Jack Taddeo, one of Des Moines’ newer radio station group managers, has a soft spot in his heart for the hard-rocking Alice Cooper. One of Taddeo’s stations, rock stalwart KGGO, a few months ago added Cooper’s syndicated radio show two nights a week.

Well, it turns out that the hard-edged rocker who once was a cabdriver named Vince Furnier likes to play golf.

“He has a great following. He works really, really well with the radio stations,” Taddeo said. “He was in town recently, and he’ll give us anything we want. I think he played a couple rounds of golf — I don’t think he told us ahead of time. He’s an avid golfer, he’s like a scratch golfer. When he comes into a market to do a show, if the weather’s right he’ll try to play a couple of rounds of golf. I can only imagine what that looked like, people on the golf course saying, ‘That guy looks like Alice Cooper.’”

“He’s been a really good guy. He’ll do interviews with us. He’ll call the station if we need him to do something.”
“We started a show called ‘Saturday Night Vinyl’ on KGGO,” Taddeo recalled. “In the old days you would play the whole album on a show, and that’s like 45 minutes of music, and it was a big deal.

“Well a couple of weeks ago we used an Alice Cooper album. My operations director reached out to the [Alice Cooper] operations people and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to feature an Alice Cooper album on ‘Saturday Night Vinyl.’ Do you think he could do a couple of promos for us or give us a few lines we could work in?’ And the response from [Cooper] was, ‘Oh, you’re going to track one of the albums? Well, what do you need me to do?’

“One thing led to another, and he ended up just hosting the show [via recordings]. Another time we asked him to do a couple of promos, he said, ‘Look we’re on the phone. When I get back to the studio, I’ll record them and send them to you. They’ll sound better.’ ”

Alice Cooper, golfer and sound engineer.