embarking on one of the most unlikely projects of his half-century tenure as the world’s shock-rocker-in-chief: he’s providing the narration for a new recording of a Prokofiev classic, although his version is called Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood.