Alice Cooper Buyers Guidegbarton /
Buyers Guides / 26/07/2008 05:00am
The witch-eyed inventor of glam, punk and shock rock who paved the way for every sleaze-rocker who’s slithered into view since.ntor of glam, punk and shock rock who paved the way for every sleaze-rocker who’s slithered into view since.
Alice Cooper invented everything cool in rock’n’roll, from wearing tight pants to shitting in a cup on stage.
Alice started life as a preacher’s son from Detroit named Vincent Furnier, but a mythical meeting with ancient witch and a ouija board somewhere in the late 1960s changed things irrevocably. Alice Cooper became the band and the man, the two fused in an explosion of rock’n’roll outrage that has spanned four decades and lays claim to the accidental invention of glam and punk, and the intentional invention of shock rock – a free-form riot of excess that has, over the years, involved mind-scrambling acts of self-evisceration and infanticide (fake) and heart-stopping acts of chemical bravado and liquid insanity (real), all wrapped around razor-sharp slices of downtown glitter punk that spoke of cheerful subjects like sex with the dead and serial murder.
Alice was the first guy to daub his face in witchy make-up, his band the first to brazenly dress in women’s clothes. The Alice Cooper Band’s first fistful of albums laid the groundwork for every sleazy gang of gutter-level guitar slingers to come along since, from The Sex Pistols to Guns N’ Roses and beyond (Hello, Turbonegro), and Alice himself has managed to successfully make the leap from underground rock’n’roll freak show to mainstream pop-culture hero, embracing everything from hard-core horror movies to hard-core Christianity along the way.
Of course, even visionaries lose their way now and again. Somewhere along the way, Alice Cooper also had occasional desperate stabs at relevance. These blind thrusts almost sunk his career in the early 1980s, when he released an increasingly bizarre quartet of new wave albums – his skinny, God-fearing ass saved only when he reinvented himself as the flash-metal Alice in 1986. And although the glory daze of the 1970s are well behind him, Alice continues to shed his skin like some leathery, leper messiah and return to the rock’n’roll arena every few years.
Throughout his long and storied career there have been lean times, mean times, times of oddball D-list celebrity status (remember The Muppet Show?), and times when a man just wants to play golf and talk about Jesus. And through it all Alice Cooper has remained one of the most consistently entertaining and iconic figures in rock’n’roll. And that’s why we love him. To death.
– SleazegrinderESSENTIAL: CLASSICS
Killer
Warner Bros, 1972
For gut-level shock rock thrills, nothing before or since can match the raw death trip power of Killer. From the enclosed 1972 calendar of Alice twisting gorily from a rope, to the astonishingly bleak doom epic Halo Of Flies, to a mind-scrambling stab at gallows-black humour called Dead Babies, Killers is arguably the first and most vital punk rock album; a still-menacing slice of primo American ugly at the dawn of the feel-bad decade.
Killers also ends with the jarring, mean-spirited jab of a whining electric drill noise that can throw you into panic if you’re not prepared for it. So maybe Alice invented industrial music too. Somebody ask Throbbing Gristle.
Love It To Death
Rhino, 1971
The Alice Cooper Band’s first post-garbage psychedelia album remains one of their most iconic, from the spider eyes gatefold and the slithery death-glam band pose on the cover, to the creepy voodoo zombie metal of Black Juju and the harrowing, timeless goth-glam dirge of The Ballad Of Dwight Frye (oh yeah, Alice invented goth, too).
The album also put them on the rock’n’roll map with I’m Eighteen (which was a fib even in ’71) and established the snaky, perverse and surprisingly accomplished hard rock sound that would send the band into arenas around the world for the next half-decade.
Inarguably classic downer rock, despite a couple of final stabs at hippy-trippy psyche.
SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION
Billion Dollar Babies
Warner Bros, 1973
Hit single No More Mister Nice Guy, a relatively straight (by Alice standards) FM rock nugget, propelled Billion Dollar Babies into the charts and turned these slimy Detroit cobras into the least likely rock superstars of 1973.
They responded to the accolades and attention with an endless tour filled with drugs, booze, blood, snakes, backstage in-fighting, and enough money for a lifetime’s worth of trouble. Meanwhile, the album, while more polished than previous records, spewed up plenty of pop-infused crunchers like Elected and the classic Generation Landslide, as well as Sick Things, one of the most alarmingly weird rock’n’roll songs ever written.
