Off the Record: Alice Cooper part 1.
In which, just for kicks, I grade Alice Cooper albums, group and solo.
I first became a fan of the Alice Cooper Band in 1972 at age 12, thanks to my neighbor Russ Butler, who had a bootleg 8-track, the kind that used to get sold at convenience stores around here, that combined songs from Love it to Death and Killer. The first one I got for myself was School’s Out, part of my very first Columbia House shipment. I was completely obsessed by that group and their music, which covered a multitude of subjects in an imaginative yet level-headed way, cynical yet humorous… and the band, even weasely-looking Alice, looked, acted, and dressed like complete badasses, charismatic as hell. The first time I saw them was on ABC’s late night concert program In Concert; in its inaugural program it aired a ACB show from September of 1972, one which climaxed with “Gutter Cat vs. the Jets”, which ended with a simulated knife fight, then saw Alice being frogmarched to the gallows to the strains of “Killer”. I was transfixed. Of course, the band eventually burned itself out and Alice snuck off and started a solo career that was never half as good or cool as the stuff he did with his band… but such is history. With this, my inaugural column of a series I’d like to do with various artists, I plan to grade and give you my personal impressions of every Alice album that matters, even solo stuff. I’ll try to keep ‘em as short as I can but some of these records will inspire me to get all loquacious on ya so bear with me, ok? Here we go.
Pretties For You (1969) The band’s debut, which was supposed to be produced by Frank Zappa, but he lost interest and left the group to finish it on their own. It’s not exactly a sonic marvel, and there’s an awful lot of stuff thrown against the wall that didn’t stick… but I like the gargantuan sounding opening instrumental “Titanic Overture”, great pysch-fuzz rocker “Living”, and the spooky “Levity Ball”, which could have fit in quite well on one of the later Ezrin albums, I believe. C+
Easy Action (1970) This time out they had a professional producer, David Briggs of L.A. Canyon scene fame, who by most accounts didn’t like the band or its music but did his job just the same, and the improvement is very noticeable. Nowhere near as many fuck-it type experiments, and almost every song here shows the band’s formative influences constructed in a fashion that makes them listenable as songs… this album got forgotten in the wake of Love It To Death, but for my money “Mr. and Mrs. Demeanor (the name of session bass player Kenny Passarelli gets stuck in the lyrics for no apparent reason), kinda Doorsy; “Shoe Salesman”, which sounds like a great lost Monkees track, the Yardbirds-beholden “Below Your Means”, the maniacal “Return of the Spiders”, and the Syd Barrett-ish “Beautiful Flyaway” in particular are well worth your attention. B
Love it to Death (1971) As they say, “shit got real here”. Discouraged by their lack of success to that point, producer Jack Richardson introduced them to then-19 year old Bob Ezrin, who had honest to goodness ideas and the knowhow to translate the band’s… and the rest is history. The first side, with “Caught in a Dream”, the anthemic first hit “I’m Eighteen”, and “Long Way to Go” is damn near perfect and defies categorization, really; power, sure, pop, yes, rock, definitely. Dennis Dunaway’s “Black Juju”, based on the riff of Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun”, is a bit long but also features Alice’s theatrical side. Side two is one great song after another; the slinky “Is It My Body?”, which in its gender confusion could also be called “The Alice Cooper Manifesto”; “Hallowed Be My Name” and “Second Coming”, both tuneful and preoccupied with religious and apocalyptic imagery… “Coming” segues wonderfully via what sounds like a toy piano into the other major track, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”, which combines compelling music with an honest to goodness story and Cooper sells it very well- his “I got to get OUT of HERE” chant before the song climaxes is amazing. Finally, the old Rolf Harris song “Sun Arise” closes the show with a little optimism, some sunlight after all the darkness so to speak, plus it gets by on a catchy chant and a howling guitar solo by (I’m assuming) Glen Buxton. There’s really not a bad track on this one, and even better was yet to come. A
Killer (1971) finds the ACB really leaning hard into the sex, violence, and horror stuff; Bruce, Dunaway, and Cooper were really coming into their own as songwriters, and Ezrin was up to the task of helping them realize their ambitions. The one-two punch of “Under My Wheels” and “Be My Lover”, both Stones cops, leads to “Halo of Flies”, an attempt to do a multi-movement, almost progressive rock-ish song; based on spy movie tropes, it’s very cleverly done and the drum solo by Neal Smith works 100 times better than most recorded drum solos of the day. “Desperado” is either about Jim Morrison, and it does sound very much like “Riders in the Storm” style Jimbo, or Robert Vaughn’s character in The Magnificent Seven, depending on which source you read. It has a lovely string arrangement, also a first for the band. Side two opens with another Stones/Yardbirds/Who type one-two punch; “You Drive Me Nervous” evokes “Summertime Blues” and “Yeah Yeah Yeah” has a great Alice vocal, some nutty lyrics (“You can pull my wings off/anything”) and a great harmonica solo (also by Alice) in the middle. This leads into “Dead Babies”, their most controversial track to date; a horror movie-style look at child neglect and abuse, many people misunderstood and took it at face value (“Alice Cooper is a baby killer!”), always a mistake. Ezrin throws in many touches that would become hallmarks of his later work on this one, in particular the infantile “nyah nyah"s in the background vocal. Finally, the title track, which at first seems like background music for the tour’s gallows sequence, evolves into another Doors homage and Alice really sells it. Killer didn’t have any top 10 singles, but it was the album that shoved them into high gear, and began their 3 year ride at the top of the biz. A
