ALICE IN SUMERLAND: BILLION DOLLAR BABIES

13/7/2018

BY JOHN BODEN

"Hello, Hooray. Let the lights grow dim, I've been ready..."

It's somewhere around 1979, I'm upstairs in the large open room that serves as my bedroom when I'm at my Dad's house for our weekend visitation. I share this room with my little brother, Roscoe. It's filled with normal childish things, toys and posters of superheroes and dressers and clothes, but there is a doorway there. A special doorway that one has to recognize before it opens. To the untrained it looks like a piles (or two) of record albums on a big dresser. To me, every album was a key. I often didn't even hear a note of what it held within its groove to be carried of to another place. I crafted stories around the cover art and song titles. Billion Dollar Babies was a long favorite of mine. Lime green scales and a gold stamp depicting a baby with scary eyes. It opened up like a wallet and had a poster of freaky looking duds with wild hair and make-up. It had song titles like "Raped And Freezin'" and "I Love The Dead." I wasn't yet ten years old but I could see the writing on the wall...

The sixth offering from the Alice Cooper Band (although they went simply by Alice Cooper any fan will tell you that the original Alice Cooper Band was a true destructive force in rock and roll-an unholy amalgamation of Stonesy swagger-channeling progressive rock and garage-dimmed din and demanding you to clap your hands and notice) Billion Dollar Babies lands on an unsuspecting world.

The first song is the fitting "Hello Hooray" a simply smirking invitation to the event about to unfold in 10 shocking stabs of mayhem. Alice sings his heart out and extends his hand for you to take and step inside. Do it.

Next up is the controversially titled "Raped And Freezin'" wherein a young man is picked up by a strange woman and after some , um, romantic mingling, left naked and alone in the desert night. After this we get one of his hits, "Elected" a tongue-in-cheek sneer at the then (and still fits as much today) political climate. The fourth track, the titular "Billion Dollar Babies" is the Alice we've been waiting for. A dank and macabre lullaby duet featuring guest vocals by Donovan. Yes, he of the "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" singing about a unique relationship with a doll.

"Unfinished Sweet" is probably my very favorite song on this album. From the fuzzed out skronk of the opening chord to the incredibly bizarre James Bond-style theme of the interlude, this song about a bad trip to the dentist is something only Alice Cooper could deliver this effectively and brilliantly.

Next up is another of Alice's hit songs, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" a true anthem for the misunderstood and persecuted and maybe a little for the paranoid. That opening squalling guitar and then the driving raw beat. This one gets the motor running, Boy. Rock and roll-- pure and simple.

"Molotov milk bottles heaved from pink high chairs..."

"Generation Landslide" is a strange little ditty, part prose beat poetry almost over a sinister boogie complete with a harmonica breakdown. The lyrics to this are absolutely brilliant and terrifying in their ability to hit the target dead center.

"Sick Things" slowly burns from the black, a dark entity stepping stealthily from the shadows. From the first straining croon of Alice's vocal we know these are dark dealings. By the time the eerie chorus comes in , with the odd whisper harmony of the chorus, we're truly aware that we are one of his very sick things. Proudly so.

This is followed by the misdirection of "Mary Ann" a weird piano song that relies on a last word punch line to change the entirety of the song. The album closes with a song that has landed them on many a banned music list. Gotten them singled out by Parent's groups and their albums fuel for many a fire--"I Love The Dead." Sure, it's a grave deep and crypt dark love letter to necrophilia but it's so ridiculously somber in a tongue-in-cheek way I feel there was never much of a threat of there being an epidemic of spade-wielding teens with boners rampaging through the cemeteries.

This album, perfect in every way, would be one of the last by the original Cooper band. Their following disc "Muscle Of Love" would sadly have that distinction. The Alice Cooper Band= Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Neal Smith, and some fellow named Alice, were a band like no other and to this day I don't feel they've ever been paralleled. They truly embraced all of the contemporary rock styles, chewed them up and regurgitated them onto the sticky gutters they travelled. What they gave back was the gross mutation of what they took in. They took in bits of the psychedelic rock and prog rock and hard rock and they took those sounds and twisted their necks until they stopped twitching. They took the still-warm corpses and tried them on, stretched them in new ways and paraded around for us to like and man, did we like. It's forty-five years later and I still like. I like it a lot.