Alice Cooper has shared a rocking cover of The Velvet Underground’s 1970 Loaded classic, “Rock And Roll” from his upcoming album Detroit Stories, which pays homage to his hometown of Detroit where he first found fame in the late 60s.

"Detroit was Heavy Rock central then,” explains Alice, “You’d play the Eastown and it would be Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, the Stooges and the Who, for $4! The next weekend at the Grande it was MC5, Brownsville Station and Fleetwood Mac, or Savoy Brown or the Small Faces. You couldn’t be a soft-rock band or you’d get your ass kicked."

“Los Angeles had its sound with The Doors, Love and Buffalo Springfield,” he says, “San Francisco had the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. New York had The Rascals and The Velvet Underground. But Detroit was the birthplace of angry hard rock.”

Alice Cooper | "Rock And Roll" [Official Visualizer]

Despite the band being from New York, The Velvet Underground’s “Rock And Roll” was chosen by Cooper to tell a Detroit story from 1971, when the Alice Cooper Group was working in Detroit, with producer Bob Ezrin who was also recording another local group called… Detroit around the same time. Detroit laid down a heavy new arrangement of “Rock & Roll” which made its way back to The Velvet’s Lou Reed, inspiring him to team up with Ezrin on his seminal 1973 album, “Berlin” and several more times in the years that followed.

The Velvet Underground | “Rock And Roll” [2015 Remastered]

Cooper has continued to worked with Bob Ezrin for the past five decades. His take on the Velvet’s “Rock And Roll” was produced by Ezrin and features Detroit’s Steve Hunter on guitar and Johnny “Bee” Badanjek on drums.

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