School’s Out (1972) featured their first Billboard top 10 single in the immortal title track, with its once-in-a-lifetime riff. The guys this time out were drawing a lot of inspiration from TV shows and movies, West Side Story in particular; the album’s showpiece, the funk-rocking “Gutter Cat vs. the Jets”, incorporates music from that film in a song about a Jets-Sharks gang fight scenario (Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim are credited along with the band); the sound collage “Street Fight” that immediately follows brings home the point. “Luney Tune” finds them revisiting “Ballad of Dwight Fry” territory. “Public Animal #9” is a great Stones-ish rocker with some fun Alice growling on the outro. “Alma Mater” is a fond look back at the band’s past; by now Alice was very effective at mixing theatrics in his vocals. “My Stars” was a sci-fi scenario, densely layered, rocking but not especially memorable; Dunaway’s jazzy “Blue Turk”, with its great descending bass line, seems to be designed to let Alice vamp as he sings the salacious, necrophiliac-leaning lyrics, but the band never performed it live. It’s the very definition of a deep cut jewel. Another Bernstein cop, this time Elmer along with Mack David, informs the “Grande Finale”. School’s Out is another astonishingly diverse record but it doesn’t quite hit the same heights as its two immediate predecessors- Killer in particular was a hard act to follow. This was my first Alice album, though, and I’ll always love it just the same. A-
Billion Dollar Babies came along in 1973, and the band was at the height of their fame. There was a slight shift in the songwriting emphasis, away from sleazy looks at fictional subjects, and more towards songs about their reaction to the public’s reaction to them, hence the reflexive “No More Mr. Nice Guy” (#25 on the Billboard charts, I would have sworn it went higher), the cinematic audience-consolidating “Sick Things” has an element of this, too. “I Love the Dead” revisits necrophilia, but as a reaction to the extreme media attention the group got it’s presented in an intentionally humorous way, as if to say “C’mon everybody, we’re not really perverts, we just write about it!” whereas in “Dead Babies” or “Blue Turk” they didn’t provide such disclaimers. “Unfinished Sweet”, a song about dental issues which arrangement-wise hearkened back to “Halo of Flies”, became a literal cartoon onstage. By now, with the fan frenzy, chart success, and media assault, everything became bigger brassier louder and more elaborate; Ezrin had really learned how to spread his wings and had become a popular producer (by this time he had also done records by Lou Reed and tourmates Flo & Eddie and others), so there’s a lot more sonic clutter on some of these songs, but also a depth of sound, especially a booming bass sound, that had never been heard on an Alice record. Many singles were released; the anthemic “Hello Hurray”, (Billboard #35, surprisingly, I don’t remember ever hearing it on the radio here) a cover of a Rolf Kempf song that was custom made for opening a show; “Elected”, a repurposed version of Pretties for You’s “Reflected” and given a clever video (they called ‘em “promo clips” then) that aired a lot on late night TV, went to #26. The title track, with perhaps the best lyrics on the whole record, a great Neal Smith drum part, and none other than Donovan Leitch, who was recording his album Cosmic Wheels (a personal favorite) at the same London studio, duetting with Alice, went to #57. One of the best songs that didn’t get released as a single was the acoustic guitar and harmonica fueled “Generation Landslide”, which had imaginative lyrics but avoided the cartoonishness of “Sweet” and “Dead” despite verses such as “Molitov milk bottles/heaped from pink high chairs/while Mother’s Lib burned birth certificate papers”. All of these and more helped the album itself go to #1, and while they didn’t know it, this would be the apogee of the band as it was. Cracks in the foundation had begun to show; session guitarists (Mick Mashbir, Reggie Vinson, Dick Wagner) had begun to fill in for Glen Buxton, who was ill for much of the sessions and whose enthusiasm and onstage performance had begun to wane, the first casualty of the Alice Cooper pressure cooker. A-
OK, this is running long… next time, we’ll look at the final band album, as well as a bunch of Alice solo records.
Listen to Pretties for You on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Easy Action on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Love it to Death on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Killer on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to School’s Out on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Billion Dollar Babies on the streaming service of your choice.