KEYPOINTS:
- Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers has opened a third location in Goodyear, Arizona.
- The new center offers free after-school programs in music, dance, and arts for teens.
- The Goodyear location is a former library, renovated with the help of a $1 million donation.The next time Alice cooper takes the stage in Arizona, on Saturday, April 26, he’ll be leading a group of instructors from his solid rock teen centers in a handful of his greatest hits at a grand opening celebration for a third teen center, this time in Goodyear.
- “It’s so amazing,” Cooper says. “I hope we have this conversation about 10 more times.”
- The new teen cente, on the former site of the Goodyear Branch Library on Van Buren Street west of Litchfield Road, is already offering free after-school programs in music, dance and arts to students ages 12 to 20.
- “We did a soft opening and we’re already doing really well,” Cooper says.
How Goodyear came to host the third Solid Rock Teen Center
The original Solid Rock Teen Center opened in 2012 on the southeastern corner of Thunderbird Road and 32nd Street in Phoenix, built in partnership with Genesis Church and Cooper’s Solid Rock Foundation after more than a decade of fundraising efforts, including alice cooper’s christmas pudding and a spring fundraiser now called coopstock.
The legendary rocker and his wife, Sheryl Cooper, worked with mesa public schools to expand the concept into a second location, a 12,000-square-foot former elementary school at 122 N. Country Club Drive in downtown Mesa, in 2021.
When it came time to expand the concept even further, Cooper says, “We were looking around Glendale and Goodyear, that area, when the Goodyear mayor said, ‘We have something over here that you might really like.’ It looked like a brand new building, which was really amazing. When I drove up, I went, ‘Oh, this can’t be it.’”
Working closely with Goodyear, Solid Rock transformed the library to suit the center’s needs, partitioning it out into rehearsal rooms, offices, a social room, a recording studio and so on.
Longtime supporter Joe Norelli and his wife, Judy, donated $1 million toward the building of the Goodyear center.
As Cooper recalls, “Joe kind of stepped up and said, ‘How much do these things usually cost?’ We told him, and he said, ‘OK, let’s go.’”
Cooper laughs at the memory, then adds, “It’s great when you get those guys that are really committed to the idea and have the means.”
Alice Cooper: ‘Every kid’s got talent; you just have to find it’
Once a new center is ready to open, it’s pretty much an “If you build it, they will come” scenario.
“You know, a lot of it, of course, is the internet,” Cooper says. “And I think a lot of it is word of mouth. A kid goes to school and says, ‘Hey, I’m learning guitar over at the Rock.’ Another kid goes, ‘Well, I want to learn drums but can’t afford a drum teacher.’ ‘Well, this is free.’”
As Cooper sees it, every kid’s got talent; you just have to find it.
“We tell kids when they come in, ‘Try absolutely everything and see what lands,” Cooper says. “Sometimes, you find a kid that’s a natural guitar player or a natural drummer. Some of these kids don’t have any musical ability, but they can walk into a studio and run ProTools. I tell these kids, ‘Do you know what a ProTools guy makes in Los Angeles or New York? He’s in six figures every year.’”
Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers offer an alternative
The goal of Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers is to offer kids a fun alternative to finding trouble to get into after school.
“Most teenagers’ worst enemy is too much time on their hands,” Cooper says.
“Unless you’re involved in sports or something else after school, you’re sitting around, you did your homework, now what are you gonna do? And usually what’s on the street is not the best thing in the world for you. So we just said, ‘Why not open a place where a kid that can’t afford a guitar lesson or a drum lesson, well, this is free? Come on in.’”
He’s not expecting every kid who wanders into Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock Teen Centers to go on to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame like he did.
“You know, a lot of them will not go on to be musicians,” Cooper says. “But they might have avoided something, a train wreck in their life, had they been out on the street.”
He and Sheryl have spent enough time at these centers to see how excited the kids are to come in and learn after school.
“I never felt that way about algebra,” Cooper says, with a laugh.
Even the Earwigs would’ve ‘moved along a lot quicker’ with help
Has he ever thought about what having someplace like these Solid Rock Teen Centers would’ve meant for him his friends in the earwigs “We would have moved along a lot quicker, but the journey for us was the most fun,” he says.
“In fact, I’m working on a book right now about those days, and it’s really fun to go back and remember some of the insanity and the fact that you’d finish school, you’d go to cross country practice and then you’d rehearse in somebody’s living room for four hours. And you didn’t have time to do homework, so your girlfriend did the homework.”
Cooper laughs at the memory, adding, “Those were great days.”
Ideally, Cooper says, he’d love to see his Solid Rock Teen Center concept keep expanding at its own pace. He’s always thought Tucson could use one, mentioning Flagstaff, Prescott, east Mesa and Glendale as other possibilities.
“I have friends that are in different big organizations,” Cooper says. “They say, ‘Well, we would have had 10 of those open by now.’ I say, ‘Well, yeah, maybe. But we’re a different breed over here. We really care about how good it is, not how many there are.’ It’ll grow at its own pace. But pretty soon, I’d love to fill the state with them.”back when they were learning how to rock ‘n’ roll inside the Cortez High School cafetorium in the ‘60s?
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