Alice Cooper: Classic or Dud??

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.

first time i heard it was on lysol by the melvins. "poison" and the alice cooper-as-cher's mother thing in the 80s turned me way off of him, so hearing that cover kind of made me think he might not suck.

the early alice stuff is okay. pretty zappa-ish.

Something about the early Alice records makes me think of the Pretty Things album SF Sorrow and also Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

you know what's really killer? the 45 version of "don't blow your mind" by the spiders with alice cooper. gaw. damn.

actually i don't even know if it was a 45 or released at all, come to think of it, but it's still great 60s shit.

I've got a Sundazed 45 of it. And yes, it kills.

Another vote for Love It To Death!

segue from "Second Coming" into "Dwight Fry" is brilliant...(do not listen to either on shuffle)...

I take him more seriously as a golfer than as a recording artist.

Posterity will do likewise.

really? is he that good he's gonna win in the US tour...seniors?

No, but he will mock-execute Jose-Maria Olazabal with an electric chair.

Could someone with a bit more knowledge than I do help me understand exactly what else was going on in the musical world at the end of 1970 that was like Alice Cooper, either musically or in makeup/stage persona? I know Sabbath were around...but I was surprised to learn that "Eighteen" was a hit before T. Rex had settled from hippie folk into the glam stuff they were famous for and it also predated the formation of the New York Dolls as well.

Apparently Slade started having hits in 1971, but that still doesn't help me too much. I don't even know what they sounded like in 1971.

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide. I really don't know Alice Cooper's music, either. And I'm surprised I don't. He's the last person in the world it would ever occur to me to listen to or try to get into. Thanks Freedom Rock thread! :)

Alice Cooper were an inept psychedelic band from arizona til they moved to detroit in early 70 and absorbed a BIG BIG influence from the STOOGES and MC5. a.c. copped his whole shtick from iggy. check out rough contemporaries like the Flaming Groovies and Brownsville Station while you're at it

Okay I know the famous Flamin' Groovies song...I can certainly see the Stooges/MC5 connection but wouldn't have thought of it. Thanks!

Stuff for Reference:

1970 = The Stooges' Funhouse (s/t debut with "I Wanna Be Your Dog" came out the year before"), Black Sabbath, MC5's Back in the USA, Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World (followed by Hunky Dory in '71), VU's Loaded, Faces debut, Hawkwind's debut, Status Quo's Ma Kelly...

1971 = Budgie's debut, Bowie's breakthrough, Mott the Hoople's Brain Capers (with "Death May Be Your Santa Claus"), T. Rex's "Ride a White Swan" and the Electric Warrior LP, Rolling Stones'Sticky Fingers, Flamin' Groovies (check out the amazing demos of "Slow Death").

Most people hate on Pretties For You (1969) and Easy Action (1970), but while different than the 'classic' era, these are awesome albums. They definitely sound like a weird cross of Beatles, Zappa, and Stooges on the first one, def. more Stooges on Easy Action, and flight out out of this world on the album ender "Lie Down And Die, Goodbye", which is an immediate precursor to classic Hawkwind if anything.

Remove a little of the space-rock factor and add a little more horror, and you have the the two '71 albums Love It To Death and Killer. Both are excellent, but I like Killer a little bit more, mainly due to "Under My Wheels", "Halo of Flies" (THIS one!), "Yeah Yeah Yeah", and "Dead Babies"

More of a sum-of-the-parts album but '72's School's Out is good. Title track is classic, but the rest doesn't stand as well on its own. There is one amazing bass interlude with amazing street fight sound effects that make you flinch.

Alice's best album is '73's Billion Dollar Babies. It's the perfect bridge between the Broadway/guillotine era Alice and the grittier raw-rock Alice. "Elected" is Alice's best single, and is an underrated dance classic. Pretty much everything here is great. But within the band, it becomes Alice+Bob Ezrin vs. the band...

'74's Muscle Of Love is the last album with the classic band lineup and it sounds exactly like a contract breaker album. Really incidental and nothing grandiose.

Essentially the band fell apart right around this time, and Alice was preparing '75's full solo album Welcome To My Nightmare, which is up there with Billion Dollar Babies. Sure, more style and substance than the rock on the previous, but there are rocking moments, and never has anyone used Vincent Price in such a great cameo as here. Michael Jackson never came close on "Thriller", and I love "Thriller".

Anyway, that should cover the good stuff for now. There's good stuff a little later on, and you should skip ahead to get the single version of 1980's "Clones (We're All)", but otherwise enters the fan-boy realm a bit more.

^^^wouldn't change a word...

Under my Wheels has been cycling thru my brane for what seems like months now, even though I haven't had Killer since the 80s. This is such a classic, classic song.

I do have to disagree that the Coop's entire schtick was lifted whole hog from Ig. While there's clearly a significant influence, the gap between KISS and Ig (e.g.) is mighty and the only way to cross thru the valley of glam is to walk with the mighty Coop.

I'd never checked out any early Alice Cooper until Friday afternoon, when I picked up a copy of Teenage Lament 74 on a whim, took it home, played it, FREAKED OUT, set the needle back and played it again about 15 times in a row. Why have I not heard this all over the radio since I was a kid?! This is all-time top 10 solid gold nugget greatest song ever material! And apparently it's got the Pointer Sisters and Liza Minelli on backup vocals??!?

Now to check out Billion Dollar Babies, etc, obviously, but would it be pessimistic to assume that it can only possibly be downhill from that song? Even if the albums are as good as suggested by all the Alice Cooper C/D threads (of which there are many), I'v got a bad feeling it's gonna be one of those situations where you completely fall for a new band, only to realise you've stumbled onto the absolute apex...

...you haven't stumbled onto the absolute apex

you have at least 5 classic LP's awaiting you...oh, but to be able to experience them all again for the first time...

by the way: in what format did you pick up "Teenage Lament '74"?...45 RPM?

45, yeah... b/w Hard Hearted Alice.

I just downloaded Muscle of Love. No sign of Minelli.