Alice Cooper: Classic or Dud??

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.

I think "Hard-Hearted Alice" has long-time Chicago journalist Bob Greene on backing vocals...(he was allowed to be token "band member" while he documented the Muscle Of Love tour in '74)...

Supposedly he's streaming his new album on Myspace.

Bob Greene?

He's just that good!

Pretties... & Easy Action sooo classik.

I love "Easy Action" but "PFY" is not very good

wrong. it is very good. so there.

troof.

I only have Killer and Love It To Death but they are awesome

Updating my Coopalog now on CD. Hell, I don't even remember what LPs I still have down in the basement.

ohh yuh just in case anyone cares i think pretties and easy action were recently reissued as nice price type cds. which is great cause the cds were like $25 otherwise.

Sigh. I keep saying I'm gonna try to get into Alice and it just never seems to happen.

Did you ever hear Teenage Lament 74?? I can't see anyone disliking that song. It was sent by God. And Satan.

the new thing is up on his myspace...not too bad so far!

at least this first one seems more like 70s type shit instead of metal, i hear saxophones! clapping!

you mean the first song? (sorry, can't stream myspace at work.)

That first album on New West was really terrible. Is this basically the followup to that?

Thing is even Alice knows he's been a joke for decades. Remember when he had the steroid-gobblin' body-builder who was supposed to look like a commando on guitar? He's been missing for at least fifteen years. Where did he go?

Time to resurrect this fanzine review from one of the Mick Box threads:

ALICE COOPER Flush The Fashion
AC doesn’t get enough credit for his chameleonic exploits. Then again, while Bowie was ripping off the hip uptown vanguard of Lou Reed and Neu!, Alice was fixated on the tricks of Meatloaf and Croft Superstars. He had his ear to the rail at the turn of the 80’s, however, when Devo and Tubeway Army came marching into his life. He quickly assembled a supporting cast of Italian-American session men, adopted a new militant transvestite chic for the stage, and took an armful of his electro-new wave lp’s down to the lab. What we get is an inebriated but spirited hodgepodge of approximations that today he doesn’t recall recording. Alice showcases his knack for timeless throwaway rhymes that sporadically appear to lead to some notion of sense, before abandoning course into the ninny non-sequential rants of an eighty-pound blackout alcoholic. But he’s got a lot on his mind, and wastes no time railing against cyborgs, gay bars and nuclear contamination, while ruminating on the virtues of police brutality and exceeding recommended dosages of aspirin. Many topics touched on by Gary Numan himself, though Alice curiously paws at them with a washed-up drunken whimsy. In fact, the degree to which his synth pop is so off-the-mark and decidedly un-bleak, makes this lp is a bit of an anomaly. And I wouldn’t doubt if future generations judge him more reverently for this madcap stab at de-evolution than his famously snarky rock anthems to high school and fucking dead people. Clocking in at a lean 30 minutes, this tour de force of garage-damaged Casio-core is a shoe-in sensation for your next dance party. (Also recommended if you can track it down: the Paris-only TV special which features Alice lip-synching these tunes in such exotic locales as subways, alleys, and junkyards, all one-shot videos with a total production value of thirty bucks or so)

On that latter note:

'Clones (We're All)' from Paris

But perhaps even better:

'Clones (We're All)' from Pink Lady and Jeff

From comments on the latter:

barriobajaj (2 weeks ago)

Is it just me or is Alice Cooper aping Gary Neuman?

chunkino (2 weeks ago)

Why do you think the song is called "Clones."

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Chunkino was wise.