Both, really. It means the band when the band was the band, but Vince changed his name at some point so it means him personally too. He actually has to pay regular royalties to the other band members for the use of it.
“When the band was the band,” you say? So it’s not a continuing entity?
Well, not the original members.
back in the day, I managed/tended bar at golf course very close to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD while finishing my degree in music at Maryland.
A surprising number of touring artists and/or crew play golf on the road…Buffet’s crew, String Cheese Incident, Phish crew all came through quite a bit.
Alice Cooper came through and played the course every time he was in the area. A super nice guy…ended up hanging in the back of the equipment room with him for almost an hour one time (slow bar day, he was waiting for a re-shaft on his driver)…we chatted about music, I bummed him a couple of cigarettes and we talked about all kinds of topics, especially the state of modern music, the mundanity of touring and the zen of golf. Actually showed him a new way to execute a flop shot, and he told me a horrible joke [about a hungrygolfer and an open-faced club sand-wedge]
Nice guy. And for the record, he does not golf with the snake.
A while ago he was interviewed on radio in Australia. He was pretty funny. He said that he was Alice Cooper because, if you didn’t realize that your on-stage persona was just an act, you end up like lots of other dead rock stars.
He said that he spends most of his year playing golf and organizing a kids concert for local schools.
Saw Alice on TV the other day. He talked about meeting Elvis in 1972. Elvis took out a loaded pistol, gave it to Cooper, told him to point it at him, and he would show how he could take it away from him. Alice told the interviewer he heard the little devil on his shoulder telling him “Your pointing a loaded gun at Elvis. Shoot him!”. Then he said the angel on his other shoulder told him, “No, just wound him!”.
I loved his stuff when I was in high school. It was obvious he was putting on a show, but the older generation just didn’t get it. I think he also claimed to be Jimmy Piersall’s (Fear Strikes Out) illegitimate son, another obvious gag. Amazing how wide the generation gap was back then.