Alice Cooper: Classic or Dud??

Dennis Dunaway is without a doubt the greatest, individual sounding and [anti]-melodic bass player OF AAALLL TIIIIIME!!!!!!!!

p.s i urge anyone who rates alice cooper on the cheese rock hes been doing for the last 20-odd years to buy the alice cooper cd that you always see going for about £2.99 in record shops. its usually called Nobody Likes Me,Nobody Like Me,Snorting Anthrax or 1969 Toronto Rock N Roll Revival. its garagy trashy psycho-delia. (ignore the 'going to the river' and 'ain't that just like a woman' tracks though cos they've got nothing to do with alice cooper as far as i know. UNLESS they are Gene Vincent tracks as the Alice Cooper group played as GV's backing band at the very same festival. it WAS going to be The Doors but they didn't for some reason)

trust me it'll be the best bargain you've ever bargained on!

CLASSIC for the first four albums, including those bizarre & hard-to-find first two (which many people dislike but not me.) LESS CLASSIC but still fair-to-great for the next four. After that, mostly DUD, tho with the occasional great moment. ("Clones" aside, I've never heard Flush The Fashion myself, but lotsa people like it so I give it the benefit of the doubt.)

That's `cos it's CRAP, Alfred.

(Yes, I'm a very young person.)

Pretties For You sounds like a Beatles-cum-Zappa album but in mostly great ways. the recording quality is inconsistent, but the songs are quite solid.. the best one is "Levity Ball"..

Easy Action seers all the way through. "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye" is Alice's best song, period.

hey i nearly mentioned it
i'm 35 and grew up with "school's out ", "elected "etc but didn't buy anything of alice until "trash" - -poison is his best single,other songs like "bed of nails","house on fire" are so good - i might buy trash tour dvd but can't find it in Australia.
i'm learning "bed of nails" on piano.who wants sheet music copy ?
i'm willing to pay for alice cooper trash songbook

At the very least, "I'm Eighteen" from Love it to Death is essential.

OTM.

i'm gonna buy one of his records tomorrow or something

get Killer or Love It To Death

Well done sir! (xp)

get Killer or Love It To Death

Buy:

Love It to Death
Killer
Billion Dollar Babies

At once

Alice Cooper just played the Missouri State Fair.
Blue Oyster Cult were also on the bill. I'm almost regretting not going.

what an awesome show that would be...

...in 1975!

I can't say enough about the effect the Coop had on my teenage self...my first full-length purchase was an 8-track tape of Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits...I'll never forget how huge "Hello! Hooray!" sounded coming out of those Ford LTD speakers...

'Billion Dollar Babies' is probably the one to get (for the unheralded "Generation Landslide" alone)...but 'Welcome To My Nightmare', recorded with a completely different band, is just as good...songs like "Steven" and "The Awakening" are truly uncanny, scary in the David Lynch sense...(see the DVD of same for some welcome rubber-mask silliness)...if you were a young boy in the mid-70's, Alice had it all: rock, rebellion, horror, spy movie soundtracks...even a little Busby Berkeley thrown in for good measure!...

see also the DVD of 'Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper' for some great vintage concert footage (and some truly terrible comedy skits)...and track down a copy of 'Billion Dollar Baby', Bob Greene's account of life on the road with the Cooper group, circa 1974...if nothing else, you will be amazed that large-scale rock tours could be executed without cell phones, ATM's, computers, etc...

my wife recently met Alice Cooper's former road manager ('69-'72). He is now an insurance broker with a cowboy fetish.

you don't mean David Libert, do you?

no, some guy named Jim Scherz...?

Coop's playing here soon, and if I get this job, I can go see him free with a date.

(entirely possible that "road manager" was an exaggeration/misnomer - I didn't meet him personally or get to pump him for stories)

x-post

Libert managed the tours during the Billion Dollar Babies era, so he must have suceeded Scherz...what stories both these guys must have!...

roxymuzak, what kind of job come with a free Cooper show as a perk?

I dig the first 7 Lps plus From the Inside and Dada.

Any more votes for From The Inside & Dada coming? No?

I do have several earlier ones and love them (to somewhat varying degrees). But those two I've been hesitating about for awhile now...

'From The Inside' is patchy...has a couple of decent rockers (the title track, "For Veronica's Sake" which I swear has an uncredited Paul McCartney on backing vox) but overall suffers from too much David Foster...(Gloop-King of LA)...(by now, his power ballads were verging on the obligatory, and "How You Gonna See Me Now" is about the weakest of the lot)...

the title track was used most effectively on the tour for that album, where he began his shows by jumping out of an "open bottle" (projected on a screen) to start the show...

My mom saw a televised Alice Cooper appearance sometime in the early-mid 70's, and the result was that I wasn't allowed to listen to rock and roll for the next year or so. I still have a hazy memory of her horrified description of the concert...had to sneak over to my friend's house to listen to "School's Out" on 45 from then on.

school's out is dope too...killer's is the jam.

the orig. alice cooper's greatest hits (with the mafia type drawing of the band) is song for song one of the greatest rock albums ever. always see it used for cheap.

But no good words for Dada, then?

hell, I don't even remember that one...I basically wrote him off after 'Special Forces'...

My mom saw a televised Alice Cooper appearance sometime in the early-mid 70's, and the result was that I wasn't allowed to listen to rock and roll for the next year or so. I still have a hazy memory of her horrified description of the concert...

