I have always wanted to know where the Alice Cooper Band Barn was and fortunately I found some good info from WCSX, the Dennis Dunaway (bassist) website, and the Glen Buxton (lead guitarist) website had the location and some photos. This period was around 1970 when the band decided to base themselves in Detroit, moving from Arizona. Alice always had an affinity for the Detroit sound from bands like MC5, The Stooges, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, the Scott Richards Case (SRC), Frigid Pink, the Pleasure Seekers, and many others. It was a distinct, hard-edged psychedelic style that was definitely it's own thing.
The band was preparing for their next album which became "Love It to Death" (great record) and Bob Ezrin (their producer - genius) came to see them in their barn complex in what was called Pontiac but is actually Auburn Hills. Bob said when he arrived it was quite the decadent scene with band members engaging in debauchery, a monkey, and a racoon that would throw its crap at people.
Ezrin loved the songs he heard and guided the band toward what became their unique signature sound. Their prior effort, "Easy Action" was decent but lacked the certain something a band needs to be huge. Eventually the band recorded the LITD album at RCA Mid-America Recording Center in Chicago. It was an instant classic and catapulted the band to fame.
I remember playing the grooves off of the record myself as a kid even though I thought the band looked scary on the cover. This period would have been when the band played the Factorie Ballroom in Waterford which I have a page on. A point of trivia, Alice Cooper was slated to play the Goose Lake International Music Festival in Jackson in Aug 1970 (see poster below) but never actually performed.
The band remembers recall their barn being near an asylum in those days but I am not seeing anything on Brown Rd that would qualify for that on the historical aerial photos. It was said the inmates would yell their approval when the band rehearsed. They may be thinking about Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane (later Clinton Valley Hospital), the notorious gigantic asylum complex in Pontiac. That was nowhere near the barn however. Dennis Dunaway claims it was a stone's throw from their barn. I will follow up with more on that if I get anything.