By Mina Kimes
CNN Money
(Fortune) — Neal Smith, the former drummer for the rock band Alice Cooper, flipped his first house in the early ’70s. The band’s 1972 mega-hit, “School’s Out,” had just been released, and its members were flush with cash, says Smith, now 65. So he used some of the proceeds to buy property in Phoenix. Two years later he sold it, tripling his investment.
Smith had caught the real estate bug, but he wouldn’t pursue it as a career for more than a decade. Smith had joined Alice Cooper in 1967, a year after he met Alice (Vincent Furnier) and the other band members at a community college in Arizona. They moved to Los Angeles and came out with two albums, neither of which was successful. Then, in 1971, the band broke through with its single “I’m Eighteen.”
