Off the Record: Alice Cooper part 3
In which I continue to grade Alice Cooper band and solo releases, just for the heck of it.
The last installment of my look back and grading of Alice Cooper on Warner Bros., both solo and with the Alice Cooper Group. Here are parts one and two.
From the Inside (1978) At the end of the Lace and Whiskey tour, Cooper had hit a wall with his substance abuse issues. Warners put out a somewhat pointless live album (The Alice Cooper Show) at the end of 1977, while the singer was rehabbing in a sanitarium. Leave it to Alice to turn his stay into a concept album. In the interest of full disclosure, I had bailed on Alice by this point, so I have never owned this record on any format. Between the power ballads and the lackluster Lace and Whiskey and the stage shows with dancing liquor bottles, I had had enough. Of course, I heard the album’s hit record power ballad “How You Gonna See Me Now” on the radio a lot, and it left me cold. There was even a tie-in comic book released by Marvel Comics based on this story, and I didn’t even care for that despite some appropriately manic art by Tom Sutton. When I did finally get around to listening to a friend’s copy, I remained frosty to it, though I was a bit surprised to see he had been collaborating with Elton John’s onetime lyricist Bernie Taupin. Of course, Taupin wasn’t what he used to be either, so that didn’t sway me at all. Anyway, occasionally I’d see a used copy in the bins and think “I should get that to keep my run of Cooper on Warners intact” but I never did. Finally, streaming came along, and I gave it a listen or two, as recently as a couple of months ago, and while I still am not especially impressed, it’s really not as terrible as I imagined all those years ago, and even found myself kinda liking the rockish title track, which leads off the record. So I think I’ll just give it a C+ and reserve the right to bump it up a notch if I ever a) listen to it again, b) buy a copy, and/or actually find myself enjoying it.
Flush the Fashion (1980) New Wave and Punk did weird things to the old guard of musicians in the late 70s and early 80s; some adapted by speeding up and shortening songs, piling on the synthesizers (even the mighty Led Zeppelin did this), and cranking up a surly attitude. It worked for some; Yes went back to the bank by unleashing their inner Kraftwerk, King Crimson by going in a Talking Heads-like direction, and Neil Young was always trying weird and different shit. Others, like Elton, Black Sabbath and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer struggled to adapt and put out some really poor records. Alice, for his part, recruited the Cars’ producer Roy Thomas Baker, hired a new band (including another Elton refugee, this time Reg’s guitar guy Davey Johnstone, and old pals Flo & Eddie on backing vocals), and went new wave, even billing himself as “Alice Cooper ‘80”- unsurprisingly sounding like the aforementioned Cars in places, as well as the likes of Gary Numan in others. Flush the Fashion was the result, and it divides the Cooper fan base to this day. After the ballads and the dancing booze bottles of the immediate past, a leaner, tougher Alice sound seemed to be a great idea. In my opinion, there are some really great tracks on this thing. Album opener “Talk Talk”, a cover of a song by the underground group The Music Machine, got things off to a punchy start. Then, a left field turn and an odd choice for a single- “Clones (We’re All)” which was Gary Numan all the way, and did trouble the charts (I saw him do this song in a performance clip on no less than the Pink Lady and Jeff show, yep) a bit, but there were no major hit songs off this admittedly admirable attempt (how’s that for alliteration?) to break out of a rut. Other good cuts (in my estimation) included pleasant titles such as “Pain”, “Grim Facts” (tres Cars), and “Dance Yourself to Death”. Maybe folks were tired of Alice by that time, maybe he didn’t seem to fit in the turn of the decade landscape anymore, who knows. B+ for effort.
Special Forces (1981) Cooper fans know the story well; he exchanged one addiction (booze) for another (cocaine) as the 80s went on, and recorded three records that he has little memory of working on at all (and to me- TO ME- this kinda sounded like he was making excuses for some albums which didn’t perform on the charts the way he wanted)… and this is the first one. This one didn’t do much for me when I first heard it all those years ago; it seemed somewhat ordinary in its insistence on the normal (for the day) synth/guitar/bass/drums configuration and the military-themed and very loose concept (apparently he was into guns and Soldier of Fortune magazine at the time) didn’t really grab me. I bought it, listened to it once or twice, and filed it. Many years later I cued it up online out of boredom if nothing else, and lo and behold, riffs jumped up and said “Hey!” and y’know, this one isn’t that bad after all. Musically, it’s not that deviant from the sound used on Flush the Fashion; and they double down on the synth pop… but because it’s Richard Podolor and not Roy Thomas Baker it has a more organic sound, kinda akin to what the arena-rock bands of the day were doing. Not sure where that really comes from, because Podolor made his bones by producing Three Dog Night, but no matter… every song on this thing is punchy and aggressive, more so than Alice had done to date. No power ballads here. He does do an updated live version of the Billion Dollar Babies deep cut “Generation Landslide”, tacking an “‘81” on the end. It’s got a more martial beat and more bombastic guitar, but that song is strong enough to hold up and AC wisely doesn’t mess around with it too much. Perhaps Alice’s studio musos were responsible for the punch pretty much each song on this one has, saying “You just worry about the content, we’ll take care of the sound.” No matter, this album starts out with a bang and doesn’t let up much at all- a nice vocal here, a clever riff there, and all these years later I think it just might be the best thing he did after kicking the original band to the curb seven years earlier. Choice Cuts include “You’re a Movie”, with Alice doing some kind of weird spin on a General Patton type vocally, all nonchalance and insouciance; it has a really nice up-and-down staircase riff at its base, “Who Do You Think We Are”, which kicks off the album with a bang, and “You Want It, You Got It” which is Cars all the way and has another surly Cooper vocal and the straight up riff-rock of “You Look Good in Rags”, with a fun acapella middle section. If there’s any AC solo record that deserves another look, it’s this one. One thing that deserves to be forgotten, though, is Alice’s appearance during this period- the booze and drugs really wrecked him. He looks gaunt and emaciated- perhaps his minimal makeup helped but you can tell the dude looks plain unhealthy, and he’s not fun to watch in the live video of the period. He’s all better now though, and I think this one’s good enough to get an A-.