That was probably Midsummer Rock, a live one-off from Cincinatti in 1971. That's the show where someone throws a chicken on stage and Alice plays with it for a while then throws it back, and the audience tears it apart. Also features Iggy (and a jar of peanut butter) & the Stooges, and that famous photo of him standing on the crowd pointing forward is from there.

The show also has Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, and Traffic; an exellent 90 minutes.

I found both Pretties For You and Easy Action at a garage sale and paid $3 each for 'em. I think that's about what they're worth— kinda fun, kinda hit and miss.

cheers for steering me in the right direction, guys. cuz i was thinking 'trash' :)

just kidding

I found both Pretties For You and Easy Action at a garage sale and paid $3 each for 'em. I think that's about what they're worth

Ha!

http://www.popsike.com/php/quicksearch.php?searchtext=pretties+for+you&x=0&y=0
http://www.popsike.com/php/quicksearch.php?searchtext=easy+action&thumbs=&x=0&y=0

Sometimes I think that Love it to Death is the finest US major label rock album of the 70s. But then 'Halo of Flies' rules all.

Myopic Void OTM.

The first two are kinda lame tho'. I have them as a 70s twofer.

"Ballad Of Dwight Fry" from LITD is probably Alice's best song...would certainly find a home in any self-loathing emo fan's iPod...("see my lonely life unfold")...

The first two are kinda lame tho'. I have them as a 70s twofer

They don't possess the total vision and concept of later releases, but they do possess some heavy music. I think "Return of the Spiders," off Easy Action, is one of the original band's hardest rocking songs. It's kind of where the band found the power to leap to LITD, Killer, BDB, etc.

Another track on EA, "Lay Down and Die, Goodbye," looks to Alice's darker theater rock. In fact, the final minute or two, where the band's vocals sound like melting acid-hell, are pretty intense.

The first two are kinda lame tho'. I have them as a 70s twofer.

i am totally not listening to statements like this anymore, they've kept me away from too many good albums. so pretties/action, i am buying you.

Saw the Melvins cover "Ballad of Dwight Fry" sometime in the early nineties and it was chilling. It was the first time I heard the song.

I think the Cooper group lived in Topanga Canyon at this time, so Neil was probably well aware of their antics.

He tried to persuade Crosby to tear up a pillow onstage.

XP...and David Briggs produced their second album.

Drummer Neal Smith later said of the record producer David Briggs, "David hated our music and us. I recall the term that he used, referring to our music, was 'Psychedelic Shit'. I think Easy Action sounded too dry, more like a TV or radio commercial and he did not help with song arrangement or positive input in any way."

Pretty amazing, the progress they made going from Briggs to Ezrin.

The same year, Briggs worked well with Spirit on Twelve Dreams of Doctor Sardonicus, which was pretty psychedelic, although I'm sure they were more instrumentally competent than the Alice Cooper band at that point.

Just watched that “Super duper Alice Cooper”

The first half was quite interesting, up to the ‘band’ splitting. The descent and recovery of his solo years managed to gloss over all his ‘solo’stuff in favour of pics with Sinatra and Dali and his eventual “nightmare 2” show, but hey..

Alice Cooper on The Snoop Sisters (one of the revolving programs that fell under the NBC Mystery Movie umbrella alongside Columbo and Quincy):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubIQeWtmK9o

The descent and recovery of his solo years managed to gloss over all his ‘solo’stuff in favour of pics with Sinatra and Dali and his eventual “nightmare 2” show, but hey..

It can be a challenge to talk about albums when the artist doesn't remember making them...

I saw him on that Special Forces tour and man, what a wreck he was in those days. At least on the From The Inside tour he had that just-out-of-rehab energy. Just a couple years later he was a virtually unrecognizable wraith.

I've read a few online reviewers who admire those early 80s records (which I haven't heard), is that a defensible position?

I quite liked Flush The Fashion, but had and have no use for Special Forces. I don't think I've ever heard Dada.

Flush The Fashion was easily better than the (3?) studio albums that preceded it - From The Inside, Lace And Whiskey, Goes To Hell.

Classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJpqK8ZZbaA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDgNNbyoWdk

This changed my life trajectory when I saw it as a nine year old.

Forgot the best one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz0lXNNkqac

I've read a few online reviewers who admire those early 80s records (which I haven't heard), is that a defensible position?

I like them. DaDa is a weird, dark fuckin' album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7rnFIsoYbM

Yes, Dada's pretty good.

Flush The Fashion is one of my favourite Alice Cooper albums, but Special Forces is weak. Haven't heard Dada actually.

Cooper reportedly has no recollection of recording DaDa, or the preceding albums Special Forces and Zipper Catches Skin, due to substance abuse. Cooper stated "I wrote them, recorded them and toured them and I don't remember much of any of that",[8] though he toured only Special Forces.[9] In 1996 Cooper said that DaDa was the scariest album he ever made,[10] and that he never had any idea what it was about. There was no tour to promote DaDa, and none of its songs have ever been played live.

Dick Wagner and Bob Ezrin really held DaDa together, and they created one hell of a creepy album. As far as theatrical "shock rock" goes, I'd list this LP right up there with Coop's best. "Pass the Gun Around" is particularly unsettling.