School’s Out
Warner Bros, 1972
A sort of drug-addled, dirtbag reworking of West Side Story, School’s Out is a trippy teenage rampage that mood-swings wildly from the grubby hard rock of the timeless bratty title track, to the head-stomping Public Animal #9 (surely the genesis of every self-destructo punk-pose, from Sid Vicious to GG Allin) and the slinky Luney Tune, to the acid-head, high-school-production-gone-wrong Broadway schmaltz that rounds off the album.
It’s completely schizophrenic and, frankly, half-baked, yet it retains a sense of timeless killer cool that transcends the gloppy jazz-hands ox manour between the rock’n’roll parts. After all, when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way.
The Eyes Of Alice Cooper
Spitfire, 2003
Following years in the artistic wilderness desperately striving for a niche, sometimes successfully (the post-GN’R anthems of Trash), sometimes not so (the bludgeoning nu metal of Brutal Planet), Alice enjoyed a stunning returning to form by playing to his strengths by going back to his roots.
Inspired by The White Stripes and Strokes-led vogue for garage band simplicity, Alice stripped back to the raw intensity of his halcyon days. Stand-outs include the swaggering angst of What Do You Want From Me? and the rocket-fuelled fire-fight of Detroit City (featuring fellow Motor City veteran, incendiary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer).
Welcome To My Nightmare
1975, Rhino
In which Vince Furnier fires his entire band, dons a top hat and a tarantula, gives Vincent Price a call and puts on the grooviest, creepiest, most absurd song-and-dance show of his or anyone else’s career.
This album is the dividing line between Alice’s hard-core shock rock phase and the playful theatricality and genre-hopping experimentation he toyed with for the next 10 years. And the gamble pays off brilliantly in this insane concept record about a broken-brained boy and the monsters in his head.
Welcome To My Nightmare is far from Alice’s most rock album, but still a wonderfully loony piece of 70s excessive mock’n’roll musical theatre.
GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING
From The Inside
Warner Bros, 1978
After a dozen years of endless touring, whoring and liver abuse, an exhausted and hopelessly alcoholic Alice Cooper checked into a mental health rehabilitation centre. He emerged a month later with a new lease on life, and a batch of songs about the ordeal which he then crafted into this uniquely cinematic concept album.
Co-written with Elton John’s brilliant lyricist Bernie Taupin, From The Inside is full of gleefully shlocky power ballads and overwrought pop metal zingers about evil nurses and thrill-killing inmates. It’s hardly as autobiographical as Alice claimed, but it’s still charming, and the songs are great. (The Marvel comic book adaptation is a howl).
Hey Stoopid
1991, Sony
This fourth album into Alice’s resurrection as elder god of glam metal finds him finally fitting into the leather pants and pointy boots without looking like somebody’s dad crashing the prom.
Aided by the sleaze metal of Feed My Frankenstein (written by Zodiac Mindwarp), and the pyrotechnics of flashy guitar wizard Joe Satriani on five tracks, Hey Stoopid is gloriously loud, dumb and relentless, full of fist-pumping arena rock anthems that neatly suture Alice’s glitter rock leanings with the over-the-top screech metal of the day.
A near classic, marred slightly by the expected puff-ball power ballads and the preaching anti-drug stance of the title song.
Special Forces
Warner Bros, 1981
The best of Alice Cooper’s early-80s oddball new wave records, Special Forces finds him reinventing himself as a paramilitary drag queen, singing cinematic odes to merry cops (Prettiest Cop On The Block) and merry dictators (You’re A Movie), and then macho-ing up with pneumatic, gritty power-pop gems like You Look Good In Rags and the hilariously cheesy Don’t Talk Old To Me. Also on tap is a live-without-a-net take on Generation Landslide and a creepy-cool rendition of Love’s fuzzrock classic Seven And Seven Is.
Special Forces went under the radar, virtually unheard by most of the world, but it was huge in France. Don’t hold that against it, though.
AVOID
Alice Cooper Goes To Hell
Warner Bros, 1976
Pointing the finger at Alice Cooper’s worst album is no easy task. Chalk it up to the length of time he’s been around, but the man has dropped some amazingly putrid bombs in his 40 years of rock’n’roll, from the Beatles-esque hippy nightmares of Pretties For You (1969) to the clanging, dumbed-down hairspray rock of Trash (1989).
I have, of course, learned to love them all over time, despite the pain they have caused me. All, that is, except for one: Goes To Hell is the nadir of 70s AOR rock, a bloated mess of over-theatrical radio-goo, cheesy ballads and disco. That’s right, disco.
The only thing Alice got right about this album was the title.
Subject: Re: Alice Cooper 
Thu Oct 02, 2008 2:53 pm