Zipper Catches Skin (1982) The second of the “Blackout Trilogy” finds our boy Vince back to inhabiting characters and doing story songs rather than leaning into his “menace to society” persona as he did on Special Forces. This time out, the songs are a bit more drawn out and bombastic; still no power ballads though. Although this one didn’t chart in either the US or UK, first time since Easy Action that an Alice Cooper product failed to clear that bar, it wasn’t completely invisible- the album cut “I Am the Future” was used in the movie Class of 1984 which caused a small stir that year. One common denominator between this one and its predecessor was bassist Erik Scott, who was a vet of the Flo & Eddie band and two of their albums (Howie and Mark are also in the credits of this record, although you don’t really hear ‘em much), is listed as co-producer, and would seem to explain the relatively tougher sound here and on Forces. Ol’ pal Dick Wagner came aboard, played on a couple of tracks, and left because of all the chemical abuse going on. Another interesting name in the credits is one John Nitzinger, who had some success with a band of the same name in the mid-late 70s and is best known to me for collaborating with the Texas Grand Funk Railroad soundalike band Bloodrock on their second, and most memorable album (it’s been a fave of mine since I was 11 years old). I think the success of this record, such as it was, was in no small part because of Nitzinger. I have to wonder if, some years later, Nitzinger ran into Alice somewhere and said “Hey Alice! How’s it going!” and Alice was like “Uh… do I know you?” Anyway, while it’s not quite as immediate as the album before, it has its share of choice cuts, including the amusing “Zorro’s Lament”, which features swish-swish-swish Zorro sword noises and sports lines like “Zorro lies dying/In the Spanish sun/All the women crying/Especially the pretty ones”; “I Better Be Good”, which seems like a soundalike of the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” in its main verses, but since “Blister” came out in 1983, well, who knows; “Remarkably Insincere” is as nasty lyrically as you’d expect and rocks along nicely; and “Adaptable (Anything for You)”. “I’m Alive (That was the Day My Dead Pet Returned to Save My Life)” aspires to Ramonesity. Combined with what I think is a really nifty package design- the front cover features the lyrics in a white background, black thin serif font in a text block a la XTC’s Go 2 with “Alice Cooper” up top, made up of red words and the album title underscored a few inches down towards the middle by a smear of blood- Zipper Catches Skin, like Special Forces, deserves better than its forgotten fate. B+
DaDa (1983) All things must pass, as that Harrison guy once sang, and by 1983 the Alice Cooper Experience seemed to have come to an impass. No longer touring, and no longer racing up the charts with hit records, Warners had lost interest in Alice, and Alice for his part was too far gone to really care. Yet, in the spirit (it seems) of going out on a high note, producer Bob Ezrin, he of the glory days and late of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, reunited with Alice, as did guitarist Dick Wagner and even Nightmare era bassist Prakash John on one track to give it one more go… and if the result sounds a bit Floydian, well, it can be expected, I suppose. WB, for its part, didn’t like it and barely promoted it. No theme, really, though most of these tracks cover one lurid subject or another with humor, much of it sophomoric. Most tracks are bombastic in nature, as you’d expect with Ezrin and Wagner on board. There are some gems here, though; I like “Scarlet and Sheba”, inspired by two cocktail waitresses, and “Enough’s Enough” lumbers along amiably, although it’s a darker, and possibly incest-themed, yikes, update of Muscle of Love’s “Never Been Sold Before”. “Former Lee Warmer” is a veiled fuck-you to the Bros Warner. There are also songs about vampirism (“Fresh Blood”), a hyuk-hyuk jokey song about all things USA called “I Love America” (a minor hit in the UK, where unlike the US, this album actually made the top 100), and schizophrenia (“No Man’s Land”) but unfortunately, the melodies don’t stick and the tempos don’t vary much, making them plodding and dull. I really want to like this one a lot more than I do; other than “Enough’s” and “Scarlet”, though, none of these songs do much for me. I guess it’s a B in conception but a C in execution and a sad end to Alice’s Warners years… but what a ride.
After the failure of DaDa, Alice took 3 years off from recording and touring, got himself clean and sober, and assaulted the charts once again via the Constrictor album, and has had a long and successful career since. To my ears, though, there was nothing special about that record, or most of the ones that have come since, so this is where this series comes to an end for me. Alice did finally reunite with the surviving band members onstage around the time of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they even back him on a couple of tracks on one of his albums…but he’s never really committed to a full on tour-and-record thing with them and probably never will. To the group members’ credit though, they don’t seem to harbor very much in the way of ill feelings and all these years later, well, why bother. Alice himself is a survivor, though, has been involved in a number of things over the years such as a syndicated radio show which is pretty good, and he did a stint as King Herod in a presentation of Jesus Christ Superstar which was shown on TV. He’s still recording and touring, too, and the other band members are involved with this or that, mostly bassist Dennis Dunaway who’s played on and off with a couple of bands, and wrote a very good biography called Snakes, Guillotines, and Electric Chairs! that I recommend highly. Dick Wagner has a bio too that has a lot of info about all things Cooper.
”Oh what a time we had/all of the time we had/you.” -”Earwigs to Eternity”, on Pretties for You. Well, that’s how I hear it anyway.
Listen to From the Inside on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Flush the Fashion on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Special Forces on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Zipper Catches Skin on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to DaDa on the streaming service of your choice.