There’s a reason Alice Cooper nearly died hanging himself by a noose onstage during rehearsals at Wembley Stadium in 1988 reports Entertainment Weekly in their Hollywood's Greatest Untold Stories article, he wanted to put on a good show.

“When I go to the circus and there’s a guy in a cage with 12 tigers, there’s always a chance that one of the tigers didn’t get the message,” the 70-year-old rock legend tells EW. “When you see a guy on a tight wire, you know that there may be a second you witness a tragedy. I always wanted that in our show: What they’re seeing could be the last night of Alice Cooper.”

With an innate flair for the dramatic, Cooper enlisted magician James Randi to come up with the new stunt (“I can tell you this because people know that I don’t get hung every night,” Cooper says, not wanting to defy the magician’s code of secrecy). In the middle of the show, there would be a gallows set up so Cooper could pretend to be executed via hanging. He’d wear a harness tethered to the rafters by a thick piano wire that kept the noose an inch above his neck. It worked perfectly for years - until that night in England.

“Everything has its stress limit and after doing so many shows, I never thought about changing the wire. You know, I figured it’ll last forever,” he says. “The wire snaps. I could hear the rope hit my chin and in an instant I flipped my head back. That must’ve been a fraction of a second because if it caught my chin it would have been a different result. It went over my neck and gave me a pretty good burn. I went down to the floor and pretty much blacked out.”

Read the full story at EW.com

On April 1st, Alice Cooper portrayed King Herod in NBC's live performance of Jesus Christ Superstar; his performance can be seen in the video below.