Off the Record: Alice Cooper part 2.
In which I grade Alice Cooper albums, just for the heck of it.
Having recently read Bob Greene’s Billion Dollar Baby, an account of touring with the group in 1973 as well as sitting in on sessions for Muscle of Love, I’ve been going back and relistening to a lot of Alice both group and solo… I thought it would be fun to list and rate, so here we are. These tend to run long, so I decided to break it up into parts. Last time out, I got to the penultimate release by the band, Billion Dollar Babies, and now will begin to get into the solo releases.
Muscle of Love (1973) Manager Shep Gordon had booked a late-year “Holiday” US tour at the end of ‘73, so everyone wanted a new album to plug while doing so. Hence, Muscle of Love, recorded rather quickly in the Autumn of 1973. The tone would be set early on when, according to Dennis Dunaway’s book, Bob Ezrin left in a huff after an argument with Michael Bruce over a song arrangement. Thus, Love it to Death co-producer Jack Richardson was asked to come on board, along with his partner, engineer Jack Douglas. Richardson’s no-nonsense approach ensured a different vibe to the songs. The thought at the time was to be less “theatrical”, more “rock and roll”, and yet they were still “Alice Cooper” and thusly had to have some sort of overall theme, which ensured the packaging would be a conceptual muddle. The group came up with the idea of making the cover look like a “plain brown wrapper” like porn magazines shipped in; this eventually became a cardboard carton with a stain printed on the bottom, which prompted many outlets to ship them back, thinking they were damaged. Their longtime graphic design studio Pacific Eye and Ear, however, had another idea- the Cooper Band on the innersleeve as sailors out on leave, paying to go in to an “Institute of Nude Wrestling” only to find out that they had to wrestle and get beat up by a gorilla, then for their trouble they wound up peeling potatoes back on board the ship in pictures printed on the giveaway book cover included inside. The music itself was all over the spectrum, too- opening cut “Big Apple Dreaming (Hippo)” (“Hippo” apparently being the working title for the song, in Greene’s book they refer to it by that name more that once- it’s a reference to the Hippopotamus Club in NY) starts off with a loping riff and vaguely funky drumbeat as Alice sings about two young naive people coming to New York City to make it big. Snatches of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” are mixed in. “Never Been Sold Before” is Alice playacting as a hooker who’s fed up with the life and is telling off her pimp: “I’m tired of streets, tricks and dicks and I’m really sick of you”. A really nice guitar riff, probably by Mashbir but maybe Michael Bruce, is the backbone of this one. “Hard Hearted Alice” is maybe the best thing on this record; from a quiet, ethereal beginning it eventually becomes a haunting low key rocker with a great guitar solo. It’s a road song, one which expresses the weariness most of them were feeling at this point. Finally, “Crazy Little Child” is a story song about a young would be safecracker whose first foray into the criminal life doesn’t turn out so well. It’s got a very New Orleans piano bar feel, and Alice delivers a great vocal. Side Two is not quite as memorable, mostly by the numbers rockers (“Working Up a Sweat”, “Woman Machine”, and yes, I’m including the title track). Probably the most noteworthy selection on side 2 is “Man with the Golden Gun”, an honest to goodness James Bond theme with Liza Minelli, Ronnie Spector, and the Pointer Sisters even, that unfortunately was finished too late to be considered for the movie of the same name…that honor went to a really bland song by Lulu, of all people. The “hit single” is also part of side two; “Teenage Lament ‘74” has the Pointer Sisters providing enthusastic backing vocals, and the song is kinda tuneful, but for some reason it really didn’t grab me. I wasn’t alone, the song only made it to #48 in the Billboard charts. Recorded as the band had a “sinking feeling…that everything was being pulled out from under us”, as Dennis Dunaway puts it in his book, it still has a lot going for it. Sadly, this was the Band’s swan song though. B+
Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits (1974) Released as a stopgap while the band took a break, or so they thought, it features Jack Richardson remixes of the band’s hits and near-hits, with nothing from the first two albums. It has a wonderfully illustrated PE&E package featuring the guys as 1930’s gangsters, but really, for those of us who already had the other records, it was absolutely inessential. C
Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) Lots of reasons and justifications for what happened- the management were concerned about the group’s growing demands for more attention, and reasoned that if it were only Alice then things wouldn’t have to be split five ways; two members, Bruce and Smith, were working on solo albums; Alice himself wanted to tweak the character and the show to make him look less monstrous, and so on. The band thought that they were all taking a break to do some solo things and get some much needed rest, and would get back to work sometime in ‘75. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way- Alice finished his solo album, Shep Gordon lined up a TV special to promote it, Bob Ezrin came back into the fold along with Steve Hunter, Dick Wagner, and other members of Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Animal touring band, and suddenly Bruce, Buxton, Dunaway, and Smith were persona non grata, much to their surprise and dismay. Anyway, this, the debut of Alice’s solo career, is a mixed bag. There’s horror movie stuff, and some humor, all of it supposed to be inspired by dreams of yet another character, “Steven”…but none of it is particularly clever or deep; Vincent Price makes a cameo reciting a poem as only he could do it in service of the metal-lite “Black Widow”, there’s yet another necrophilia song that at least rocks (“Cold Ethyl”), and “Department of Youth”, somewhat anthemic and reminiscent of “Elected”, featuring yet another Ezrin children’s choir. The title track aspires to jazz or stripper music or something, and “Some Folks” is a show tune basically, only minus dancing chorus girls (they may have been in the TV special, I haven’t watched it since it originally aired). The most noteworthy thing, though, was something a little new for Alice: a ballad. He had flirted with balladry before (“Mary Ann”, “Desperado”) but never really succumbed, but he certainly made the right decision here. “Only Women Bleed”, a melodic and nicely arranged song of sympathy for battered women, hit all the right notes with 1975 record buyers, and wound up reaching #12 in Billboard, though I would have sworn it went higher… it really resonated with a lot of folks and helped ensure that Alice’s solo career got off to a good start. The resulting “Welcome to my Nightmare” tour, when it hit Louisville in 1975, was 15-year-old David Allen Jones’ first concert. B-
Alice Cooper Goes to Hell (1976) Alice followed the mostly successful Nightmare with yet another concept album, this time poking fun at his image as it essays the story of Alice (once again calling himself “Steven”), who wakes up and finds himself in Hell. Lead track “Go to Hell” is a stomping rocker, finding Steven being sentenced by a group chorus a la “Pluto’s Judgement Day”. As a story, it barely holds together, but this one contains many songs that hit me better than the ones on Nightmare: the doo-woppish “Give the Kid a Break”, in which Alice/Steven pleads his case before the Devil and his jury; a stab at disco called “You Gotta Dance”; a soft-shoe shuffle called “I’m the Coolest” that features Cooper singing the part of Satan in a really low close-miked voice - it works a lot better than you’d think. Since “Only Women Bleed” broke Alice to a whole new audience, it was decided that another ballad was in order, and that was “I Never Cry”, a tender little tune that also went to #12 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Wish You Were Here”, in which Alice says he’s “having a hell of a time…wish you were here”, is a stomping rocker that works really well, as does a cover of the old 1917 standard “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” with loud guitars and group vocals. “Guilty” finds him once again coyly poking fun at his image, it’s a straight-ahead rocker, almost pop-friendly. Pretty much everything else is mediocre filler. Really, the whole thing sounds like it was written as a Broadway musical, which probably wasn’t far from what Alice and Co. had in mind. I myself thinks it works better than Nightmare does overall, and one or two of the tunes are as good as it got for solo Alice in the 70s. B+
Lace and Whiskey (1977) This time out, Cooper went back into the studio to do another record with a very loose concept: Film Noir/Pulp Fiction Detective novels and movies, and the jacket reflects that, although the songs rarely do. By this time, AC had gone thoroughly mainstream, no more parental outrage and sensational headlines. His drinking had begun to get the best of him too, and the material reflects it. The album opens in fine fashion with the riff-rocker “It’s Hot Tonight”, but nothing else on that side stands out until the side one closer “You and Me”, yet another melodic and relatable soft rock ballad designed, like “Only Women Bleed” and “I Never Cry”, to maintain the interest of the record buyers that made its predecessors so successful. “You and Me” did place higher than either of those songs, finishing at #9. There’s a fun cover of the old warhorse “Ubangi Stomp” on side 2, but despite some high-concept titles like “King of the Silver Screen” and “I Never Wrote those Songs”, nothing sticks. I’m sure it has its admirers, but I’m not among their number. C-
OK, that will do for this long-delayed second installment. Next time out I’ll hopefully finish this with Cooper’s late 70s last stand on the charts, as well as a clutch of records that were a mixed bag for certain.
The Alice Cooper Show was released after Lace and Whiskey