The singer posed in the nide (more or less). The picture then received a lot of attention before a concert in London on June 30th of that year when the band pulled off a well-planned stunt.
ALICE COOPER: This picture was taken by Richard Avedon, one of the greatest fashion photographers of all time. We were taking a lot of different pictures that day and someone suggested doing a nude picture with the snake covering my private parts. It didn't take much persuasion to get me to pose naked. I was 24 years old and this picture turned out really well. At the time, it was very sexy for a rock star to lie naked with a big boa constrictor wrapped around him. It pissed off every parent in the US and Europe. It was the last straw when it came to what I could get away with.
We were notorious in London and when we went there in the summer of 1972 the headlines read: "The worst artist ever is coming to our youth." Of course, this meant that we sold every single ticket and the single “School’s Out” became number one. We decided to take it a step further as the gig approached. We knew Derek Taylor who had done press for the Beatles. Our manager Shep Gordon and I met him and brainstormed what would work, something that everyone in London would hear about. We came up with the idea of putting a giant billboard advertising the concert on the back of a lorry that was going through Oxford Circus during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. We asked the driver to make sure that the lorry broke down in the middle of the intersection. He got a lot of money for the trouble, because we thought he would probably get arrested if anyone caught him. I was convinced that the whole band would go to jail for this. The lorry stopped traffic in all directions for several hours. The next day all the newspapers reported on the traffic chaos with a picture of the lorry – with our big billboard. People loved it. Londoners got the idea, they understood this kind of Hollywood stunt, although everyone was surprised that we dared to go so far as to stop London with a nude picture of Alice Cooper, the most controversial figure in the world. The newspapers raved about it. We were more Monty Python than Monty Python was. And by the way, no one went to jail.
