Alice Cooper estimates he spent $1 million on drugs before getting sober in 1983

Somewhere in the world, Alice Cooper is sitting with a Sharpie, dutifully signing his name to thousands of copies of his new memoir.

“They told me if you sign a few of them, it will be a bestseller. So I signed 17,500 books,” Cooper says with a chuckle.

But that wasn’t enough.

After learning that Michael Douglas was inking 25,000 copies of his new book, Cooper challenged himself.

“I’ve got to beat him, I’ve got to,” Cooper adds playfully.

The Cooper opus, “Devil on My Shoulder” (Da Capo/Hachette, 496 pps, out now), is as riveting and entertaining as the man behind the byline.

The one born Vincent Furnier, who cofounded the Alice Cooper band in Phoenix in the late-‘60s, adopted the Cooper persona with a legal name change in the ‘70s and still lives out the horror-goth-shock-rock theater of ringed black eyes, fake gore and the occasional snake (a new leg of his Alice’s Attic Tour kicks off Oct. 27 following a worldwide book tour).

In “Devil on My Shoulder,” Cooper – in his quippy, self-deprecating voice – spares no details. He recalls his harrowing drug-addicted years, the journey of the band immortalized by rebel yells including “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” his return to his faith and the evolution of a fruitful solo career that yielded a dozen-plus hits (“Only Women Bleed,” “You and Me,” “Poison”).

In a recent conversation from Europe, where he’d been touring with supergroup The Hollywood Vampires, a gregarious Cooper, 78, delved into some of the darkest and funniest topics in his memoir.

Question: You had the “Me, Alice” autobiography in the ‘70s – which you now tell us had a lot of fictionalized stories  – and the“Golf Monster” book in 2007. So what makes this your definitive memoir?

Cooper: I really liked the idea that (cowriter) Daniel (Richler) had about Alice and myself having some sort of problem through the whole book, because everybody does have the devil on their shoulder, always whispering the wrong things to do, always tempting you. But in my case, it was coming from a religious background and ending up having my records burned on the 700 Club – even though there was never anything satanic on anything I ever did – and coming back to the Lord and still being Alice Cooper. There’s a great conflict there, but at the same time it all fits together.

You've spoken openly about alcohol addiction before, but here you go much deeper into cocaine and freebasing. Why was this the time to tell those stories?

Because it's just being honest. If you lived in LA, cocaine was everywhere. It was a commodity at points. People were paying bills with it. I'm sitting there, a guy comes in and we sniffed a little bit and he goes, if you freebase it, it's not addictive. And by far the most addictive thing there ever has been on this planet is crack cocaine. I got way lost in it because it was so easy and it made you feel like you could do anything. The problem was, your basic everyday life disintegrates.

You also talk about “making the rock” (processing powdered cocaine into crack) and how much time was spent on that.

I was the chef. Everybody brought their coke to me because I was the best. I made the best stuff. But you don't realize at the time (the drug) is such a great liar. It tells you that everything's OK and you can do anything. Whereas you basically can do nothing because you're so wrapped up in getting the coke and making the coke and smoking it.

I didn’t realize you and Bernie Taupin (Elton John collaborator and lyricist) were such close friends. But he was the first person you called out of rehab. What truth did he tell you that nobody else could?

It was one of those things where you almost don't have to say it. You're embarrassed about the fact that you took two or three years away from everybody. What happens is your relationship just disintegrates. Everything is just falling apart around you. It’s a slow thing, but pretty soon you wake up and realize that it's you, a gun, cocaine and you're living alone up in Beverly Hills and you're absolutely paranoid.

Do you think you really spent a million dollars on drugs?

Oh, I think so. I think everybody did back then. That was fairly conservative.

You share a vivid recollection of your wife (Sheryl) coming at you with a frying pan because she was worried about your state of mind around your then-baby daughter (Calico).

That was a moment of reality that I went, this is the most gentle woman on the planet. And it was just pure frustration on her part. But at the same time, we just had our 50th anniversary. I couldn't live without her and she couldn't live without me.

And you share those stories with kids you counsel now?

I have the Solid Rock Teen Centers (around Arizona). When kids talk to me about alcohol and drugs, I can talk to them from reality. They can't say, “What do you know about it?” I'll go, “Hey, I got high with the best of them.”

Maybe that was the greater plan for you, that you survived addiction so that you could one day help other people through it.

I fully believe that. I get emails all the time saying, if you can stop drinking and drugs, then I can. And I go, wow, what an interesting platform that is. Because I was sort of the Dean Martin of rock 'n' roll. I was always on that golden buzz. I was never an angry drunk. I was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with.

You write about how you grew up watching the horror show hosts on TV. How much of Alice Cooper do you think came from them?

Something that changed my life was a movie by (John "Ole") Olsen and (Harold "Chic") Johnson called "Hellzapoppin.” That was absolutely the most absurd thing. I liked horror movies because I saw the humor in them. I loved being scared, but at the same time, there was always that laugh behind it. So I connected with the villain because I always thought the villain was a little bit absurd. If you can add the villain and the absurd humor and then write great songs, that’s what gave birth to Alice Cooper. Everybody wanted to be Peter Pan. I wanted to be Captain Hook.

There is a great story in the book about the cover art for “School’s Out” causing an uproar not because it came with a pair of lacy underwear, but because they were made of paper and flammable, which was against shipping laws. Do you think some of the salacious stuff the band was accused of would get you canceled today?

First of all, I think canceling is over. The whole idea is very silly because it actually went against everything that we fought for free speech. I mean, everybody knows you're not supposed to call people (certain) things … But yeah, everything we did would have been canceled.

In the annals of music history, what do you hope that people say about how Alice Cooper changed rock ‘n’ roll?

I think really it was bringing production into rock music, making the lyrics happen on stage. We were the first ones to use uplighting and downlighting. When people saw the Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome to My Nightmare shows, it was like a form of Broadway, only not watering it down. It was hard rock, as hard as you could imagine. The theatrics were really well done. It wasn't schlock. That was really something I think we brought that nobody else did.